The roots of medicalized fascism pt. 1

On secular ideology at the end of empire

What is a society?

Human beings are made to live and interact in tribal bands of, at most, about 150 people. Reams of data support something akin to this assertion, and not least our experiential fact that this seems to be the upper limit of the set of people we can effectively remember and have meaningful long-term relationships with.

Sami in Härjedalen

We’ve evolved towards and with this tribal lifestyle for, arguably, a couple of millions of years. The urban patterns of human existence, in most places just a couple of generations old, have not even begun scratching the surface of our DNA.

So society, to us, is basically the band. The tribe. The clan. People to whom we are bound by blood and fidelity, generally for life. We’re “configured” to these sorts of immediate and permanent relationships.

Our cognitive approach to society, our experience and apprehension of it, is therefore an extension of this fundamental model, rooted in our ancient human nature. This of course goes a long way to explain most of the disorders of civilized life, individually as well as collectively, but that’s somewhat beside the point here.

Since our mental map of society is always modelled after this small, tight-knit tribe, it inevitably follows that abstract and impersonal higher-level constructs such as the state, the nation, the kingdom, or what have you, are always a form of usurpation of the immediate and natural social world. These are artifices, simulacra, that mimic the band or the family and interpose themselves between us and them, and which thus appropriate our natural human energies of care, support and industry that we would normally direct towards those around us. You build a career and struggle to amass status points in an abstract network felt to be much more real than your elderly parents tucked away out of sight in the care home. You nurture and protect nameless inmates in the private healthcare system while your children spend most of their waking hours among strangers in daycare.

The hierarchical social orders of civilization are a kind of institutional parasite that feeds upon our natural social intentionalities to sustain itself.

(Incidentally, this is the root of alienation and of the appropriation of surplus value analyzed by Marxist economics.)

(Edward Hopper. (1927). Automat.)

So we’re born and raised in a hopefully nurturing environment among loving persons close to us and each other. Parents, siblings, cousins, grandparents, friends, neighbors &c. And when the child meets still new people in the village around her, she approaches them as some sort of mythical heroes. They’re embodied mysterious absolute truths, archetypes of deep reality imbued with the vastness of an incomprehensible past. Great-grandmother is an eternal fixture of love and security in the yellow house upon the hill; an old friend of her father that they encounter together on a stroll is a manifest immutable pipe-smoking reality as strange and inexorable as the very blueness of the sky.

On this naive (yet inexpressably and profoundly true) and immediate apprehension of the robust and living reality around us, is then projected the monolithic framework of the modern social order. Of mass society. It’s piecemeal, and operates by a step-by-step association between the intimate social reality and the abstractions of the hierarchical system. The network of friends and family members amicably indicate “our society” in outward concentric circles. Our school. The neighborhood association. Our city council. Our healthcare. Our police and our government. Our nation, our lebensraum, and our manifest destiny.

And in modern mass society, the simulacra of these latter constructs have almost fully replaced actual interpersonal relationships to the isolated, semi-transient individual, whose familial ties are generally smashed to bits.

There’s much talk about the emergent formation of “parasocial relationships”, specifically in relation to social media, but the phenomenon in question is much older and deeper. A similar sort of pseudo-relationship is formed to the abstractions of the social artifices of civilization, all in all a sort of institutional superstructure that builds upon and usurps the immediate social realities and the mythical narratives that normally bind them together in dynamic mutual interchange. While this sort of institutional attachment is more or less embryonic in traditional or pre-technological societies (perhaps contained by the immediate presence of robust social ties), it becomes fully dominant in atomized mass society.

In this new situation, the equally new myths are disconnected from (the increasingly suppressed) deep, lived social reality, and instead projected upon parasocial simulacra with real people reduced to mere spectators. Actual human beings now at best bear only a passive relationship to the fundamental narratives of society.

While a person like the village smith in a traditional society used to be an actual reflection of something divine and mysterious, violently forging the treasures of the Earth in his dark and dangerous abode; while the uncle returning poverty-stricken and starved from America was in some immediate way actually the prodigal son of the New Testament and Christ in the flesh, dad’s old friend is now no longer as immutable as the color of the sky. He’s just another silently desperate middle-aged man among a billion interchangeable others, disconnected from the overarching mythological framework. Just meat and no magic.

