The diagnosis here is exact and the Dunkirk reading is the most analytically precise thing written about that film. The three-element structure, the departure, the trials, the return and rectification, has dissolved not because human nature changed but because the specific institutional and cultural infrastructure that gave it meaning was systematically dismantled. Aurelien has been documenting this dismantling with considerable precision across many essays.
But the essay ends in a place that its own analysis should not permit it to end. The probable leaders of the reckoning, we are told, will not be like Odysseus or De Gaulle but something altogether nastier. This conclusion follows logically only if the hero is the necessary form of the return. The essay's entire analytical structure assumes that what has been lost must be recovered in the same form it took when it existed: the individual of unusual abilities, the polytropos, the man of many ways who overcomes obstacles through intelligence and courage and returns to set things right. The grief at the loss of this figure is genuine and the grief is correct. But the assumption that this figure is the only possible vehicle for what his return represents may itself be a shard in the eye.
The governance commons, the specific institutional inheritance that enabled the Odysseus story to function as a cultural technology rather than simply as a fantasy of individual exceptionalism, predates the hero cult and survives its various corruptions. The Athenian assembly that Odysseus returned to was governed by sortition: the random selection of citizens for governance roles. The thing Odysseus came back to defend was not a monarchy but a demos, the self-governing community whose capacity for collective action the managed consensus has spent considerable energy convincing us was always a romantic illusion. It was not. The bombed cities of England that the Blitz Spirit mythology encoded in manageable heroic form were also the spontaneous self-organisation of communities that no government planned for and no individual hero directed. The jury room, which every Western democracy still trusts for its most consequential decisions, is sortition in daily practice. The Irish Citizens' Assembly that resolved the abortion question the professional political class had been avoiding for thirty years was one hundred and sixty randomly selected citizens deliberating for eighteen months. These are not romantic examples. They are the documentation of a governance capacity that the managed consensus presents as naive and that the evidence consistently shows is available.
The return home that the Odyssey encodes is not the return of the hero to the kingdom. It is the return of the community to self-governance, which the hero's absence had placed at risk. Penelope's weaving is the holding action, not the solution. The solution is the assembly that the suitors had displaced and that Odysseus, characteristically, had to restore through the specific violence that the situation had made necessary. But the target of that violence was not the demos. It was the class that had used the hero's absence to capture the governance commons for its own benefit. The suitors are the managed consensus. Odysseus's return is the recovery of the governance commons from those who had enclosed it.
This is the anti-hero story that the series The Freeze-Frame Revolution has been building across its sortition pieces and its polity assessments: not the hero who returns to set things right through exceptional individual virtue, but the demos that recovers its own capacity for self-governance through the institutional design that makes that capacity structurally available rather than depending on the coincidental appearance of polytropos. The anti-hero is all of us. The return home is to the governance commons. The shard that prevents us from seeing this, the specific distortion that makes the commons appear naive, the randomly selected citizen appear incompetent, the jury room appear as an exception rather than as proof of concept, has been in circulation for a very long time and was named in Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen before the political scientists got hold of the question.
Aurelien is right that the reckoning is coming. He is right that the professional political class is not equipped for it and that the vocabulary of competence, solidarity, and collective endurance has been systematically abandoned. He is right that the probable shape of the reckoning, given the vacuum into which it will arrive, looks considerably more like Mussolini than like De Gaulle. But the vacuum is not the absence of the hero. It is the absence of the institutional infrastructure that would allow the community's own governance capacity to become visible and operational before the crisis makes the strong man's offer appear to be the only available option. The institutional infrastructure can be built before the crisis arrives. It has been built before, in Athens and in the Swiss cantons and in the Althing and in the Irish Citizens' Assembly. The Basic Law of the Commonwealth — a constitutional framework for the governance commons that the series has been developing — is one attempt at building it for the contemporary moment.
Not all of us will be polytropos. The institutional design that does not require us to be is the return home the Odyssey was always actually about.
Indeed. For a long time I've thought that whatever replaces the current political classes will rapidly splinter before effecting any useful change: as so far the expected replacements themselves exhibit no evidence they're intellectually or ideologically or even emotionally equipped to deal with the chaos. If that is right, then it's their unknown successors that will find a successful response.
I trust you are correct in this analysis. I hope that the way towards that poly what?polymetropos, polydemos? perhaps, will not be closed off before we, the demos, are able to find that path to, if not, return, then, to a better tomorrow, one with autonomy, agency, and dignity.
We have to rebild the words and ideas vocabulary, debate, disseminate, and educate. People have done that before. After the little 1905 revolution in Russia, if I remember correctly, there was an active movement in Russia where intelectuals moved and roam the countryside and educate. Maybe the resulting little soviets sprouting up after 1917 (and soon killed by the bolsheviks with their centralization drive) were a partial result of that drive.
Thank you Aurelien , i like and agree with your essay.
I have a feeling that someone somewhere would have covered similar points in centuries past about their view of their past.
In my opinion the modern day media ( tv radio internet ) plays too big a role in forming peoples opinions and their actions , now that would not be a bad thing if the media were trustworthy , theyre not , increasingly theyre used to distort and misrepresent all manner of things , some people are confused and dont know what to beleive some just beleive everything the media presents to them , nothing can be trusted.
Politicians cannot be trusted , the media collaborate with them not to get to the truth but to misrepresnt.
Today i noticed a plea on tv for donations to the disaster in Venezuela , an earthquake , it struck me that the need should be met by USA who are stealing Venezuela,s oil or the UK who have held on to billions of dollars worth of gold transferred from banks in Venezuela in 1999 when the MFI and the USA and UK governments decided that Venezuela could not be trusted to look after its own gold bullion.
