Viral Authoritarianism
How so? I wasn't thinking about it in that connection. It interested me for two reasons: one, it suggests the possibility of a kind of "reformist" absolutism, that can "inhabit" any system and build up its authority structures; two, the inability of the Western democracies to put up even a feeble defense of their systems against even so unimpressive a challenger--just about anything you could say about China could just as easily be said about the West. But what do you have in mind?
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Well, the anarchist imaginary leads to the totalitarian state--there's always some violation of natural equality that needs to be suppressed. Totalitarianism is when you imagine the entire people rising up and remedying such a violation. At a certain point, if China wants to normalize a hierarchical order, they'll have to jettison even the rhetorical socialism, and, of course, we need to think through state control over the economy carefully. I still think the best way to approach that is through constraints, so all exchanges embed and refer to sovereignty precisely while going their own way in the space maintained by the sovereign.
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I don't know much about Manson, but in my understanding he was chock full of "charisma." Charisma is clearly a form of power. Now, my authority here is Philip Rieff, whom GAers unafraid of dipping their toes in reactionary water, might find interesting. Rieff has a book entitled Charisma: The Gift of Grace and How it Has Been Taken From Us (very cheap on Amazon or AbeBooks), and he argues that charisma was originally a product of abstention and self-discipline--the one who could withstand temptation better than others, obey a higher imperative, exercised the power of charisma (which really means "gift") over his fellows. However, the modern age reverses this, and redefines charisma as transgression--obeying the law, being moral, resisting desire, etc., that's easy and makes you easily controlled--a sucker. The one worth following now is the one who breaks the law, ridicules convention, upsets the squares. That's freedom, that's the source of a truer insight and more authentic experience. I suspect that would go some way toward explaining Manson.
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"generational" talk is always a marketing strategy, so the question would be, what kind of marketing strategy ("media creation") constructed Manson in this way. One prominent narrative in the late 60s was that the earlier, pacifistic, liberal social movements (civil rights, anti-war, etc.) had become violent, anti-social and revolutionary. Obviously there were plenty of events conforming to this narrative--SDS becoming the Weathermen, for example. It seems to me the Manson murders were slotted into this narrative; then, it's a question of which details, what context, which responses, made it easy to do so.
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Well, he does know which way the wind blows.