From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The Übermensch (German pronunciation: [ˈʔyːbɐmɛnʃ]; transl. “Beyond-Man,” “Superman,” “Overman,” “Uberman”, or “Superhuman”) is a concept in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. In his 1883 book Thus Spoke Zarathustra (German: Also sprach Zarathustra), Nietzsche has his character Zarathustra posit the Übermensch as a goal for humanity to set for itself. It is a work of philosophical allegory, with a structural similarity to the Gathas of Zoroaster/Zarathustra.

In English

In 1896, Alexander Tille made the first English translation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra, rendering Übermensch as “Beyond-Man”. In 1909, Thomas Common translated it as “Superman”, following the terminology of George Bernard Shaw‘s 1903 stage play Man and Superman. Walter Kaufmann lambasted this translation in the 1950s for two reasons: first, the failure of the English prefix “super” to capture the nuance of the German über (though in Latin, its meaning of “above” or “beyond” is closer to the German); and second, for promoting misidentification of Nietzsche’s concept with the comic-book character Superman. Kaufmann and others preferred to translate Übermensch as “overman”. A better translation like “superior humans” might better fit the concept of Nietzsche as he unfolds his narrative. Scholars continue to employ both terms, some simply opting to reproduce the German word.^[1][2]

The German prefix über can have connotations of superiority, transcendence, excessiveness, or intensity, depending on the words to which it is attached.^[3] Mensch refers to a human being, rather than a male specifically. The adjective übermenschlich means super-human: beyond human strength or out of proportion to humanity.^[4]

This-worldliness

Nietzsche introduces the concept of the Übermensch in contrast to his understanding of the other-worldliness of Christianity: Zarathustra proclaims the will of the Übermensch to give meaning to life on earth, and admonishes his audience to ignore those who promise other-worldly fulfillment to draw them away from the earth.^[5][6] The turn away from the earth is prompted, he says, by a dissatisfaction with life that causes the sufferer to imagine another world which will fulfill his revenge. The Übermensch grasps the earthly world with relish and gratitude.

Zarathustra declares that the Christian escape from this world also required the invention of an immortal soul separate from the earthly body. This led to the abnegation and mortification of the body, or asceticism. Zarathustra further links the Übermensch to the body and to interpreting the soul as simply an aspect of the body.^[7]

Death of God and the creation of new values

Zarathustra ties the Übermensch to the death of God. While the concept of God was the ultimate expression of other-worldly values and their underlying instincts, belief in God nevertheless did give meaning to life for a time. “God is dead” means that the idea of God can no longer provide values. With the sole source of values exhausted, the danger of nihilism looms.

Zarathustra presents the Übermensch as the creator of new values to banish nihilism. If the Übermensch acts to create new values within the moral vacuum of nihilism, there is nothing that this creative act would not justify. Alternatively, in the absence of this creation, there are no grounds upon which to criticize or justify any action, including the particular values created and the means by which they are promulgated.

In order to avoid a relapse into Platonic idealism or asceticism, the creation of these new values cannot be motivated by the same instincts that gave birth to those tables of values. Instead, they must be motivated by a love of this world and of life. Whereas Nietzsche diagnosed the Christian value system as a reaction against life and hence destructive in a sense, the new values which the Übermensch will be responsible for will be life-affirming and creative (see Nietzschean affirmation).

As a goal

Zarathustra first announces the Übermensch as a goal humanity can set for itself. All human life would be given meaning by how it advanced a new generation of human beings. The aspiration of a woman would be to give birth to an Übermensch, for example; her relationships with men would be judged by this standard.^[8]

Zarathustra contrasts the Übermensch with the degenerate last man of egalitarian modernity, an alternative goal which humanity might set for itself. The last man appears only in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and is presented as a smothering of aspiration antithetical to the spirit of the Übermensch.

According to Rüdiger Safranski, some commentators associate the Übermensch with a program of eugenics.^[9] This is most pronounced when considered in the aspect of a goal that humanity sets for itself. The reduction of all psychology to physiology implies, to some, that human beings can be bred for cultural traits. This interpretation of Nietzsche’s doctrine focuses more on the future of humanity than on a single cataclysmic individual. There is no consensus regarding how this aspect of the Übermensch relates to the creation of new values.

Re-embodiment of amoral aristocratic values

For Rüdiger Safranski, the Übermensch represents a higher biological type reached through artificial selection and at the same time is also an ideal for anyone who is creative and strong enough to master the whole spectrum of human potential, good and “evil”, to become an “artist-tyrant”. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche vehemently denied any idealistic, democratic or humanitarian interpretation of the Übermensch: “The word Übermensch [designates] a type of supreme achievement, as opposed to ‘modern’ men, ‘good’ men, Christians, and other nihilists … When I whispered into the ears of some people that they were better off looking for a Cesare Borgia than a Parsifal, they did not believe their ears.”^[10] Safranski argues that the combination of ruthless warrior pride and artistic brilliance that defined the Italian Renaissance embodied the sense of the Übermensch for Nietzsche. According to Safranski, Nietzsche intended the ultra-aristocratic figure of the Übermensch to serve as a Machiavellian bogeyman of the modern Western middle class and its pseudo-Christian egalitarian value system.^[11]

Relation to the eternal recurrence

The Übermensch shares a place of prominence in Thus Spoke Zarathustra with another of Nietzsche’s key concepts: the eternal recurrence of the same. Several interpretations for this fact have been offered.

Laurence Lampert suggests that the eternal recurrence replaces the Übermensch as the object of serious aspiration.^[12] This is in part due to the fact that even the Übermensch can appear like an other-worldly hope. The Übermensch lies in the future — no historical figures have ever been Übermenschen — and so still represents a sort of eschatological redemption in some future time.

Stanley Rosen, on the other hand, suggests that the doctrine of eternal return is an esoteric ruse meant to save the concept of the Übermensch from the charge of Idealism.^[13] Rather than positing an as-yet unexperienced perfection, Nietzsche would be the prophet of something that has occurred a countless number of times in the past.

Others maintain that willing the eternal recurrence of the same is a necessary step if the Übermensch is to create new values, untainted by the spirit of gravity or asceticism. Values involve a rank-ordering of things, and so are inseparable from approval and disapproval; yet it was dissatisfaction that prompted men to seek refuge in other-worldliness and embrace other-worldly values. Therefore, it could seem that the Übermensch, in being devoted to any values at all, would necessarily fail to create values that did not share some bit of asceticism. Willing the eternal recurrence is presented as accepting the existence of the low while still recognizing it as the low, and thus as overcoming the spirit of gravity or asceticism.

Still others suggest that one must have the strength of the Übermensch in order to will the eternal recurrence of the same; that is, only the Übermensch will have the strength to fully accept all of his past life, including his failures and misdeeds, and to truly will their eternal return. This action nearly kills Zarathustra, for example, and most human beings cannot avoid other-worldliness because they really are sick, not because of any choice they made.

Nazism

The term Übermensch was used frequently by Hitler and the Nazi regime to describe their idea of a biologically superior Aryan or Germanic master race;^[14] a racial version of Nietzsche’s Übermensch became a philosophical foundation for National Socialist ideas.^[15][16] The Nazi notion of the master race also spawned the idea of “inferior humans” (Untermenschen) who should be dominated and enslaved; this term does not originate with Nietzsche, who was critical of both antisemitism and German nationalism. In his final years, Nietzsche began to believe that he was in fact Polish, not German, and was quoted as saying, “I am a pure-blooded Polish nobleman, without a single drop of bad blood, certainly not German blood”.^[17] In defiance of nationalist doctrines, he claimed that he and Germany were great only because of “Polish blood in their veins”,^[18] and that he would be “having all anti-semites shot” as an answer to his stance on anti-semitism. Nietzsche died long before Hitler’s reign, and it was partly Nietzsche’s sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche who manipulated her brother’s words to accommodate the worldview of herself and her husband, Bernhard Förster, a prominent German nationalist and antisemite.^[19] Förster founded the Deutscher Volksverein (German People’s League) in 1881 with Max Liebermann von Sonnenberg.^[20]

Anarchism

The thought of Nietzsche had an important influence on anarchist authors. Spencer Sunshine writes: “There were many things that drew anarchists to Nietzsche: his hatred of the state; his disgust for the mindless social behavior of ‘herds’; his anti-Christianity; his distrust of the effect of both the market and the State on cultural production; his desire for an ‘overman’ — that is, for a new human who was to be neither master nor slave; his praise of the ecstatic and creative self, with the artist as his prototype, who could say, ‘Yes’ to the self-creation of a new world on the basis of nothing; and his forwarding of the ‘transvaluation of values’ as source of change, as opposed to a Marxist conception of class struggle and the dialectic of a linear history.”^[21] The influential American anarchist Emma Goldman, in the preface of her famous collection Anarchism and Other Essays, defends both Nietzsche and Max Stirner from attacks within anarchism when she says “The most disheartening tendency common among readers is to tear out one sentence from a work, as a criterion of the writer’s ideas or personality. Friedrich Nietzsche, for instance, is decried as a hater of the weak because he believed in the Übermensch. It does not occur to the shallow interpreters of that giant mind that this vision of the Übermensch also called for a state of society which will not give birth to a race of weaklings and slaves.”^[22]

Sunshine says that the “Spanish anarchists also mixed their class politics with Nietzschean inspiration.” Murray Bookchin, in The Spanish Anarchists, describes prominent CNT–FAI member Salvador Seguí as “an admirer of Nietzschean individualism, of the superhombre to whom ‘all is permitted’.” Bookchin, in his 1973 introduction to Sam Dolgoff‘s The Anarchist Collectives, even describes the reconstruction of society by the workers as a Nietzschean project. Bookchin says that “workers must see themselves as human beings, not as class beings; as creative personalities, not as ‘proletarians,’ as self-affirming individuals, not as ‘masses’. . .(the) economic component must be humanized precisely by bringing an ‘affinity of friendship’ to the work process, by diminishing the role of onerous work in the lives of producers, indeed by a total ‘transvaluation of values’ (to use Nietzsche’s phrase) as it applies to production and consumption as well as social and personal life.”^[21]

In popular culture

• The comic-book hero Superman, when Jerome “Jerry” Siegel first created him, was originally a villain modeled on Nietzsche’s idea (see “The Reign of the Superman“).^{[citation needed]} He was re-invented as a hero by his eventual designer, Joseph “Joe” Shuster, after which he bore little resemblance to the previous character. However, Superman does find an adversary in the mold of the Nietzschean Übermensch in the recurring arch-villain Lex Luthor,^{[citation needed]} his greatest enemy on Earth. Luthor is preceded, even, by a supervillain resembling Siegel’s original concept for Superman bearing the synonymous name of ‘Ultra-Humanite‘. A direct reference to the term occurs in the episode “Double Trouble” of the TV series Adventures of Superman, in which a German-speaking character calls the title character “verfluchter Übermensch” (“cursed Superman”).^[23] In the tenth season of the show Smallville, an alternate Lionel Luthor refers to Clark as the “Übermensch“. Overman is an alternate version of Superman, from Earth-10, an Earth where the Axis Powers won World War II.^[24]
• Jack London dedicated his novels The Sea-Wolf and Martin Eden to criticizing Nietzsche’s concept of the Übermensch and his radical individualism,^[25] which London considered to be selfish and egoistic.
• George Bernard Shaw‘s 1903 play Man and Superman is a reference to the archetype; its main character considers himself an untameable revolutionary, above the normal concerns of humanity.^{[citation needed]}
• James Joyce utilizes the Übermensch in the first chapter of his novel Ulysses. Joyce makes Buck Mulligan say it:^[26] “—My twelfth rib is gone, he cried. I’m the Uebermensch. Toothless Kinch and I, the supermen.”
• In The Power, a 1956 book by Frank M. Robinson, the villain consciously models himself upon Nietzsche’s Übermensch, and a quotation from Nietzsche serves as the book’s motto.
• In real life, Leopold and Loeb committed murder in 1924 partly out of a superficially Übermensch-like conception of themselves.^[27] Their story has been dramatized many times, including in the Alfred Hitchcock film Rope, the 1959 film Compulsion based on Meyer Levin’s novel, the 1994 film Swoon, the 2002 film Murder by Numbers, and the 2005 Off-Broadway musical Thrill Me: The Leopold and Loeb Story.
• A character in the show Dollhouse (Season 1, Episode 12; titled “Omega”) references Übermensch in relation to Nietzsche when trying to describe a person that had the memories, skills, and intelligence of dozens of people uploaded into their (single) mind by means of futuristic technology.
• The Medic character in the video game Team Fortress 2 will sometimes chant “I am the Übermensch!” for one of his “Cheers” voice commands.
• In the Disney TV Cartoon, Pepper Ann, in an episode titled “Effie Shrugged”, Effie, a physically imposing bully teaches Pepper Ann some basic information on Übermensch.
• David Bowie‘s song titled “The Supermen“, from his 1970 album The Man Who Sold the World, was inspired by the work of Nietzsche. Bowie later said “I was still going through the thing when I was pretending that I understood Nietzsche… And I had tried to translate it into my own terms to understand it so ‘Supermen’ came out of that.”^[28]
• The Avatar Press comic book series, “Über“, written by Kieron Gillen uses the idea in an alternate universe during World War II in which Nazi Germany creates superhuman soldiers.
• A chapter in the novel Old School by Tobias Wolff is entitled ‘Übermensch’. It humorously castigates Ayn Rand’s better-and-bigger-than-life characters and satirically depicts the narrator/main character as deluded, because of Rand’s The Fountainhead, in his belief that he is superior to others.
• “Übermenscher” is the name of a monster that appears in the episode “Arcadia” of the X-Files series.
• The TV show Andromeda features a race of genetically engineered super-humans called Nietzscheans who follow the philosophies and teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Ayn Rand, Niccolò Machiavelli, and Social Darwinism. The Nietzscheans regard themselves as superior to “Kludges” (ordinary unmodified humans) and are often referred to as “Übers”, pejoratively, by such humans.

