I. Introducing the Bugman
Beginning in 2020, the Covidians revived a science I call applied or practical political psychology. Of all the ideologies on the Left, Maoism went furthest in applying political psychology, Maoism being the ideology that gave us 'thought reform' and the 'washing of the brain', and this was pertinent to Covidianism, because starting its life in China, Covidianism used many of the brainwashing techniques of Maoism. Cults, too, avail themselves of the same techniques, and both Maoism and cultism operate on the same principle, which is: Change a man's thoughts, change a man. Over the course of three years, we saw the principle put into practice across the globe, and the result of the Covidians' employing it was that millions of people allowed themselves to be persuaded that masking could 'stop the spread'; that lockdowns, shutdowns, forced closure of businesses, forced unemployment, contact tracing, etc., were all necessary to combat the virus; and that the 'vaccines' were 'safe and effective'. Those caught up in the mass hysteria were cajoled by the media, the 'health professionals', the politicians, and the promptings of their own consciences. Most important of all, the last of these was worked to the utmost in a typical cult-like fashion. Cult leaders seeking to indoctrinate a person appeal to his conscience and exploit his natural tendency to persuade and monitor himself. The conscience, when the leader's manipulating it is attended with success, helps the leader tighten his grip on the minds of his followers, and eventually the directed conscience places the recruit under the leader's complete control. After the first round of brainwashing takes hold, the recruit becomes a devotee, and he remains so on his own initiative and without external compulsion. One consequence is that even if he is taken out of the cult environment - to be sent on canvasing and hawking missions, for example - he can be trusted to return to it. Physically he can leave the cult, mentally he cannot.
One can use methods of auto-suggestion for purposes that are not sinister and destructive; indeed, one can use them to improve one's life. But doing so takes one away from politics, as we shall see.
The principle of 'Changing a man thoughts, changing a man' is put to beneficial use in pop psychology and self-help; there, the right thoughts can overcome any obstacle, and in the doctrine of Norman Vincent Peale and Mary Baker G. Eddy, a thing cannot be evil, only thinking makes it so. Such a view is far removed from all politics. For in politics, the world is always incomplete, lacking, and while the world exists in this state of privation, it is bad, even evil. To complete it and make it whole, something external is needed - something only the politician can bring about. In order to make the world better again, a politician may propose a Bolshevik revolution, a Greater East Asian Prosperity Sphere, a Third Reich. Today we regard these goals as vague and ethereal, but at the time politicians promulgated them, they were always within reach; that is, they were feasible. And as a matter of course, the canny politician understands the usefulness of practicable ideals. He will posit simple, discrete, achievable objectives, knowing that if he demands the impossible from his followers, they will desert him. (For that reason, the crusade against global warming will eventually fail, seeing that the end goal of reducing carbon emissions and then stopping them altogether can never be achieved). His realism means that Political Man differs from Self-Help Man. It means he differs from New Age Man as well, 'New Age Man' being the type who follows a Rudolf Steiner or Helena Blavatsky. A spiritual thinker, New Age Man desires to comprehend the nature of reality from the vantage point of mysticism. Moreover, he strives to accept reality without qualm. In other words, he wants to make peace with the world as it is. Nothing could be more unpolitical.
This topic brings us to another unpolitical type: the Bugman. The Bugman is a subset of the 'normie', and like the normie, he approves of the existing social, political, and consumerist order. When it comes to politics, the Bugman may hold political opinions that he regards as non-conformist, but at bottom these are only commonplaces and half-baked notions. Fundamentally he agrees with the existing order, and this agreement makes him apolitical.
During the lockdown years, I became fascinated by the Bugman. In the first year, I believed - mistakenly, as it turned out - that the indignities heaped upon the normie population would cause it to revolt. And in that time of turmoil, even a Bugman could show revolutionary gumption. But over the course of three years, the Bugman followed the diktats of the Covidians unquestioningly and took all the outrages in stride. In 2020, only one thing excited him: the release of Cyberpunk 2077.
