CHRISTMAS IS COMING. Republicans push to gut food aid program that helps feed half of all infants in US... and they enjoy the suffering

I am republishing the following text I hesitated to publish last year for the explanation was horrible even for my self who has been documenting the rise of hatred in America. The usual economic explanations are not enough. Let's face it there is a "the joy of hating", ?the enjoyment of “sadism” or “death drive” the one that is nestled in the depths of the ?human brain. Their voters want to participate to the joy, the same one crowds felt when they applauded tortures and killing on the public square. A warning: they are on a rampage

This text is a quick translation and partly adapted from an article published by 'Cosmopolis A Review of Cosmopolitics Revue de cosmopolitique" 2022/3-4 under the title Nicole Morgan " Laissez faire et Laissezmourir . Eros and Thanatos" Un another text (complementary) on Les réseaux sociaux et la table d'ésope is being published in the same issue. (To be translated and published soon)

In October 2005, Le Monde Diplomatique[ii] translated an article by John Kenneth Galbraith, “The Art of Ignoring the Poor”. Published twenty years earlier in English by Harper's Magazine , the thought of the great economist had in no way lost its relevance or its clarity. He documented “one of the oldest human exercises: the process by which, over the centuries, we have undertaken to spare ourselves any guilty conscience about the poor”. For the policies of the West are rooted in this bad conscience, itself maintained and regulated by Christianity. In an article on the foundations of politics, Glenn Tinder reminds us that the word charity comes from the Latin Caritas which means "love". "Christian love, he writes, has a precise name , Agapé, different from other forms of love: Philia , friendship, Eros , passion. The origin of the charitable organizations that bear their name rests on this definition . [iii] The philosophers of the Enlightenment (Karl Marx included) tried ?to found altruism on other grounds (such as reason), but, Tinder tells us, the fact is that policies of modern secular states still maintain their deep roots in Agapé . He takes up here the themes of Carl Schmitt who undertook an analysis of the secularization of theological concepts in order to apply them to the theory of the “state”. According to this idea, the religious God becomes the judge, while the miracle becomes the exception. Modern state theory rests on secularized theological concepts. Luc Ferry has just taken up the theme with clarity in a podcast on philosophy and Christianity [iv] .

This is how the welfare state would have replaced almost all charitable organizations, redefining their modalities. Charity became an application of citizens' rights including economic rights, creating what Gosta Esping Anderson called "the world of the welfare state", a complex world of direct and indirect aid, varying from state to state. It is a displacement of power which has been felt as a loss for Churches. Admittedly, charitable nuns have continued to help the poorest, but we are a long way from the time when charitable orders organized the social field, as in the Middle Ages, financed by a powerful Church which owned a third of the land in Europe.[v]

Let's turn the pages of time and come to the America of Ayn Rand for whom, (we have written about it so much[vi] ), altruism is "a monstrous feeling" from whom the "parasites" profit of self interested corrupted ?bureaucrats have built a selfish empire: the State. Donald Trump calls “losers”. For Milton Friedman, more moderate in his vocabulary, they are a weight which slows down growth and becomes counterproductive. ?The solution? Leave it to the builders of growth and poverty will disappear, he says. Contemporary growth zealots named it “the fallout theory”. While waiting for those happy days, The laissez-faire should help the rich. ?December 2020 was the perfect illustration of this. The financial aid offered by the Republicans almost all goes to companies, which create jobs for all those who are ready to work.[vii]

Logically, altruistic religions would therefore have no place in this new social contract, and the evidence was on the way out. In 1966, Time magazine published an article on religion in the United States with an iconic cover " Is God Dead ??. This was pushing the trend towards economism a little too quickly. The United States remains a firmly religious country or I would say rather magical even if poll after poll, we speak of a faster decline especially among Catholics .

There is a very strong American exceptionalism, which lies partly in the fact that they are the most pious of all the rich Western democracies. In fact, across all major religions "Americans pray more often, are more likely to attend weekly church services, and place a greater emphasis on faith than adults in other affluent Western democracies, such as Canada, Australia and most European states, according to a recent study by Pew Research. For example, more than half of American adults (55%) say they pray daily, compared to 25% in Canada, 18% in Australia and 6% in Britain. (The average European country sits at 22%.) In fact, when it comes to their prayer habits, Americans are more like people in many poor, developing countries—notably South Africa (52%), the Bangladesh (57%) and Bolivia (56%) - than people in wealthier countries. It turns out that the United States is the only country out of 102 examined in the study to have above-average levels of prayer and wealth. In all other countries studied with a gross domestic product of more than $30,000 per person, less than 40% of adults say they pray every day. ?[viii]

We return to the paradoxical question: how to explain the extraordinary success of an ideology of radical selfishness that preaches love of wealth and total indifference to the poor with the Christian religion that is so present in the United States?