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%9Cbermensch

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2009 publication
Author	Carl Gustav Jung
Original title	Liber Novus (“The New Book”)
Translator	Mark Kyburz John Peck Sonu Shamdasani
Publisher	Philemon Foundation and W. W. Norton & Co.
Publication date	2009
Pages	404
ISBN	978-0-393-06567-1
OCLC	317919484
Dewey Decimal	150.19/54 22
LC Class	BF109.J8 A3 2009

The Red Book is a red leather‐bound folio manuscript crafted by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung between 1915 and about 1930. It recounts and comments upon the author’s psychological experiments between 1913 and 1916, and is based on manuscripts first drafted by Jung in 1914–15 and 1917.^[1] Despite being nominated as the central work in Jung’s oeuvre,^[2] it was not published or made otherwise accessible for study until 2009.

In October 2009, with the cooperation of Jung’s estate, The Red Book: Liber Novus was published by W. W. Norton in a facsimile edition, complete with an English translation, three appendices, and over 1500 editorial notes.^[3] Editions and translations in several other languages soon followed.

In December 2012, Norton additionally released a “Reader’s Edition” of the work; this smaller format edition includes the complete translated text of The Red Book: Liber Novus along with the introduction and notes prepared by Sonu Shamdasani, but it omits the facsimile reproduction of Jung’s original calligraphic manuscript.^[4]

While the work has in past years been descriptively called simply “The Red Book”, Jung did emboss a formal title on the spine of his leather-bound folio: he titled the work Liber Novus (in Latin, the “New Book”). His manuscript is now increasingly cited as Liber Novus, and under this title implicitly includes draft material intended for but never finally transcribed into the red leather folio proper.^[5]

Context and composition

Jung was associated with Sigmund Freud for a period of approximately six years, beginning in 1907. Over those years, their relationship became increasingly acrimonious. When the final break of the relationship came in 1913, Jung retreated from many of his professional activities to intensely reconsider his personal and professional path.^[6] The creative activity that produced Liber Novus came in this period, from 1913 to about 1917.

Biographers and critics have disagreed whether these years in Jung’s life should be seen as “a creative illness”, a period of introspection, a psychotic break, or simply madness.”^[7] Anthony Storr, reflecting on Jung’s own judgment that he was “menaced by a psychosis” during this time, concluded that the period represented a psychotic episode.^[8] According to Sonu Shamdasani, Storr’s opinion is untenable in light of currently available documentation.^[9] Jung himself stated that: “To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness.”^[10] It appears that Jung has premeditated the arguments of Storr and (Jung biographer) Paul Stern and, in riposte, declares the analyses of Storr and Stern superficial.^[8]

During the years in which Jung engaged with his “nocturnal work” on Liber Novus, he continued to function in his daytime activities without evident impairment.^[11] He maintained a busy professional practice, seeing on average five patients a day. He lectured, wrote, and remained active in professional associations.^[12] Throughout this period he also served as an officer in the Swiss army and was on active duty over several extended periods between 1914 and 1918 during World War I.^[13]

Jung referred to his imaginative or visionary venture during these years as “my most difficult experiment.”^[14] This experiment involved a voluntary confrontation with the unconscious through wilful engagement of what Jung later termed “mythopoetic imagination”.^[15][16] In his introduction to Liber Novus, Shamdasani explains:

“From December 1913 onward, he carried on in the same procedure: deliberately evoking a fantasy in a waking state, and then entering into it as into a drama. These fantasies may be understood as a type of dramatized thinking in pictorial form…. In retrospect, he recalled that his scientific question was to see what took place when he switched off consciousness. The example of dreams indicated the existence of background activity, and he wanted to give this a possibility of emerging, just as one does when taking mescaline.”^[17]

Jung initially recorded his “visions”, or “fantasies, or “imaginations” — all terms used by Jung to describe his activity^[18] — in a series of six journals now known collectively as the “Black Books“.^[19] This journal record begins on 12 November 1913, and continues with intensity through the summer of 1914; subsequent entries were added up through at least the 1930s.^[20] Biographer Barbara Hannah, who was close to Jung throughout the last three decades of his life, compared Jung’s imaginative experiences recounted in his journals to the encounter of Menelaus with Proteus in the Odyssey. Jung, she said, “made it a rule never to let a figure or figures that he encountered leave until they had told him why they had appeared to him.”^[21]

After the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, Jung perceived that his visionary experience was not only of personal relevance, but entwined with a crucial cultural moment. In late-1914 and 1915 he compiled the visions from the journals, along with his additional commentary on each imaginative episode, into an initial manuscript. This manuscript was the beginning of Liber Novus.^[22]

In 1915 Jung began artfully transcribing this draft text into the illuminated calligraphic volume that would subsequently become known as the Red Book. In 1917 he compiled a further supplementary manuscript of visionary material and commentary, which he titled “Scrutinies”; this also was apparently intended for transcription into his red folio volume, the “Red Book”.^[23] Although Jung labored on the artful transcription of this corpus of manuscript material into the calligraphic folio of the Red Book for sixteen years, he never completed the task. Only approximately two-thirds of Jung’s manuscript text was transcribed into the Red Book by 1930, when he abandoned further work on the calligraphic transcription of his draft material into the Red Book.^[24] The published edition of The Red Book: Liber Novus includes all of Jung’s manuscript material prepared for Liber Novus, and not just the portion of the text transcribed by Jung into the calligraphic red book volume.^[25]

In 1957, near the end of his life, Jung spoke to Aniela Jaffé about the Red Book and the process which yielded it; in that interview he stated:

“The years… when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.”^[26]

In 1959, after having left the book more or less untouched for about 30 years, Jung wrote a short epilogue: “To the superficial observer, it will appear like madness.”^[10]

Creation and physical description

The Red Book resting on Jung’s desk

Jung worked his text and images in the Red Book using calligraphic pen, multicolored ink, and gouache paint. The text is written in German but includes quotations from the Vulgate in Latin, a few inscriptions and names written in Latin and Greek, and a brief marginal quotation from the Bhagavad Gita given in English.

The initial seven folios (or leaves) of the book — which contain what is now entitled Liber Primus (the “First Book”) of Liber Novus — were composed on sheets of parchment in a highly illuminated medieval style. However, as Jung proceeded working with the parchment sheets, it became apparent that their surface was not holding his paint properly and that his ink was bleeding through. These first seven leaves (fourteen pages, recto and verso) now show heavy chipping of paint, as will be noted on close examination of the facsimile edition reproductions.

In 1915, Jung commissioned the folio-sized and red leatherbound volume now known as the Red Book.^[27] The bound volume contained approximately 600 blank pages of paper of a quality suitable for Jung’s ink and paint. The folio-sized volume, 11.57 inches (29.4 cm) by 15.35 inches (39.0 cm), is bound in fine red leather with gilt accents. Though Jung and others usually referred to the book simply as the “Red Book”, he had the top of the spine of the book stamped in gilt with the book’s formal title, Liber Novus (“The New Book”).

Jung subsequently interleaved the seven original parchment sheets at the beginning of the bound volume. After receiving the bound volume in 1915, he began transcribing his text and illustrations directly onto the bound pages. Over the next many years, Jung ultimately filled only 191 of the approximately 600 pages bound in the Red Book folio.^[28] About a third of the manuscript material he had written was never entered into the illuminated Red Book. Inside the book now are 205 completed pages of text and illustrations (including the loose parchment sheets), all from Jung’s hand:^[29] 53 full-page images, 71 pages with both text and artwork, and 81 pages entirely of calligraphic text.

The Red Book is currently held, along with other valuable and private items from Jung’s archive, in a bank vault in Zurich.

Publication and display

During Jung’s life, several people saw his Red Book — it was often present in his office — but only a very few individuals who were personally trusted by Jung had an opportunity to read it. After Jung’s death in 1961, Jung’s heirs held the book as a private legacy, and refused access to it by scholars or other interested parties.^[30]

After many years of careful deliberations, the estate of C. G. Jung finally decided in 2000 to allow publication of the work, and thereafter began preparations for the publication. The decision to publish was apparently aided by presentations made by Sonu Shamdasani, who had already discovered substantial private transcriptions of portions of the Red Book in archival repositories.^[10] Editorial efforts and preparation for publication were underwritten by major funding from the Philemon Foundation.

On occasion of the publication in October 2009, the Rubin Museum of Art in New York City displayed the original book along with three of Jung’s original “Black Book” journals and several other related artifacts; this exhibit was open from 7 October 2009 to 25 January 2010. The Red Book was subsequently exhibited at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles from April 11 – June 6, 2010. It was the center of a major display and conference at the Library of Congress from June 17 – September 25, 2010.^[31] Thereafter, the Red Book has been the focus of museum displays in Zurich, Geneva, Paris, and other major cities.

More at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Book_(Jung)

European School of Theosophy Date: Sunday, 07 June 2020 Time: 17:00 London (16:00 GMT) Covid-19 has concentrated our minds like nothing else since 9/11 and possibly not even then. It has produced a vast collective thought-form and we have all been the architects and builders of it. Everyone has had a hand in it. As much as we regard ourselves as individuals, humanity has a collective mass mind. Each of us constantly contributes to this mental reservoir but much of our input is unconscious. The Ageless Wisdom tradition teaches that ‘thoughts are things’. Although not as dense and tangible as a car or a table, their existence is real and they persist depending on the power we attach to them. Some can continue for millennia. This virus has shown us just how inter-connected we are physically and the extent to which life on Earth is globalised. But it’s also important to explore the collective mental dimension to this. In the contemporary Western world of illusory individualism, we labour under the fatal illusion that we have hermetically sealed minds compartmentalised and separated from one another. We’re convinced that each mind has its own unique thoughts, each possesses its own customised perspective on life with each operating in splendid isolation from all others. This is a total travesty of the truth, although it remains the prevailing view. Human minds are inextricably entangled. And not only that, the consciousness of human minds intermingles intricately with that of the other kingdoms of nature. The timeless truths of the Ageless Wisdom tradition insist that everything is conscious on its own level as well as intimately interconnected. Therefore, what we perceive as separation is an illusion. There was global consciousness long before the internet because global consciousness is super-physical. It didn’t take a digital revolution to create it. So, what precisely causes this intimate and universal interconnectedness?

LOS ANGELES

The freeway system displaced generations of people of color.

By Hadley Meares  Jun 11, 2020 (NewYorker.com)

When Angelenos gathered downtown to protest the murder of George Floyd, theystarted at City Hall and eventually made their way toward the 101. Pastor Stephen “Cue” Jn-Marie from the Row Church led the first group of protesters onto the freeway, which they occupied for roughly 30 minutes.

Ever since the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2012, uprisings protesting police brutality and racism have blocked freeways throughout America. The freeway and highway systems in the U.S. are part of “a long, long, long history of looting our communities, looting our lives,” Pastor Cue explains.

Nowhere is this truer than in Los Angeles, where several generations of Angelenos, mainly people of color, have been displaced or trapped by the construction of freeways in the name of progress and ease of movement for white residents, many of whom moved outward to the suburbs of L.A. and Orange counties as the postwar era dawned.

“Communities of color, or black folks, were not permitted to live in the suburbs through land covenants made between white homeowners, through racism, through redlining,” Pastor Cue says. “The whole narrative that black folks would bring down the value of the communities … that narrative is lingering in our society, even today.”

Though racially restrictive land covenants were struck down by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1948, years of Jim Crow policies had already institutionalized racist housing practices that relegated black people and other people of color to certain neighborhoods — and labeled those neighborhoods as slums.

Those “slums” were the first places on the chopping block when freeways began to be routed across America in earnest in 1956, the year in which construction on 41,000 miles of interstate highways were authorized at a cost of $27 billion.

In 1957, one Urban Land Institute official celebrated that “inner belt expressways” would “inevitably slice through great areas of our nation’s worst slums,” writes UCLA professor Eric Avila, in Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles.

“Suddenly, they are flush with millions and millions of dollars to build freeways, and they look at these redlining maps and go, ‘Hmm, where should we build freeways? What areas are in need of rehabilitation?’ When looking at redlining maps, they can easily identify a community like Boyle Heights, which was redlined, and say, ‘Okay, here’s a slum that needs to be cleared. Let’s put a highway here,’” Avila explained in an interview with Curbed LA.