I must admit that in those years, I envied the Bugman, especially the Bugman who enjoyed his leisure after being made unemployed by the lockdowns and shutdowns. To be laid off from one's job, and then to while away one's time sitting on a couch, smoking dope, eating junk food, playing 'vidya' games: that seemed to me to be a pleasant life, albeit not a virtuous one.
Moreover, I envied the Bugman's naivete. The contentedness of the Bugman neared the state of those characters in The Matrix (1999) who chose forgetfulness and oblivion over knowledge and truth. In the movie, the 'red pill' gives knowledge and the 'blue pill' takes it away, and those who swallow the blue pill are made as innocent as Adam and Eve before the Fall.
The question to be considered here is whether or not political psychology holds true for the Bug Man. Does the Bugman confirm the hypothesis of the Maoists, the cultists, and the Christian Scientists in its essentials, that is, does the Bug Man's innocence and passivity come about from his ideas? If so, this brings up the possibility that we ourselves can become Bugmen. To do so, we need only change our ideas to match his.
II. The Politics of Anti-Politics
I mentioned the game Cyberpunk 2077 because its subject matter does bear upon politics: one of the reasons why I never became a fully-fledged 'National Socialist' or white nationalist was because I liked the cyberpunk genre too much. The denizens of Blade Runner (1982) live in a dark, smooty, grimy Los Angeles in the year of the future 2019, and the futuristic and grim milieu befits the central theme of cyberpunk, which is 'High tech, low life'. In keeping with the anti-natural tendencies of the genre, many characters are cyborgs or (in the case of Blade Runner) artificially-grown human beings, that is, homonculi. Cyberpunk shares a theme with postmodernism, and that is the distancing and isolating of man from nature. Urban living, modern thinking, perception, thought, language - all of these form a wall between man and the natural world, man and the absolute truth, man and the spiritual. As such, white nationalism, Neo-Nazism, and blood and soil ideology must by definition repudiate cyberpunk. Blade Runner is un-völkisch. But as someone who has seen Blade Runner a dozen times and will probably watch it a dozen times more, my response is: so much the worse for völkischness.
In a time when the term had not yet been invented, I was once a Bugman. In my youth, I was dissatisfied with my own life but well-satisfied with life at large, by which I mean the prevailing political, cultural, and economic order, an order to which no alternative existed, the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc having collapsed a few years before. In that period, I may have disliked certain political parties, journalists, intellectuals, and opinion-makers, and disliked them intensely; but I never questioned the existing order's underlying precepts, rules, and assumptions. In the same way, one may become aggravated by other drivers when caught in a traffic jam, but such a judgment, which takes place during an instance of a temporary and fleeting emotion, does not entail one's rejecting cars and driving in general. The driver abides by the rules of the game, and so does the Bugman. And like the Bugman, when it came to politics, I prided myself on my political insight and sophistication, but I held opinions that were only a confused heaping of fashionable Left and Right ideas, neither of which I committed to. In the last analysis, I was, just like the Bug Man, apolitical.
The question is whether or not apoliticism is itself political in a covert and subterranean fashion. It may be that, perversely, the act of choosing not to choose constitutes an political ideology in itself. Carl Schmitt thought so: see Political Romanticism (1919).
This intellectual attitude of mine, which was akin to political romanticism, was reinforced by my reading a textbook on the contemporary postmodern age. The book was divided up into three parts: the first was written on art history, the second on the French post-structuralist thinkers (Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Lyotard, Baudrillard, et al.), and the third on postmodern culture and life. The third section struck a chord with me. It resonated, because it held up a mirror to my life. The author here made mention of Blade Runner, Robocop, Silence of the Lambs, Total Recall, and other famous films of the period, and also Nike sneakers, Madonna (then in her 'Vogue' phase), virtual reality, Disneyland, McDonalds, karaoke. The author deplored all of it, but I found his depiction of modern popular culture, capitalism, and postmodernism to be wonderful: it captured the essence of what it was that made life worth living. For every weekend, me and my friends would pile into a car, commute to the city, and drive around without pause, and on those trips, I felt a tremendous sensation of freedom; I understood what it was like for an Eastern European who had lived in a communist country for forty years and who all of a sudden was allowed out to travel and shop in the West. In those fast-paced, frenetic years, I spent long hours at the nightclub, the shopping mall, the fast food restaurant, the petrol station, and the 24/7 convenience store, and I treated all these abodes as though they were sacred, that is, houses of worship.
