.

And by a prudent flight and cunning save A life which valour could not, from the grave. A better buckler I can soon regain, But who can get another life again? Archilochus

Thursday, November 7, 2024

The End is Near! @@

Nathan Gardels, "Illiberal Democracy Comes To America"
The election may mark liberalism’s last sigh as a dominant ideology.

The stunning election of Donald Trump and his allies in the U.S. Congress has set America on a starkly divisive course not seen since the Civil War era.

Several things bear pointing out.

Those who implicitly trusted the electoral system lost decisively, while trust has apparently been restored for those who suspected all the institutions of democracy were corrupt. Conspiracy theories about stolen ballots have evaporated overnight. No one this time around is plotting to block the transfer of power.

The “strong gods” of family, faith and nation prevailed against the culturally liberal sentiments of the open society, which we wrote about recently in Noema. That is a trend across the West that will now receive a further boost as the ascendant direction of history.

Festering resentment against elites — who were seen as insulated from the consequences of their woke tolerance, including on immigration — conjoined with the economic headwinds battering working America. Despite the headline statistics trumpeted by the Democrats, or the barely manifested results of President Joe Biden’s industrial policies, the ongoing reality of inflation and the unequal conditions in daily life could not be masked. As recently reported, the top 20% account for 40% of all consumption, which drives the American economy, while the bottom 40% accounts for only 20%. And that is not to speak of the third factor of a creeping isolationist temper that sees entanglement in conflicts abroad as worsening damage at home.

Whether all those across a surprisingly broad spectrum who amassed the popular vote for Trump fully grasped what they were mandating, illiberal democracy is what we will all now get.

Illiberal Democracy Is Not Fascism, Exactly

Illiberal democracy may not be the fascism of historical precedent, but a close enough cousin to fear. The historian and author of “The Anatomy of Fascism,” Robert Paxton, has said about the MAGA movement: “It’s bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that’s very much like the original fascisms. It’s the real thing. It really is.” Similarly driven by dysfunctional government and perceived social decadence, Trump voters, says Paxton, have an “obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood.”

It’s more than a bit unnerving to remember that, even at the height of its popularity on the path to power when it banned other parties, the Nazis received 37% at the ballot box. Hitler was appointed as chancellor in 1933 by German President Paul von Hindenburg because his party was the biggest in a parliamentary system. He never won a direct popular vote in a competitive election. Trump won nearly 51% of the popular vote in this week’s election.

Elections Alone Are Not Democracy

When Nicolas Berggruen and I published our 2019 book “Renovating Democracy: Governing In The Age of Globalization And Digital Capitalism,” The Economist asked us a question that could fit this very moment as well: “You argue that we need to ‘renovate democracy.’ But another way to see things is that democracy is working just fine, it’s just that the outcomes don’t appeal to comfortable cosmopolitans… What makes you convinced that democracy is broken?”

The answer now would be the same as then: “What we are seeing is the result of elections. But democracy is as much about what happens outside the ballot box: impartial rules, practices, institutions — and political culture — that are not only inclusive, but that foster the reasoned discourse, negotiation and compromise necessary to reach a governing consensus in diverse societies.”

We pointed out then that Trump’s first victory was not the cause of our governing crisis, but a symptom of it:
In recent decades this system has decayed. The mainstream political parties were captured by the organized special interests of an insider establishment that failed to address the dislocations of globalization and disruptions of rapid technological change. This led to a deep distrust of governing institutions by all those left behind. Such disaffection gained more traction than ever before because of the participatory power of social media.

When an unresponsive elite forsakes the average citizen in a system legitimated by popular sovereignty—and fortified by social media—demagogues who fashion themselves as tribunes of the people ride the rage to power. …

The danger now is that the fevered populists are throwing the baby out with the bathwater, assaulting the very norms and institutional checks and balances that guarantee the enduring survival of republics. The revolt against a moribund political class has transmuted into a revolt against governance itself. The result is protracted polarization.
The chief challenge, we said at the time, is not for partisans to put their team back in power through elections, but to mend the breach of distrust between the public and all the intermediating institutions of self-government that have decayed.

This can be done, we argued, by integrating social networks and the broader civil society into governance through new deliberative practices, such as citizens’ assemblies and other forms of impactful citizen engagement “that complement representative government and compensate for its waning legitimacy. In our book we call this ‘participation without populism.’”

The X Factor

What has fanned warranted ressentiment against the “cosmopolitan caste” and the so-called “coastal elites” into an inflamed culture war with the divergent “values of the heartland” is not only the ever-evolving clash between liberal modernity and tradition and their associated status-spheres, but the consolidation of rigid worldviews through the siloed virality of social media.

The newest challenge liberal democracy faces is a digital media ecosystem that both empowers a multitude of voices and concentrates control. The digital oligarch mostly closely linked with the Trump revolution, Elon Musk, has not turned X into a public square, but into a partisan propaganda platform for the MAGA movement.

Indeed, the public square where competing propositions can be tested against each other in the full gaze of the body politic as a whole has virtually disappeared.

Peer-to-peer connectivity fosters this deformation because, as the philosopher Byung-Chul Han notes, it “redirects the flow of communication. Information is spread without forming a public sphere. It is produced in private spaces and distributed to private spaces. The web does not create a public.”

Without a common public space where the credibility and trustworthiness of information can be established, there is no solid ground for meaningful discourse. What takes its place is an arms race of ploy and counter-ploy, which we witnessed in spades during the election campaign.

Just as republics have historically created institutional checks and balances when too much power is concentrated in one place, as should now be the case with ownership of the means of connectivity, so too we need to foster checks and balances for an age when information flows are so distributed that the public sphere is disempowered. The deliberative practices already discussed are but one way to do so.

Liberals Must Deliver The Goods

Finally, the Trump movement has triumphed in the U.S. for much the same reason Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Morena party succeeded in Mexico. Despite the party’s now realized pledge to gut the independent judiciary by mandating direct election of judges, the party’s presidential candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, won last summer’s balloting in a landslide.

For all the endless talk of threats to the “rule of law” and “democracy” by the previously governing elites, they failed to move the needle when in power by delivering the goods for the majority who were left behind. For most Mexicans, liberal concerns were a meaningless abstraction in the context of their meager prospects, which never seemed to improve.

Whether Trump’s election marks the last sigh for the ideology of liberalism in the U.S. rests on two things. First, whether his illiberal regime can deliver the goods any better than liberal democrats. Second, whether the opposition does not simply focus on how to get their partisans back in power, but grapples seriously with how to deepen democracy by restoring its connective tissue beyond elections through practices and institutions that enable and encourage negotiation, compromise and consensus rather than partisan combat and culture wars.

Majoritarian Rule Is Not Constitutional Government

To base the idea of democracy solely on elections invites illiberalism because it implies that majoritarian rule is all that is necessary. But, as the American founding fathers well understood, the will of the majority does not embrace all interests in a society, which must be protected equally. That is the reason for constitutional rule as the founding principle of a liberal polity.

In constitutional theory, the imposition of limitations and restraints — the “negative” — is what prevents the majority from absolute domination. It is the negative that makes the constitution, and the “positive” that makes government. The one is the power of acting, the other is the power of preventing or arresting action. The two, combined, make constitutional government.