UK and European governments give billions of £ and € every year to Ukraine to fight a war with Russia whilst simultaneously allowing their own populations to sink into deeper and deeper poverty and debt.
We are continually told that university education is a waste of time and that most students should instead be directed to apprenticeships but for many years now apprenticeships have been devalued to the point you can be offered an apprenticeship in a restaurant or an office where you will very likely be used to wash the dishes or shunt the mail around the office , education for the sake of improving knowledge and reasoning and experiencing discussion , differing views , is not valued anymore , too many people spend their time alone at home , being with lots of other people and being able to speak to them face to face , togetherness , is in itself an education but no longer valued.
The era of D Trump is a good example of what can go wrong when togetherness is rejected , there is no discussion , other views are not wanted not accepted , the policy is my way or the highway , he and his band of robbers are worldwide highwaymen , people across the world feel uneasy about their future their safety and the media bombards them with D Trump threats every day , nothing is secure in such circumstances.
When the rot starts from the top of governments it works its way down through society and thats what we are seeing now.
This article is confused and contradictory. It depends on the past being both stifling and refreshingly demanding. It reeks of half-stifled Edwardian nostalgia.
1. As you note the "heroic people doing heroic things" trope is largely a matter of marketing, marketed when it happens to be convenient at the moment to TBTB.
Zelenskii is treated as Churchill, Marcus Aurelius, Saladin, Chandragupta, and Solomon The Wise, all rolled into one because that happens to be the preferred narrative at the moment. When he was elected in 2019 over vociferous American and european objections, he was a naughty boy in need of a stern lesson.
2. "De Gaulle, stranded in England in 1940, and effectively alone, manages to take on to himself the attributes of a symbolic King, as Odysseus had been King of Ithaca, and by force of personality and diplomacy rather than military power, avoids traps and snares, and makes his way back, via Brazzaville and Algiers, to be received in Paris as the rightful ruler. Indeed, even the story of Penelope makes a fleeting appearance. Just as she resisted the suitors, so La France (always feminine) and Marianne, the (female) symbol of the Republic, fought on through the Resistance and the Free French, against the French State of Pétain, and its collaboration with the Nazis. And finally, of course, there was the reckoning, the Purge, when some of the most egregious collaborators like Laval the Prime Minister were executed, even if for political reasons the carnage was less impressive than it had been on Ithaca."
Humans conveniently forget that Vichy had a lot more support and supporters than will admit to the fact after the war. For example, most of the french colonies (French Indochina, French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, Madagascar, Syria and Lebanon, French Guiana, and the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe) declared for Vichy and remained loyal until conquered by the british or it became evident that the Allies were winning, but that is treated as an embarrassing faux pas to be swept under the rug.
When the Axis appeared ascendant, a lot of french were supporters of the Petain regime, only to switch sides later. Again, victory has a thousand fathers, while defeat is an orphan.
For that matter, Ukraine provides another instructive example.
3. I have no use for symbolism, especially symbols placed in a work to give it Deep Meaning. High school intellectualism at its most pretentious and worst.
When you began by talking about polytropos (“many turns”), I thought you were going to go on to another epithet of Odysseus: angylometis (“devious devising”), also said of Cronos, Prometheus, and Zeus/nous.
The paradigmatic allegory illustrating angylometis is the castration of Uranus, the folk-devouring sire of the Titans, who when he is about to bed with his own mother Gaia, is unmanned by his youngest son Cronos armed with a crooked (angylo) knife. Three drops of blood which land on the soil (Gaia) become the Furies (Erinyes), while the genitals cast in the sea give birth to Aphrodite, of the sea foam.
The remorseless “many turns” of events—paradoxically those both intended and unexpected— resemble steering under sail in the wind, as well as the crafting of intricate plans and things. In another context, such workings of things could also be said to resemble the Dao (道).
Courage, determination. Leadership, hero. Are you mad? Nowadays this will get you quickly jailed or shot. We are in science fiction territory. Heroes have to live in the skirting board like rats and function orientally and tangentially.
This strikes a massive nerve in Canada right now. Our political class has traded hard operational competence for performative branding, while simultaneously reducing our entire history to a flat narrative of shame. By tearing down our historical myths and founders, we've left a generation with no positive inheritance or cultural muscle memory to draw upon. We’ve traded citizens for hotel guests, and heroes for competitive victims. Thank you for putting words to a very heavy, palpable reality.
"Our political class is obviously completely lost: day-to-day management by image replaced competence and vision so long ago that such qualities can now not be recovered. Performative posturing is all they have left, and there is no longer even a genuine vocabulary of competence, cooperation, collective effort and endurance to appeal to. " Although there is lots to comment on, one of which is the absence of a righteous goal that would make a hero admirable in today's world, where white hat vs black hat no longer suffices for determining the correct moral position. The irony in the quoted passage, is that in the USA, the dominant power in the West, the governing bodies are awash with old folks who have lost, if they ever had, any allegiance or dedication to moral principles. That these are the same people who have beggared the society of the vision necessary to recover the way, true path, etc., suggests we are in even a worse position than that simply no one remembers.
The road to hell is quite obviously paved with convenience. Maybe we should consider convenience as an indicator for what to avoid?