My exalted feelings in response to this 'capitalist' and 'postmodern' existence may have only been a preference of mine: they may have been only feelings, and as such, merely subjective. But perhaps they owed their origin to a distinct intellectual idea. The ideas of Thomas Hardy, which are gloomy, fatalist, and pessimistic, hold much in common with those of Schopenhauer. Even though it is uncertain whether Hardy had ever read Schopenhauer, it is certain that Schopenhauer could have supplied the intellectual justification for Hardy. In the nineties, I asked myself if there was a philosopher who could give a voice and a name to the feelings that I had - feelings that were as positive as Hardy's were negative.
At first I thought that I had found that philosopher in Baudrillard. Of all the French thinkers, he seem to be the one who was most in touch with the present - what academics called 'modernity'. He did own a television set after all. Unlike him, other French intellectuals seemed mired in the first half of the 20th century, when modernism held sway; witness their obsession with Freud and Joyce.
Something that could be said in the favour of the French post-structuralists was that all of them repudiated Marx; they held to an anti-Marxism that bordered on anti-communism. The anti-Marxism was symptomatic of the political struggle in French intellectual circles of the sixties and seventies. Then, Marxism rode high, and the post-structuralists sought to prove their intellectual superiority to it. They wanted to make their own thought distinct, and in hindsight, they chose wisely, for after the fall of communism, the Marxists were left looking foolish.
On closer examination, Baudrillard turned out to be something of a disappointment. In the first half of his career, he wrote on the subjects of consumerism, shopping malls, TV advertising, consumer credit. All these formed part of the experience of someone living in the modern world, and Baudrillard's according these subjects importance gave his thought an air of timeliness and immediacy. But at root, Baudrillard disdained consumerism, he considered it fake and unreal, and he sought after the more honest, pure, natural. In the second half of his career, his work lost clarity. As could be expected from a French thinker, he obscured and mystified. Much has been written on the French intellectual's habit of putting up walls of verbiage, and putting up these walls is what Baudrillard did. Some critics suggest that these walls were built in order to mask Baudrillard's true political opinions. Like the Bugman, Baudrillard's attitude is one of passivity and assent, and perhaps deep down Baudrillard really did approve of the existing order. When he is forced to confront it, he feigns helplessness and passivity; it is all so terrible, but what can one do.
I moved on from Baudrillard and looked to conservative thinkers such as Hayek. If one affirms capitalism, consumerism, surely one is affirming the market order Hayek speaks of? And in turn, if one does so, one is surely classifying oneself as a neoliberal or (to use the American term) libertarian. But I resisted designating myself as such, and while I recognised the greatness of Hayek's endeavour, I saw Hayek himself as something of a relic. He was a man who belonged to the era of the eighties, that is, of Reagan, Thatcher, the New Right, and the Cold War.
A prominent conservative thinker of post-Cold War era was Francis Fukuyama, the author of 'The End of History?' (1989) and The End of History and the Last Man (1992), both, unusually enough, conservative and at the same time nihilistic (the 'Last Man' is taken from Nietzsche's Zarathustra). Fukuyama was influenced by the Russian thinker Alexandre Kojève. Years after I first came across a mention of Kojève, I stumbled on Jan-Werner Müller's adequate summarising of Kojève's ideas in A Dangerous Mind. Carl Schmitt in Post War European Thought (2003). My subsequent exploring of the twists and turns of Kojève's thought led me to a paradox worthy of Fukuyama. This was the hypothesis that what I had affirmed in the carefree years of my youth was not capitalism but communism; the truth was that I had been a Marxist.