(Vǫlundr the Smith, chieftain of the Elves (Poetic Edda, ca 800 AD, 19th century illustration))

The resulting situation lifts up our “parasocial ties” to the system’s social artifices to an almost complete predominance. The abstractions crowd out actual relationships to other people, especially in the alienated conditions of the urban environment; especially in a hyper-mediated context of modern propaganda where we primarily relate to technological reproductions.

That loneliness inside the crowd is perhaps the most terrible ordeal of modern man; that loneliness in which he can share nothing, talk to nobody, and expect nothing from anybody, leads to severe personality disturbances. For it, propaganda, encompassing Human Relations, is an incomparable remedy. It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness. Propaganda is the true remedy for loneliness. It also corresponds to deep and constant needs, more developed today, perhaps, than ever before: the need to believe and obey, to create and hear fables, to communicate in the language of myths. It also responds to man’s intellectual sloth and desire for security … (Ellul, J. (1962). Propaganda. Ch. 3:2)

And so these abstractions become substitutes for our friends, lovers and family. There are many “collective ideologies”, many facets of the system’s interconnected set of pseudo-social simulacra that manifest as roles which we can relate to and identify with, and through which the “well-adjusted” citizen internalizes society at large and comes to think of it as his own.

When I was about four or five, I was going to build a spaceship with… A candle and a bunch of dry sticks. Rather than propulsion (which obviously would have been the strategic choice), my main concern was how to get back to Sweden from orbit since I didn’t really know my way around the world map, so I had my dad sketch the outline of Scandinavia on a post-it.

Science with a capital “S” was one such collective ideology I internalized early on, through a narrative of the inexorable march of “research” and technology providing the key to interstellar colonization and astonishing transhumanist augmentation. The police was another, as for most boys, and Medicine I think came last. I remember some late winter during early sunset, sitting in my second-floor room at a 486 PC learning the Latin names of the parts of the human skeleton. This exercise was supposedly in preparation for an imaginary medical school some ten years in the future. I was mesmerized by the discipline’s power to define, to measure and to know intimately the occult workings of the human body.

And one aspect of the myth of medicine that stood out was the notion that “medical science” actually knew just about everything possible to know about the human body, how to perfect and support this flesh-machine, and how to protect it from disease. The myth of medicine was thus joined at the hip to the authority of Science, and sort of embodied its power and mystery, bringing us into immediate healing contact with the sacred source of redemption.

Medicine namely holds a special place in the mythological landscape of secular modernity. Just like the cult of Apollo of the Greek and Roman pantheon, originally a god of health and protection from evil, the enterprise of industrial medicine provides a ritual space for strengthening existential security and apotropaic (protective, warding) magical observances. And while the classical world gave one a plethora of options towards these or similar ends, medicine almost uniquely performs these sorts of functions today, single-handedly carrying most of the burden of providing existential and psychological assurance and peace of mind.

The stadium of Delphi, every four years hosting the Pythian games in honor of Apollo from the 500s BC until the 300s AD

The resulting situation is one wherein medicine becomes key to value-formation. Medicine, broadly speaking, becomes not only an expression of ethics, but a central determinant thereof. It becomes a “moral enterprise”, as Ivan Illich argues, and comes to itself shape our categories of good and evil.

“The permissibility of abortion has nothing to do with ethics”, I once saw being argued. “It’s about [medical] science”. A contradictory statement at the face of it, but a quite telling sentiment. The person’s intuition evidently being that medical science simply describes reality in such a definite sense that all speculations of ethics and philosophy become moot. The authority of science being transposed into explicit moral guidance, the is becoming an ought by fiat.

Something similar was being expressed by the pharmacist clique I encountered at university. While discussing recreational use of benzodiazepines and ADHD drugs, someone remarked that these substances were “designed” for very specific and healthful ends, and should not be brought outside of the narrow context provided for us by the near-omniscient authority of medicine.

A rather adorably naive perspective, considering the contemporary structures of R/D and marketing in the pharmaceutical sector, as well as the actual development history of the drugs in question. Benzos began as failed leftovers from a scrapped research project, showing potential as a substitute for the then widely abused barbiturates, and let’s just say that speed wasn’t exactly meticulously designed to correct an amphetamine deficit in the brains of non-compliant teenagers unwilling to submit to institutional formation.

But here was that same exaggerated perception of the competence and benevolence of medical science, with an ethical imperative hiding somewhere in the undergrowth of its precepts. The similarities to the cult of Apollo are striking.

