Collective Madness ... Deciphered

It really is about elites consciously and willfully “breaking eggs” to make their “omelette.” Because, finally, they can pursue their Chiliastic dream.

What might make for a good model for the madness of our time?  Is it like 1968 or Germany 1932?  Is it like Russia 1917 or 1928?  Is it like the run up to the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) or the anarchist ferment of about 1912?  Is it The 1848 Revolutions that infused the young Karl Marx with hope and expectation of the imminent “Final Crisis of Capitalism?”  How about the Paris Commune of 1870?  Is it like the immediate aftermath of the First World War in Germany, with fighting between Freikorps and the socialists who had set up the short-lived Soviet of Bavaria in 1918?  Are there any bids for “The French Revolution?”  Is it like China’s Second Five-Year Plan (the “Great Leap Forward,” 1958-1962) or China’s Cultural Revolution (1966-1976)?

In this essay I am going to make a bid for the Soviets’ First Five-Year Plan (the “Great Break,” 1928-1932), notwithstanding the fact that many other revolutionary episodes share much of the structure of the Soviets’ “Great Break.”  The common structure of revolutionary episodes is a kind of road-side Hegelianism dressed up as a profound, sophisticated Progressivism.  That Progressivism is Chiliastic: history presents these windows of opportunity in which to seize power and implement the grand plan; implementing the plan amounts to inducing the Second Coming—that’s what makes it “Chiliastic”; everything will be wonderful after the Chiliasm.  Is that not the fundamental pitch of any election victory speech: after cleaning up our predecessor’s mess, everything will be great going forward?

I would suggest that the most sophisticated aspect of revolutionary episodes is the fact that some skeptical wag watching any given road-side spectacle had the sense to invent terms like (the Latinate) “Millenarianism” or (the Greek) “Chiliasm.”  The revolution never delivers Heaven on Earth.

An interesting feature of this bid is that it constitutes a complement to explanations which are in the spirit of “the madness of crowds,” “mass formation” or the psychology of totalitarianism.  There are two sides to the Madness.  On one side of the coin is religious belief in the Chiliasm.  On the other is the very serious business of implementing the Chiliasm.  The matter of the psychology of belief addresses the question of how so many people can adopt a kind of religious belief in refutable (and refuted) propositions passed off as “settled science.”  For example, “You’re not gonna get COVID if you have these vaccinations…”  That was part of a halting declaration of Biden’s that then made it into Bryson Gray’s rap number “Let’s Go Brandon.”  We know that the mRNA therapies (the “vaccines”) have never worked as advertised, and yet the authorities in places like Washington, DC still insist that children who endeavor to attend the public schools get vaccinated. Unbelievable.

The story of the Soviet’s First Five-Year Plan is a story about implementing the Madness.  It involves much about the rise to the pinnacle of power of that “wonderful Georgian” (in Lenin’s estimation) Joseph Stalin, the “man of steel,” né Ioseb Jughashvili.  (Much of what I say here is inspired by Robert Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow 1985, Francis Spufford, Red Plenty 2010, and Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government 2017.  These are brilliant books.)

Russia had suffered grievously during the First World War, but it suffered even worse during the Russian Civil War (1918-1921).  Lenin and his cabal managed to navigate the chaos, remain intact, and secure a firm grip on power, but they ended up in control of a shattered empire.  Francis Spufford put it thusly:

In the chaos and economic collapse following the overthrow of the Tsar by disorganized liberals, they were able to use the discipline of the cult’s membership to mount a coup d’etat—and then to finesse themselves into the leadership of all those in Russia who were resisting the armed return of the old regime.  Suddenly, a small collection of fanatics and opportunists found themselves running the country that least resembled Marx’s description of a place ready for socialist revolution.

Lenin’s grand vision amounted to organizing “the whole of society” like a single, well-managed factory.  The technical problem, as he understood it, was just that: a mere technical problem—specifically, getting the right technicians in the right places to run everything.  A practical problem, to be sure, must have been the fact that the country had been shattered by years of world war and civil war.  Were the authorities really in a position to implement much of any program?  A political problem involved getting all of the working people and the peasants (mostly in the wheat growing regions, including those of the Ukraine) to go along with the program. Which the peasants affirmatively did not, hence the Peasant War of 1918-1922.

Going along with the program would have involved acquiescing to the collectivization of the agricultural sector.  That did not happen.  Instead, it looks like the peasantry had several good years of being left alone in peace.  That ended in 1928 with implementation of the First Five-Year Plan.  The regime started to round up recalcitrant peasants and to send them off by the hundreds of thousands to labor camps scattered around Russia.  Millions ultimately perished.