III. Kojève
Kojève called himself a Marxist and even a Stalinist, and he was joking, but only half-joking. When the body of his work is considered as a whole, we are tempted to discount his so-called Marxism as a mere instance of his typical Kojèvean irony and facetiousness. But we would be mistaken to do so. The truth of the matter is that he did promote Marxism, but that he departed from the orthodox interpretations of Marx.
Before the nineties, this Marxism could have been dismissed as the doctrine of a dilettante, but after nineties, it could not. For intellectuals had established unorthodox Marxism as the reigning orthodoxy in the last remaining Marxist superpower in the world - China.
After the death of Mao, the Chinese turned away from Soviet-style Marxism. Whether or not this reflected an expediency, or a growing influence of 'capitalist roaders' in the Chinese Communist Party, or a recognition that Soviet methods simply did not work, or all three, one cannot say. What we do know is that by the late seventies and early eighties the Chinese communist intellectuals were forced to devise, and devise quickly, apologia for Deng Xiaoping's new course. In their attempts to do so, they undertook the task of squaring the circle. Capitalist and communist policy were being implemented at the same time. How could one argue that this was Marxist?
The effort led to the re-examining of the now-dusty and moldy works of Marx and Engels; the Chinese intellectuals scoured these in a search for different path to socialism, one that did not terminate in the Russian model. The discussions of what the Chinese call the 'initial stage of socialism' make for some interesting reading, if one finds Marxism interesting, and certain passages of the Wiki summary are striking. One intellectual puts forward the notion that the new Chinese version of Marxism contradicts orthodox Marxism when it suggests that 'History was unilinear rather than multilinear'. 'The problem facing the CPC [the Chinese Communist Party] was that a unilinear view of history meant that China could not adopt socialism because [China] had skipped the capitalist mode of production, but a multilinear view meant that China did not need to adopt socialism because it was not a specific "stage in human evolution"'.
This implies that a non-socialist country such as China may still qualify either as socialist or as being on the road to socialism. Kojève concluded likewise.
Marx and Engels wrote their main works in the mid to late nineteenth century, and their writings often seem more bound to that particular time more than the writings of other thinkers of that period; if these works could be said to have an odour - and Nietzsche believe that certain writings had a distinctive 'smell' - then they are redolent of the antiques store. The opponent of Marx must Marx's portrayal of Victorian-era capitalism and in order to use it against Marx, he must choose between two avenues of attack.
The first is that Marxism was not only wrong and it had always been wrong; nothing Marx writes of factory conditions, for example, is true. Conservatives such as Hayek take this route, and this type of anti-Marxist is inclined to revisionism: 'Was 19th century England as bad as Marx said it was?'.
The second is that Marxism was once right. Marx did describe the social and economic conditions of his time accurately, he was right, but the caveat is that he was right for his time only. This line recommends itself to the anti-Marxist taking it because it presents him with one singular advantage, which is that a good many Marxists agree with him. After WWII, the intellectuals of the Frankfurt School and the New Left asked how it was that Marxism could still hold true. Had not Western Europe moved beyond the Victorian-era smoke-stack capitalism and the attendant phenomena of children being chained to workbenches? Most certainly it had. And so one asks how it is that in such a Europe that Marxist revolution is possible.
Kojève looks to the same questions in one of the most famous of his post-war lectures, 'Colonialism from a European perspective', which was held at a business club in Düsseldorf in 1957.
Without naming them, Kojève dismisses the Lenins, Trotskys, Maos, as 'Romantics' who 'distorted the Marxist theories in order to apply them to noncapitalist relations, i.e., precisely to economic systems Marx did not have in view'. This touches upon a salient point, one that is brought up by many a non-Marxist. Communism took root only in agrarian, semi-capitalist, and semi-feudal countries such as Russia and China; industralised countries such as Germany and England resisted its blandishments. But Marx devised his theories precisely for the industrialised countries. This is a leak in Marxist theory, and one that Marxists beginning with Lenin attempted to patch up.