It is this governing arrangement that has made America great. The biggest danger of Making America Great Again is that a movement that believes it is the embodiment of the will of the majority will cast aside any constraints on its power as a contrivance by the elites of the ancien regime to keep the masses down.

Wednesday, November 6, 2024

The State of US Election Fraud...

Reduced?

Will we see the 14th Amendment Steal Described Below Instead?
Remember, Remember, the 5th of Novenber!

Sunday, November 3, 2024

On Barry and the Deep State

Why CIA and the USIC (and Corporate America) Be So Woke:
The NED, NDI, IRI Model for...

GLOBAL "Community Organizing"

Friday, November 1, 2024

El Dia de los Muertos!

On Heidegger's Releasement

...freedom FROM Will

...and travelling full circle.  From William James' "On the Varieties of Religious Experience" through Freud's Psychiatry, Lacan's Linguistics, and now back to philosophy.... or better... poetics and symphonics.

Thursday, October 31, 2024

By the prickling of my thumb...

...something wicked this way comes!

Critical Election Theory

"Constant election campaigns, as a permanent media spectacle produce pathological individuals in a pathological Society."
- Jacques Ellul 
(Actual Candidate Profiles Not Included)
"The creation of a religion is one of the indispensable elements of propaganda. The content of this religion is of little importance, what matters is to satisfy the religious feelings of the masses; these feelings are used to integrate the masses into the National Collective. We must not delude ourselves: when one speaks to us of 'Massive Democracy' and 'Democratic Participation,' these are only veiled terms that mean 'religion'. Participation and unanimity have always been characteristics of religious societies, and only of religious societies." (251-252) 
"We have seen that the existence of two contradictory propagandas is no solution at all as it in no way leads to a 'democratic' situation: the individual is not... a supreme Arbiter when he decides in favor of the more honest and convincing (candidate)... The individual is seized, manipulated, attacked from every side: the combatants of two propaganda systems do not fight each other, but try to capture him.

As a result the individual suffers the most profound psychological influences and distortions. Man modified in this fashion demands simple solutions, catch words... a clear and simple division into Good and Evil... he cannot bear ambiguity. He cannot bear that the opponent should in any way whatever represent what is right or good." (254-255)
-Jacques Ellul

BURNT CROSS LYRICS
"Governed By Fools"

Welcome to the dawning of the age of oppression
The face of hostility observing all nations
Pacified then crucified, you’re under sedation
We’re standing in the ruins of civilisation

[Chorus]
We are governed by fools that are driven by profit and war
We’re just pawns in their game, being shat on once again
Now it’s getting even worse than it ever was before
... ever was before

Socialist traitor Gordon Brown must be so proud
Watching his fascist pigs disperse another crowd
Tearing down the banners that he once stood behind
Can you see the hypocrisy, or are you fucking blind?

[Chorus]

The embers smoulder, have got to enflame
Got to let them know we’re not playing there game
Show them that we’re sick of their promises and lies
And wont just take the shit whilst our freedom is denied

We’re all governed by fools, who are drowning in their own bureaucracy
We’re just pawns in their game, being fucked over again
Destined to a life of forced authority
...forced authority, forced authority

Governed by fools, divided we fall

Wednesday, October 30, 2024

On Our Resurgent Liberal Fascism...

"The means employed to spread Democratic ideas make the citizen psychologically a "Totalitarian Man". The only difference between him and a Nazi is that he is a totalitarian man with Democratic convictions."
 - Jacques Ellul
...and the post 9/11 US Intelligence Community's "continuity of Government" focus that is attempting this election year to "save democracy from democracy".


Excerpts from the Video above:
...At the conjunctural level of analysis, I think one of the best definitions, at least operative definitions of fascism, is that put forth by Michael Parenti in his work "Black shirts and reds," he said that "fascism is nothing more than a final solution to the class struggle, the totalistic submergence and exploitation of democratic forces for the benefit and profit of higher Financial circles. Fascism is a false revolution, it promises a radical transformation of society but what it delivers is actually an ongoing war on working people."

---

...Capital came into this world dripping from head to toe, from every pore with blood and dirt. It came into the world through acts of brutal genocidal colonialism, through the enslavement of major swaths of the population, the indigenous population, the African population. And that this colonial Heritage needs to be understood, as the forms of violent imposition of a capitalist system that predated the conceptual identification of fascism per se, but that resonate very strongly with some of the fundamental impulses that are integral to understanding what fascism is. And the systemic level of analysis that connects fascism to colonialism, and the Deep history of colonialism, also allows us to see the ways in which the real struggle against fascism needs to be a struggle against colonialism. And it foregrounds the extent to which all three of the major fascist countries that are identified as the main forces in World War II, to Italy, Germany, and Japan were invested absolutely and totally in colonial Endeavors. 
And so, the colonialism that predates fascism as a concept needs to also be understood as one of the driving mechanisms behind uh fascism, even in its conjunctural sense. The Nazi Rampage in the East against the Soviet Union was actually modeled on the US Colonial Rampage in the West and the Western frontier. And just as the US settlers were genocidally eliminating the indigenous population in order to have living room to the West, so were the Nazis planning on genocidally eliminating the peoples to the East in order to open up their Lebensraum or "living realm" in the East. And this is a very very explicit connection, and Germany was simply one of the countries like Italy.

---

...I think that many people who are familiar with Marxist analysis are very attuned to the ways in which bourgeois ideology often passes a particular off for a universal. So that when the founding fathers of the United States claim that "all men are created equal", what they did not mean was that all people were actually created equal. What they meant is that a particular group of white property owning males were created equal. So they take the particular and they talk in the name of the universal, right, as if that was all people.

What's interesting in the ideology of fascist exceptionalism is that rather than universalizing the particular, this ideological operation transforms the systemic into the sporadic, the structural into the singular, the conjunctural into the idiosyncratic. So it's the same basic ideological move, but in the opposite direction. It is the natural outgrowth of this bourgeois approach to Fascism that conceptualizes Germano-Italian fascism as absolutely unique, and defines it in terms of its epiphenomenal and superficial characteristics and never mines down into the Capitalist Roots, thereby obfuscating the structural parallels with other forms of repressive governance around the world.

---

...The overall kind of depiction of conjunctural fascism (in WWII) needs to be written.

And fortunately, there's great work on this front in terms of a capitalist backing and strong liberal aiding and abetting. I would like to point to the fact that the US backers of Capitalism also included the big Capital within the United States, as well as some of the important forces that were operative within the US National Security State. So, Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and Dupont had all become deeply involved and invested in Germans weapons production in the inter-War period, and in fact, American Investment in Germany had sharply increased after Hitler came to power. According to Christopher Simpson's excellent work on this front, Commerce Department reports show that the US investment in Germany increased some 48.5% between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in Continental Europe. So in this regard, fascism in Europe was astro-turfed, it wasn't simply a Grassroots movement, and fascism itself. As far as I've been able to see in my research, I've not found examples of fascism that is purely Grassroots. I've always found instances of astroturfing. Astroturfing, of course, means that instead of a Grassroots movement coming from below, there are capitalist ruling class elements that plant the seeds by funding fascist movements and trying to Foster them as much as possible. One of the important legal firms involved in foreign direct investment in Hitler's Germany was Sullivan and Cromwell, which of course was overseen by or part of. The leadership of Sullivan and Cromwell was the Dulles brothers, who would go on to become the head of the US State Department on the one hand, and the head of the Central Intelligence Agency on the other. And they would make sure, in the wake of World War II, that these financial investments were protected.