Despite widespread multiracial protests and civic organizing by Boyle Heights residents, plans were approved for what is known as the East Los Angeles Interchange, which links the Pomona, Santa Monica, Santa Ana, and Golden State freeways. Two thousand homes were destroyed for construction of freeways in Boyle Heights.

Completed in the early 1960s, the interchange radically altered both the neighborhood’s population and economic development. “Boyle Heights transitioned from a multi-racial, multi-ethnic working-class community to a monolithic concentration of Mexican American and Mexican immigrant poverty,” Avila says.

The “slum” label was a pretext; the determining factor in whether a neighborhood was targeted was in fact its racial demographics, as the story of Sugar Hill makes clear. A flourishing historic neighborhood of prominent black Angelenos, including movie star Hattie McDaniel, singer Ethel Waters, and civic leaders John and Vada Somerville, Sugar Hill was the heart of cosmopolitan black life in L.A. during the 1940s and early 1950s. That did not stop city leaders from planning to tear the neighborhood in half to build the Santa Monica Freeway, that stretch of the 10 that runs from the east side of downtown west to the Pacific Ocean.

Residents protested, butin response, the Los Angeles Times reported, Frank B. Durkee, state director of public works and chairman of the highway commission, claimed only thatthe route through Sugar Hill would “affect fewer families and fewer businesses.” In May 1954, the freeway route was officially adopted, sounding the death knell for Sugar Hill.

“The road could have been built without cutting through the so-called Sugar Hill section,” the Los Angeles Sentinel later wrote. “However, in order to miss Sugar Hill, it was ‘said’ that the route would have to cut through fraternity and sorority row areas around USC. Sorority and fraternity row still stands and Sugar Hill doesn’t, so you know who won out!”

The construction of the freeway would drastically change the layout of the neighborhood. Not only did it serve as a dislocating device, says Adam Janeiro at West Adams–based City Living Realty, but “rather than those parcels becoming green space or becoming a greater buffer, or maybe even parcels wherein displaced properties could have been moved, in many cases they became very shabbily built infill housing.”

The freeway also became a physiological barrier for many (overwhelmingly white) Angelenos who, until the Great Recession, were unwilling to go south of the 10. “There have always been Maginot lines, and they’ve moved in time.” Janeiro says. “‘I won’t go south of Pico.’ ‘I won’t go south of Venice.’ ‘I won’t go south of Washington’ … One of the last Maginot lines was the 10 freeway.”

Avila contrasts the fate of Sugar Hill with that of another exclusive L.A. enclave: Beverly Hills. Beverly Hills is a local rarity — a majority white city in the middle of Los Angeles, where white people make up only 28 percent of the population. In the 1960s, Beverly Hills residents protested the construction of what was known as the Beverly Hills Freeway. They used many of the same arguments as Sugar Hill residents — that their homes were historic, that their community was valuable.

“Beverly Hills won, Sugar Hill lost, and that gives you a very clear indication of who was able to fight freeways, and who was not. It wasn’t necessarily poor versus rich,” Avila says.

Residents of Sugar Hill — and anyone else who lost their houses due to freeway construction — were not entitled to assistance from the government in finding and moving to new homes. “When enacted into law in 1956, the interstate highway program did not impose even a nominal obligation on federal or state governments to assist those whose residences were being demolished,” Richard Rothstein writes in The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America. “In 1965, the federal government began to require that new housing be provided for those forced to relocate by future interstate highway construction, but by then the interstate system was nearly complete.”

Those who were left behind in neighborhoods bisected by freeways faced economic, societal, and health inequalities that are still felt today. “Some found the means to move to the suburbs, while others, lacking similar opportunities, remained concentrated within communities that increasingly resembled ghettos and barrios,” Avila writes in Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight. These communities were increasingly isolated and ethnically monolithic, watching economic progress literally pass them by.

“Freeways were the way that folks — white folks — could move into the suburbs and then they had access into the suburb and access into the city for commerce,” Pastor Cue says. “We know that black folks, or people of color, are watching all those trucks pass by, and commerce is moving through the community on a regular basis. But our communities are not benefiting from that commerce.”

The ruinous economic implications were immediately obvious. According to Avila in Popular Culture, Ninth District assemblyman Edward F. Elliott, who represented downtown L.A. stated that freeways were merely “speedways to carry the buying public through instead of into the central business area.” He cited a study showing a 57 percent decline of retail sales in Los Angeles from 1950 to 1960 alone. Downtown, he said, “had become encircled, cut up and glutted with freeways.”

Land values in neighborhoods blighted by freeways also went down, with generational consequences still reverberating today.

“Black folks inherited poverty while white children were able … to benefit from the equity from their parents’ home,” Pastor Cue says. “They’re able to get these inheritances, and now, due to the reversal of white flight, they now gentrify the community by taking those same resources and coming back in the community and saying … ‘We’re going to jack up the prices of the homes simply by our presence.’ Now those folks who used to live in that community can’t afford to rent anything in those communities.”

Another crippling legacy of freeways, pollution from tens of thousands of cars is a health hazard to the around 1.2 million Angelenos living within 500 feet of local freeways. In her paper “From Progression to Oppression: A look at the injustices associated with progressing Los Angeles’ transportation system,” Felisia Castañeda notes that freeway “pollution translates into significant decreased lung function in children between the ages of ten and eighteen, lower birth weights and higher rates of premature pregnancies.”

Frustrated motorists speeding off the freeways and through neighborhoods also are a major threat. In From Progression to Oppression, Castañeda includes one heartbreaking remembrance from 10-year-old Librado Almanza, who lived next to a major L.A. freeway:

In many urban cities, the streets are our playground. We play football, baseball, ride our bikes and many other things in the street … My friends and I were walking to the corner store. We have to cross a six‐lane street to get there. That day a truck ran a red light and struck me as I was crossing the street. My leg and collar bone were broken. The inside of my mouth was busted and my chin was cut. I had massive abrasions throughout my body.

In recent years, conversations have opened up around remaking freeways and how to address the economic, societal, and environmental challenges they’ve brought to Los Angeles. Curbed’s Alissa Walker even argues that getting rid of freeways altogether is a feasible possibility.

The increasing awareness of the damage freeways inflict on communities has slowed their construction in the past two decades. In 1999, after years of protest, a proposed portion of the 710 freeway that would have majorly impacted the Latinx enclave of El Sereno (as well as, to a lesser extent, South Pasadena and Pasadena) was halted by Judge Dean D. Pregerson of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. Talk of construction has been renewed over the years, but the project is stalled indefinitely.

However, the judge’s order came too late for many homeowners whose residences had already been taken by the state through eminent domain. In March, Pastor Cue joined with the group Reclaiming Our Homes to move 13 families into state-owned houses that have sat empty for years in the midst of L.A.’s housing crisis. “We moved them in because we’re saying, ‘You have 150 homes that are sitting vacant while we have 60,000 people in the county of Los Angeles that are houseless,’” he explains.

These injustices have gone unseen by many Angelenos. “Moving through the city now on a freeway, you’re essentially removed from any kind of contact with people, you’re totally isolated in your car, and you’re also isolated on the platform of the freeway, so you lose any kind of sense of where you’re at, of what communities you’re going through, and you lose a sense of the rich and full diversity of the city,” Avila says.

By blocking commuters traversing the freeways, organizers hope to force meaningful change through high visibility. As protests continue all over the country, expect more protesters marching on freeways and fighting for a redrawing of the American road map. On May 31, Santa Monica police blocked the 10 freeway during protests, On June 1, protesters blocked the 405 at Wilshire Boulevard and the 101 in San Luis Obispo. On June 2, they shut down the 60 in Moreno Valley and interrupted traffic on the 1 in Monterey.

“They are protesting not just what happened to George Floyd, but they’re protesting a system that continues to loot them,” Pastor Cue says. “People are basically using the spark of George Floyd to say, ‘We don’t want this system anymore. This system is violent.’ The violence that you see on property is minimal compared to the violence that the system has inflicted upon every marginalized group in this society.”

According to Avila, many of the young people protesting are the very people whose ancestral communities were destroyed by freeways a generation ago. “It’s a way of saying, ‘Hey, we’re going to take back this space in the same way that the freeway took our space,’” he explains. “The act of being on the freeway still seems to bother the press and a lot of people in the public the most. Well, that’s the intention. That’s exactly the intention.

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Criticism of democracy is grounded in democracy’s purpose, process and outcomes. Since Classical antiquity and through the modern era, democracy has been associated with “rule of the people,” “rule of the majority,” and free selection or election either through direct participation or elected representation respectively, but has not been linked to a particular outcome.^[1]

Political thinkers approach their critique of democracy from different perspectives. Many^[who?] do not necessarily oppose democracy—”rule of the people”—but, rather, seek to expand or question its popular definition. In their work, they distinguish between democratic principles that are effectively implemented through undemocratic procedures; undemocratic principles that are implemented through democratic procedures; and variations of the same kind.

For instance, some critics of democracy would agree with Winston Churchill‘s famous remark, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”^[2] While others, may be more prepared to describe existing democratic regimes as anything but “rule of the people.”

Critics of democracy have tried to highlight democracy’s inconsistencies, paradoxes, and limits by contrasting it with other forms of governments. They have characterized most modern democracies as democratic polyarchies^[3] and democratic aristocracies;^[4] they have identified fascist moments in modern democracies; they have termed the societies produced by modern democracies as neo-feudal;^[5] while, yet others, have contrasted democracy with Nazism, anarcho-capitalism, theocracy, and absolute monarchy.

The most widely known critics of democracy include Plato and the authors of the Federalist Papers, who were interested in establishing a representative democracy in America instead of a direct democracy.

Additional historical figures associated with the critique of democracy thought include Aristotle, Montesquieu, James Harrington, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Martin Heidegger, Hubert Lagardelle, Charles Maurras, Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Oswald Spengler, Nicolás Gómez Dávila, and Elazar Menachem Shach.

Leading contemporary thinkers in critical democratic theory include Jürgen Habermas, Robert A. Dahl, Robert E. Goodin, Bernard Manin, Joseph Schumpeter, James S. Fishkin, Ian Shapiro, Jason Brennan, Hélène Landemore and Hans-Hermann Hoppe.

Criticism of democracy’s purpose

Benefits of a specialized society

One such argument is that the benefits of a specialized society may be compromised not by democracy. As ordinary citizens are encouraged to take part in the political life of the country, they have the power to directly influence the outcome of government policies through the democratic procedures of voting, campaigning and the use of press. The result is that government policies may be more influenced by non-specialist opinions and thereby the effectiveness compromised, especially if a policy is very technically sophisticated and/or the general public inadequately informed. For example, there is no guarantee that those who campaign about the government’s economic policies are themselves professional economists or academically competent in this particular discipline, regardless of whether they were well-educated. Essentially this means that a democratic government may not be providing the most good for the largest number of people. However, some have argued that this should not even be the goal of democracies because the minority could be seriously mistreated under that purported goal.^[6]

Rule of the aristocratic

Manin

The real difference between ancient democracies and modern republics lies, according to Madison, in “the total exclusion of the people in their collective capacity from any share in the latter, and not in the total exclusion of the representatives of the people from the administration of the former.

— Bernard Manin, p. 2 (See: Madison, “Federalist 63,” in The Federalist Papers, p. 387; Madison’s emphasis.)^[4]

Bernard Manin is interested in distinguishing modern representative republics, such as the United States, from ancient direct democracies, such as Athens.^[4] Manin believes that both aspire to “rule of the people,” but that the nature of modern representative republics lends them to “rule of the aristocratic.” Manin explains that in ancient democracies, virtually every citizen had the chance to be selected to populate the government but in modern republics, only elites have the chance of being elected. He does not defend this phenomenon but rather seeks to describe it.

Manin draws from James Harrington, Montesquieu, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau to suggest that the dominant form of government, representative as opposed to direct, is effectively aristocratic.^[4] He proposes that modern representative governments exercise political power through aristocratic elections which, in turn, brings into question democracy’s “rule of the people” principle. As far as Montesquieu is concerned, elections favor the “best” citizens who Manin notes tend to be wealthy and upper-class. As far as Rousseau is concerned, elections favor the incumbent government officials or the citizens with the strongest personalities, which results in hereditary aristocracy. Manin further evinces the aristocratic nature of representative governments by contrasting them with the ancient style of selection by lot. Manin notes that Montesquieu believed that lotteries prevent jealousy and distribute offices equally (among citizens from different ranks), while Rousseau believed that lotteries choose indifferently, preventing self-interest and partiality from polluting the citizen’s choice (and thus prevent hereditary aristocracy).

However, Manin also provides criticism of direct democracy, or selection by lot.^[4] Manin reflects on Montesquieu’s interrogation of the extent to which Athenian direct democracy was truly direct. Montesquieu finds that citizens who had reason to believe they would be accused as “unworthy of selection” commonly withheld their names from the lottery, thereby making selection by lot vulnerable to self-selection bias and, thus, aristocratic in nature. Manin does not dwell on direct democracy’s potentially aristocratic elements, perhaps because he share’s Montesquieu’s belief that there is nothing alarming about the exclusion of citizens who may be incompetent; this exclusion may be inevitable in any method of selection.