Kojève proceeds with the 'Marx was true, but true only for his time' line of argument. Expanding upon it, he makes an extraordinary assertion: the greatest Marxist of the 20th century was Henry Ford.
[The capitalists] rebuilt capitalism in a Marxist way.
To put it briefly, the capitalists saw exactly the same thing as Marx saw and said although independently of him, and with some delay. Namely, that capitalism can neither progress, nor even exist, if the 'surplus value' produced through industrial technologies is not divided between the capitalist minority and the working majority. In other words, the post-Marxist capitalists understood that the modern, highly industralised capitalism of mass production not only permits, but also requires, a constant increase in the income (and of the standard of living) of the working masses. And they behaved accordingly.
In brief, the capitalists did exactly what they ought to have done according to Marxist theory in order to make the 'social revolution' impossible, i.e., unnecessary. This 'Marxist' reconstruction of the original capitalism was accomplished more or less anonymously. But, as always, there was a great ideologue here, too. He was called Henry Ford. And thus we can say that Ford was the only great, authentic Marxist of the 20th century.
Those who lived in the West after 1991 and who shared in its prosperity and comforts were living in societies that were post-Marxist in two ways. The first of these was that we who lived in those societies lived in a world in which there was no Soviet communism; the second, that after the reforms by the likes of Ford, we lived in a political, social, and economic order that had deliberately forestalled the Marxist revolution.
IV. America as communist
None of the above quite captures the spirit of the post-1991 age, however.
Marxism traditionally concerns itself with capitalism that has gone wrong, never with capitalism gone right. To use the jargon of economists, it is contraction that preoccupies the Marxists, not growth. Now, Western countries such as Australia and America experienced contraction in the early nineties, as did the countries of the former Eastern bloc, and the post-communist countries experienced the worst of it after their abrupt shifting-over from communism to capitalism. In Yugoslavia, the currency became worthless, and the resulting economic disruption brought about break-up and war. But unlike the Easterner, the fortunate Westerner in that period could know poverty and at the same time good living; poverty did not bar the way to the enjoying of the fruits of consumerism.
When we think of consumerism and growth, we think of America; the country seems to embody both. Kojève agreed. In a famous passage in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, we find:
One can even say that, from a certain point of view, the United States has already attained the final stage of Marxist "communism," seeing that, practically, all the members of a "classless society" can from now on appropriate for themselves everything that seems good to them, without thereby working any more than their heart dictates.
Now, several voyages of comparison made (between 1948 and 1958) to the United States and the U.S.S.R. gave me the impression that if the Americans give the appearance of rich Sino-Soviets, it is because the Russians and the Chinese are only Americans who are still poor but are rapidly proceeding to get richer. I was led to conclude from this that the "American way of life" was the type of life specific to the post-historical period, the actual presence of the United States in the World prefiguring the "eternal present" future of all of humanity.
What Kojève is referring to in the last sentence is his notion of the end of history: there shall be no history after a certain point, that is, no great historical events, and thereafter humanity will continue to live in time but not in history. That living will be for the day and not the morrow.
Derrida attempts to clarify the passage in Specters of Marx (1994).
Why and how was Kojève able to think that the United States had already reached the "final stage" of "Marxist 'communism'"? What did he think he perceived there, what did he want to perceive there? Answer: the appropriation, in abundance, of everything that can respond to need or desire, the cancellation of the gap between desire and need suspends any excess, any disadjustment, in particular in work. It is not at all surprising that this end of the disadjustment (of the being "out of joint") "prefigures [an] eternal present".
Derrida here is florid and French, that is, typically Derrida. But we get his meaning. 'The end of disadjustment' implies an end of conflict and the reaching of a resolution. Thereafter, one can appropriate 'in abundance', of everything that can respond to need or desire'; 'the gap between desire and need' has been cancelled.
Derrida has put his finger on what capitalism is and paradoxically, what communism is. For this abundance, this growth, this 'cancellation of the gap', was promised to us by Marx and the Marxists of the first half of the 20th century. We find these themes in the writings of Lenin and Trotsky, and even of Stalin and Khrushchev. In the form given to it by Kojève, the communist idea may have won me over in my youth. Perhaps, had I encountered it, I would have declared myself to be a communist.