Lenin absorbed an assassin’s bullet in 1918, but he managed to live on, physically diminished, until 1924.  Stalin’s own cabal managed to navigate the chaos of the mid-1920’s and to arrogate more power to itself.  By 1929, Stalin managed to secure an even firmer grip on power.  The Soviets were already well along into implementing their First Five-Year Plan, notwithstanding the fact that they’d only set aside four years to complete it.  “‘The Five Year Plan in Four Years’ was advanced, and the magic symbols ‘5-in-4’ or ‘2+2=5’ were posted and shouted throughout the land.”  Which leaves us here:

Dispatch from Moscow, 1929 –

The New York Times correspondent was typing out the second page of his wire dispatch:

…And so again Stalin is getting away with it, because when all is said and done he represents the ruthless Asiatic spirit so suitable to this backward population accustomed to Asiatic autocracy STOP

as your correspondent clearly foresaw and reported fortnight ago right opposition is knuckling under which cinches scheduled communist congress for stalin STOP

mind you your correspondent holds no brief for shall we say unusual methods used to liquate better-off peasant but like stalin he recognizes this is war dash class war STOP

Your correspondent has been convinced by ten years intimate study of soviet situation that you cant make omelettes without breaking eggs

I get this from Eugene Lyons, Assignment in Utopia (1937).  Lyons elaborated:

The egg-and-omelette theory, dashed off nonchalantly one midnight, was destined to achieve a sort of immortality.  It told exactly nothing about Russia, since eggs were being smashed for omelettes in a lot of other countries.  But it told a lot, apparently, about a type of reporting.

Lyons was the UPI’s correspondent in Moscow (United Press International).  A bigger presence may have been The New York Times’ “Man in Moscow,” Walter Duranty.  Duranty and nearly all other correspondents in Moscow are infamous for ignoring the “liquidation” of millions of “better-off peasants” (“kulaks”) who resisted collectivization. The best-and-brightest awarded Duranty a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of affairs in Stalin’s Russia.

Duranty and Lyons are portrayed in the film Mr. Jones (2019) with James Norton portraying Gareth Jones, a … an intrepid Welshman who set off for the Ukraine to research and reveal the reality of the Holodomor, the “The Ukrainian Genocide.” Jones graces a few pages of Assignment in Utopia.

The Western press did not merely ignore what was going on in Stalin’s Russia.  The press actively covered for it, and everyone in the media actively cheered on the Soviet experiment, for they perceived it as a (hopefully) superior model to quasi-free market capitalism in the West.  Indeed, the advent of global depression in 1929 invested the idea with more than a little credibility.

A self-congratulatory press must have been excited by the prospect of the final crisis of capitalism.  It turns out, however, that cheering on the Soviet experiment involved ignoring the vivid and obvious evidence that it was proving to be more of a death wish.  It was worse for the fact that the elites in the leadership effectively wished deaths by the tens of millions on tens of millions of others.  They would not suffer the consequences of their own, failed policies.

So, right there we have four clues about how to decipher their madness and our madness. 

• The leadership was religiously committed to a Chiliastic plan.

• The leadership exhibited no interest in studying the feasibility of The Plan.

• The leadership understood that the plan might prove to be ambitious, but they were willing to destroy the lives of millions in making a best effort to implement the plan.  Indeed, destroying other inconvenient people could prove to be a convenient by-product of implementation of the plan.

• The members of the media were unencumbered by concerns about feasibility and the human cost.  Indeed, they, too, were so religiously committed to the plan that they were willing to cover up the spectacular failures.

This sounds familiar, no? … No? Really?

I illuminate a fifth clue:

• Much elite opinion abroad also proved to be remarkably unencumbered with the inconvenient evidence of spectacular failure and policy-induced death and misery resulting in the destruction of whole, peasant societies.

George Bernard Shaw stands out as one of the “thought leaders” on this count.  He exclaimed,

I have advised the nations to adopt Communism and have carefully explained how they can do it without cutting one another's throats. But if they prefer to do it by cutting one another's throats, I am no less a Communist. Communism will be good even for Yahoos. (Letter to Kingsley Martin, 1942)

This was 1942, ten years after the First Five-Year Plan had wrapped up. This dude had ten years to think about this, and he still doubled down ….

The evidence of the genocide was well known by this time. But Shaw could not give up the dream of Nirvana in Stalin’s Russia. Alas, some people are impervious to empirical evidence. Further, may we yet surmise that the destruction of whole societies—the cracking of millions of eggs—was a feature, not a bug, of the plan?