Additionally, Manin is interested in explaining the discrepancy between 18th century American and French revolutionaries’ declaration of the “equality of all citizens” and their enactment of (aristocratic) elections in their respective democratic experiments.^[4] Manin suggests that the discrepancy is explained by the revolutionaries’ contemporary preoccupation with one form of equality over another. The revolutionaries prioritized gaining the equal right to consent to their choice of government (even a potentially aristocratic democracy), at the expense of seeking the equal right to be face of that democracy. And it is elections, not lots, that provide citizens with more opportunities to consent. In elections, citizens consent both to the procedure of elections and to the product of the elections (even if they produce the election of elites). In lotteries, citizens consent only to the procedure of lots, but not to the product of the lots (even if they produce election of the average person). That is, if the revolutionaries prioritized consent to be governed over equal opportunity to serve as the government, then their choice of elections over lotteries makes sense.

Michels

A major scholarly attack on the basis of democracy was made by German-Italian political scientist Robert Michels who developed the mainstream political science theory of the iron law of oligarchy in 1911.^[7] Michels argued that oligarchy is inevitable as an “iron law” within any organization as part of the “tactical and technical necessities” of organization and on the topic of democracy, Michels stated: “It is organization which gives birth to the dominion of the elected over the electors, of the mandataries over the mandators, of the delegates over the delegators. Who says organization, says oligarchy” and went on to state “Historical evolution mocks all the prophylactic measures that have been adopted for the prevention of oligarchy.”^[7] Michels stated that the official goal of democracy of eliminating elite rule was impossible, that democracy is a façade legitimizing the rule of a particular elite, and that elite rule, that he refers to as oligarchy, is inevitable.^[7] Michels had formerly been a Marxist but became drawn to the syndicalism of Sorel, Eduoard Berth, Arturo Labriola, and Enrico Leone and had become strongly opposed parliamentarian, legalistic, and bureaucratic socialism of social democracy and in contrast supported an activist, voluntarist, anti-parliamentarian socialism.^[8] Michels would later become a supporter of fascism upon Mussolini’s rise to power in 1922, viewing fascism’s goal to destroy liberal democracy in a sympathetic manner.^[9]

Maurras

Charles Maurras, an FRS member of the Action française movement, stated in a famous dictum “Democracy is evil, democracy is death.” Maurras’ concept of politique naturelle declared recognition of inescapable biological inequality and thereby natural hierarchies, and claimed that the individual is naturally subordinated to social collectivities such as the family, the society, and the state, which he claims are doomed to fail if based upon the “myth of equality” or “abstract liberty”. Maurras criticized democracy as being a “government by numbers” in which quantity matters more over quality and prefers the worst over the best. Maurras denounced the principles of liberalism as described in The Social Contract by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and in Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen as based upon the false assumption of liberty and the false assumption of equality. He claimed that the parliamentary system subordinates the national interest, or common good, to private interests of a parliament’s representatives where only short-sighted interests of individuals prevail.

Lagardelle

French revolutionary syndicalist Hubert Lagardelle claimed that French revolutionary syndicalism came to being as the result of “the reaction of the proletariat against idotic democracy,” which he claimed was “the popular form of bourgeois dominance.” Lagardelle opposed democracy for its universalism, and believed in the necessity of class separation of the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, as democracy did not recognize the social differences between them.

Shach

Israeli politician Rabbi Elazar Menachem Shach promoted Judaic law to be the natural governance for Jews and condemned democracy, he claimed that “Democracy as a machinery of lies, false notions, pursuit of narrow interests and deceit – as opposed to the Torah regime, which is based on seeking the ultimate truth.” Shach criticized democracy for having no real goals, saying “The whole point of democracy is money. The one does what the other asks him to do in pursuit of his own interest, so as to be given what he himself asks for, and the whole purpose of the transaction is that each would get what they want.”

Criticism of democracy’s process

Political instability

More recently, democracy is criticized for not offering enough political stability. As governments are frequently elected on and off there tend to be frequent changes in the policies of democratic countries both domestically and internationally. Even if a political party maintains power, vociferous, headline grabbing protests and harsh criticism from the mass media are often enough to force sudden, unexpected political change. Frequent policy changes with regard to business and immigration are likely to deter investment and so hinder economic growth. For this reason, many people have put forward the idea that democracy is undesirable for a developing country in which economic growth and the reduction of poverty are top priority.^[10] However, Anthony Downs argued that the political market works much the same way as the economic market, and that there could potentially be an equilibrium in the system because of democratic process.^[11] However, he eventually argued that imperfect knowledge in politicians and voters prevented the reaching of that equilibrium.^[11]

Short-termism

Democracy is also criticised for frequent elections due to the instability of coalition governments. Coalitions are frequently formed after the elections in many countries (for example India) and the basis of alliance is predominantly to enable a viable majority, not an ideological concurrence.

This opportunist alliance not only has the handicap of having to cater to too many ideologically opposing factions, but it is usually short lived since any perceived or actual imbalance in the treatment of coalition partners, or changes to leadership in the coalition partners themselves, can very easily result in the coalition partner withdrawing its support from the government.

Democratic institutions work on consensus to decide an issue, which usually takes longer than a unilateral decision.

M. S. Golwalkar in his book Bunch of Thoughts describes democracy as, “is to a very large extent only a myth in practice…The high-sounding concept of “individual freedom” only meant the freedom of those talented few to exploit the rest.”

Corruption

The inability of governments around the world to successfully deal with corruption is causing a global crisis of democracy.^[12] Whilst countries that have high levels of democracy tend to have low levels of corruption, it is also clear that countries with moderate levels of democracy have high corruption, as well as countries with no democracy having very little corruption.^[13] This means that democracy does not effectively deal with corruption. One important internal element of democracy is the electoral process which can be considered easily corruptible. For example, it is not inevitable in a democracy that elections will be free and fair. The giving and receiving of bribes, the threat or use of violence, treating and impersonation are common ways that the electoral process can be corrupted^[14], meaning that democracy is not impenetrable from external problems and can be criticised for allowing it to take place.

Corruption is also a simple form of appealing to the short term interests of the voters.

Another form is commonly called Pork barrel, where local areas or political sectors are given special benefits but whose costs are spread among all taxpayers.

Mere elections are just one aspect of the democratic process. Other tenets of democracy, like relative equality and freedom, are frequently absent in ostensibly democratic countries.

Moreover, in many countries, democratic participation is less than 50% at times, and it can be argued that election of individual(s) instead of ideas disrupts democracy.

Potential incompatibility with former politics

The new establishment of democratic institutions, in countries where the associated practices have as yet been uncommon or deemed culturally unacceptable, can result in institutions that are not sustainable in the long term. One circumstance supporting this outcome may be when it is part of the common perception among the populace that the institutions were established as a direct result of foreign pressure.

Sustained regular inspection from democratic countries, however effortful and well-meaning, are normally not sufficient in preventing the erosion of democratic practices. In the cases of several African countries, corruption still is rife in spite of democratically elected governments, as one of the most severe examples, Zimbabwe, is often perceived to have backfired into outright militarism.

Efficiency of the system

Economists, such as Meltzer and Richard, have added that as industrial activity in a democracy increases, so too do the people’s demands for subsidies and support from the government. By the median voter theorem, only a few people actually hold the balance of power in the country, and many may be unhappy with their decisions. In this way, they argue, democracies are inefficient.^[15]

Such a system could result in a wealth disparity or racial discrimination. Fierlbeck (1998) points out that such a result is not necessarily due to a failing in the democratic process, but rather, “because democracy is responsive to the desires of a large middle class increasingly willing to disregard the muted voices of economically marginalized groups within its own borders.”^[16] The will of the democratic majority may not always be in the best interest of all citizens.

Susceptibility to propaganda

Lack of political education

Voters may not be educated enough to exercise their democratic rights prudently. Politicians may take advantage of voters’ irrationality, and compete more in the field of public relations and tactics, than in ideology. While arguments against democracy are often taken by advocates of democracy as an attempt to maintain or revive traditional hierarchy and autocratic rule, many extensions have been made to develop the argument further.^[10] In Lipset’s 1959 essay about the requirements for forming democracy, he found that almost all emerging democracies provided good education. However, education alone cannot sustain a democracy, though Caplan did note in 2005 that as people become educated, they think more like economists.^[17]

Manipulation or control of public opinion

Politicians and special interests have attempted to manipulate public opinion for as long as recorded history − this has put into question the feasibility of democratic government.^[18][19] Critics claim that mass media actually shapes public opinion, and can therefore be used to “control” democracy. Opinion polls before the election are under special criticism.^[20][21] Furthermore, the disclosure of reputation damaging material shortly before elections may be used to significantly manipulate public opinion. In the United States the FBI was criticized for announcing that the agency would examine potentially incriminating evidence against Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server just 11 days before the election.^[22] It has been said that misinformation − such as fake news − has become central to elections around the world.^[22] In December 2016 United States’ intelligence agencies have concluded that Russia worked “to undermine public faith in the U.S. democratic process, denigrate Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency” − including passing material against the Democrats to WikiLeaks to discredit the election and favor Donald Trump.^[22] Social bots^[23] and other forms of online propaganda as well as search engine result algorithms^[24] may be used to alter the perception and opinion of voters. In 2016 Andrés Sepúlveda disclosed that he manipulated public opinion to rig elections in Latin America. According to him, with a budget of $600,000, he led a team of hackers that stole campaign strategies, manipulated social media to create false waves of enthusiasm and derision, and installed spyware in opposition offices to help Enrique Peña Nieto, a right-of-center candidate, win the election.^[25][26]. This highlights that a significant criticism of democracy is that voters can be so easily manipulated.

Manipulation of the opposition

Further information: Suppression of dissent

Various reasons can be found for eliminating or suppressing political opponents. Methods such as false flags, counterterrorism-laws,^[27] planting or creating compromising material and perpetuation of public fear may be used to suppress dissent. After a failed coup d’état over 110,000 people have been purged and nearly 40,000 have been imprisoned in Turkey, which is or was considered to be a democratic nation, during the 2016 Turkish purges.^[28][29]

Fake parties, phantom political rivals and “scarecrow” opponents may be used to undermine the opposition.^[30]

Information Overload Paradox

Too much information, as common in the present digital age, where people are deluged by information through newspapers, daily television, social media and various other forms, is called information overload. This creates a situation in democracies where people are too fatigued to process all this information intelligently or incompetent or unwilling to do so, for various reasons.

Limited responsiveness and representation

Robert A. Dahl defines democracies as systems of government that respond nearly fully to each and every one of their citizens. He then poses that no such, fully responsive system exists today.^[3] However, this does not mean that partially democratic regimes do not exist—they do. Thus, Dahl rejects a democracy dichotomy in favor of a democratization spectrum. To Dahl, the question is not whether a country is a democracy or not. The question is to what extent a country is experiencing democratization at a national level. Dahl measures this democratization in terms of the country’s endorsement and reception of public contestation. And polyarchy, or “rule of the many people,” is the only existing form of democratizeable government; that is, it is within polyarchies that democratization can flourish. Countries do not immediately transform from hegemonies and competitive oligarchies into democracies. Instead, a country that adopts democracy as its form of government can only claim to have switched to polyarchy, which is conducive to, but does not guarantee, democratization. Dahl’s polyarchy spectrum ends at the point in which a country becomes a full polyarchy at the national level and begins to democratize at the subnational level, among its social and private affairs. Dahl is not deeply concerned about the limits of his polyarchy spectrum because he believes that most countries today still have a long way before they reach full polyarchy status.^[31] For Dahl, whatever lies beyond full polyarchy is only possible, and thus only a concern, for advanced countries like those of Western Europe.

Criticism of democracy’s outcome

Mob rule

Main article: Ochlocracy

Plato’s Republic presents a critical view of democracy through the narration of Socrates: “foolish leaders of Democracy, which is a charming form of government, full of variety and disorder, and dispensing a sort of equality to equals and unequaled alike.”^[32] In his work, Plato lists 5 forms of government from best to worst. Assuming that the Republic was intended to be a serious critique of the political thought in Athens, Plato argues that only Kallipolis, an aristocracy led by the unwilling philosopher-kings (the wisest men), is a just form of government.

Plato rejected Athenian democracy on the basis that such democracies were anarchic societies without internal unity, that they followed citizens’ impulses rather than pursuing the common good, that democracies are unable to allow a sufficient number of their citizens to have their voices heard, and that such democracies were typically run by fools. Plato attacked Athenian democracies for mistaking anarchy for freedom. The lack of coherent unity in Athenian democracy made Plato conclude that such democracies were a mere collection of individuals occupying a common space rather than a form of political organization.