“ We sneer at such toxically masculine behaviour now: after all, there wasn’t any real moral difference between the Nazis and the Allies was there? ”
This is overstated lazy nonsense on your part. Who is this “ we”? I suppose if you look hard you could find someone saying this because you can find some adolescent somewhere saying the most extreme possible thing to make a point. And more plausibly, you can find people pointing to the very real crimes of Western imperialism and how they laid the foundations for Nazi crimes— Hannah Arendt, for example—but how many people in Western cultures actually say there was no difference between the West and Hitler?
The same goes for your claim that nobody respects extreme heroism in war. Just nonsense. Your pieces are badly marred by this crap.
'So where, in today’s events, or in cultural productions set in the present time, do we encounter this tradition? Well we don’t, actually, which is why Nolan’s film is so interesting, and why it will be equally interesting to see how it is received. For the fundamental three-element structure I have described no longer corresponds to anything valued by current western culture or society.......times of great social conformity have in the past provided opportunities for challenges and even adventure. In the period that Zweig was writing about, there were semi-official mechanisms for this, generally involving travelling and working abroad. There were also those who deliberately exiled themselves, those who became involved in radical or even revolutionary politics, those who embraced new philosophies, sometimes from other civilisations, those who embraced new and shocking concepts of art and life.........Everyday life for both men and women involved far more physical effort than it does today, and often a higher level of difficulty in everyday things Attaining adulthood involved passing through a series of stages where you acquired new responsibilities and learnt to do new things. .....I think it’s fair to say that our society no longer expects or encourages people to do original and difficult things. Ironically, the result of mass media, and the Internet in particular, has been to promote not diversity and challenge, but conformity, since everyone can see what everyone else is doing. I’ve talked before about organisations becoming more risk-averse and procedure-intensive, and less tolerant of the kind of person who can be a nuisance when things are fine, but whom you really need when things go wrong....Yes, degrees have been devalued and turned into credentials, yes there are too many graduates and not enough jobs, but the most fundamental purpose of any education is surely your own intellectual and cultural development. Use ChatGPT for your college assignments and you are committing a kind of intellectual suicide....I was part of the first generation of children from “ordinary” backgrounds to go to university in Britain, roughly during the period from the late 60s to the late 70s, and before the beginning of the neoliberal destruction of higher education. “Ordinary” scarcely describes most of us: some were working-class, and not a few came from homes where there were no books. To get through the education system of the time, up to and through university, and perhaps beyond, was extremely difficult anyway, and especially so for those who did not come from the educated middle class. Nonetheless, it was recognised by all in those days that you got nowhere without trying, and overcoming obstacles....today, we have outsourced hero-worship along with everything else. People who would never dream of cheering for their own countries cheer for Russia, Ukraine or Iran, projecting their own unmet needs on to them, and often reacting violently to any criticism with a kind of transferred patriotism. So Zelensky and a contingent of the Ukrainian Army were furiously applauded by the crowds at the Bastille Day parade in Paris this week. There’s a mordant irony in the fact that Zelensky is not a politician but an actor, playing the kind of heroic figure that western culture would like to have, but cannot bring itself to actually want. He enables those who would really like to admire Churchill or Roosevelt or even De Gaulle, but cannot take the risk of doing so, to find an acceptable replacement, for whom worship is not only permitted, but actively encouraged. And the carefully cultivated media image of the Ukrainian Army enables us to vicariously exult in all the qualities of bravery and determination that we have learned to despise in our own countries......As I’ve suggested elsewhere, the fact that the very concept of “home” has been sabotaged and ridiculed, and that the world has been symbolically reduced to a vast hotel ecology across which people move freely, mean that there are no longer identities and homes to build resilience on, nor to demonstrate competence for, let alone to return to, so we have to borrow examples from elsewhere. And if you don’t like a hotel you complain and move to another one.'
Perhaps thus it ever was...but I am the same age and of a similar background and what I would identify with is the lack of vision that we have today. In the 60's we had hope which we inherited from our parents delivering us from the war. My parents took it for granted that things would get better and we never questioned it and embraced our history with that kind of positivity.
That's what's died. I no longer want to embrace 'our' past - the past that I unearthed. I find it unwholesome. I want to see the world advance but know that the lessons and leadership required no longer exist in 'the west' because there is no collective settkled vision. If another hotel is China, take me there! But I'm too old and will be content to cheer it on from a distance and just repeat 'I told you so' to those who will fail to cope with the coming travails.
We are old. Our country is exhausted and uninspiring. I have fallen out of love for it. I expect chaos and even welcome it as a precondition for rebirth. Something to fight against that may be transformative. Everything that I loved about this country has been 'financialised' and cheapened; community has been destroyed; nothing works; we have privatised memory so that now there are millions of different versions that drive us apart rather than bring us together. When history gets tired by endless reinterpretation and repetition it is time to leave it alone.
"We are old. Our country is exhausted and uninspiring. I have fallen out of love for it. I expect chaos and even welcome it as a precondition for rebirth."
I refuse to love anything that cannot love me back.
That said, yes, things will have to get worse, if they ever will to get better.
If I can add one element to this picture of the degradation of the western mind (thanks Aurelien!), it is the consequence of the emergence, more or less at the beginning of the century, of the economic sector of Cognitive Mining. The new "gold rush" (signaled by the dot-com bust and the soon-on-our-screens AI-bust) was the understanding that you could make a lot of money not from just influencing individual choices, but by shaping the very cognitive premises on which those choices are predicated. A precocious master of this was mr. Berlusconi in Italy (on which the current World Bestest President is modeled), followed obviously by the scores of "techpreneurs" who basically concocted a big machine for strip mining (and reselling to us as Ersatz) exactly those qualities you refer to: determination, decisiveness, courage, self-awareness, and the like. The consequence is that nowadays determination is simply impossible, because the cognitive premises of it are not there anymore: the stability of the mind around one purpose. Same for courage, for sitting through adversity, etc....in all these cases, we are unable to "perform" simply because there's not anymore a stable subject to wade through the thorns. Ulysses sets sail for Ithaca, but after a couple of days decides to spend a beautiful week on the beach of Cyrces, then he turns around to go snorkeling in the Aegean, then gets bored with sailing and decides to learn skateboarding...and so on and so forth.