Which brings me to two tales.  The first is a Tale of Two Little Corporals.  The second is Vladimir Lenin’s Tale of “What is to be done?” (1901).

A Tale of Two Little Corporals –

Both Ernst Toller and Adolph Hitler had to insinuate their ways into the ranks of the troops on the front lines of World War I.  Both ended up on the Western Front, and both saw a lot of action.

Toller was a writer and playwright, and what I know of his experience comes from his very nice book, I Was a German (1934).  Hitler had been painting houses to pay the rent and had assembled an application to art school.  Toller insinuated his way into an artillery regiment.  Hitler, if I recall correctly, got a job as a runner, delivering messages between command posts.  Something like that.

Hitler stood out for volunteering for the most dangerous missions, hopping from bomb crater to bomb crater, as he navigated his way through hot fields of fire from one command post to another.  He also stood out for his pro-war stridency, which irritated at least some of his comrades, who seemed to value their own physical integrity much more than Hitler valued his own.  Hitler’s (Jewish) commandant recommended Hitler for two Iron Crosses over the course of his surprisingly long service in the war.  He did finish the war in a field hospital, but that he survived at all is amazing.

Both Toller and Hitler ended up in Munich right after the war, and both went into politics, but their paths otherwise diverged widely.  Toller had a big hand in motivating the Soviet Republic of Bavaria.  Hitler got his start doing the rounds in the beer halls, complaining to whomever would listen about the travesty that was the settlement to the war in Versailles.  Hitler ended up doing a short stint in prison.  Toller ended up doing many years in prison, but he eventually made it to the United States.  Under Hitler’s direction, Germany declared war on the United States some time after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.  It remains a puzzle about why Hitler motivated that; wasn’t fighting the Soviet Union a sufficiently big project?

Both Toller and Hitler were fanatics.  But, what really makes Hitler stand out was the fact that he was willing to force everyone to do what he was willing to do: risk everything in pursuit of a grand vision of how society should be organized.  He demonstrated his own capacity to risk his own life time and time again on the Western Front.  It is hard not to wonder that he perceived that he had paid his dues many times over; he was willing to make everyone else pay up.  Ultimately, he was willing to risk destroying his own society in order to have one chance to reinvent it. 

When Lenin deplored the Deplorables –

In his essay, “What is to be done?” (1901), Vladimir Lenin complained that the Deplorables of his age were not disposed to act in their own interests.  

[The strikes of the 1890’s] were simply trade union struggles, not yet Social Democratic struggles. They marked the awakening antagonisms between workers and employers; but the workers, were not, and could not be, conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system, i.e., theirs was not yet Social-Democratic consciousness.

Working class folks were all about getting a larger slice of the economic pie, but they were not interested in re-engineering society and forcing it on to the shining path leading up to the Marxist Chiliasm.  At the Chiliasm, society would emerge from its chrysalis (Socialism) and enter the stateless state of Communism.  Man will have secured Heaven on Earth.

That was all well and good for the university students, but the peasants just wanted to work their own land and be left alone.  Working folks just wanted better compensation and to be left alone.

Much seemed to be the case in the Unites States.  The country’s most prominent union leader, Samuel Gompers, did not see that socialism, as he understood it, would serve the interests of working people.  Joshua Muravchik devotes a chapter of Heaven on Earth: The Rise, Fall, and Afterlife of Socialism (2019) to that point.

Since virtually everywhere—from Marx, Engels and Lassalle in Germany, to Lenin and Plekhanov in Russia, to Attlee and Webbs in England—socialism had been brought to the workers by advocates from the privileged classes, Gomper’s position boded ill for socialism in America.

America, for that matter, had become “a model of an alternative future.”

In the war of abstractions, socialism had trounced capitalism, which had precious few defenders. But in the competition between real living systems, America offered an image that was the envy and yearning of the world.  America was not synonymous with capitalism; it represented more than that.

Were working people in Russia yearning for an American experience, whether in their country or in America itself?  Perhaps.  Some number of them did venture to America.  That said, what was to be done in Lenin’s Russia?  Launch a campaign to raise awareness of “class consciousness.”  Be Fishers of Men, it seems:

We deliberately select this blunt formula:

… Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes. For that reason, the reply to the question as to what must be done to bring political knowledge to the workers cannot be merely the answer with which, in the majority of cases, the practical workers, especially those inclined towards Economism, mostly content themselves, namely: “To go among the workers.” To bring political knowledge to the workers the Social Democrats must go among all classes of the population; they must dispatch units of their army in all directions.