Sunday, October 27, 2024

Democracy Needs Saving from Itself?...

Slavoj Zizek, "Saving Democracy from Itself"
Through a de facto partial suspension of democracy, Macron kept the far right out of power and restored stability.

In Agatha Christie’s novel The Hollow, the eccentric Lucy Angkatell holds a dinner party for the Christows (John, a famous doctor, and his wife, Gerda), various members of her extended family, and her neighbor, detective Hercule Poirot. The next morning, Poirot witnesses a scene that seems strangely staged: Gerda stands with a gun in her hand next to John’s body as it bleeds into the swimming pool. Lucy, Henrietta (John’s lover), and Edward (a cousin of Lucy’s) are also present. John utters a final urgent appeal, “Henrietta,” and dies.

It seems obvious that Gerda is the murderer. Henrietta steps forward to take the revolver from her hand, but apparently fumbles and drops it into the pool, destroying the evidence of Gerda’s fingerprints on the handle. Poirot realizes that the dying man’s “Henrietta” was a call to his lover to protect his wife from imprisonment for his death.

Without any conscious plan, the entire family joins in the plot and deliberately misdirects Poirot. Each of them knows that Gerda is the murderer, so they stage the crime scene, but in a reflexive way: the deception lies in the very fact that it appears staged. The truth masks itself as artifice, such that the faked elements are, in fact, “clues.” As another of Christie’s famous detectives, Jane Marple, remarks in They Do It with Mirrors: “Never underestimate the power of the obvious.”

If we replace John’s body with democracy and Gerda with French President Emmanuel Macron, we can open a window onto France following its parliamentary election this summer. After the far-right National Rally won the first round, Macron was caught holding a smoking gun. But in the weeks and months thereafter, he managed to protect French democracy by partly suspending it, thus denying the second-round winner – a leftist coalition called the New Popular Front (NFP) – the fruits of its victory.

The French constitution – which was imposed by Charles de Gaulle at the establishment of the Fifth Republic in 1958 – stipulates that the president nominates the prime minister, whose appointed government can operate even if its members have not been confirmed by the National Assembly. It was owing to this peculiarity that François Mitterand later decried the Fifth Republic as undemocratic, describing it in 1964 as a “permanent coup.”

The rationale for this constitutional feature was that the French people should be forced to make a choice, and that if their choice is unclear, the president has the authority – and the duty – to maintain order and stability. The June European Parliament election and the French general election both indicated that French voters were unable or unwilling to make a clear choice. In doing so, they gave Macron the opening he needed to sideline both the far right and the NFP by allying his own coalition with the Gaullist Republicans.

Macron was widely criticized for calling an election so soon after National Rally had finished first in the EU election. But National Rally ultimately finished third, and other parties have de facto supported his handling of the situation by not calling for a no-confidence vote against his recently appointed prime minister, Michel Barnier.

Something similar happened in France during the historic May 1968 protests, which almost toppled de Gaulle and his government – or so it seemed – only for him to return with a new National Assembly in place. Notably, the protests erupted at the very high point of the French welfare state, when the standard of living was higher than it had ever been before.

The implication, in retrospect, is that a strong case can be made for enlightened dictatorship. France is lucky in that its constitution allows for the type of partial suspension of parliamentary democracy that Macron indulged in. Just imagine what will happen in Germany when there is no possible way to form a government without including the far-right Alternative für Deutschland.

Although I disagree with Macron’s politics and policies, I respect his quick reaction to the far right’s apparent ascent this summer. His decision to dissolve parliament was certainly risky, but it was a risk worth taking. The new fascism must be fought with haste and vigor wherever it appears.

Though National Rally’s Marine Le Pen was denied her victory in the second round, CNN described the result well: “Macron’s gamble has kept the far right out of power, but plunged France into chaos.” Because Macron and Jean-Luc Mélenchon (the key figure in the NPF) are so far apart, no deal to forge a grand coalition seemed possible. Instead, the country seemed set for a prolonged period of instability and anti-left subterfuge – bad news for an already brittle economy and efforts to fend off the far right in the 2027 presidential election.

Instead, France has not been plunged into chaos. For now, at least, it seems that Macron’s gamble has restored a semblance of normality. Some will wonder whether a non-elected government can drag on indefinitely; but others will answer, “Why not?” It is certainly preferable to a hung parliament, prolonged political unrest, and social and economic chaos.

Through a de facto partial suspension of democracy, Macron kept the far right out of power and restored stability. For that, he deserves congratulations and support. With neo-fascism on the rise globally, similar measures may prove necessary elsewhere. As the philosopher Jon Elster concluded in 2020: “We can reverse the common dictum that democracy is under threat, and affirm that democracy is the threat, at least in its short-termist populist form.”

...More Like Leftists Rejoicing in "Enlightened Despotism" 

Lacan 101

On Intersectionality and the Formation of Symbolic and Totemic Social Capital


We Have Never Been Woke: The Cultural Contradictions of a New Elite, by Musa al-Gharbi (Princeton, 432 pp., $35)

Oliver Traldi, "Who the Woke Are"
A new book delivers keen insights into the human condition while speaking directly to concrete social phenomena.

What is a theory? In philosophy, we usually think of it as a set of propositions. These propositions might be challenged directly, or they might turn out to generate empirical predictions or logical consequences that could be challenged instead. But we can also think of theories as things that live in people’s minds—ideas that shape our vocabularies, our maps of the world, our attunements to perceptions, our instincts about what jumps out as important in our environments. Thinking this way, a theory’s measure is its number of adherents. What ought to be evaluated is how they think when gripped by the theory, not what the theory’s abstract implications might be.

Theories of politics in particular seem apt for this sort of evaluation. Some political philosophies do not specifically entail that horrible things ought to be done. But if such a theory’s adherents always seem to do horrible things once they get power, that should count against the theory.

Musa al-Gharbi’s book We Have Never Been Woke presents an account of the character and causes of woke politics. It fills a gap in this regard: al-Gharbi, primarily a sociologist, gives a different kind of perspective than, say, Yascha Mounk’s relatively centrist history of wokeness as rooted in radical academic ideas or Richard Hanania’s relatively right-wing history of wokeness as rooted in activist jurisprudence and the administrative state. But at a further remove, We Have Never Been Woke is a story of how theories—both the woke theories criticized and the more classically leftist theories used to criticize them—simultaneously open our eyes to some things while blinding us to others.