According to Plato, other forms of government place too much focus on lesser virtues and degenerate into other forms from best to worst, starting with timocracy, which overvalues honour, then oligarchy, which overvalues wealth, which is followed by democracy. In democracy, the oligarchs, or merchant, are unable to wield their power effectively and the people take over, electing someone who plays on their wishes (for example, by throwing lavish festivals). However, the government grants the people too much freedom, and the state degenerates into the fourth form, tyranny, or mob rule.^[33]

John T. Wenders, a professor of Economics at the University of Idaho, writes:

If we base our critique on the definition of democracy as governance based on the will of the majority, there can be some foreseeable consequences to this form of rule. For example, Fierlbeck (1998: 12) points out that the middle class majority in a country may decide to redistribute wealth and resources into the hands of those that they feel are most capable of investing or increasing them. Of course this is only a critique of a subset of types of democracy that primarily use majority rule.

US President James Madison devoted the whole of Federalist No. 10 to a scathing critique of democracy and offered that republics are a far better solution, saying: “…democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” Madison offered that republics were superior to democracies because republics safeguarded against tyranny of the majority, stating in Federalist No. 10: “the same advantage which a republic has over a democracy, in controlling the effects of faction, is enjoyed by a large over a small republic”.

The Founding Fathers of the United States intended to address this criticism by combining democracy with republicanism. A constitution^[34] would limit the powers of what a simple majority can accomplish.^[35]

Cyclical theory of government

Machiavelli put the idea that democracies will tend to cater to the whims of the people,^[36] who follow false ideas to entertain themselves, squander their reserves, and do not deal with potential threats to their rule until it is far too late.

However Machiavelli’s definition of democracy was narrower than the current one. He hypothesized that a hybrid system of government incorporating facets of all three major types (monarchy, aristocracy and democracy) could break this cycle. Many modern democracies that have separation of powers are claimed to represent these kinds of hybrid governments. However, in modern democracies there is usually no direct correlation with Machiavelli’s idea, because of weakening of the separation of powers, or erosion of the original function of the various branches. For example, the modern United States executive branch has slowly accumulated more power from the legislative branch, and the Senate no longer functions as a quasi-aristocratic body as was originally intended, since senators are now democratically elected.

Political Coase theorem

Some have tried to argue that the Coase theorem applies to political markets as well. Daron Acemoglu, however, provides evidence to the contrary, claiming that the Coase Theorem is only valid while there are “rules of the game,” so to speak, that are being enforced by the government. But when there is nobody there to enforce the rules for the government itself, there is no way to guarantee that low transaction costs will lead to an efficient outcome in democracies.^[37]

Religion

Islam

Main article: Salafism

The practice of orthodox Islam in the form of Salafism can clash with a democratic system. The core precept of Islam, that of “tawheed“, (the “oneness of God”), can be interpreted by fundamentalists to mean, among other things, that democracy as a political system is incompatible with the purported notion that laws not handed down by God should not be recognized.^[38]

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopediaJ

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In general relativity, a white hole is a hypothetical region of spacetime and singularity which cannot be entered from the outside, although energy–matter and light can escape from it. In this sense, it is the reverse of a black hole, which can be entered only from the outside and from which energy-matter and light cannot escape. White holes appear in the theory of eternal black holes. In addition to a black hole region in the future, such a solution of the Einstein field equations has a white hole region in its past.^[1] However, some believe this region does not exist for black holes that have formed through gravitational collapse, nor are there any known physical processes through which a white hole could be formed. Although information and evidence regarding white holes remains inconclusive, the 2006 GRB 060614 has been proposed as the first documented observance of a white hole.^[2]

Supermassive black holes (SBHs) are theoretically predicted to be at the center of every galaxy and that possibly, a galaxy cannot form without one. It has been proposed by Stephen Hawking^[3] that these SBHs spawn a supermassive white hole.^[4]

Overview

Like black holes, white holes have properties like mass, charge, and angular momentum. They attract matter like any other mass, but objects falling towards a white hole would never actually reach the white hole’s event horizon (though in the case of the maximally extended Schwarzschild solution, discussed below, the white hole event horizon in the past becomes a black hole event horizon in the future, so any object falling towards it will eventually reach the black hole horizon). Imagine a gravitational field, without a surface. Acceleration due to gravity is the greatest on the surface of any body. But since black holes lack a surface, acceleration due to gravity increases exponentially, but never reaches a final value as there is no considered surface in a singularity.

In quantum mechanics, the black hole emits Hawking radiation and so can come to thermal equilibrium with a gas of radiation (not compulsory). Because a thermal-equilibrium state is time-reversal-invariant, Stephen Hawking argued that the time reverse of a black hole in thermal equilibrium is again a black hole in thermal equilibrium.^[5] This may imply that black holes and white holes are the same object. The Hawking radiation from an ordinary black hole is then identified with the white-hole emission. Hawking’s semi-classical argument is reproduced in a quantum mechanical AdS/CFT treatment,^[6] where a black hole in anti-de Sitter space is described by a thermal gas in a gauge theory, whose time reversal is the same as itself.

Origin

A diagram of the structure of the maximally extended black hole spacetime. The horizontal direction is space and the vertical direction is time.

The possibility of the existence of white holes was put forward by Russian cosmologist Igor Novikov in 1964.^[7] White holes are predicted as part of a solution to the Einstein field equations known as the maximally extended version of the Schwarzschild metric^{[clarification needed]} describing an eternal black hole with no charge and no rotation. Here, “maximally extended” refers to the idea that the spacetime should not have any “edges”: for any possible trajectory of a free-falling particle (following a geodesic) in the spacetime, it should be possible to continue this path arbitrarily far into the particle’s future, unless the trajectory hits a gravitational singularity like the one at the center of the black hole’s interior. In order to satisfy this requirement, it turns out that in addition to the black hole interior region which particles enter when they fall through the event horizon from the outside, there must be a separate white hole interior region, which allows us to extrapolate the trajectories of particles which an outside observer sees rising up away from the event horizon. For an observer outside using Schwarzschild coordinates, infalling particles take an infinite time to reach the black hole horizon infinitely far in the future, while outgoing particles which pass the observer have been traveling outward for an infinite time since crossing the white hole horizon infinitely far in the past (however, the particles or other objects experience only a finite proper time between crossing the horizon and passing the outside observer). The black hole/white hole appears “eternal” from the perspective of an outside observer, in the sense that particles traveling outward from the white hole interior region can pass the observer at any time, and particles traveling inward which will eventually reach the black hole interior region can also pass the observer at any time.

Just as there are two separate interior regions of the maximally extended spacetime, there are also two separate exterior regions, sometimes called two different “universes”, with the second universe allowing us to extrapolate some possible particle trajectories in the two interior regions. This means that the interior black-hole region can contain a mix of particles that fell in from either universe (and thus an observer who fell in from one universe might be able to see light that fell in from the other one), and likewise particles from the interior white-hole region can escape into either universe. All four regions can be seen in a spacetime diagram which uses Kruskal–Szekeres coordinates (see figure).^[8]

In this spacetime, it is possible to come up with coordinate systems such that if you pick a hypersurface of constant time (a set of points that all have the same time coordinate, such that every point on the surface has a space-like separation, giving what is called a ‘space-like surface’) and draw an “embedding diagram” depicting the curvature of space at that time, the embedding diagram will look like a tube connecting the two exterior regions, known as an “Einstein-Rosen bridge” or Schwarzschild wormhole.^[8] Depending on where the space-like hypersurface is chosen, the Einstein-Rosen bridge can either connect two black hole event horizons in each universe (with points in the interior of the bridge being part of the black hole region of the spacetime), or two white hole event horizons in each universe (with points in the interior of the bridge being part of the white hole region). It is impossible to use the bridge to cross from one universe to the other, however, because it is impossible to enter a white hole event horizon from the outside, and anyone entering a black hole horizon from either universe will inevitably hit the black hole singularity.

Note that the maximally extended Schwarzschild metric describes an idealized black hole/white hole that exists eternally from the perspective of external observers; a more realistic black hole that forms at some particular time from a collapsing star would require a different metric. When the infalling stellar matter is added to a diagram of a black hole’s history, it removes the part of the diagram corresponding to the white hole interior region.^[9] But because the equations of general relativity are time-reversible – they exhibit Time reversal symmetry – general relativity must also allow the time-reverse of this type of “realistic” black hole that forms from collapsing matter. The time-reversed case would be a white hole that has existed since the beginning of the universe, and which emits matter until it finally “explodes” and disappears.^[10] Despite the fact that such objects are permitted theoretically, they are not taken as seriously as black holes by physicists, since there would be no processes that would naturally lead to their formation; they could exist only if they were built into the initial conditions of the Big Bang.^[10] Additionally, it is predicted that such a white hole would be highly “unstable” in the sense that if any small amount of matter fell towards the horizon from the outside, this would prevent the white hole’s explosion as seen by distant observers, with the matter emitted from the singularity never able to escape the white hole’s gravitational radius.^[11]

Big Bang/Supermassive White Hole

A view of black holes first proposed in the late 1980s might be interpreted as shedding some light on the nature of classical white holes. Some researchers have proposed that when a black hole forms, a Big Bang may occur at the core/singularity, which would create a new universe that expands outside of the parent universe.^[12][13][14] See also Fecund universes.

The Einstein–Cartan-Sciama-Kibble theory of gravity extends general relativity by removing a constraint of the symmetry of the affine connection and regarding its antisymmetric part, the torsion tensor, as a dynamical variable. Torsion naturally accounts for the quantum-mechanical, intrinsic angular momentum (spin) of matter.

According to general relativity, the gravitational collapse of a sufficiently compact mass forms a singular black hole. In the Einstein–Cartan theory, however, the minimal coupling between torsion and Dirac spinors generates a repulsive spin–spin interaction which is significant in fermionic matter at extremely high densities. Such an interaction prevents the formation of a gravitational singularity. Instead, the collapsing matter on the other side of the event horizon reaches an enormous but finite density and rebounds, forming a regular Einstein–Rosen bridge.^[15] The other side of the bridge becomes a new, growing baby universe. For observers in the baby universe, the parent universe appears as the only white hole. Accordingly, the observable universe is the Einstein–Rosen interior of a black hole existing as one of possibly many inside a larger universe. The Big Bang was a nonsingular Big Bounce at which the observable universe had a finite, minimum scale factor.^[16]

A 2012 paper argues that the Big Bang itself is a white hole.^[17] It further suggests that the emergence of a white hole, which was named a ‘Small Bang’, is spontaneous—all the matter is ejected at a single pulse. Thus, unlike black holes, white holes cannot be continuously observed; rather, their effects can be detected only around the event itself. The paper even proposed identifying a new group of gamma-ray bursts with white holes.

In 2014, the idea of the Big Bang being produced by a supermassive white hole explosion was explored in the framework of a five dimensional vacuum by Madriz Aguilar, Moreno and Bellini.^[18]

In popular culture

The idea of white holes was explored in an episode of the British science fiction sitcom Red Dwarf entitled “White Hole“. In the episode, the cast encounter an unusual space-time phenomenon that appears to be spewing time into the universe, causing events to happen in a non-linear way, as illustrated when the character Kryten tries to explain the phenomenon to the others:Cat: “So, what is it?”
Kryten: “I’ve never seen one before – no-one has – but I’m guessing it’s a white hole.”
Rimmer: “A white hole?”
Kryten: “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. A black hole sucks time and matter out of the universe, a white hole returns it.”
Lister: “So, that thing’s spewing time back into the universe? (He puts on his hat)”
Kryten: “Precisely. That’s why we’re experiencing these curious time phenomena on board.”Lister: “What time phenomena?”
Kryten: “Like just then, when time repeated itself.”
Cat: “So, what is it?… Only joking!”

Out of the night that covers me
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance,
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.

–William Ernest Henley (August 23, 1849 – July 11, 1903) was an influential English poet, critic and editor of the late Victorian era in England. Though he wrote several books of poetry, Henley is remembered most often for his 1875 poem “Invictus”, a piece which recurs in popular awareness. Wikipedia

After Buddha was dead, people
showed his shadow for centuries afterwards in a
cave,—an immense frightful shadow. God is dead:
but as the human race is constituted, there will
perhaps be caves for millenniums yet, in which
people will show his shadow.—And we—we have
still to overcome his shadow!^[4]

–From Nietzsche’s The Gay Science

JUNE 10, 2020 (counterpunch.org)

by DON FITZ

Beginning in December 1951, Ernesto “Che” Guevara took a nine-month break from medical school to travel by motorcycle through Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, and Venezuela. One of his goals was gaining practical experience with leprosy. On the night of his twenty-fourth birthday, Che was at La Colonia de San Pablo in Peru swimming across the river to join the lepers. He walked among six hundred lepers in jungle huts looking after themselves in their own way.

Che would not have been satisfied to just study and sympathize with them – he wanted to be with them and understand their existence. Being in contact with people who were poor and hungry while they were sick transformed Che. He envisioned a new medicine, with doctors who would serve the greatest number people with preventive care and public awareness of hygiene. A few years later, Che joined Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement as a doctor and was among the eighty-one men aboard the Granma as it landed in Cuba on December 2, 1956.