We could endlessly debate whether these consequences are intended (conspiracy theorists abound) or not (after all, who in their sane mind would deliberately undermine the competences and human capabilities of their own people, for God's sake?). Maybe Aurelien's answer is the most acceptable: We Just Don't Care. After all, what image of "Our Own People" might have possibly be rooted in the minds of a bunch of sociopathic tech geeks grown up in California in the 80's? At most, the image they held of "society" was that of the cheerleaders and "popular" high school girls and boys - the bullies, so if anything not-so-good happens to these people's brains, well....who cares anyway? Some geeks get revenge on their high school bullies by buying guns and going on a shooting spree, others by founding facebook and screwing a couple of billion brains. The result is the same, just on a different scale. And looking at the background of the trillionare rulers of the world, it is not surprising that Victimization is at the center: we're living in the fantasy world of Iliad's Paris.
"logical conclusion of decades of belief that everything should be made as easy as possible."
I'm tempted to say it's a bit worse: it's the complacent worldview that we know what "the answers" are and as long as we can recite the verbatim when asked, everything is fine. And since anyone should be able to look up the right answers, everyone should be treated equally as long as they can recite the magic mantra. When I was still teaching, I saw this attitude everywhere and I imagine, after decades, it's only worse. (This is also true about academic "research," too. There are "right" fashionable questions to ask and the appropriate framing and methodologies that also happen to be fashionable at the time to approach them. You are not allowed to question them...well, if you are lucky, you may get a couple of high ranked publications out of them, but most of your ideas will be laughed out of circulation for not asking "the right questions"--especially at middling publications. And, unless you have friends in high places , volume is what counts for tenure.) I'll confess that going off the beaten path makes for difficulties in evaluating quality: shiny boots indicates diligence, not skills as a good soldier. But without a war, how to tell who's a good soldier? If a paper is going off the "usual path," how to tell if the author is a lunatic or someone insightful? Now, I think that you can, if you are looking at an undergrad or even graduate student paper...but I also found that students have gotten good at picking "bureaucratic" fights for their grades, ie X got credit for answer X, I said the same (no, you didn't, you dingbat--you did not explain how you got there.) so I should get the same credit. The bottom line is that, if the "right answers" grow on trees (and AI made these trees far more plentiful) and if the right answers are all that matter, why shouldn't everyone deserve the prize?
Clarence Thomas could not have expressed this reactionary slop any better. Except, of course, he would substitute 'strict Catholic piety' for 'challenges' and ' homecoming'.
Neither the article nor the comments so far discuss the role of the father.
The Odyssey stands out because the archetypal hero myth is the coming of age of a young man. They Odyssey is not just the return of a hero: it is a return of a father. This underlies the hero of the story, and the home. When Odysseus returns he reasserts the boundaries of the home - for defining boundaries is a key aspect of the father archetype.
The father archetype has been systematically erased from the culture. In the aftermath of World War II the order and discipline of the father has come to be seen as abusive - fascist, even, with Hitler as the demon incarnation of the tyrannical father. The industrial economy drew fathers away from the household (the traditional workplace of both parents). Divorce made fathers virtually optional. Culture consistently depicts fathers as domineering or incompetent.
The need for fathers does not go away, as in this passage from the article: "identifying yourself as a victim only makes sense as a strategy if you can thereby persuade or coerce some greater power or authority into helping you, or intervening in your favour. . . . a benevolent and powerful outside actor (clearly substituting for God here)." I think the appeal is not to God, but to the father. Like the victim, the very concept of rights is incoherent without a paternal authority to enforce them.
As a father I learned that children really do crave boundaries. A child acting up will often become obviously happier the moment appropriate limits are imposed. I say children, but the reality is that none of us ever finishes growing up - I would argue especially now when our culture lacks grown-ups. We have a need for the void left by the erasure of the father to be filled.
Which makes us uncomfortable. Isn't the father evil? We repress the need in various ways - by denial and attacks on any semblance of authority or boundaries, in political demands for recognition (from whom?), in dark romance, in kink, on the authoritarian right. Swinging one way or the other we have lost the sense of balance required to integrate the complementary functions of nurture and order. I think the fact that the father has not already been raised in the article or comments is significant: it points to a large blind spot or powerful aversion.
Inevitably the father will return. Suppressed too long, I think the tyrannical father is likely. Better to welcome back a healthier archetype voluntarily. Maybe these movies will help do this.
The diagnosis here is exact and the Dunkirk reading is the most analytically precise thing written about that film. The three-element structure, the departure, the trials, the return and rectification, has dissolved not because human nature changed but because the specific institutional and cultural infrastructure that gave it meaning was systematically dismantled. Aurelien has been documenting this dismantling with considerable precision across many essays.