The details that stick out to al-Gharbi are often strikingly simple. In the introduction, he recalls how in the fall of 2016, during his first semester as a doctoral student at Columbia University, undergraduate students claimed to be so traumatized in the wake of Donald Trump’s victory that they couldn’t do their work. Such students, al-Gharbi notes, were in fact attendees of an elite institution on their way to an elite life. As they claimed the mantle of the vulnerable and downtrodden, they focused on their own mental health rather than the material struggles of Columbia’s actual working-class community—“the landscapers, the maintenance workers, the food preparation teams, the security guards.Al-Gharbi cast a similarly sharp eye on the pro-Palestine protests this spring, noting at Compact, where he is a columnist, that while no Columbia student “faced more than a single misdemeanor charge[,] those who faced charges at City College, the nearby public university raided by police the same night, were all hit with felonies.

The conclusion, which becomes a starting point for the book, is that “we have never been woke.” In other words, if we conceive of wokeness as an ideology or philosophy or set of precepts, it’s not one that “woke” people generally adhere to. Rather, the woke are, in the words of the book’s subtitle, “a new elite” beset by “cultural contradictions,” which emerge from the very motivations and incentives that drove them to become woke to begin with. In another instance of sensitivity, al-Gharbi suggests that researchers in his fields tend themselves to be part of this new elite—and that their work on the sociology of elites, and on issues related to wokeness, thus suffers from persistent blind spots and biases.

The woke are, for al-Gharbi, “symbolic capitalists” whose occupations require the manipulation of words and data and who face a certain amount of inherent economic precariousness, which is compensated by higher social status. It’s widely acknowledged that writers and professors accept lower salaries for this “symbolic capital,” but al-Gharbi is the first to tie this fact rigorously to the rise of wokeness, centered as it is in these professions. The book’s perspective is perhaps best articulated in the following passage:

Elites, especially those who identify with historically marginalized and disadvantaged groups, increasingly define the relentless pursuit of their own self-interest as a “radical” act. High-end consumption is redefined as an act of “self-care” or “self-affirmation” . . . because they . . . are “worth it” and “deserve it.” Likewise, elites from historically disadvantaged groups who accumulate ever more power or influence in their own hands are described as somehow achieving a “win” for those who remain impoverished, marginalized, and vulnerable. . . . [B]ehaviors that would be recognized as exploitative, oppressive, or disrespectful if carried out by people who are white, heterosexual, or male are often interpreted as empowering, righteous, or necessary when carried out by “other” elites and elite aspirants.

In my view, al-Gharbi is more consistently correct about wokeness than any other author on the subject. He accurately traces wokeness to well before Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential candidacy, finding its origin in the Occupy Wall Street protests of 2011, attended, in his view, by many of the same people who wound up embracing full-fledged wokeness. I like to say that it started even earlier that same year: in April 2011, when the Obama administration’s Department of Education issued a “Dear Colleague” letter requiring that universities receiving federal funding adjust their procedures around adjudicating claims of sexual assault.

Indeed, at times al-Gharbi seems to suggest that the desire for more symbolic capital, for more social status, is a more essential human drive than the desire for more money; financial gains hit a threshold of diminishing returns and baseline satisfaction, whereas symbolic gains don’t seem to. And “because status is intrinsically relative . . . status competition much more closely approximates a zero-sum game.” Thus We Have Never Been Woke is ultimately not just a sociological book about a new cultural elite, the causes of the Great Awokening, or the causes of awokenings in general. It is also a philosophical book about ineliminable aspects of the human condition that draws its inspiration from concrete social circumstances.

Al-Gharbi gives a grand theory of awokenings—accounting for not only the recent Great Awokening but also social changes in the leadup to the Civil War, in the 1920s, and in the 1970s—and finds multiple threads of causation common to them.

One such thread is elite overproduction. When too many would-be elites are produced, they don’t get the standing they think they deserve, and sometimes seek to be revolutionaries instead. In cases where elite overproduction occurs simultaneously with more widespread social unrest, would-be elites can co-opt and redirect political movements toward their own goals—which, according to al-Gharbi, is often correlated with plateaus when it comes to those movements’ successes on their own terms. The biggest victories of these redirected revolutions are often “social justice sinecures,” or carved-out positions for the elites among supposedly marginalized groups.

According to al-Gharbi, elite overproduction leads to resentment and reactive calls for revolution: “Frustrated symbolic capitalists and elite aspirants sought to indict the system that failed them—and also the elites that did manage to flourish—by attempting to align themselves with the genuinely marginalized and disadvantaged.” But this isn’t completely clear. If wokeness is a legitimating ideology of a successful and powerful elite class, how can it also be a kind of formation aimed against that class by those who failed to join it? Some disentangling of this sort of tension could have helped highlight the book’s overall thesis amid the forest of fascinating detail.

In the recent Great Awokening, al-Gharbi notes with his characteristic eye, the new group of over-credentialed underachievers mostly consisted of women, and a significant majority of the jobs in the administrative bloat that was created in the wake of woke upheaval—the HR and DEI bureaucracies—went to women. Later on, he writes: “The feminization of the symbolic professions is significant in light of the robust and ever-expanding lines of research in moral and social psychology demonstrating that . . . men and women tend to engage in very different forms of conflict, competition, and status seeking.” This feminization is linked, for al-Gharbi, to the rise of a “victimhood culture” oriented in part around the concept of “trauma.” The psychology of victimhood fits the broader sense of superiority that al-Gharbi attributes to the woke symbolic capitalists: “Research has found that people who understand themselves as victims often demonstrate less concern for the hardships of others; they feel more entitled to selfish behavior; they grow more vicious against rivals . . . [T]hey also gain a sense of moral superiority relative to everyone else.”

Further, the risk-aversion and fear of ostracism that characterizes the psychology of most symbolic capitalists leads to reduced innovation in spheres as diverse as science, business, and pop culture. This section is more speculative than most, but I was happy to see al-Gharbi address the ubiquity of remakes, adaptations, and spinoffs in contemporary cultural output—just what one would expect if culture is dominated by those who have spent their lives getting better and better at following the rules. Progressive culture seems to resemble the political equivalent of bankers showing off their near-identical business cards to one another in American Psycho. Thus We Have Never Been Woke also improves on earlier accounts of wokeness by linking it to other contemporary phenomena that are obviously related but hard to associate as a matter of pure political belief.

Another such phenomenon is widespread mental illness among symbolic capitalists; al-Gharbi writes: “As symbolic capitalists’ attitudes about the social world changed, their emotional states moved in tandem.” It seems to me that it could have been the other way around; either way, I would have loved to read more on that topic.

Beyond symbolic capital, al-Gharbi introduces a new term for a kind of social status arising out of victimhood culture: totemic capital. This is the “authority afforded to an individual . . . on the basis of claimed or perceived membership in a historically marginalized or disadvantaged group.” This—along with a kind of raw assumption of totemic homogeneity—fuels, for instance, the infamous “as a” construction (e.g., “As a mentally ill Jewish-Italian man of size, I find that comment offensive”). It also explains the phenomenon of “race faking,” in which white people, especially white women, purport to be members of minority groups, just as victimhood culture itself explains the prevalence of hate crime hoaxes. Indeed, for al-Gharbi minority elites themselves are engaging in a kind of race faking, “trad[ing] on the struggles and experiences of lower- to moderate-income nonimmigrant and monoracial Black people—enhancing their own credibility and life prospects by purporting to speak on behalf of these others.”