Blah-blah-blah …

How well did that go, sending emissaries from the universities to proselytize?  Not so successfully, perhaps, but the humiliation of defeat in the Russo-Japanese war (1905-06) might have inflamed the unschooled masses. There was something to that, but it was really the war on the Eastern Front that proved to be the thing.  It was the stuff that inspired the winning slogan, “Peace, Land, Bread!”  The problem with that, however, was that it morphed into the Peasant War of 1918-1922 after the revolution.  The peasants were not too keen to give up the bit about “Land” and “Bread.”  With the launch of the First Five-Year Plan, however, the authorities were ready to suppress any peasant war before it could even start.  There would be no more talking.  No more proselytizing.  The insubordinate masses would be deported en masse to labor camps where inmates would ultimately perish by the millions.

What do we get from these two tales?:

• The elites are willing to risk the destruction of non-elites in pursuit of the grand plan, and they are willing to destroy non-elites who refuse to go along with the grand plan.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1980), Milan Kundera suggests that it was the “better half” of society that had engineered and cheered on the formal Communist takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1948.

[T]he half that cheered was the more dynamic, the more intelligent, the better half.

Yes, say what you will—the Communists were more intelligent.  They had a grandiose program, a plan for a brand-new world in which everyone would find his place.  The Communists’ opponents had no great dream; all they had was a few moral principles, stale and lifeless, to patch up the tattered trousers of the established order.  So of course the grandiose enthusiasts won out over the cautious compromisers and lost no time turning their dream into reality: the creation of an idyll of justice for all.

But, here is the key part:

From the start there were people who realized they lacked the proper temperament for the idyll and wished to leave the country.  But since by definition an idyll is one world for all, the people who wished to emigrate were implicitly denying its validity.  Instead of going abroad, they went behind bars.

• These elites really are neo-Puritans, so convinced that they are building a shining “City on a Hill.”

• Everyone has to go along with the neo-Puritan plan.  They have to celebrate it. The neo-Puritans thus compel speech.  Anyone who won’t be compelled has to be affirmatively canceled.

Last January I posted an essay titled “Democratic Socialism, Oxymoron?”  In it I had recounted the experiences of Ignazio Silone with cancelation:

The committed Communist Ignazio Silone contributed a beautiful essay to The God That Failed (1949), a collection of essays about people of the Left who either found themselves the target of Orwellian heresy-hunts or found themselves voluntarily leaving the doctrinaire Left.  The two salient features of Silone’s testimonial are (1) his actually warm and fuzzy experiences with democratic process and (2) his shock and disappointment to find that the Bolsheviks really had no interest in discussing issues.  With respect to the latter he could observe:

“What struck me most about the Russian Communists, even in such exceptional personalities as Lenin and Trotsky, was their utter incapacity to be fair in discussing opinions that conflicted with their own.  The adversary, simply for daring to contradict, at once became a traitor, an opportunist, a hireling.  An adversary in good faith is inconceivable to the Russian Communists… To find a comparable infatuation one has to go back to the Inquisition.”  (Emphasis in the original.)

… I observe that The Collected Works of Lenin run 45 volumes, and one does not have to look too hard to discern Lenin’s attitude about how to deal with the proponents of inconvenient opinions.  His strategy was not to endeavor to bring such people to his view or to agree-to-disagree but rather to “destroy” these people, to get them canceled.  And you do that by getting the mass of other people to adopt your view.  Whether they believe in your view or not is another matter.  Bullying them in to going along with it, and thereby isolating those willing to advance contrary views, achieves the result.  Does this not sound familiar?

Bolshevik governance, Silone discovered in the early 1920’s, looked a lot like the Stalinist governance that Orwell encountered in Spain.  Lenin’s Bolsheviks and then the Stalin’s Stalinists were not interested in accommodating diversity of opinion.  They were interested in imposing top-down hierarchical control and the uniformity of their thought.  Nothing democratic about it.  Full stop.

People who think they’re geniuses seem to populate the supply-side of markets for Chiliastic bullshit.  These people may call themselves Progressives or Liberals.  They may call themselves Conservatives and may liberally cite tedious one-liners from Edmund Burke’s oeuvre of tedious one-liners.  But all of these people-who-think-they’re-geniuses seem to have the advantage in the Market for Bullshit in that they’re not very smart; they don’t know that they’re not very smart; yet, their lack of self-awareness invests them with confidence in their Chiliastic plans; that confidence helps them hawk their crass, road-side Millenarianism.  They go into politics, write columns for the New York Times, or launch their own Substack pages.

What, then, makes a genius a genius?  Let me pose this formative definition: A genius knows what he knows and knows what he doesn’t know.  That makes him well equipped to ask good questions.  What really makes the genius a genius, however, is that he can assume the perspective of the randomly selected consumer of road-side Millenarianism and can thus understand the potential attraction of road-side Millenarianism and can then frame his questions in ways that the randomly selected consumer can understand.  Do any such geniuses exist?

In Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984), Franz experiences a flash of genius.  “In a flash of insight, Franz saw how laughable they all were,” the self-anointed best-and-brightest geniuses. 

Since the days of the French Revolution, one half of Europe has been referred to as the left, the other half as the right.  Yet to define one or the other by means of the theoretical principles it professes is all but impossible.  And no wonder: political movements rest not so much on rational attitudes as on the fantasies, images, words, and archetypes that come together to make up this or that political kitsch.

The fantasy of the Grand March that Franz was so intoxicated by is the political kitsch joining leftists of all times and tendencies.  The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.

And, yet, in a flash, “As soon as kitsch is recognized for the lie it is, it moves into the context of non-kitsch, thus losing its authoritarian power …”

In a flash of genius, Franz assumed a wider, penetrating perspective, and he achieved some degree of liberation.

We have all been puzzling over the madness of our age.  Some observers speak of “Normies” who have yet to be “red pilled” and may yet suffer from “mass psychosis” as evidenced by their quiescence in the face of extra-judicial COVID mandates.  Some of those Normies may yet speak unironically of “Our Democracy” and may really believe that a fellow dressed up as the lead singer of the band Jamiroquai was both intent and capable of motivating “insurrection”.  Yet other Normies seem to believe it is entirely natural to intervene in complex biological processes and subject children to hormonal therapies and “gender-affirming” surgeries.  Through all of this, some of us find ourselves paraphrasing people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: “They lie.  We know they lie. They know we know they lie.  They still lie…”

That last bit about transgenderism really is hard to understand.  Easier to understand, however, might be the mad dash of the established elites to centralize the whole of the management of society by further insulating the rule of the administrative agencies in the United States, the EU, and wherever from the residual bits of political accountability.  They hyped a pandemic as a way of arrogating to administrative agencies authority that they did not have.  But, why now?  Why now this apparent fit of collective madness?

The exact timing of when might be hard to pin down, but the fact that we periodically observe these fits of radical over-reach on the part of the central authorities might give us some clues into the why of it.  And, I would suggest that there always exists some non-trivial share of the population that yearns to impose centralized control of society.  The impulse to centralize is always there, because it has so much intuitive appeal.  People who hate democratic process, because it enables the wrong people to vote, have always been there.  These people have always been there like a virus being tamped down by society’s immune system.  But, societies can become immunocompromised.  They can lose appreciation for how well systems of free exchange and competitive politics have enabled people to live.  Everything, including grand experiments with central planning, may seem ever more plausible, banal, normal, blasé.  A cabal of fanatics may yet find their chance to impose a new round of old experiments on the whole of society.  That non-trivial share of the population is there waiting for the leadership of the cabal of fanatics.

Judging from decades of staring at “Presidential Approval Polls” over at RealClearPolitics, very nearly a quarter of the electorate seems to be comprised by the kind of people who would be enthusiastic about the idea of “banning Capitalism” and implementing Heaven on Earth.  Then there are the three-out-of-eight (about 38%) who would ever be skeptical that further concentration of power in the hands of the central authorities would be a good thing.  That leaves the mushy middle of the remaining three-out-of-eight who comprise the Normies.  These are the people who are most likely to perceive that any insane project the expert class demands must be normal … because why else would the experts demand such things?  They’re experts.

Political elections (barring any cheating) are won by those who can get their people out and convince enough the Normies to show up and vote for them.  Which reminds me of the very best lesson I learned in public school as a very young lad: One could reasonably argue that, in 1775, only about one-third of the population in the British colonies in America would support revolution.  Loyalists comprised another third.  And the remaining third were comprised of folks more likely to believe that the colonies and British authorities could yet work things out.

I remember being struck by that proposition.  Wasn’t everyone in favor of revolution?  More striking, however, was the fact that I found the argument of the moderate middle the most compelling. But, did such people comprise a mushy middle?  Were they the Normies of their time?  Would I have been one of them?  Or did the prospect of armed conflict becoming a likely thing help concentrate the mind?  Could no one avoid having their Normie-ness challenged, in which case, nearly everyone entered the revolutionary episode of 1775-1783 with eyes wide open?

With the central authorities literally pepper-spraying more and more people at school board meetings or on the Capitol grounds … or at their front doors in the middle of the night, the proportion of Normies in the electorate may be deteriorating.  But, ever slowly.  The imminent mid-term elections in the United States will give us some clues about how many Normies among us remain.