Revolutionary Medicine

After the January 1, 1959, victory that overthrew Fulgencio Batista, the new Cuban constitution included Che’s dream of free medical care for all as a human right. An understanding of the failings of disconnected social systems led the revolutionary government to build hospitals and clinics in underserved parts of the island at the same time that it began addressing crises of literacy, racism, poverty, and housing. Cuba overhauled its clinics both in 1964 and again in 1974 to better link communities and patients. By 1984, Cuba had introduced doctor-nurse teams who lived in the neighborhoods where they had offices (consultorios).

The United States became ever more bellicose, so in 1960 Cubans organized Committees for Defense of the Revolution to defend the country. The committees prepared to move the elderly, disabled, sick, and mentally ill to higher ground if a hurricane approached, thus intertwining domestic health care and foreign affairs, a connection that has been maintained throughout Cuba’s history.

As Cuba’s medical revolution was based on extending medical care beyond the major cities and into the rural communities that needed it the most, it was a logical conclusion to extend that assistance to other nations. The revolutionary government sent doctors to Chile after a 1960 earthquake and a medical brigade in 1963 to Algeria, which was fighting for independence from France. These set the stage for the country’s international medical aid, which grew during the decades and now includes helping treat the COVID-19 pandemic.

In the late 1980s and early ’90s, two disasters threatened the very existence of the country. The first victim of AIDS died in 1986. In December 1991, the Soviet Union collapsed, ending its $5 billion annual subsidy, disrupting international commerce, and sending the Cuban economy into a free fall that exacerbated the AIDS epidemic. A perfect storm for AIDS infection appeared on the horizon. The HIV infection rate for the Caribbean region was second only to southern Africa, where a third of a million Cubans had recently been during the Angolan wars. The embargo on the island reduced the availability of drugs (including those for HIV/AIDS), made existing pharmaceuticals outrageously expensive, and disrupted the financial infrastructures used for drug purchases. Desperately needing funds, Cuba opened the floodgate of tourism.

The government drastically reduced services in all areas except two: education and health care. Its research institutes developed Cuba’s own diagnostic test for HIV by 1987. Over twelve million tests were completed by 1993. By 1990, when gay people had become the island’s primary HIV victims, homophobia was officially challenged in schools. Condoms were provided for free at doctor’s offices and, despite the expense, so were antiretroviral drugs.

Cuba’s united and well-planned effort to cope with HIV/AIDS paid off. At the same time that Cuba had two hundred AIDS cases, New York City (with about the same population) had forty-three thousand cases. Despite having only a small fraction of the wealth and resources of the United States, Cuba had overcome the devastating effects of the U.S. blockade and had implemented an AIDS program superior to that of the country seeking to destroy it. During this Special Period, Cubans experienced longer lives and lower infant mortality rates in comparison to the United States. Cuba had inspired healers throughout the world to believe that a country with a coherent and caring medical system can thrive, even against tremendous odds.

COVID-19 Hits Cuba

Overcoming the HIV/AIDS and Special Period crises prepared Cuba for COVID-19. Aware of the intensity of the pandemic, Cuba knew that it had two inseparable responsibilities: to take care of its own with a comprehensive program and to share its capabilities internationally.

The government immediately carried out a task that proved very difficult in a market-driven economy –altering the equipment of nationalized factories (which usually made school uniforms) to manufacture masks. These provided an ample supply for Cuba by the middle of April 2020, while the United States, with its enormous productive capacity, was still suffering a shortage.

Discussions at the highest levels of the Cuban Ministry of Public Health drew up the national policy. There would need to be massive testing to determine who had been infected. Infected persons would need to be quarantined while ensuring that they had food and other necessities. Contact tracing would be used to determine who else might be exposed. Medical staff would need to go door to door to check on the health of every citizen. Consultorio staff would give special attention to everyone in the neighborhood who might be high risk.

By March 2, Cuba had instituted the Novel Coronavirus Plan for Prevention and Control. Within four days, it expanded the plan to include taking the temperature of and possibly isolating infected incoming travelers. These occurred before Cuba’s first confirmed COVID-19 diagnosis on March 11. Cuba had its first confirmed COVID-19 fatality by March 22, when there were thirty-five confirmed cases, almost one thousand patients being observed in hospitals, and over thirty thousand people under surveillance at home. The next day it banned the entry of nonresident foreigners, which took a deep bite into the country’s tourism revenue.

That was the day that Cuba’s Civil Defense went on alert to respond rapidly to COVID-19 and the Havana Defense Council decided that there was a serious problem in the city’s Vedado district, famous for being the largest home to nontourist foreign visitors who were more likely to have been exposed to the virus. By April 3, the district was closed. As Merriam Ansara witnessed, “anyone with a need to enter or leave must prove that they have been tested and are free of COVID-19.” The Civil Defense made sure stores were supplied and all vulnerable people received regular medical checks.

Vedado had eight confirmed cases, a lot for a small area. Cuban health officials wanted the virus to remain at the “local spread” stage, when it can be traced while going from one person to another. They sought to prevent it from entering the “community spread” stage, when tracing is not possible because it is moving out of control. As U.S. health professionals begged for personal protective equipment and testing in the United States was so sparse that people had to ask to be tested (rather than health workers testing contacts of infected patients), Cuba had enough rapid test kits to trace contacts of persons who had contracted the virus.

During late March and early April, Cuban hospitals were also changing work patterns to minimize contagion. Havana doctors went into Salvador Allende Hospital for fifteen days, staying overnight within an area designated for medical staff. Then they moved to an area separate from patients where they lived for another fifteen days and were tested before returning home. They stayed at home without leaving for another fifteen days and were tested before resuming practice. This forty-five-day period of isolation prevented medical staff from bringing disease to the community via their daily trips to and from work.

The medical system extends from the consultorio to every family in Cuba. Third-, fourth-, and fifth-year medical students are assigned by consultorio doctors to go to specific homes each day. Their tasks include obtaining survey data from residents or making extra visits to the elderly, infants, and those with respiratory problems. These visits gather preventive medicine data that is then taken into account by those in the highest decision-making positions of the country. When students bring their data, doctors use a red pen to mark hot spots where extra care is necessary. Neighborhood doctors meet regularly at clinics to talk about what each doctor is doing, what they are discovering, what new procedures the Cuban Ministry of Public Health is adopting, and how the intense work is affecting medical staff.

In this way, every Cuban citizen and every health care worker, from those at neighborhood doctor offices through those at the most esteemed research institutes, has a part in determining health policy. Cuba currently has eighty-nine thousand doctors, eighty-four thousand nurses, and nine thousand students scheduled to graduate from medical studies in 2020. The Cuban people would not tolerate the head of the country ignoring medical advice, spouting nonsensical statements, and determining policy based on what would be most profitable for corporations.

The Cuban government approved free distribution of the homeopathic medicine PrevengHo-Vir to residents of Havana and Pinar del Rio province. Susana Hurlich was one of many receiving it. On April 8, Dr. Yaisen, one of three doctors at the consultorio two blocks from her home, came to the door with a small bottle of PrevengHo-Vir and explained how to use it. Instructions warn that it reinforces the immune system but is not a substitute for Interferon Alpha 2B, nor is it a vaccine. Hurlich believes that something important “about Cuba’s medical system is that rather than being two-tiered, as is often the case in other countries, with ‘classical medicine’ on the one hand and ‘alternative medicine’ on the other, Cuba has ONE health system that includes it all. When you study to become a doctor, you also learn about homeopathic medicine in all its forms.”

Global Solidarity in the Time of COVID-19

A powerful model: Perhaps the most critical component of Cuba’s medical internationalism during the COVID-19 crisis has been using its decades of experience to create an example of how a country can confront the virus with a compassionate and competent plan. Public health officials around the world were inspired by Cuba’s actions.

Transfer of knowledge: When viruses that cause Ebola, mainly found in sub-Saharan Africa, increased dramatically in the fall of 2014, much of the world panicked. Soon, over twenty thousand people were infected, more than eight thousand had died, and worries mounted that the death toll could reach into hundreds of thousands. The United States provided military support; other countries promised money. Cuba was the first nation to respond with what was most needed: it sent 103 nurse and 62 doctor volunteers to Sierra Leone. Since many governments did not know how to respond to the disease, Cuba trained volunteers from other nations at Havana’s Pedro Kourí Institute of Tropical Medicine. In total, Cuba taught 13,000 Africans, 66,000 Latin Americans, and 620 Caribbeans how to treat Ebola without themselves becoming infected. Sharing understanding on how to organize a health system is the highest level of knowledge transfer.

Venezuela has attempted to replicate fundamental aspects of the Cuban health model on a national level, which has served Venezuela well in combating COVID-19. In 2018, residents of Altos de Lidice organized seven communal councils, including one for community health. A resident made space in his home available to the Communal Healthcare System initiative so that Dr. Gutierrez could have an office. He coordinates data collections to identify at-risk residents and visits all residents in their homes to explain how to avoid infection by COVID-19. Nurse del Valle Marquez is a Chavista who helped implement the Barrio Adentro when the first Cuban doctors arrived. She remembers that residents had never seen a doctor inside their community, but when the Cubans arrived “we opened our doors to the doctors, they lived with us, they ate with us, and they worked among us.”

Stories like this permeate Venezuela. As a result of building a Cuban-type system, teleSUR reported that by April 11, 2020, the Venezuelan government had conducted 181,335 early Polymerase Chain Reaction tests in time to have the lowest infection rate in Latin America. Venezuela had only 6 infections per million citizens while neighboring Brazil had 104 infections per million.

When Rafael Correa was president of Ecuador, over one thousand Cuban doctors formed the backbone of its health care system. Lenin Moreno was elected in 2017 and Cuban doctors were soon expelled, leaving public medicine in chaos. Moreno followed recommendations of the International Monetary Fund to slash Ecuador’s health budget by 36 percent, leaving it without health care professionals, without personal protective equipment, and, above all, without a coherent health care system. While Venezuela and Cuba had 27 COVID-19 deaths, Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil, had an estimated death toll of 7,600.

International medical response: Cuban medicine is perhaps best known for its internationalism. A clear example is the devastating earthquake that rocked Haiti in 2010. Cuba sent medical staff who lived among Haitians and stayed months or years after the earthquake. U.S. doctors, however, did not sleep where Haitian victims huddled, returned to luxury hotels at night, and departed after a few weeks. John Kirk coined the term disaster tourism to describe the way that many rich countries respond to medical crises in poor countries.

The commitment that Cuban medical staff show internationally is a continuation of the effort that the country’s health care system made in spending three decades to find the best way to strengthen bonds between caregiving professionals and those they serve. By 2008, Cuba had sent over 120,000 health care professionals to 154 countries, its doctors had cared for over 70 million people in the world, and almost 2 million people owed their lives to Cuban medical services in their country.

The Associated Press reported that when COVID-19 spread throughout the world, Cuba had thirty-seven thousand medical workers in sixty-seven countries. It soon deployed additional doctors to Suriname, Jamaica, Dominica, Belize, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, St. Kitts and Nevis, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. On April 16, Granma reported that “21 brigades of healthcare professionals have been deployed to join national and local efforts in 20 countries. The same day, Cuba sent two hundred health personnel to Qatar.

As northern Italy became the epicenter of COVID-19 cases, one of its hardest hit cities was Crema in the Lombardy region. The emergency room at its hospital was filled to capacity. On March 26, Cuba sent fifty-two doctors and nurses who set up a field hospital with three intensive care unit beds and thirty-two other beds with oxygen. A smaller and poorer Caribbean nation was one of the few aiding a major European power. Cuba’s intervention took its toll. By April 17, thirty of its medical professionals who went abroad tested positive for COVID-19.

Bringing the world to Cuba: The flip side of Cuba sending medical staff across the globe is the people it has brought to the island—both students and patients. When Cuban doctors were in the Republic of the Congo in 1966, they saw young people studying independently under streetlights at night and arranged for them to come to Havana. They brought in even more African students during the Angolan wars of 1975–88 and then brought large numbers of Latin American students to study medicine following Hurricanes Mitch and Georges. The number of students coming to Cuba to study expanded even more in 1999 when it opened classes at the Latin American School of Medicine (ELAM). By 2020, ELAM had trained thirty thousand doctors from over one hundred countries.

Cuba also has a history of bringing foreign patients for treatment. After the 1986 nuclear meltdown at Chernobyl, 25,000 patients, mostly children, came to the island for treatment, with some staying for months or years. Cuba opened its doors, hospital beds, and a youth summer camp.

On March 12, nearly fifty crew members and passengers on a British cruise ship either had COVID-19 or were showing symptoms as the ship approached the Bahamas, a British Commonwealth nation. Since the Braemar flew the Bahamian flag as a Commonwealth vessel, there should have been no problem disembarking those aboard for treatment and return to the United Kingdom. But the Bahamian Ministry of Transport declared that the cruise ship would “not be permitted to dock at any port in the Bahamas and no persons will be permitted to disembark the vessel.” During the next five days, the United States, Barbados (another Commonwealth nation), and several other Caribbean countries turned it away. On March 18, Cuba became the only country to allow the Braemar’s over one thousand crew members and passengers to dock. Treatment at Cuban hospitals was offered to those who felt too sick to fly. Most went by bus to José Martí International Airport for flights back to the United Kingdom. Before leaving, Braemar crew members displayed a banner reading “I love you Cuba!” Passenger Anthea Guthrie posted on her Facebook page: “They have made us not only feel tolerated, but actually welcome.”