Al-Gharbi deserves credit for mentioning these phenomena (and is even audacious enough to name Elizabeth Warren as a race faker), but he likely underestimates their importance. The problem is that his theory of totemic capital is in tension with his theory of symbolic capital as the root of wokeness. If symbolic capitalists are riding a false egalitarianism into increased social status and power, why would their theory enjoin them to cede authority to totem-bearers? If wokeness developed in the self-interest of elite white liberals, why would it involve such bowing and scraping? Why would it require the handing off of opportunities? The admission that one’s accomplishments aren’t really one’s own, but rather the result of privilege and discrimination? Why do woke whites so favor affirmative action that might hurt their own prospects?

This is where al-Gharbi’s own forms of theory-building, based on various forms of capital, cause him some blindness of his own. Examining the quasi-religious aspects of wokeness would have been useful in this context; his account of symbolic capitalists as self-interested could be rescued if the interest in question is some sort of purging of their souls of original sins, like unconscious bias. And, since al-Gharbi sometimes seems to place wokeness mainly in the minds of white liberal symbolic capitalists, it would make sense to acknowledge that totem-bearers don’t have to be woke in order to gain the sort of symbolic capital that woke whites seem to want. In fact, one might regard wokeness as simply parasitic on the totemic capital that al-Gharbi describes—an essentially derivative phenomenon that is, in some sense, a kind of anti-whiteness.

Similarly, though al-Gharbi analyzes symbolic capitalists’ divergence from their stated egalitarian ideals, he doesn’t seem to question the intuitive appeal of those ideals. This is so even though the apparent hypocrisy seems related to other phenomena he’s skeptical of, like victimhood culture. The third chapter, titled “Symbolic Domination,” begins: “Who are the elites? In contemporary America, it seems no one wants to adopt the label.” But of course elitism is in tension with egalitarianism. At a philosophical level, it’s hard to know how we can evaluate wokeness without evaluating the various egalitarian claims that underpin it. This relates to another tension throughout the book: though at some points al-Gharbi suggests that the woke ideology, with its purpose of legitimating the position of elite symbolic capitalists, is held as a genuine set of core beliefs, at others he seems to suggest that it’s held opportunistically or as a mere pretense.

Because academic and journalistic elites are symbolic capitalists, political analysis of disagreement from dominant elite views in the academy and media often falls into the diagnostic mode. Sharply combining critiques of discourses around terms like “fascism” and “misinformation,” al-Gharbi writes that “interpret[ing] deviance from, or resistance to, our own preferences and priorities in terms of pathologies . . . or deficiencies. . . . Inconvenient social movements are typically explained in terms of some noxious counterelite.” But surely, for all its many virtues, We Have Never Been Woke is a similar kind of diagnostic text, which falls into similar patterns. Al-Gharbi claims, for instance: “Although our language often makes appeals to solidaristic altruism, symbolic capitalists primarily deploy political discourse . . . for the purposes of individual enhancement and personal expression.” Perhaps pathology and deficiency are two of the only options we have when it comes to theorizing about ideology.

It would take too long to catalog all the terrific details and vignettes that made their way into this book. To show that symbolic capitalists often win against the superelite, al-Gharbi mentions the case of Henry Ford II losing out against the social-justice orientation of the Ford Foundation. Discussing campus politics, he writes that “many student clubs at Yale are explicitly oriented around social justice but are also highly competitive to get into.” Virtually every aspect of contemporary culture gets some sort of mention and ends up being related in some way to the same forces that have generated wokeness. We Have Never Been Woke is a great book on wokeness, probably the most incisive and interesting one that’s been written. It also holds appeal as a work on political beliefs, as a work of political sociology, and as an incredibly well-sourced piece of cultural criticism. It is very much worth reading.

When Guilt-Pride becomes Totemic Capital  in the minds of an over-produced newly emergent elite!

Saturday, October 26, 2024

Axion Haze...

Re-Enchanting the World

 

Kathryn Jezer-Morton, "Why Isn’t Halloween Scary Anymore?"
When I was 10, I was living in the rural Northeast. That Halloween, one of the neighborhood parents took a bunch of us trick-or-treating in the back of his pickup truck. There were about five of us, thrilled to be riding around in the open truck bed after dark. Our route took us past a cemetery that dated back to the Revolutionary War, sitting down a slope away from the road, surrounded by an old stone wall and hemmed in by thick woods. As we approached the cemetery, the dad behind the wheel killed the engine. We heard some revs and cranks, then nothing. “Sorry, kids,” he called back to us from the cab. “Must be something wrong with the truck.”

It must have been on a dare that we all ended up venturing down the hill toward the cemetery into the enveloping darkness of the woods. As we nervously stood around among the headstones, a figure emerged from the forest covered in ashes, wielding a chain saw, and dragging a heavy chain around its neck. Another appeared out of the shadows, covered in birch bark. We heard a voice coming from under the fallen leaves — the ghosts were converging on us. (They had put a boom box under a leaf pile.) We ran for our lives back to the truck, which miraculously started right back up as soon as the last of us had been pulled up into the back. We peeled away, shrieking. It was an ecstatic moment of terror alongside the delicious relief of safety.

When my kids return to the parks they loved as toddlers, they are always amazed at how small everything is. “This slide used to be huge,” they insist. Sometimes I wonder if that’s the way I feel about Halloween — did it stop being scary, or did I grow up? I’m pretty sure one thing has changed: Terrifying children for sport is not as socially acceptable as it once was. The thought of parents banding together to scare their children on Halloween evokes, more than anything else, the casual and oblivious cruelty of mid-century American life. Perhaps scaring children as a practice has fallen far out of favor because real life is scary enough without a need for added theatrics. Just the same, being spooked on Halloween by a group of adults is one of my favorite childhood memories, and I say this as someone who can’t comfortably handle horror as a genre or fear as an emotion.

It was exceptional for the adults in our neighborhood to get together and plan a prank like this — this was the only time it ever happened, and even decades later, I’m impressed they pulled it off. I wonder what compelled them. I know some people were lucky enough to grow up around adults who loved staging magical or creepy spectacles for local kids, and I know it’s not always a privilege; I’ve spoken to many people who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s who had nightmares for years after enduring the antics of adults.

For my kids, Halloween is more of an aesthetic experience than a creepy one, and sometimes I wonder if they’re missing something that I intimately knew — the feeling of a thinning veil between worlds that is hard to describe in words but vividly conjured in memories. As much as I love over-the-top Halloween decorations — and I truly do; I hope the skeletons never stop getting bigger — there is another dimension to Halloween, a numinous enchanted dimension, that I wonder if they have felt before.

This fall, I am teaching night school at a local college, and I recently had my students read a section of the philosopher Byung-Chul Han’s book, The Crisis of Narration. The section, called “The Disenchantment of the World,” argues that the stories we tell have been stripped of their mystery and magic by an overemphasis, in digital media in particular, on accumulating facts and links of causality. This happened, then this, then this; a world narrated in bullet points, in a rush to get to the conclusion. This is how AI speaks back to us — in the most efficient way to convey information, in the absence of any evocative feeling. I had never taught this essay before, and I wasn’t sure of what everyone would make of it. I was a bit worried it would land as flat-footed kids these days griping.