Easy to answer. These religious organizations which would be registered as sects in France for example, are not illegal in the US. Some are legitimized over time, others take on circus’s shows. Not only is it legal but these shows benefit from a special tax status. They don't pay taxes! For shrewd businessmen, this is a niche not to be missed. Is religious who calls himself religious and invokes God or Jesus or both (as a brand name). The business has become so successful that some churches have put the love of money in their gospel. The adoration of Donald Trump must be understood through this uniquely American phenomenon. Paula White, a famous TV evangelist, has "advised" Donald Trump for more than twenty years. Her message is constant and "popular" "The more money we make, the richer we are, the more proof that God loves us"[ix]

It's a transfer of power that suits everyone: laissez-faire no longer wants the state to play ‘sisters of charity” and the churches are only too happy to regain control of what they had lost: teaching and caring. The other aspect is a more complex though it can be summarized as follows: fundamentalist laissez-faire and Christian fundamentalism place moral responsibility solely on the individual. If the individual cannot find work, it is because he or she ?is lazy. And if he steals a piece of pizza because he's hungry, he's listening to the demon. The main thing is not only to free society from all responsibility towards him, but also to ensure that the pizza thief no longer steals the fruit of the entrepreneurs' labor. Fundamentalist laissez-faire needs a punitive social order. Fundamentalism is only too happy to offer its guilt services : private jails, a thriving business which recreates slavery.

We should go further. There is in Ayn Rand’s and her followers (She would love Musk) a call for blood, a call for punishing severely the poors. Paul Krugman saw it coming, admitting: “It's scary. The Nobel Prize in economics could not ?find the meaning of the economic measures imposed by the Bank for International Settlements (BIS ) which attacks the most fragile and the poor. This, he says, makes no economic sense. He says it very quickly at the end of an article “It seems that they are dealing with an imperative and deep need to inflict suffering, to expunge sin or something like that. He, always so clear and so precise, cannot find the words to say it. ?[x]

I will propose some concepts: "the joy of hating", ?the enjoyment of “sadism” or “death drive” the one that is nestled in the depths of the ?human brain, this deep feeling Henri Laborit described ?in L'Homme et la Ville : man, he argues continues to use his reptilian brain and his limbic system in order to maintain his dominance over other men and over nature . To confirm this domination, he needs to impose suffering, to see it and even to enjoy it. It is not a new idea “The purpose of punishment, says Hobbes, is not revenge but terror. Nietzsche wrote his strongest pages on this theme. We are far from the Utopian of Thomas More who likes nothing more ?than to ?do good. We are far from the noble savage” of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the Kantian ideal-man whose soul aspires to the good, culmination with Hegel which is a blind faith in moral progress and a soul’s aspiration to “grandeur”, the Dickens hope that one Christmas night, the old Scrooge will see the light.

But what if the old Scrooge, who did not give a hoot for little Timmy's welfare, had not been visited by the miraculous ghost of Christmas. What if the ?predatorial Scrooges of the world enjoyed destroying mountains, polluting a river, slaughtering animals and crushing ?cultures too weak to resist.

What if Freud and Jung had tried to warn us about the "death drive".

The idea of a death drive constitutive of psychic life celebrated its centenary in 2020 and we brought out for a moment the founding text Beyond the Pleasure Principle (1920). And yet nothing is more contemporary than this dialogue around Thanatos between Freud and none other than Einstein. Published simultaneously in German, English and French by the International Institute for Intellectual Cooperation, one of the many branches of the League of Nations, in 1933, the booklet Why War? is made up of two long letters - one from Einstein and the other from Freud. The two authors, who had met at the end of 1926, had remained in epistolary contact. In 1932, when the IICI asked Einstein to contribute to one of its "correspondence" volumes, it was he who proposed this exchange with Freud on the subject of war.