But the essay ends in a place that its own analysis should not permit it to end. The probable leaders of the reckoning, we are told, will not be like Odysseus or De Gaulle but something altogether nastier. This conclusion follows logically only if the hero is the necessary form of the return. The essay's entire analytical structure assumes that what has been lost must be recovered in the same form it took when it existed: the individual of unusual abilities, the polytropos, the man of many ways who overcomes obstacles through intelligence and courage and returns to set things right. The grief at the loss of this figure is genuine and the grief is correct. But the assumption that this figure is the only possible vehicle for what his return represents may itself be a shard in the eye.
The governance commons, the specific institutional inheritance that enabled the Odysseus story to function as a cultural technology rather than simply as a fantasy of individual exceptionalism, predates the hero cult and survives its various corruptions. The Athenian assembly that Odysseus returned to was governed by sortition: the random selection of citizens for governance roles. The thing Odysseus came back to defend was not a monarchy but a demos, the self-governing community whose capacity for collective action the managed consensus has spent considerable energy convincing us was always a romantic illusion. It was not. The bombed cities of England that the Blitz Spirit mythology encoded in manageable heroic form were also the spontaneous self-organisation of communities that no government planned for and no individual hero directed. The jury room, which every Western democracy still trusts for its most consequential decisions, is sortition in daily practice. The Irish Citizens' Assembly that resolved the abortion question the professional political class had been avoiding for thirty years was one hundred and sixty randomly selected citizens deliberating for eighteen months. These are not romantic examples. They are the documentation of a governance capacity that the managed consensus presents as naive and that the evidence consistently shows is available.
The return home that the Odyssey encodes is not the return of the hero to the kingdom. It is the return of the community to self-governance, which the hero's absence had placed at risk. Penelope's weaving is the holding action, not the solution. The solution is the assembly that the suitors had displaced and that Odysseus, characteristically, had to restore through the specific violence that the situation had made necessary. But the target of that violence was not the demos. It was the class that had used the hero's absence to capture the governance commons for its own benefit. The suitors are the managed consensus. Odysseus's return is the recovery of the governance commons from those who had enclosed it.
This is the anti-hero story that the series The Freeze-Frame Revolution has been building across its sortition pieces and its polity assessments: not the hero who returns to set things right through exceptional individual virtue, but the demos that recovers its own capacity for self-governance through the institutional design that makes that capacity structurally available rather than depending on the coincidental appearance of polytropos. The anti-hero is all of us. The return home is to the governance commons. The shard that prevents us from seeing this, the specific distortion that makes the commons appear naive, the randomly selected citizen appear incompetent, the jury room appear as an exception rather than as proof of concept, has been in circulation for a very long time and was named in Hans Christian Andersen's The Snow Queen before the political scientists got hold of the question.
Aurelien is right that the reckoning is coming. He is right that the professional political class is not equipped for it and that the vocabulary of competence, solidarity, and collective endurance has been systematically abandoned. He is right that the probable shape of the reckoning, given the vacuum into which it will arrive, looks considerably more like Mussolini than like De Gaulle. But the vacuum is not the absence of the hero. It is the absence of the institutional infrastructure that would allow the community's own governance capacity to become visible and operational before the crisis makes the strong man's offer appear to be the only available option. The institutional infrastructure can be built before the crisis arrives. It has been built before, in Athens and in the Swiss cantons and in the Althing and in the Irish Citizens' Assembly. The Basic Law of the Commonwealth — a constitutional framework for the governance commons that the series has been developing — is one attempt at building it for the contemporary moment.
Not all of us will be polytropos. The institutional design that does not require us to be is the return home the Odyssey was always actually about.
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/the-anti-hero
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/all-of-us
https://squirrelbrain77.substack.com/p/the-mirror-the-shard-and-the-two
Indeed. For a long time I've thought that whatever replaces the current political classes will rapidly splinter before effecting any useful change: as so far the expected replacements themselves exhibit no evidence they're intellectually or ideologically or even emotionally equipped to deal with the chaos. If that is right, then it's their unknown successors that will find a successful response.
I trust you are correct in this analysis. I hope that the way towards that poly what?polymetropos, polydemos? perhaps, will not be closed off before we, the demos, are able to find that path to, if not, return, then, to a better tomorrow, one with autonomy, agency, and dignity.
We have to rebild the words and ideas vocabulary, debate, disseminate, and educate. People have done that before. After the little 1905 revolution in Russia, if I remember correctly, there was an active movement in Russia where intelectuals moved and roam the countryside and educate. Maybe the resulting little soviets sprouting up after 1917 (and soon killed by the bolsheviks with their centralization drive) were a partial result of that drive.
I thought Odysseus returned to Ithaca, not Athens? Was Athens even mentioned in the Odyssey? I think it got a brief mention in the Iliad.
It is all figurative here, Athens, as the place of recorded democracy, with an institutional system. And Odysseus is all of us...
At least that is my read of the comment.
Thank you Aurelien , i like and agree with your essay.
I have a feeling that someone somewhere would have covered similar points in centuries past about their view of their past.
In my opinion the modern day media ( tv radio internet ) plays too big a role in forming peoples opinions and their actions , now that would not be a bad thing if the media were trustworthy , theyre not , increasingly theyre used to distort and misrepresent all manner of things , some people are confused and dont know what to beleive some just beleive everything the media presents to them , nothing can be trusted.
Politicians cannot be trusted , the media collaborate with them not to get to the truth but to misrepresnt.
Today i noticed a plea on tv for donations to the disaster in Venezuela , an earthquake , it struck me that the need should be met by USA who are stealing Venezuela,s oil or the UK who have held on to billions of dollars worth of gold transferred from banks in Venezuela in 1999 when the MFI and the USA and UK governments decided that Venezuela could not be trusted to look after its own gold bullion.