The students at night school come from all over. Many are recent immigrants seeking to earn enough college credits to apply for a specific training program. Others are students for whom school has never been easy, who are going for a second chance after having dropped out. For easily half the people in the room, English is a second or third language, but they all understood precisely what Han was arguing in the essay. They recognized the disenchantment, and they could describe it. The classroom rippled with resonance as we discussed the chapter.

Parenting today is very consumed with “making magic” — holiday magic, birthday magic, core-memory magic. Being a good parent has become as much about sprinkling an affective fairy dust over your children’s memories as it is about keeping them fed and clothed. And yet, the disenchantment persists — it might even grow. What are we missing?

It would be easy to blame it on something like “consumer culture” or “Amazon” — where’s the magic in shopping your way to a vibe? But that’s an incomplete explanation, not to mention a boring and predictable critical orientation. Hand-making your costumes is not going to re-enchant your world. Nostalgic re-creations of aesthetics of Halloweens past won’t do it, either. Re-enchantment is an emotional process. It has to do with inviting our children, and ourselves, to experience inexplicable feelings that might occasionally overlap with fear. The fear I felt that one Halloween has lasted like a magic elixir in my mind ever since. It’s made me want to find more sources of that feeling, even just for a split second, as I attune my attention while passing an abandoned building or notice a figure pass into the shadows. I think it’s possible that one singular Halloween prank I experienced in the fifth grade permanently enchanted Halloween for me for the rest of my life. It’s crazy how these things happen.

When we cross the threshold into the holiday season, we enter a culturally significant period of memory-making. One way that Byung-Chul Han describes enchantment is when the past and the present momentarily collide, providing us a brief, overwhelming experience of being beyond time itself — “two separate moments in time combining into one fragrant crystal of time. The torturous contingency of time is thereby overcome, and this produces happiness.”

Isn’t this all we really want during the holiday season? Is one fragrant crystal of time too much for a parent to ask for? I wonder if it’s a projection of parents’ anxiety about our own distraction that causes us to salivate so uncontrollably around the idea of “making memories” with our kids. Attentiveness is a necessary condition of memory-making, and we are all spiraling to varying extents about how we are and are not attentive. Maybe our own anxiety about missing out on the important moments is having the unintended consequence of disenchanting our holidays. Maybe by trying to capture the vibe through photo shoots and cute decorations, we’re feeding the wrong dog, so to speak.

So how might we re-enchant our holidays? I couldn’t begin to tell you. For me, the Pict-o-Matic freeze-frame quality of holiday rituals and events — remember when we did this ritual five years ago? Ten? Twenty? — catapults me into a private cosmos of mourning for people and places that I’ll never see again. The enchantment of the holidays, from Halloween all the way through office-party season and past Christmas into the dead zone of the dawning New Year, is for me a feeling of proximity to past selves that makes the present day seem hyperreal. If we’re lucky enough to reach middle age, we are treated to this dreadful and amazing view of all the previous iterations of our life, and to peer over the precipice at all the future ones, and to know that in a few years, it will be this very dinner, this very outfit, this very child’s petulant mood, that will conjure for us the undeniable feeling of the weight of life.

But the midwinter holidays can be so emo. Halloween is not the time to get hung up on your personal history. It’s the invisible world, not the world of our memories, that makes this holiday so interesting. You don’t have to be a horror-movie aficionado to know that when we encounter visions or feelings that are unexplainable or mysterious, it can make us feel more real.

Friday, October 25, 2024

Dugin's Westernology - An Analysis of Current American Politics

Alexander Dugin applies Lacan’s three orders to US politics, arguing that while Kamala Harris and the Democrats seek to dismantle traditional structures, “psychedelic Trumpism,” influenced by figures like Curtis Yarvin, Peter Thiel, and J. D. Vance, alongside the Alt-Right, counters from the right, with a warning that a Harris victory could spell the end of humanity.

Lacan’s Method

Let us try to apply Lacan’s topology to the American elections.

Let us recall Lacan’s basic model. It can be represented as three Borromean rings or three orders:
The Real
The Symbolic
The Imaginary
The Real is the domain where every object is strictly identical to itself. This absolute identity (A=A) excludes the very possibility of becoming, i.e., of being in a state of transformation. Thus, the Real is the zone of pure death and nothingness. There are no changes, movements, or relations. The Real is true, like the truth of nothingness that has no alternatives.

The Symbolic is the domain where nothing equals itself, where one thing always refers to another. It is an escape from the Real, motivated by the desire to avoid death and falling into nothingness. It is here that content, relationships, movements, and transformations are born, but always in a dreamlike state. The Symbolic is the unconscious. The essence of a symbol is that it points to something other than itself (it does not matter what specifically, as long as it is not itself).

The Imaginary is the domain where the dynamic of the Symbolic stops, but without the object dying and collapsing into the Real. The Imaginary is what we mistakenly take for Being, the world, ourselves — nature, society, culture, and politics. It is everything, yet it is also a lie. Every element of the Imaginary is actually a frozen moment of the Symbolic. Wakefulness is a form of sleep that does not realize itself. Everything in the Imaginary refers to the Symbolic but presents itself as supposedly “Real.”

In the Real, A=A is true. In the Imaginary, A=A is false. In the Imaginary, no object is identical to itself, but unlike in the Symbolic, it doesn’t want to admit this — neither to itself nor to others.

The Real is nothing. The Symbolic is ever-changing becoming. The Imaginary consists of false nodes of the frozen Symbolic.

Lacan and Politics

Lacan was well aware that the model of the three orders casts doubt on the basic strategies of reformism, progressivism, and revolution. It is no coincidence that in his youth, he was right-wing and a monarchist, close to Charles Maurras. And in the 1960s, contrary to the “New Left,” he supported the status quo and de Gaulle’s rule. This was no accident but stems directly from the Borromean rings model.

The “New Left” revolutionaries (in Lacan’s interpretation) wanted to replace the Imaginary (old social-political structures, order as such) with the Symbolic (surreal, schizophrenic, transgressive). They used Lacan’s ideas in a utilitarian way — ironic Freudianism helped undermine the claims of the Imaginary (Order) to foundational logic (A=A), revealing it as merely a frozen moment of delirium. However, they overlooked the fact that once the old Imaginary collapses or melts under the pressure of critique (whether political, aesthetic, social, or epistemological), the Symbolic cannot take its place. It will instantly become the new Imaginary — equally totalitarian, dictatorial, and absurd.

Examples of this, Lacan saw everywhere, especially in Soviet Bolshevism. The Bolsheviks began with a call for freedom and equality but quickly transformed into a rigid party hierarchy with a totalitarian apparatus of violence. The same happened with Cromwell or the French Revolution. The Symbolic retains its properties only while remaining in the unconscious, in the realm of dreams. The moment it surfaces, it turns into the Imaginary, essentially the same thing, though now dressed in new forms. All Imaginary systems were once Symbolic, alive, and changing before freezing into permanence.