Medicine for all: In 1981, there was a particularly bad outbreak of the mosquito-borne dengue fever, which hits the island every few years. At the time, many first learned of the very high level of Cuba’s research institutes that created Interferon Alpha 2B to successfully treat dengue. As Helen Yaffe points out, “Cuba’s interferon has shown its efficacy and safety in the therapy of viral diseases including Hepatitis B and C, shingles, HIV-AIDS, and dengue.” It accomplished this by preventing complications that could worsen a patient’s condition and result in death. The efficacy of the drug persisted for decades and, in 2020, it became vitally important as a potential cure for COVID-19. What also survived was Cuba’s eagerness to develop a multiplicity of drugs and share them with other nations.

Cuba has sought to work cooperatively toward drug development with countries such as China, Venezuela, and Brazil, Collaboration with Brazil resulted in meningitis vaccines at a cost of 95¢ rather than $15 to $20 per dose. Finally, Cuba teaches other countries to produce medications themselves so they do not have to rely on purchasing them from rich countries.

In order to effectively cope with disease, drugs are frequently sought for three goals: tests to determine those infected; treatments to help ward off or cure problems; and vaccines to prevent infections. As soon as Polymerase Chain Reaction rapid tests were available, Cuba began using them widely throughout the island. Cuba developed both Interferon Alpha 2B (a recombinant protein) and PrevengHo-Vir (a homeopathic medication). TeleSUR reported that by April 20, over forty-five countries had requested Cuba’s Inteferon in order to control and then get rid of the virus.

Cuba’s Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology is seeking to create a vaccine against COVID-19. Its Director of Biomedical Research, Dr. Gerardo Guillén, confirmed that his team is collaborating with Chinese researchers in Yongzhou, Hunan province, to create a vaccine to stimulate the immune system and one that can be taken through the nose, which is the route of COVID-19 transmission. Whatever Cuba develops, it is certain that it will be shared with other countries at low cost, unlike U.S. medications that are patented at taxpayers’ expense so that private pharmaceutical giants can price gouge those who need the medication.

Countries that have not learned how to share: Cuban solidarity missions show a genuine concern that often seems to be lacking in the health care systems of other countries. Medical associations in Venezuela, Brazil, and other countries are often hostile to Cuban doctors. Yet, they cannot find enough of their own doctors to go to dangerous communities or travel to poor and rural areas as Cuban doctors do.

When in Peru in 2010, I visited the Pisco policlínico. Its Cuban director, Leopoldo García Mejías, explained that then-president Alan García did not want additional Cuban doctors and that they had to keep quiet in order to remain in Peru. Cuba is well aware that it has to adjust each medical mission to accommodate the political climate.

There is at least one exception to Cuban doctors remaining in a country according to the whims of the political leadership. Cuba began providing medical attention in Honduras in 1998. During the first eighteen months of Cuba’s efforts in Honduras, the country’s infant mortality dropped from 80.3 to 30.9 deaths per 1,000 live births. Political moods changed and, in 2005, Honduran Health Minister Merlin Fernández decided to kick Cuban doctors out. However, this led to so much opposition that the government changed course and allowed the Cubans to stay.

A disastrous and noteworthy example of when a country refused an offer of Cuban aid is the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. After the hurricane hit, 1,586 Cuban health care professionals were prepared to go to New Orleans. President George W. Bush, however, rejected the offer, acting as if it would be better for U.S. citizens to die rather than to admit the quality of Cuban aid.

Though the U.S. government does not take kindly to students going studying at ELAM, they are still able to apply what they learn when they come home. In 1988, Kathryn Hall-Trujillo of Albuquerque, New Mexico, founded the Birthing Project USA, which trains advocates to work with African-American women and connect with them through the first year of the infant’s life. She is grateful for the Birthing Project’s partnership with Cuba and the support that many ELAM students have given. In 2018, she told me: “We are a coming home place for ELAM students—they see working with us as a way to put into practice what they learned at ELAM.”

Cuban doctor Julio López Benítez recalled in 2017 that when the country revamped its clinics in 1974, the old clinic model was one of patients going to clinics, but the new model was of clinics going to patients. Similarly, as ELAM graduate Dr. Melissa Barber looked at her South Bronx neighborhood during COVID-19, she realized that while most of the United States told people to go to agencies, what people need is a community approach that recruits organizers to go to the people. Dr. Barber is working in a coalition with South Bronx Unite, the Mott Haven Mamas, and many local tenant associations. As in Cuba, they are trying to identify those in the community who are vulnerable, including “the elderly, people who have infants and small children, homebound people, people that have multiple morbidities and are really susceptible to a virus like this one.”

As they discover who needs help, they seek resources to help them, such as groceries, personal protective equipment, medications, and treatment. In short, the approach of the coalition is going to homes to ensure that people do not fall through the cracks. In contrast, the U.S. national policy is for each state and each municipality to do what it feels like doing, which means that instead of having a few cracks that a few people fall through, there are enormous chasms with large groups careening over the edge. What countries with market economies need are actions like those in the South Bronx and Cuba carried out on a national scale.

This was what Che Guevara envisioned in 1951. Decades before COVID-19 jumped from person to person, Che’s imagination went from doctor to doctor. Or perhaps many shared their own visions so widely that, after 1959, Cuba brought revolutionary medicine anywhere it could. Obviously, Che did not design the intricate innerworkings of Cuba’s current medical system. But he was followed by healers who wove additional designs into a fabric that now unfolds across the continents. At certain times in history, thousands or millions of people see similar images of a different future. If their ideas spread broadly enough during the hour that social structures are disintegrating, then a revolutionary idea can become a material force in building a new world.

A version of this article appeared in the June print issue of Monthly Review.Join the debate on FacebookMore articles by:DON FITZ

Don Fitz is on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought, where this article first appeared. He was the 2016 candidate of the Missouri Green Party for Governor.  He can be reached at: fitzdon@aol.com.

June 4, 2020 (haaretz.com)

The pandemic is liable to worsen, ecological disasters loom and technological surveillance will terminate democracy. Salvation will come only by reorganizing human society. A conversation with the radical – and anxious – philosopher Slavoj Zizek

Slavoj Zizek.

This is not an easy time for Slavoj Zizek. Quite the opposite, and he’s the first to admit it. Reoccurring panic attacks incapacitate him for hours at a time and, unlike in the past, the nights have stopped providing him with an easy escape. His sleep is wracked by nightmares of what the future holds for humanity. There are days when he fantasizes about being infected by the coronavirus. At least, that way all of the uncertainty would come to an end, or so he imagines. Finally, he would be able to cope with the virus concretely, instead of continuously being haunted by it, as some sort of a spectral entity.

Our conversation begins with him in the interviewer’s seat. “What’s happening there? How do you survive? Do you stay in the apartment? Do people go out? How is it in Israel, can you swim again?” His questions come in rapid-fire succession, and then stop as quickly and abruptly as they started, and then he apologizes: He’s worried that his anxiety won’t allow him to complete the interview. But gradually he hits his stride.

We’re speaking in the wake of the publication last month of his new book, “Pandemic! COVID-19 Shakes the World,” which he wrote at lightning speed, in just a few weeks. It’s unmistakably Zizek: Its pages are a bag full of tricks, and provocative, as always. Still, it’s not the most impressive work he’s produced. Mirroring his state of mind, the book is a conceptual maelstrom, an unpolished sprawl of fragments of ideas, not all of which are fully developed. However, criticism along those lines is liable to miss the heart of the matter: This is an attempt by one of the leading philosophers of our time to address the broadest possible public as quickly as possible, while we are still at a crossroads.

He’s one of the very few living intellectuals who need no introduction. Still, it’s hard to refrain from describing the phenomenon that answers to the name of Slavoj Zizek. A philosopher, a cultural critic, a dynamo of ideas who loathes political correctness and bashes left and right with equal abandon. He leaps between Kant and Hegel, Freud and Lacan, deconstructing everything he encounters: historical events, political movements, theological treatises, films, symphonies, technological developments and Coca-Cola ads. This is the stuff of his charismatic solo performances in interviews, lectures, documentary films and of course his books.

He’s been tagged the “Elvis of culture theory,” “the greatest philosopher of the New Left” and “the most dangerous philosopher in the West.” He has plenty of advocates, but also no few critics who have wondered if he isn’t just a philosopher clown, “the Borat of the philosophers,” as one journalist once suggested. Be that as it may, in the past decade he has featured on Foreign Policy magazine’s list of the world’s 100 leading thinkers. He is that rarest of phenomena: a celebrity philosopher.

Not getting it

At age 71, Zizek is currently closeted in his home in Ljubljana, the capital of Slovenia, with his fourth wife, the Slovene writer and journalist Jela Krecic, who is three decades younger than him. During the past couple of weeks the epidemic seems to have faded in his country, with only two or three new cases being reported daily. But Zizek, who spoke to Haaretz via Skype, is in no hurry to breathe a sigh of relief.

Let’s start with how you’re feeling these days.

“Still alive. I’m so-so, depressed as always.”

What is it that worries you so much?

“What worries me lately is what I would call similar mass psychological mood shifts in different places. Until just recently there was quarantine paranoia, and suddenly the atmosphere magically changed: ‘Oh, maybe it’s not so serious, maybe it’s not so bad.’ The right-wing nationalist government in Slovenia wants to score points from this, as if life should be allowed to return to normal. The prime minister, Janez Jansa, who is a close friend of Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban, presents himself as the father of Slovenian independence. Now his motto will be, ‘I saved Slovenia two times – from communism and from the virus.’”

Sounds familiar.

“Yes, I understood something similar is happening in Israel. I think this is a dangerous moment. I detect a sinister logic behind it. It’s something like, ‘Who knows what will be in the autumn with the second wave, so let’s live the little bit of freedom we can get now.’ It’s a ‘Kill Bill’ moment, as I noted in my book.”

Zizek likens the coronavirus crisis to the concluding scene in Quentin Tarantino’s film “Kill Bill: Volume 2.” During the final confrontation, the heroine strikes the evil Bill in several places, causing his heart to explode after he takes a few steps. According to Zizek, the moment that elapses between the blows and the death resembles the state of the global capitalist system now, after the blows it took at the height of the pandemic.

On the other hand, in many places the epidemic has in fact faded.

“We are more and more disoriented. There is a little good news, but at the same time there are new dimensions to the virus, and new variations that might turn out to be more dangerous. We now have this fake return to normal. The really frustrating thing is this lack of basic orientation. It’s the absence of what [the philosopher and literary critic] Fredric Jameson calls ‘cognitive mapping’ – having a general idea of the situation, where it is moving and so on. Our desire to function requires some kind of clear coordinates, but we simply, to a large extent, don’t know where we are.”

You write in your new book, “There is no return to normal, the new ‘normal’ will have to be constructed on the ruins of our old lives.” But what if the peak of the epidemic is behind us? Maybe the world won’t change so fast.

“It’s so frustrating, all these myths we desperately tried to cling to. First ‘the summer heat will make it better,’ then ‘in the fall there will be a vaccine,’ then ‘we will achieve herd immunity.’ All that is disappearing, and the virus looks like it is here to stay. What happens if there is a second wave at the same time that there’s a flu wave? We had the illusion that ‘one month of quarantine and then life will go back to normal.’ That is over, so now we’re confronting the real problem: how to build a new world in these conditions.”

‘I don’t agree with those who claim that now is no time for politics, that we should mobilize to survive. No! Now is a great time for politics, because the world in its current form is disappearing.’

In his book, Zizek recalls the warnings of scientists after the SARS and Ebola epidemics. Persistently, we were told that the outbreak of a new epidemic was only a matter of time, but instead of preparing for the various scenarios we escaped into apocalypse movies. Zizek enumerates different scenarios of looming catastrophes, most of them consequences of the climate crisis, and calls for tough decisions to be made now.

In the end, all roads lead to global warming.

“I want to quote the French philosopher Bruno Latour, even though philosophically, I’m not on his side. He said that the coronavirus crisis is just a dress rehearsal for future problems that await us in the form of global warming, epidemics and other troubles. I don’t think this is necessarily a pessimistic view, it’s simply realistic. So many people have been warning us about this – there will be epidemics and ecological disasters – and now we know what it looks like. We need to stop thinking through a capitalist prism. I don’t agree with those who claim that now is no time for politics, that we should just mobilize to survive these dangers. No! Now is a great time for politics, because the world in its current form is disappearing. Scientists will just tell us, ‘If you want to play it safe, keep this level of quarantine,’ or whatever. But we have a political decision to make, and we are offered different options.”

Let’s talk about what you suggest.