UK and European governments give billions of £ and € every year to Ukraine to fight a war with Russia whilst simultaneously allowing their own populations to sink into deeper and deeper poverty and debt.
We are continually told that university education is a waste of time and that most students should instead be directed to apprenticeships but for many years now apprenticeships have been devalued to the point you can be offered an apprenticeship in a restaurant or an office where you will very likely be used to wash the dishes or shunt the mail around the office , education for the sake of improving knowledge and reasoning and experiencing discussion , differing views , is not valued anymore , too many people spend their time alone at home , being with lots of other people and being able to speak to them face to face , togetherness , is in itself an education but no longer valued.
The era of D Trump is a good example of what can go wrong when togetherness is rejected , there is no discussion , other views are not wanted not accepted , the policy is my way or the highway , he and his band of robbers are worldwide highwaymen , people across the world feel uneasy about their future their safety and the media bombards them with D Trump threats every day , nothing is secure in such circumstances.
When the rot starts from the top of governments it works its way down through society and thats what we are seeing now.
This article is confused and contradictory. It depends on the past being both stifling and refreshingly demanding. It reeks of half-stifled Edwardian nostalgia.
"It depends on the past being both stifling and refreshingly demanding." It was. As anyone mature or at least old enough to have been there knows.
A correct and refreshing analysis, in contrast to all the rather nauseating (and long-winded) agreement elsewhere here.
Ouch! Perhaps you could expound?
Here we go again:
1. As you note the "heroic people doing heroic things" trope is largely a matter of marketing, marketed when it happens to be convenient at the moment to TBTB.
Zelenskii is treated as Churchill, Marcus Aurelius, Saladin, Chandragupta, and Solomon The Wise, all rolled into one because that happens to be the preferred narrative at the moment. When he was elected in 2019 over vociferous American and european objections, he was a naughty boy in need of a stern lesson.
2. "De Gaulle, stranded in England in 1940, and effectively alone, manages to take on to himself the attributes of a symbolic King, as Odysseus had been King of Ithaca, and by force of personality and diplomacy rather than military power, avoids traps and snares, and makes his way back, via Brazzaville and Algiers, to be received in Paris as the rightful ruler. Indeed, even the story of Penelope makes a fleeting appearance. Just as she resisted the suitors, so La France (always feminine) and Marianne, the (female) symbol of the Republic, fought on through the Resistance and the Free French, against the French State of Pétain, and its collaboration with the Nazis. And finally, of course, there was the reckoning, the Purge, when some of the most egregious collaborators like Laval the Prime Minister were executed, even if for political reasons the carnage was less impressive than it had been on Ithaca."
Humans conveniently forget that Vichy had a lot more support and supporters than will admit to the fact after the war. For example, most of the french colonies (French Indochina, French West Africa, French Equatorial Africa, Madagascar, Syria and Lebanon, French Guiana, and the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe) declared for Vichy and remained loyal until conquered by the british or it became evident that the Allies were winning, but that is treated as an embarrassing faux pas to be swept under the rug.
When the Axis appeared ascendant, a lot of french were supporters of the Petain regime, only to switch sides later. Again, victory has a thousand fathers, while defeat is an orphan.
For that matter, Ukraine provides another instructive example.
3. I have no use for symbolism, especially symbols placed in a work to give it Deep Meaning. High school intellectualism at its most pretentious and worst.
When you began by talking about polytropos (“many turns”), I thought you were going to go on to another epithet of Odysseus: angylometis (“devious devising”), also said of Cronos, Prometheus, and Zeus/nous.
The paradigmatic allegory illustrating angylometis is the castration of Uranus, the folk-devouring sire of the Titans, who when he is about to bed with his own mother Gaia, is unmanned by his youngest son Cronos armed with a crooked (angylo) knife. Three drops of blood which land on the soil (Gaia) become the Furies (Erinyes), while the genitals cast in the sea give birth to Aphrodite, of the sea foam.
The remorseless “many turns” of events—paradoxically those both intended and unexpected— resemble steering under sail in the wind, as well as the crafting of intricate plans and things. In another context, such workings of things could also be said to resemble the Dao (道).
Courage, determination. Leadership, hero. Are you mad? Nowadays this will get you quickly jailed or shot. We are in science fiction territory. Heroes have to live in the skirting board like rats and function orientally and tangentially.
This strikes a massive nerve in Canada right now. Our political class has traded hard operational competence for performative branding, while simultaneously reducing our entire history to a flat narrative of shame. By tearing down our historical myths and founders, we've left a generation with no positive inheritance or cultural muscle memory to draw upon. We’ve traded citizens for hotel guests, and heroes for competitive victims. Thank you for putting words to a very heavy, palpable reality.
Pierre Berton's books are still available in the library...
"Our political class is obviously completely lost: day-to-day management by image replaced competence and vision so long ago that such qualities can now not be recovered. Performative posturing is all they have left, and there is no longer even a genuine vocabulary of competence, cooperation, collective effort and endurance to appeal to. " Although there is lots to comment on, one of which is the absence of a righteous goal that would make a hero admirable in today's world, where white hat vs black hat no longer suffices for determining the correct moral position. The irony in the quoted passage, is that in the USA, the dominant power in the West, the governing bodies are awash with old folks who have lost, if they ever had, any allegiance or dedication to moral principles. That these are the same people who have beggared the society of the vision necessary to recover the way, true path, etc., suggests we are in even a worse position than that simply no one remembers.
