24-June-2022 –
05-July-2022
While reading about the fascists, many of whom were soldiers, I realized armor is inimical to life.
Those killers were taught to work and obey regardless of pain. This teaching was like forging, their armor formed by shame's fire and deprivation's force. This armor was to replace their skin because feeling was a liability.
I could describe their lessons' physics. Beatings, cold, exhaustion, drownings, sleeplessness. But torture is practical so men gladly promulgate its methods. I'll talk instead about the words.
The fascists were forced to hear words as weapons. Their torturers (superiors) stated, screamed, and whispered words built to shame. Words were meant to make men feel worthless, and they worked. The listeners were now incapable of finding pride outside pain, death, and obliteration. The world collapsed. Language helped them feel less and less. Gradually the men got numb enough to be good killers, their armor resplendent.
Fascists were tortured into existence.
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We inherit this tradition of loving armor and weapons.
What is soft is bad and should be hard. Hard is good because hard is strong and strength is impenetrable, immovable, rigid. You must not yield. Winning is never changing.
Tradition would have us live without feeling. The truth is simple, like a rock: life is staying alive and to stay alive you must be insensitive, linear, purposive. To live you must be a bullet.
Thus it is proper to armor yourself against others. Everything not you is an assault. The market converts this fact into growth. Bellum omnium contra omnes, Thomas Hobbes's theory of everything: the war of all against all. This is proven by history and science and custom. We know what we are, which is whatever we could never be.
This is fascism's story.
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The story is bullshit, but the story shows us this truth: language can be weaponized.
The weapon of language has two forms.
Language can cut, its epithets knifelike. The cutting phrase makes pain immediately, reducing a person to an object which can be used or discarded.
Language can poison, its vapors named law, policy, truth. Definition deletes community, argument erases history. This poison dissolves all but memory (though trauma often finishes the work).
The knife is cheap and ready, but the poison is complex. The poison requires our belief in its reality. We must name it rule or norm or wisdom, then respect it. This respect is often proportional to the poison’s lethality. (No surprise that men worship and "protect" documents as if they were perfect lovers: unchanging, accommodating, mute to misinterpretation.)
The construction of the fascist shows us that every insult is an ode to hierarchy and a metonym for murder. The insult helps its speaker violently maintain their belief in superiority. The insult hurts and hardens the listener; if survived, it reinforces their armor. Yet if the insult is heard often enough, if it is thought true often enough, then the insult becomes poison and knife. This insult destroys its host.
A simple proof: those suffering from the illness called depression insult themselves relentlessly because this helps them die.
The logical end of the insult is the logical end of fascism: murder.
We may so easily speak catastrophe.
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The insult takes many forms. We love and accept one of these forms. We call it teasing.
Teasing, we think, is insulting denuded of lethality. Teasing prevents hubris, checks ambition, catches the teaser and teased in the same web of reference. Teasing causes laughter and laughter's the best medicine.
And don't worry: the distinctions are clear. You tease your friends but insult your enemies. You insult who hurts you—you insult to hurt—but you tease whom you love. You tease them so that they love you.
These are the accepted ratios.
Against this I invite us to take seriously the experience of children. The teased child feels bad; the teased child hurts. Their stomach drops, their head heats, their skin sweats, their cheeks flush. Their eyes go down where they were once looking ahead.
Adults like to imagine this pain is a product of going too far; they like to imagine that, having grown up, they know the proper limits. Yet as inheritors of the fascist’s armor and weapons, adults want to hurt each other. Friends want to hurt each other. Spouses want to hurt spouses; siblings want to hurt siblings. Parents hurt children as a matter of course (this is the great diffuse factory in which fascism is made); children hurt parents carefully, knowing the danger.
Cats show plainly the pleasure of cruelty. We should admit that the human animal, no iconoclast, imagines limits in order to exceed them.
Thus the joy of teasing comes from knowing you might go too far. We enjoy teasing for its proximity to insulting—and so to power. We tease to taste power's danger; we tease to touch cruelties freely available to the powerful. Thousands of years of fascist inertia swaddle us in armor and gifts us weapons; we tease to learn their use.
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Love has nothing to do with combat.
We must risk the world which comes with feeling.
And we may practice living alive to pain with the plainest, most obvious love: kindness.