Thus, today’s revolutionary is tomorrow’s totalitarian, cruel official and enforcer of violence. Reforms (in the context of the Borromean rings) are impossible, as they will lead to the same result. The Symbolic can never replace the Imaginary under any conditions.


Lacan believed this, and this conclusion flows directly from his system.

Kamala Harris and the Symbolic

Now to the US elections. Here we see a fierce clash between “progressives” (Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party) and “conservatives” (Trump and the Republicans). In Lacanian analysis, the roles seem obvious: Kamala Harris embodies an invitation to transgression, the legalization of perversions, and liberation from all prohibitions and norms, i.e., the expansion of the Symbolic realm. The Democrats’ platform is a structure of well-tempered delirium: more LGBT, more cancel culture, more illegal immigrants, more drugs and gender reassignment surgeries, more deconstruction of old orders, more BLM and critical race theory.

Of course, the main Imaginary being mocked and attacked from all sides is Donald Trump — the generalized archetype of “unfreedom,” “hierarchies,” and “male rationality.”

Kamala Harris represents the Symbolic, as seen in her strange speeches, endless cold and meaningless laughter, her incoherence, and her expressive gestures that point to something intuitively understandable but indefinable. Harris is a figure of active dreaming. The voter sees in her that the impossible becomes possible, and one thing seamlessly flows into another. But everything remains unfocused and blurry. This is “progress”: Whites become Blacks, capitalists become something else (“Loot the stores — that’s the whole law!”), men and women become vague objects of desire (Lacan’s “little a”), always evading fixation.

In other words, despite Lacan’s own warnings about the unchanging structure of the Borromean rings, the Democrats are actively trying to destroy the American Imaginary, fervently wanting to replace it with the Symbolic.

Psychedelic Trumpism and Right-Wing Dreaming

Where can we find a counterattack on the frozen liberal Imaginary, which has turned into overt totalitarianism? The answer is obvious: in the opposite pole, which we can call “Trumpist Symbolic.” We saw the signs of this strategy during Trump’s first presidential campaign in the Alt-Right, on 4chan, in the figure of the meme Pepe the Frog, in reptilian conspiracy theories, chaos magic, and the delirious theories of QAnon. We might call this “esoteric Trumpism” or, more precisely, “psychedelic Trumpism.” If the Democrats and their transgressive practices have become the Imaginary — frozen in totalitarian prescriptive power structures — then psychoanalytic critique from the Symbolic has naturally focused on the Republicans. Of course, not all Republicans, but the most liberated, “unhinged,” and delirious factions.

Here we encounter an interesting picture. The power held by the Democrats and the neoconservative wing of the Republicans places them as carriers of the Imaginary, that is, the globalist order. However, progressivism as a synonym for the Symbolic clashes with the totalitarianism entrenched in the Democrats, who fiercely cling to power. Even though the Democrats’ narrative depicts the Imaginary as Trump — the tough, feminine Melania, the Republicans, and old liberal America — in the larger system, it is the Democrats who now embody the Imaginary, desperately holding onto power. Kamala Harris is an agent of a rigid, organized system — what is called the Deep State. She is not an organism but a mechanism, a link in the vertical chain of authority. This is how the Imaginary order manifests itself. Appeals to the Symbolic only slightly obscure its true nature.

The only critique capable of identifying and destabilizing this frozen order comes from “psychedelic Trumpism,” which increasingly assumes the function of the Symbolic.

This analysis helps explain the selection of J. D. Vance as a potential vice president or even Trump’s successor in his ideological battle against the liberal establishment. Vance no longer represents the Imaginary but the purely Symbolic. He openly aligns himself with the extravagant, psychedelic field of post-liberal right-wing thought, especially the chaotic Alt-Right universe. Figures like Peter Thiel, Curtis Yarvin (Mencius Moldbug), and the brilliant French philosopher René Girard (who wrote on sacred violence) are atypical for classic right-wing Republicans. They cannot be used to illustrate the Imaginary (which the progressives supposedly aim to dismantle in the name of the Symbolic). In Vance, the Democrats’ psychoanalytic strategy fails, as Vance himself embodies the atypical right-wing Symbolic pole. It is even possible that he understands this and is familiar with Lacan. Thus, choosing Vance as vice president is a key move in Trump’s campaign. Once again, the magic of chaos — represented by the Borromean rings and their connection to dreamlike psychedelia — comes into play, but this time more systematically.

Strictly following Lacan, the Trump-Vance alliance seems harmonious and full of promise. Trump himself offers the Imaginary that appeals to the right-wing electorate. But this is complemented by right-wing postmodernism, social critique, and the liberating delirium embodied in “psychedelic Trumpism” and, by extension, Vance. The rational, daytime mode of governance, inevitable in any administration and transparent in Trump’s case, is balanced by the nighttime mode of liberated (right-wing) dreaming.
Transgression from the Right

From this application of Lacan’s model to the upcoming American elections, we can draw several more conclusions.

First, it brilliantly explains the totalitarian nature of modern globalist liberalism, which has become impossible to ignore. The attempt to replace the Imaginary with the Symbolic is doomed to failure but will only generate a new Imaginary — one that is more alienated, aggressive, intolerant, and violent. Hence, we see the phenomenon of “liberal fascism.”

On the other hand, the emergence of “psychedelic Trumpism” makes sense, representing not a marginal anomaly but a perfectly reasonable and even pragmatic strategy. If every kind of deviation and pathology is permitted, but Tradition is forbidden, then the will to life and the dynamic of the Symbolic will fuel tremendous energy into normal gender and species-based orientations. Tradition, then, acquires a revolutionary character. When Tradition is outlawed, this alone makes it an object of passionate desire. Progressives freeze socio-political and cultural life, alienating it. Thus, the new counterculture becomes non-conformism from the right.

Who Will Win the Election?

It is difficult to say, but the aggressive, totalitarian elite, betting on minority groups, might fail. By removing the forbidden status from deviations, they automatically make legally suppressed normalcy the center of attraction. If, in the order of the Imaginary, normalcy resides in the “past” — what existed before the progressives and liberals — then in the order of the Symbolic, normalcy resides in the “future.” Normalcy is the suppressed and outlawed today that, like a forbidden fruit, longs to triumph tomorrow. Usually, conservatives struggle with envisioning the future. But “psychedelic Trumpism” offers a unique response, shifting the unconscious and even transgressive practices to the right, thereby capturing the future’s territory.

Be Cautious of Nothingness

Lastly, we have not yet touched on the subject of the Real — one of the Borromean rings.

Here, progressives attempt a complex maneuver: by normalizing the Symbolic, they aim to remove the tension between it and the Real. They hope to bring nothingness (death) under their control rather than excluding it. Likely, this is the goal of AI, migration to cyberspace, and the Singularity, where the identity of the machine with itself will no longer create traumatic flows that awaken the unconscious (the Symbolic). If the Symbolic (as progressives naively believe) has already replaced the Imaginary, then the problem of confrontation with the Real has been solved. To conquer death and the terror it brings, life itself must be eliminated. Hence the focus on transhumanism and mechanical immortality, a theme explored in speculative realism.

The Democratic Party’s ontological project inevitably leads to the elimination of humanity.