The road to hell is quite obviously paved with convenience. Maybe we should consider convenience as an indicator for what to avoid?
“ We sneer at such toxically masculine behaviour now: after all, there wasn’t any real moral difference between the Nazis and the Allies was there? ”
This is overstated lazy nonsense on your part. Who is this “ we”? I suppose if you look hard you could find someone saying this because you can find some adolescent somewhere saying the most extreme possible thing to make a point. And more plausibly, you can find people pointing to the very real crimes of Western imperialism and how they laid the foundations for Nazi crimes— Hannah Arendt, for example—but how many people in Western cultures actually say there was no difference between the West and Hitler?
The same goes for your claim that nobody respects extreme heroism in war. Just nonsense. Your pieces are badly marred by this crap.
'So where, in today’s events, or in cultural productions set in the present time, do we encounter this tradition? Well we don’t, actually, which is why Nolan’s film is so interesting, and why it will be equally interesting to see how it is received. For the fundamental three-element structure I have described no longer corresponds to anything valued by current western culture or society.......times of great social conformity have in the past provided opportunities for challenges and even adventure. In the period that Zweig was writing about, there were semi-official mechanisms for this, generally involving travelling and working abroad. There were also those who deliberately exiled themselves, those who became involved in radical or even revolutionary politics, those who embraced new philosophies, sometimes from other civilisations, those who embraced new and shocking concepts of art and life.........Everyday life for both men and women involved far more physical effort than it does today, and often a higher level of difficulty in everyday things Attaining adulthood involved passing through a series of stages where you acquired new responsibilities and learnt to do new things. .....I think it’s fair to say that our society no longer expects or encourages people to do original and difficult things. Ironically, the result of mass media, and the Internet in particular, has been to promote not diversity and challenge, but conformity, since everyone can see what everyone else is doing. I’ve talked before about organisations becoming more risk-averse and procedure-intensive, and less tolerant of the kind of person who can be a nuisance when things are fine, but whom you really need when things go wrong....Yes, degrees have been devalued and turned into credentials, yes there are too many graduates and not enough jobs, but the most fundamental purpose of any education is surely your own intellectual and cultural development. Use ChatGPT for your college assignments and you are committing a kind of intellectual suicide....I was part of the first generation of children from “ordinary” backgrounds to go to university in Britain, roughly during the period from the late 60s to the late 70s, and before the beginning of the neoliberal destruction of higher education. “Ordinary” scarcely describes most of us: some were working-class, and not a few came from homes where there were no books. To get through the education system of the time, up to and through university, and perhaps beyond, was extremely difficult anyway, and especially so for those who did not come from the educated middle class. Nonetheless, it was recognised by all in those days that you got nowhere without trying, and overcoming obstacles....today, we have outsourced hero-worship along with everything else. People who would never dream of cheering for their own countries cheer for Russia, Ukraine or Iran, projecting their own unmet needs on to them, and often reacting violently to any criticism with a kind of transferred patriotism. So Zelensky and a contingent of the Ukrainian Army were furiously applauded by the crowds at the Bastille Day parade in Paris this week. There’s a mordant irony in the fact that Zelensky is not a politician but an actor, playing the kind of heroic figure that western culture would like to have, but cannot bring itself to actually want. He enables those who would really like to admire Churchill or Roosevelt or even De Gaulle, but cannot take the risk of doing so, to find an acceptable replacement, for whom worship is not only permitted, but actively encouraged. And the carefully cultivated media image of the Ukrainian Army enables us to vicariously exult in all the qualities of bravery and determination that we have learned to despise in our own countries......As I’ve suggested elsewhere, the fact that the very concept of “home” has been sabotaged and ridiculed, and that the world has been symbolically reduced to a vast hotel ecology across which people move freely, mean that there are no longer identities and homes to build resilience on, nor to demonstrate competence for, let alone to return to, so we have to borrow examples from elsewhere. And if you don’t like a hotel you complain and move to another one.'
Perhaps thus it ever was...but I am the same age and of a similar background and what I would identify with is the lack of vision that we have today. In the 60's we had hope which we inherited from our parents delivering us from the war. My parents took it for granted that things would get better and we never questioned it and embraced our history with that kind of positivity.
That's what's died. I no longer want to embrace 'our' past - the past that I unearthed. I find it unwholesome. I want to see the world advance but know that the lessons and leadership required no longer exist in 'the west' because there is no collective settkled vision. If another hotel is China, take me there! But I'm too old and will be content to cheer it on from a distance and just repeat 'I told you so' to those who will fail to cope with the coming travails.
We are old. Our country is exhausted and uninspiring. I have fallen out of love for it. I expect chaos and even welcome it as a precondition for rebirth. Something to fight against that may be transformative. Everything that I loved about this country has been 'financialised' and cheapened; community has been destroyed; nothing works; we have privatised memory so that now there are millions of different versions that drive us apart rather than bring us together. When history gets tired by endless reinterpretation and repetition it is time to leave it alone.
"We are old. Our country is exhausted and uninspiring. I have fallen out of love for it. I expect chaos and even welcome it as a precondition for rebirth."
I refuse to love anything that cannot love me back.
That said, yes, things will have to get worse, if they ever will to get better.