You see, to the end-user, to the “consumer”, as well as to the cadres of glorified drug dealers, it’s not really about actual medical science. Notwithstanding its actual track record, permeating the role and function of this institution in our society is something quite like songs of warding and rituals of protective magic. This is evident in the prescription line at the pharmacy, where lonely and frightened people revel in the “therapeutic contact” with the kind and pleasant apotecharies. It’s evident in countless examples of pharmaceutical malpractice, such as when dangerous antipsychotics with mile-long lists of side effects are prescribed as a sleep aid (since one of those myriad side effects happens to be “drowsiness”).

And this is one of the core reasons as to how an entirely useless and positively hazardous substance like statins is prescribed to almost a full third of the adult US population, most of whom honestly believe it’s keeping them fit and healthy. It’s why SSRIs are the go-to treatment for a plethora of “mood disorders” in spite of their purported mechanism now evidently being both unattainable by the drug as such, as well as unable to produce its desired effects, all the while the actual efficacy of the drugs is on par with placebo.

Silent Hill 2, (Brookhaven Hospital). 2002.

It’s also why we’ve so readily accepted an incipient biopolitical authoritarianism in the wake of the covid narrative, with a generalized notion of “health” as the unique highest good, as the lone anchor point of anything even akin to applied ethics.

If until now this cultic practice was, like every other liturgy, episodic and limited in time, the unexpected phenomenon which we are at present witnessing is that it has become permanent and ubiquitous. The cultic practice no longer concerns taking medications, being visited by a doctor, or undergoing surgery. Rather, the entire life of human beings must become, at every instant, the site of an uninterrupted cultic celebration. The enemy (the virus) is omnipresent and must be fought constantly and ceaselessly (Agamben. (2020). Where are we now? The epidemic as politics.)

The covid situation was revolutionary. The incredible barrage of the marketing apparatus purified these already influential tendencies towards the medicalization of life, elevating health within the framing of industrial medicine to the issue of utmost concern. The isolation further catalyzed all of this, rendering our parasocial ties to the system’s abstractions almost completely unchallenged by reality.

And the resulting situation is not only an ideological outgrowth of what’s manifest in classical Fascism, but indeed a more complete actualization of its basic principles than anything we’ve ever seen. The covid-era biopolitics are truly totalitarian in the proper sense of the word, increasingly grafted to mythical institutions such as the utopian rebirth narrative of climate change mitigation.

As a background, biological life itself is structured as the supreme value of society, where physical life and its flourishing is all that matters. The secular worldview becomes auxiliary to this project, affirming how there’s really nothing except physical existence, and no other value apart from its perfection. Health. The health of Gaia, the health of the state. The absence of whatever is designated unclean and pathological.

And the whole edifice becomes totalitarian in that there’s absolutely no corrective to the view within the dominant culture. There’s no pantheon of bickering gods, no realization that Apollo also has a trickster side to him and sometimes brings disease.

There’s no actual quest for the transcendent within secular modernity’s horizons, so health and physical perfection become the only deep values. I wrote elsewhere that, in this situation, paradoxically,

… a strategic reintroduction of the specter of death as a looming threat, will therefore at least superficially address society’s fundamental lack of meaning, because it will supercharge and refocus our desires towards temporal existence and biological life, as well as the political powers which shape and sustain them. In a context where life is devoid of transcendent meaning, and death is both sanitized and hidden from view, the reintroduction of death in a sense eroticizes life and makes it acutely relevant again, which inevitably will expand and reinforce the goals of biopower, which governs our health and provides safety and reassurance.

Open up your newspaper. It’s evident how all the pressing issues of our day are piece by piece being subsumed under the auspices of the incipient biopolitical ideology. Apart from obvious institutional arrangements such as the continuance of the health emergency under the label of “monkey pox”, the climate change narrative is increasingly connected to health concerns and not only to metaphors of physical fitness. True believers tout renewable energy as “healing the Earth”. The foreign policy of the empire’s enemies is framed as mental illness, and the Harvard Political Review requests a “vaccine for political nihilism” amid a plethora of portrayals of conspiracist wrongthink as some form of clinical insanity.

Of course, with no other deep values apart from physical health and its perfection, all meaningful forms of political dissent will tend to be pathologized. Ideas will increasingly not be afforded the dignity of being right or wrong, because we don’t really work with those categories anymore.

Ideas will now rather be thought of as either proper and healthy, or in some sense bad for you, casually rejected if they can be labelled as unclean. And if you’re in possession of pathological ideas, well, you will then in some way or another have to be cured of them, lest the mind-virus spreads.