These elections in the United States will determine the fate of humanity — whether it will be or not. A Trump victory will maintain the balance between the three Borromean rings. A Harris victory may mean their irreversible collapse.

And here, finally, it must be said that for Lacan, the Borromean rings and their three orders are what constitute the human being.

Physicists Review the 'Dark'... the UAP of the Physical Sciences

Proponent of Anti-Kuhnian Woke Democratized Science

Comments of Byung-Chul Han's "What is Power"?

Power depends upon freedom
Violence eliminates choices
Power:Increases Freedom::Violence:Increases Restrictions
Power thrives on offering Choices
Language is the "tool/ tech" of Power
...and the Gatekeeper is YOU!
...and Joining the Digital Panopticon is on YOU!

Wednesday, October 23, 2024

Guilt-Pride: Germany's #1 Export (White Wokeism)

Identity Technologies for Achieving Profilic Superiority...
...or Simply Hubris and an Inflated Self-Esteem?

The Identity Tech Underlying the Social Cancellation Phenomena


From The Book of Ecclesiastes:
1 The words of the Preacher,[a] the son of David, king in Jerusalem.

2 Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher, vanity of vanities! All is vanity.
Curtis Yarvin:  "You can only LOSE the Culture War"

Saturday, October 19, 2024

Do Neutron Stars Produce Axions?

An axion cloud around a neutron star. While some axions escape the star’s gravitational pull, many remain bound to the star and over a long period of time form a cloud surrounding it. The interaction with the neutron star’s strong magnetic field causes some axions to convert into photons – light that we can eventually detect with our telescopes on Earth. Credit: University of Amsterdam

University of Amsterdam, "Physicists show that neutron stars may be shrouded in clouds of axions"
A team of physicists from the universities of Amsterdam, Princeton and Oxford have shown that extremely light particles known as axions may occur in large clouds around neutron stars. These axions could form an explanation for the elusive dark matter that cosmologists search for—and moreover, they might not be too difficult to observe.

The research was published in the journal Physical Review X and is a follow-up to previous work, in which the authors also studied axions and neutron stars, but from a completely different point of view.

While in their previous work they investigated the axions that escape the neutron star, now the researchers focus on the ones that are left behind—the axions that get captured by the star's gravity. As time goes by, these particles should gradually form a hazy cloud around the neutron star, and it turns out that such axion clouds may well be observable in our telescopes. But why would astronomers and physicists be so interested in hazy clouds around far-away stars?

Axions: From soap to dark matter

Protons, neutrons, electrons, photons—most of us are familiar with the names of at least some of these tiny particles. The axion is lesser known, and for a good reason: at the moment it is only a hypothetical type of particle—one that nobody has yet detected.

Named after a brand of soap, its existence was first postulated in the 1970s, to clean up a problem—hence the soap reference—in our understanding of one of the particles we could observe very well: the neutron. However, while theoretically very nice, if these axions existed they would be extremely light, making them very hard to detect in experiments or observations.

Today, axions are also known as a front-running candidate to explain dark matter, one of the biggest mysteries in contemporary physics. Many different pieces of evidence suggest that approximately 85% of the matter content in our universe is "dark," which simply means that it is not made up of any type of matter that we know and can currently observe.

Instead, the existence of dark matter is only inferred indirectly through the gravitational influence it exerts on visible matter. Fortunately, this does not automatically mean that dark matter has no other interactions with visible matter at all, but if such interactions exist, their strength is necessarily tiny. As the name suggests, any viable dark matter candidate is thus incredibly difficult to directly observe.

Putting one and one together, physicists have realized that the axion may be exactly what they are looking for to solve the dark matter problem. A particle that has not yet been observed, which would be extremely light, and have very weak interactions with other particles… could axions be at least part of the explanation for dark matter?

Neutron stars as magnifying glasses

The idea of the axion as a dark matter particle is nice, but in physics an idea is only truly nice if it has observable consequences. Would there be a way to observe axions after all, fifty years after their possible existence was first proposed?

When exposed to electric and magnetic fields, axions are expected to be able to convert into photons—particles of light—and vice versa. Light is something we know how to observe, but as mentioned, the corresponding interaction strength should be very small, and therefore so is the amount of light that axions generally produce. That is, unless one considers an environment containing a truly massive amount of axions, ideally in very strong electromagnetic fields.

This led the researchers to consider neutron stars, the densest known stars in our universe. These objects have masses similar to that of our sun but compressed into stars of 12 to 15 kilometers in size.

Such extreme densities create an equally extreme environment that, notably, also contains enormous magnetic fields, billions of times stronger than any we find on Earth. Recent research has shown that if axions exist, these magnetic fields allow for neutron stars to mass-produce these particles near their surface.

Overview of the four stages characterizing the formation and evolution of axion clouds around neutron stars. Credit: Physical Review X (2024). DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevX.14.041015

The ones that stay behind

In their previous work, the authors focused on the axions that after production escaped the star—they computed the amounts in which these axions would be produced, which trajectories they would follow, and how their conversion into light could lead to a weak but potentially observable signal.

This time, they consider the axions that do not manage to escape—the ones that, despite their tiny mass, get caught by the neutron star's immense gravity.

Due to the axion's very feeble interactions, these particles will stay around, and on timescales up to millions of years they will accumulate around the neutron star. This can result in the formation of very dense clouds of axions around neutron stars, which provide some incredible new opportunities for axion research.

In their paper, the researchers study the formation, as well as the properties and further evolution, of these axion clouds, pointing out that they should, and in many cases must, exist.

In fact, the authors argue that if axions exist, axion clouds should be generic (for a wide range of axion properties they should form around most, perhaps even all, neutron stars), they should in general be very dense (forming a density possibly twenty orders of magnitude larger than local dark matter densities), and because of this they should lead to powerful observational signatures.

The latter potentially come in many types, of which the authors discuss two: a continuous signal emitted during large parts of a neutron star's lifetime, but also a one-time burst of light at the end of a neutron star's life, when it stops producing its electromagnetic radiation. Both of these signatures could be observed and used to probe the interaction between axions and photons beyond current limits, even using existing radio telescopes.

What's next?

While so far, no axion clouds have been observed, with the new results we know very precisely what to look for, making a thorough search for axions much more feasible. While the main point on the to-do-list is therefore "search for axion clouds," the work also opens up several new theoretical avenues to explore.

For one thing, one of the authors is already involved in follow-up work that studies how the axion clouds can change the dynamics of neutron stars themselves. Another important future research direction is the numerical modeling of axion clouds: the present paper shows great discovery potential, but there is more numerical modeling needed to know even more precisely what to look for and where.

Finally, the present results are all for single neutron stars, but many of these stars appear as components of binaries—sometimes together with another neutron star, sometimes together with a black hole. Understanding the physics of axion clouds in such systems, and potentially understanding their observational signals, would be very valuable.

Thus, the present work is an important step in a new and exciting research direction. A full understanding of axion clouds will require complementary efforts from multiple branches of science, including particle (astro)physics, plasma physics, and observational radio astronomy.

This work opens up this new, cross-disciplinary field with lots of opportunities for future research.