If I can add one element to this picture of the degradation of the western mind (thanks Aurelien!), it is the consequence of the emergence, more or less at the beginning of the century, of the economic sector of Cognitive Mining. The new "gold rush" (signaled by the dot-com bust and the soon-on-our-screens AI-bust) was the understanding that you could make a lot of money not from just influencing individual choices, but by shaping the very cognitive premises on which those choices are predicated. A precocious master of this was mr. Berlusconi in Italy (on which the current World Bestest President is modeled), followed obviously by the scores of "techpreneurs" who basically concocted a big machine for strip mining (and reselling to us as Ersatz) exactly those qualities you refer to: determination, decisiveness, courage, self-awareness, and the like. The consequence is that nowadays determination is simply impossible, because the cognitive premises of it are not there anymore: the stability of the mind around one purpose. Same for courage, for sitting through adversity, etc....in all these cases, we are unable to "perform" simply because there's not anymore a stable subject to wade through the thorns. Ulysses sets sail for Ithaca, but after a couple of days decides to spend a beautiful week on the beach of Cyrces, then he turns around to go snorkeling in the Aegean, then gets bored with sailing and decides to learn skateboarding...and so on and so forth.
We could endlessly debate whether these consequences are intended (conspiracy theorists abound) or not (after all, who in their sane mind would deliberately undermine the competences and human capabilities of their own people, for God's sake?). Maybe Aurelien's answer is the most acceptable: We Just Don't Care. After all, what image of "Our Own People" might have possibly be rooted in the minds of a bunch of sociopathic tech geeks grown up in California in the 80's? At most, the image they held of "society" was that of the cheerleaders and "popular" high school girls and boys - the bullies, so if anything not-so-good happens to these people's brains, well....who cares anyway? Some geeks get revenge on their high school bullies by buying guns and going on a shooting spree, others by founding facebook and screwing a couple of billion brains. The result is the same, just on a different scale. And looking at the background of the trillionare rulers of the world, it is not surprising that Victimization is at the center: we're living in the fantasy world of Iliad's Paris.
"logical conclusion of decades of belief that everything should be made as easy as possible."
I'm tempted to say it's a bit worse: it's the complacent worldview that we know what "the answers" are and as long as we can recite the verbatim when asked, everything is fine. And since anyone should be able to look up the right answers, everyone should be treated equally as long as they can recite the magic mantra. When I was still teaching, I saw this attitude everywhere and I imagine, after decades, it's only worse. (This is also true about academic "research," too. There are "right" fashionable questions to ask and the appropriate framing and methodologies that also happen to be fashionable at the time to approach them. You are not allowed to question them...well, if you are lucky, you may get a couple of high ranked publications out of them, but most of your ideas will be laughed out of circulation for not asking "the right questions"--especially at middling publications. And, unless you have friends in high places , volume is what counts for tenure.) I'll confess that going off the beaten path makes for difficulties in evaluating quality: shiny boots indicates diligence, not skills as a good soldier. But without a war, how to tell who's a good soldier? If a paper is going off the "usual path," how to tell if the author is a lunatic or someone insightful? Now, I think that you can, if you are looking at an undergrad or even graduate student paper...but I also found that students have gotten good at picking "bureaucratic" fights for their grades, ie X got credit for answer X, I said the same (no, you didn't, you dingbat--you did not explain how you got there.) so I should get the same credit. The bottom line is that, if the "right answers" grow on trees (and AI made these trees far more plentiful) and if the right answers are all that matter, why shouldn't everyone deserve the prize?
Clarence Thomas could not have expressed this reactionary slop any better. Except, of course, he would substitute 'strict Catholic piety' for 'challenges' and ' homecoming'.
Someone get this writer an editor! There's a pithy and erudite essay dispersed through this logorrheal mess, somewhere.
You may have just used irony at depths unknown by the majority of all of us.
Neither the article nor the comments so far discuss the role of the father.
The Odyssey stands out because the archetypal hero myth is the coming of age of a young man. They Odyssey is not just the return of a hero: it is a return of a father. This underlies the hero of the story, and the home. When Odysseus returns he reasserts the boundaries of the home - for defining boundaries is a key aspect of the father archetype.
The father archetype has been systematically erased from the culture. In the aftermath of World War II the order and discipline of the father has come to be seen as abusive - fascist, even, with Hitler as the demon incarnation of the tyrannical father. The industrial economy drew fathers away from the household (the traditional workplace of both parents). Divorce made fathers virtually optional. Culture consistently depicts fathers as domineering or incompetent.
The need for fathers does not go away, as in this passage from the article: "identifying yourself as a victim only makes sense as a strategy if you can thereby persuade or coerce some greater power or authority into helping you, or intervening in your favour. . . . a benevolent and powerful outside actor (clearly substituting for God here)." I think the appeal is not to God, but to the father. Like the victim, the very concept of rights is incoherent without a paternal authority to enforce them.
As a father I learned that children really do crave boundaries. A child acting up will often become obviously happier the moment appropriate limits are imposed. I say children, but the reality is that none of us ever finishes growing up - I would argue especially now when our culture lacks grown-ups. We have a need for the void left by the erasure of the father to be filled.
Which makes us uncomfortable. Isn't the father evil? We repress the need in various ways - by denial and attacks on any semblance of authority or boundaries, in political demands for recognition (from whom?), in dark romance, in kink, on the authoritarian right. Swinging one way or the other we have lost the sense of balance required to integrate the complementary functions of nurture and order. I think the fact that the father has not already been raised in the article or comments is significant: it points to a large blind spot or powerful aversion.
Inevitably the father will return. Suppressed too long, I think the tyrannical father is likely. Better to welcome back a healthier archetype voluntarily. Maybe these movies will help do this.
The US richly deserves all the enmity it receives. I make no apology for loathing their foreign policy history from the Spanish American War onwards.