V. In conclusion: Hegel and Christian Science
The idea of the reconciliation and the unity of opposites stands at the center of Hegel's philosophy, and I will explain it in non-philosophical language and how it bears on the subject of the discussion.
In our reading of Hegel, we see that his account of the self, or consciousness, or soul, is a narrative proceeding through stages. In the narrative's first half, the inner self and the outer world stand opposed to one another. That is to say, one is dissatisfied with the world because it does not live up to one's expectations, it does not conform to the ideal one may have of it. But then a change takes place, and the situation improves. Suddenly - and the transition can be quite abrupt - the outer world and the inner become the one and same. One's fond imaginings become reality; the world of one's heart's desire, and the world as it really is, become identical. Thus, the 'gap is canceled'. This is Hegel's Absolute Idea.
How did the improvement come about? From Hegel, we can deduce two answers, one contradicting the other. The first is that the outer world was brought closer to one's heart's desire by a deliberate effort: one worked to make the ideal real. The second is that perhaps the reality of the outer world matched the ideal of one's inner all along: the outer world does not need any improvement, it has already met one's heart's desire, it already stands there complete and perfect. And we fail to recognise its completeness because our consciousness is defective. Here Hegel begins to sound like Peale and Eddy.
Now, as stated at the outset, Positive Thinking does not sit well with the politically-minded. In particular, it meets with a violent reaction from the Marxists, who are a perpetually dissatisfied people. To repeat, the political activist is someone who wants something that is not there, that is, he wants something that is missing; he detects a privation in the world and he wants ameliorate it. And the more radical he is, the more completion he wants. He invites his audience to inspect the existing state of affairs and find it wanting, which is why he often meets with the accusation that he wants to induce a state of discontent.
Usually in the narrative put forth by the rabble rouser a fix can be achieved through a simple means: a vote for Trump, a Marxist revolution. But if the remedy is not close to hand, then one is made to feel discontented and for nothing. One then arrives at the sad truth that lofty goals cannot be attained in this world, only in the next. When the normie realises that he has been backed into such a corner, he drops out of politics, and after the experience, he is a little wiser and a little more discontented than before.
Under the direction of the demagogue, the masses are to turn away from what little sources of satisfaction there in their lives, and they become worse off as a result. The normie then rues his dabbling in politics and his allowing himself to be seduced by what Spengler calls 'subverters, rhetors, and fantastics'. Perhaps he would have benefited from the ideas of Peale and Eddy.
The standard objection to Peale and Eddy is that evil does exist in the world and that it exists objectively; it is not a trick played upon oneself by one's own mind. But Peale and Eddy, and Hegel before them, were striving for a mystical insight that is detached from everyday perception. The man who secures the insight stands far above. His view of human existence is (in language of cinematography) a bird's eye view as opposed to a worm's eye. In one of his most famous poems ('Lapis Lazuli', written in 1936), Yeats, after climbing to the top of a summit from which he looks down upon on mankind, acquires the bird's eye view.
One has to ask if the political activist today can stand on that plane; if the activist can reach that mystical objectivity; and to reach it, if he must be made of the same stuff as a Taoist sage or a Buddhist monk.
To arrive at an answer, we need understanding of what it is that distinguishes the right-wing mind from the left-wing, seeing that we are on the Right, and that we must know our own politics, for inability to know it could stand in the way of our apprehending the truth, which is what Hegel calls the Absolute Idea.
The conservatives who claim that radical leftists are mentally ill (that is, insane - 'mental illness' being a euphemism for insanity) are correct: discontent lies at the heart of the leftist's being, and this is a discontent that makes him unhinged, a discontent that will always be there, a discontent that will always finds it justification in whatever the ideology he comes across.