“What if we will need another lockdown, even longer? Or multiple lockdowns? It’s a sad prospect, but we should get ready to live in some kind of permanent state of emergency. What we should fear now is a perfect storm: a health, economic and mental health crisis. You know, Marxists like to make fun of the state mechanisms of oppression and domination, but we desperately need an efficient state apparatus. I think we’re entering a new era. This virus doesn’t mean everything is over, but we need to reorganize our social life.”

What will that societal reorganization look like?

“We should focus on what is crucial, which is, first, health care. The coronavirus epidemic is a universal crisis. In the long term, states cannot preserve themselves in a safe bubble while the epidemic rages all around. We need coordinated efforts, centralized at least in some sense, and we need to get ready for long periods of infection. We shouldn’t think in terms of money when it comes to health. Materially, we have the means to organize some kind of global health care. If we don’t, our global unity is liable to disappear, and it could be the end of globalization as we know it. People will continue to die in certain places, at the same time that others try to continue functioning as isolated bubbles. Australia and New Zealand are trying to establish their own joint bubble, but I don’t think this will work. Every country has a right to protect its citizens, but it’s dangerous to see this approach as a solution, because in this way the long-term threat will remain.”

What is the solution?

“Globalization today shouldn’t mean abolishing quarantines and so on, it should mean tightly coordinating procedures and helping each other. That’s the life-and-death question: Will we be able as humanity to coordinate our resources in order to confront together what looms ahead, or will this logic of bubbles continue to predominate?”

Away with fashion

For starters, Zizek believes that international bodies need to be strengthened, among them the much maligned World Health Organization. In this spirit, he decided to donate all the royalties from his new book to the organization Doctors Without Borders.

“The next serious problem I see is a food shortage,” he continues. “States are aware of it and I hope they’re getting ready. At the moment, we are living off old stocks. Now it’s the spring harvest, and in Europe they have a problem. In France, for example, most of the spring harvest is done by people from other European countries, but now borders are closed. Who will do the work? The WHO is constantly warning that the pandemic could lead to mass starvation, so we need to reorganize our agriculture and food distribution.”

One thing that riles Zizek is the concern being shown by many for nonessential industries. “People say we need to revitalize the economy, and I say: Forget about the economy we have now. We have to treat simply as irrelevant things like the fashion industry, the need to have a new car every two years, or whatever. It’s tragic, I know, that all kinds of big companies are in deep shit, but are they worth saving?”

In your book you suggest reinventing communism, such that it will provide a solution to all our problems, now and in the future. Can you elaborate on this?

“The formula proposed by Marx and Engels was, ‘From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs’! Yes! But this will not be in the way Marx meant it, where everyone will have a comfortable life, with whatever they need, and choose their creative job and so on. My formula is much more brutal, and darker. The state should simply guarantee that nobody actually starves, and perhaps this even needs to be done on an international scale, because otherwise you will get refugees. For our part, we need to forget about cars, air travel, fashion – and everyone should give back to society according to their ability. This means, for one thing, that the state should be given a certain right to mobilize people when needed. Can you imagine any other way to solve the problems we face?”

‘Materially, we have the means to organize some kind of global health care. If we don’t, our global unity is liable to disappear, and it could be the end of globalization as we know it.’

I’m not sure that idea will get much support, especially not in the individualistic West.

“I am not some evil old communist, and I don’t have any great communist dreams. We don’t need a communist party exercising tight control for this. I hope it’s clear that I don’t mean what we usually associate with 20th-century communism, or the weird hybrid forms that exist in countries such as North Korea and Cuba, or the fusion between despotic communism and brutal capitalism that is practiced in China and Vietnam. That’s why I use the expression ‘war communism,’ to describe a situation in which society is on the edge and the point is to organize a minimal, decent survival.”

If we examine the new left – those who recognize the seriousness of the climate crisis and promote such ideas as universal medical insurance and a basic income for everyone – there is truly a momentum of ideas that were once considered off the wall. But it seems to me that, even so, the road to the dark communism you are proposing is still very long.

“People tell me, ‘You’re crazy, you exaggerate,’ but aren’t governments already thinking in these terms, already doing it? Look at what even Trump had to do. He gave billions to ordinary people, and despite the fact that he gave even more to save corporations, we should be aware that this is no longer capitalistic market logic; we changed the horizon and it’s difficult, it’s a risky experiment.”

There was a rescue package in 2008, too, but more than a decade later capitalism is still very much alive.

“We live in a time when many things are possible and more strange things will happen. The economic problems will compel those in power to take actions that before this crisis appeared to be radically leftist measures. Even conservatives are having to do things that run against their principles. There are some radical things that only a right-winger can do – if a left-winger does them, he will be considered a traitor. Nixon made peace with China, and de Gaulle accepted Algerian independence – while the socialist government before him didn’t dare do it. Take Trump’s meeting with Kim Jong Un: If Obama had done it, he would have been branded a communist puppet.”

That’s an argument that Israelis can relate to, because we remember that it was right-wing leaders who removed the settlements in Sinai and the Gaza Strip. On that note, do you share the view that the epidemic will serve as a cover for Israel to annex areas of the West Bank and deepen the occupation?

“Maybe I’m too much a humanist utopian, but secretly I hope that the coronavirus crisis will scare the shit out of Israelis and Palestinians and seduce them into, ‘Okay, let’s try a little bit more of collaboration and mutual help.’ I know that now, in Gaza, textile factories are working full time making masks even for Israel. In this regard I’m almost a classical liberal capitalist – ‘commerce is good,’ you know? You begin by exporting masks to Israel, who knows what can happen… I don’t expect a big peace conference, let’s begin slowly by developing commercial links, without thinking in terms of total peace or a fight to the death. Let’s say, ‘Yes, maybe there will be a point in the future when we’ll try to kill each other, but until then – why don’t we sell you some masks, you’ll sell us some water or whatever?’ I believe in short-term pragmatic gestures, which can lead to something. I’m not a complete utopian, but maybe.”

The China syndrome

Although Zizek speaks of the need for a strong state, he is disturbed by the possibility that the West will follow China’s example with regard to citizen surveillance and the elimination of privacy.

“As I always said, even before the coronavirus, with all these new techniques of digital control, we’re approaching a new model. I can smell it in the air. You’re not openly controlled, you still appear to retain your personal freedoms, you order this and that food, you can do whatever you want in your own little isolated world, you can have your personal perversions. But in practice the control isn’t any less tight than in the Chinese model – maybe even more so. In China at least nobody has great democratic illusions, you know you’re tightly controlled by the party, the state apparatus and so on. The mechanisms of control in the West don’t work like that; I am very wary of the authorities’ cooperation with Google.”

Perhaps you could explain your concern, because as I understand it, you’re not just talking about surveillance and the infringement of privacy.

“I’m talking about what Naomi Klein calls the ‘Screen New Deal.’ The big technology companies like Google and Microsoft, which enjoy vast government support, will enable people to maintain Telexistence. You undergo a medical examination via the web, you do your job digitally from your apartment, your apartment becomes your world. I find this vision horrific.”

So those who see this change as an act of liberation are wrong?

“First, it’s class distinction at its purest. Maybe half the population, not even that, could live in this secluded way, but others will have to ensure that this digital machinery is functioning properly. Today, apart from the old working class, we have a ‘welfare working class,’ all those caregivers, educators, social workers, farmers. The dream of this program, the Screen New Deal, is that physically, at least, this class of caregivers disappears, they become as invisible as possible. Interaction with them will be increasingly reduced and be digital.”

In the book you take note of the price that the privileged class, too, will pay in this situation.

‘It’s tragic, I know, that all kinds of big companies are in deep shit, but are they worth saving?’

“The irony here is that those who are privileged, those who, in this scenario, will be able to live in this perfect, secluded way, will also be totally controlled digitally. Their morning urine will be examined, and so on with every aspect of their life. Take the new analysis capabilities that can test you and provide results [for the coronavirus] in 10-15 minutes. I can imagine a new form of sexuality in this totally isolated world, in which I flirt with someone virtually, and then we say, ‘Okay, let’s meet in real life and test each other – if we’re both negative, we can do it.’”

Perhaps above all, Zizek is uneasy about the power that will be concentrated in the hands of the few. “Can you imagine how much power will be concentrated in the hands of the digital giants when they enjoy state collaboration? As Julian Assange wrote, we will get a privately controlled combination of Google and something like the NSA. So this is another reason that I am against the Screen New Deal; they will totally control our lives, and democracy in any meaningful sense will thereby be abolished. Maybe we need some sort of mechanism to cope with the pandemic, but it should be controlled publicly and transparently, because it’s our money. That can be done.”

Zizek enunciates each syllable of that last sentence separately, as though he were speaking in the town square. Possibly he misses the period when he addressed large audiences and forgot momentarily that he was speaking with one individual.

“We can be opposed to this [monitoring] without engaging in any health risks,” he continues. “I’m not saying, ‘No control, walk in the parks freely, embrace each other and so on.’ But it’s not necessary for this system that tracks us and so on to function in this nontransparent way.”

Suddenly he recalls an interview he read with the entrepreneur Elon Musk, and once again he’s fired up. “He talked about the progress being made by his company, Neuralink [which seeks to enable a direct hookup between computers and the human brain]. He said that 10 years from now we will no longer need spoken language, because we’ll have direct, brain-to-brain, computer-mediated communication. I am skeptical about the scientific feasibility of this. But I think the timing of the interview is highly significant, during the coronavirus crisis, because the tendency is the same as with the Screen New Deal: to bypass material reality, and to establish a kind of digitally mediated direct communication in the virtual universe.”

And you see this as a perverse idea.

“This is what I really fear, the combination of viral and ecological catastrophes and the subsequent self-isolation, with these escapes into a digital world, where we’re directly connected to a computer. Combine this with Neuralink and you get a Matrix-like vision of our future.”

So people who may think things are bad now don’t know what’s in store for them.

“I like to use Stalin’s ridiculous answer, when he was asked which deviation was worse – right wing or left wing. He answered, ‘They are both worse.’ You know this nonsense?” Zizek asks, with rolling laughter. “So, if you ask me which way is worse, the Trump way – brutal capitalism – or the Screen New Deal, I think both are worse. As I said, the problems we’re facing are desperate, aren’t they? But excuse me for talking too much.”

Screen fatigue

In his book “Beyond the Pleasure Principle,” Freud referred to an enigma that troubled him deeply: Soldiers who returned wounded from World War I were more successful in processing their traumatic experiences than those who came back without a scratch. The soldiers who were physically unscathed tended to have recurring dreams about the war’s horrors. In “Pandemic!,” Zizek takes a Lacanian approach and proposes that a distinction be made between reality – the social and material space we inhabit – and the real, “a spectral entity, invisible and for that very reason appearing as all-powerful.” According to Zizek, it is only when the real becomes part of our reality – for example, in the case of infection by the virus – that it becomes “something we can deal with.”

Accordingly, Zizek divides workers during the crisis into those who encounter the virus and its consequences as part of their daily reality – medical staff, welfare-service people, farmers, the food industry – and those who are secluded in their homes, for whom the epidemic remains in the realm of the Lacanian spectral and omnipresent. Yet, both groups are condemned to weariness: the essential workers because of their high-stress work and its dangers, and the people confined to their home because of the lassitude that engulfs those who observe the end of their familiar world, as it is projected from the screens.

As for Zizek himself, his new book appears to be not only an attempt to sound his voice and be counted in the category of the essential workers, but also a personal struggle against symptoms that were observed in people who were locked down at home during the recent confinement. To a certain extent, he is already practiced in this. He opens the appendix to the book with a “personal confession”: He likes the idea of being confined to his apartment. Even when he travels, he prefers “to stay in a nice hotel room and ignore all the attractions of the place I’m visiting.” He would rather read a good essay about a famous painting than see the painting in a crowded museum. Still, “being obliged to confine myself [is] more difficult.”

“The fact that everyone is behaving like me doesn’t make it easier,” he tells me. “Paradoxically, it is even more painful and more troubling for me. In the meantime, as I warned you, I am already exhausted. You see, this is exactly my problem – I get too excited and then comes a bout of depression.”

Then perhaps one last question, please. In the book you call for a philosophical revolution. What will be the future of academia in general and philosophy in particular in the brave new world that awaits us?

“I don’t know what will happen with academia. Will humanities survive and so on? Humanities professors in the United States tell me that many of their students feel that the world is falling apart, so why should they now be interested in 19th-century literature and philosophy? It’s a sad world.”

Although he had wanted to conclude the conversation, Zizek gets carried away momentarily: “It sometimes makes me cry to watch old films, because they take place in a world that, at least for some time, will not be here. It’s a lost world. How will literature and cinema reinvent themselves? Will they still try to fake the old reality?”

What about philosophy?

“I think philosophical reflection will be needed, even if for no other reason than because the reality in which we’re living is dissolving. It’s no longer the same world, so people are totally at a loss. Look at what’s already happening in the United States, all this racism exploding, and of course antisemitism. Philosophy, or whatever you want to call it – reflections on the meaning of life – will have to be there to allow people to orient themselves in the new world.”