Strategic Intention and Mass Man
by J. R. Nyquist
Weekly Column Published: 03.14.2008
Print“I looked into Putin’s eyes, and I saw three things, a ‘K’ a ‘G’ and a ‘B,’” – John McCain
There recently appeared an essay by Anthony Daniels, published in The New Criterion, in which he summarized Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset’s notion of “mass man” as the man “who goes from distraction to distraction, who is prey to absurd fashions, who never thinks deeply….” In the first decade of the twenty-first century this is all too familiar. In 2008 we live in a society dominated by “mass men,” overtaken by mass psychology, mass media, mass schooling and the mass ignorance presently crowding in around us.
Today’s mass audience cannot distinguish the important from the trivial. What needs to be acknowledged, and one day will be acknowledged, is the very real distinction between “low-minded” and “high-minded,” between moral courage and venial conformism, between thinkers and fakers. This is what it comes down to. The masses have grown weak and lazy. They don’t want to admit reality because there might be a responsibility clause. This being the main consideration, the denial of key events is best accomplished through a flood tide of triviality – the small man’s escape pod. Once you are lost upon the Great Ocean of Intellectual Junk, any ratty half-truth will serve.
If we were trained to think in hierarchical instead of egalitarian terms, if we understood the basis of our own existence, our critical attention would be instinctively drawn to certain issues touching on our political and economic future. We would know that certain lifestyle choices are destructive to society as a whole, that fiat currencies cannot last, that sparing the rod spoils the child, that if you want peace you’d better prepare for war. It is more and more obvious, however, that today’s mass man has lost his instincts, lost sight of what is important, and judges everything from the false assumptions of a false standpoint.
Once upon a time we had a civilization. We had standards. We had notions of objectivity. We had a culture that wasn’t low-minded. We looked back to great men as we looked forward to our posterity. Art was beautiful and meaningful. Politics was evolving away from tyranny. Economics was about liberty and responsibility. What do we have today? We have Britney Spears and Jerry Springer. Our standards are seriously eroded. Subjectivity has cynically declared that objectivity is impossible. Everything high-minded has fallen to neglect.
But more important, and even more disastrous, the emergence of “mass man” has something to do with the emergence of totalitarianism (which claimed roughly 100 million lives in the last century). And it is safe to say that totalitarianism is going to claim even more lives in the future. But people don’t want to wake up. They don’t want to acknowledge that totalitarianism is something real and ongoing. It grows in the soil of mass culture. It leads to destruction and mass murder because every totalitarian construct is based on lies, sustained by crime and driven by the politicization of personal disappointment and envy. It is normal history when one country invades another, when a cavalry commander or Indian chief commits an atrocity. Men have done terrible things to one another throughout history. But to make terror and murder into a system signifies a new type of regime.
The mass man fails to see the evils of totalitarianism; he fails to see the tendency of Mr. Hitler; he fails to see the letters “K-G-B” behind Putin; he denies the Holocaust; he doesn’t care if Iran deploys nuclear missiles; he doesn’t think Russia or China will ever start a global war. The philistinism of the mass man is found in his readiness to believe totalitarian propaganda. Such is a propaganda that blames the intended victim.
Totalitarianism arises because mass man is susceptible. He is fundamentally ignorant, though remarkably “well informed.” Mass man’s inertia accepts the dictates of bureaucracy. He has no “great idea” or “faith” to guard him against expedient compromise, or participation in genocide. The mass man’s unquestioning opportunism allows him to exemplify that selfsame “banality of evil” referred to by Hannah Arendt in her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem. After all, the mass man under Hitler, under Stalin, would argue that he is doing his job. He is merely following orders.
Is mass man innocuous or sinister? Does he do it on purpose, or does he require an evil mastermind like Hitler? What would it mean to say that the mass extermination of the Jews under Hitler was a sociological phenomenon having nothing to do with intentionality? That is to say, what does it mean to say that the Holocaust was something other than a conspiracy against specific victims? What does it mean to say that the systematic vilification of a people was due to “a historical process”?
I don’t think the result, on one end, is possible without the intention at the other. There is nothing diabolical lest it be intentional. And everything intended is individual. Hitler was an individual. His henchmen were individuals. Each was responsible for his actions. It is no excuse to plead oneself down to a cog. Each derived some private satisfaction in the persecution, looting and killing of Jews. To imagine such people cannot exist, because one’s imagination is too limited, is to forget what history has already proved.
If another genocidal war breaks out, which nations will be the victimized? Which nations are currently vilified and blamed for the world’s problems? Two nations, specifically: (1) The Jews and (2) the Americans. The failure to understand the significance of this vilification, and the failure to recognize its origins, is a sad failure indeed.
As Bernard Chazelle recently pointed out in an essay titled Anti-Americanism: a Clinical Study, there is no such thing as anti-Frenchism, anti-Polishism or anti-Spanishism. Why not? Because “anti-Americanism stands alone: a living testament….” Well, not quite alone. One needs to recall anti-Semitism, and one needs to couple that with the Holocaust. The vilification of an entire people is something akin to tenderizing a steak. The task of vilification makes ready for the oven.
It was Paul Johnson, the British historian, who wrote: “Anti-Americanism is the prevailing disease of intellectuals today.” What he should have said, but failed to clarify, was that today’s “intellectuals” are frauds; they are mass men, exactly like those referred to by Jose Ortega y Gasset in his book, Revolt of the Masses. The pretense of learning, the pretense of thinking, merely covers the underlying meanness of someone who, in Anthony Daniel’s words, “will not recognize his betters.”
The mass man picks up ideas the way a rat picks up plague-infested fleas. He does not think about them. He is infected by them. And it is entirely possible that someone intentionally spread the infection. Consider the following subtlety: When an American strategist thinks about nuclear missiles he is thinking about deterrence. When a Russian strategist thinks of nuclear missiles he is thinking about the annihilation of enemies. American nuclear strategists from Herman Kahn to Peter Vincent Pry were chiefly concerned with deterrence. Russian nuclear strategists from Sokolovskiy to Sidorenko were chiefly concerned with annihilating the enemy. The difference between the two is important – though easily missed.
Hate is the key ingredient, and getting Americans to hate themselves has been a special trick. Perhaps the mass man, hating what is great, inclines to hate his own country if its greatness is sufficient. In that case, a cunning enemy needn’t lift a finger – though the Soviet Union lifted heaven and earth to spread anti-American hate from 1950 to 1991. One of the most effective propaganda techniques involved planting false stories in Western newspapers. Such were Moscow’s “active measures.” With regard to this tactic, the recent SVR/KGB defector Sergei Tretyakov told author Pete Earley: “We said [after the collapse of the Soviet Union], ‘Okay, now we’re friends. We’ll stop doing this’ and the SVR [KGB] shut down Directorate A [Active Measures]. But Directorate A simply underwent a name change. That’s all. It became Department MS [measures of support] and the very same people who had run it under the KGB were still doing it for the SVR.”
The mass man is an easily manipulated creature. He is preyed upon by advertisers, snake oil salesmen and quacks of every description. Please allow, dear masses, that you have been the special target of a higher sort of advertisement. You have been targeted. You have been duped. The ovens are being warmed even now.
Can you feel the heat?
Copyright © 2008 Jeffrey R. Nyquist
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