Unlike the man of the Left, the man of the Right started off his life as contented, not discontented, and he was fortunate enough to experience only recently a way of life that was good and proper. The life in that past compares favourably to life in the present, for at some point in the recent past society took a wrong turn; now life gets worse every year. Henceforth the rightist devotes himself to the task of stopping the rot and preserving what is good, true, and sane.
The thought of almost every radical rightist from Hitler to Trump progresses in such a manner. In the time of his innocence, the intelligent and distinguished man who has not yet entered politics may lean towards a nationalism and patriotism that are mundane and everyday. His opinions may be so widely shared, and so ordinary and commonsensical, such that he may define himself not as a radical or a conservative but as a moderate; he may incline towards liberalism, even socialism. But then a catastrophic event intervenes, the old certainties vanish, and the world as he knows it is turned upside down. But while it changed, he stayed the same. And by his clinging to what was once previously regarded as the norm, he is abominated as a reactionary. The Left considers him to be dangerous.
He could be either Hitler or Trump: Hitler once knew a Vienna that was supreme and good before the catastrophe, Trump once knew a Manhattan. In the first half of the essay, I lauded the past like a Hitler or a Trump would have, and it would be easy to build a conservative, even reactionary, position upon that past, setting off the good past against the bad present. This conservatism would point out the undeniable truth that the West of twenty and thirty years ago compares most favourably against the West of 2023.
Such a position would be right-wing and reactionary; at the same time, it would be something of an evasion. For the likes of Hegel, Eddy, and Peale reached a mystical objectivity that looms far above the populism of a Hitler or a Trump.
When faced with a choice between those two perspectives, to which one should we ourselves strive towards: the mystical or the political? Our first instinct is to respond, the political. This is because we find it difficult to escape the prosaic and the everyday; we lack the detachment of a Hegel, who wrote the Phenomenology of the Spirit (1807) when the French and Prussian armies were coming to blows in Jena a few kilometres away.
Of course, the privations experienced by Europeans in the Hegel's exceed those of ours. Everyday wisdom says: compare and contrast the bad times against the good, and count your blessings. But platitudes miss the point. According to his interpreters Koyré and Kojève, Hegel understood that a fundamental change had occurred at the turn of the 19th century, a change which, in Kojève's view, was for the better. And its beneficial effects were such that they would not have disappeared one to two hundred years later; that is, they would not have been negated by Biden, transsexuals, Black Lives Matter, wokeness, inflation, Covidianism, LGBTism, and race-swapping Disney movies.
The detachment of Hegel approaches that of a Buddhist sage, and clinging it to it through circumstances as adverse as those endured by Hegel requires determination and grit; we can infer that Hegel himself practised a daily mental self-discipline and made a habit of shutting out of his consciousness the Napoleonic Era's cholera, starvation, economic disruption, and corpses.
As profound as it was, the truth of Hegel did not differ overly much from the truth of the Bugman. But whereas Hegel came to that truth by means of logic, the Bugman came to it by dint of his existence. The Bugman understands Hegel's Absolute Idea only instinctively, and he cannot put it into intellectual form.
We have, then, come full circle, and if we are to take the Bugman as an exemplar, we must follow Bugman law. We must live according to his precepts. And what are these? Sit on one's couch, play 'vidya', eat junk food, and smoke dope. Live the life that I did thirty years ago: frequent the convenience store, the fast-food restaurant, the shopping mall, the comic book shop, and treat those places as sacred sites.
An alternative to the Bug Man does exist, that alternative being the political in Carl Schmitt's sense. Reading between the lines in Kojève, we almost detect Kojève and Schmitt, who were good friends, exchanging views. Here one thinker who is apolitical confronts another who is political.
In the present, the Apolitical Man stands on top; but Political Man, long suppressed, may erupt to the surface. For now, he stands in abeyance, and if we are to decide between the two, we must come down in favour of the Apolitical. When taking all the evidence of the past three years into consideration, we must render the verdict that the Political has not delivered, and that our hankering after it has caused unneeded mental strife, friction, and turmoil. In order to ameliorate our condition, we must seek something else. And perhaps that something else is the way of the Bugman.