“It's Einstein, Paul Laurent Assoun tells us, who formulates the question – which is not indifferent to the dialectic that is thus being put in place. It falls to him indeed to identify the most important question in the order of civilization: "Is there a way of freeing men from the threat of war?" To tell the truth , Einstein wonders about the “path” (Weg) which made it possible to escape the fatality (Verhiingnis) of the war. The question thus posed in relation to the dramatization imposed on it by technical development, he turns to Freud as an expert capable of shedding light on the question from the angle of (his) profound knowledge of the instinctive life of man, conceding that for his part, as a physicist, "the usual direction." of his thought is not one that opens glimpses into the depths of human will and feeling.

Freud's answer was condescending. He teaches Einstein a lesson of psychoanalysis... coupled with a lesson in epistemology with a sparkle of comparative psychology. This is an opportunity to remind Einstein that physics cannot, any more than psychoanalysis, do without a “mythology” – the key idea of Freudian epistemology. "After careful consideration of the structure of Freud's letter, we therefore find ourselves confronted with this duality: reference to the raw reality of power and to the drive for death and destruction. These are two very heterogeneous poles: the materiality of power and the most interior form of breaking human reality. But precisely: for Freud, war is not a psychological fact that psychoanalysis rebaptizes with an additional hypothesis and denomination. It is the death drive to the work in the real, or better: the place where the death drive (Todestrieb) meets power (Macht) as violence (Gew) “[xi]

In politics, this translates into the rise to power of an "it" which makes the impulses of death and killing (with enjoyment) of those who are designated by hatred throb. In 2017, psychiatrist Bandy Lee and her colleagues used the term: Donald Trump is a dangerous "It" [xii] who has triggered collective psychosis like Hitler and others did. The scapegoat (the designated enemy) is “the poor” immigrant of course, but also American. Hatred preceded Trump and was built over fifty years. Let's say that with Trump: it found a climax which surprised superficial analysts but which did not shake confidence in a dialectic of human progress which is the fabric of all our speeches, including that of Galbraith who remarkably documented swings in the pendulum of “caritas” towards the poor. After the excesses of the welfare state, it is pointed out, we will return to a rational, humane management of human health (all values combined).

But let us reread Freud, who does not believe in human moral progress any more than he announces a plunge into Dante's hell. He is not a moralist but an analyst of the depths, the place of impulses which reveal themselves to us in a thousand and one ways, but which do not disappear and can become this deadly narcissism. Let's reread Freud as analyzed by Tomofei Gerber        

“But if the narcissistic drives of the ego, the survival instinct, also belong to Eros, then the opposite drive must also be reconsidered. It is no longer a matter of selfishness, which consists in preserving one's own internal unity, but rather of a process of abolition of unities. It's the death drive, Thanatos. We see how the two fundamental drives become abstract principles: On the one hand, there is "anabolism" (Aufbau), on the other, there is "catabolism" (Zerfall) (The Ego and the Id , p. 3975): "I drew the conclusion that in addition to the drive to preserve the living substance", that is to say the drives of the ego, "and to join it to ever larger units" , that is, the sexual drives, both of which are now aspects of Eros, "there must be another contrary drive seeking to dissolve these unities and bring them back to their primitive, inorganic state" (Civilization and its Discontents, p. 4509). The death drive is not a matter of survival, which is after all a matter of self-preservation, it is quite the opposite: the drive to find the shortest path to decomposition. ?[xiii]

Had Freud read Baudelaire, no doubt because the poet, takes the id seriously. He even gains in lucidity over the course of his work. There is a clear difference between Les Fleurs du Mal , a collection first published in 1857, and the Little Prose Poems published ten years later. In Les Fleurs du Mal , the grandiloquent evocation of Satan. “My brothers, never forget, when you hear the progress of enlightenment being praised, that the devil's finest trick is to persuade you that he does not exist!” ?[xiv]

…. and that it manifests itself in multiple forms, some of which are so passive that we do not see them, that we can live in denial of the violence that we will no longer recognize as such.

[i] Haine Froide, What the American right is thinking, Paris, Le Seuil 2012

[ii] The art of ignoring the poor. Le Monde Diplomatique, October 2005.

[iii] Glenn Tinder “Can We Be Good Without God” On the Political Meaning of Christianity. Atlantic Monthly December 1989.

[iv] " What is religion and how does it dialogue with other areas of spiritual life such as science, philosophy, ethics, art or politics? Why is it Is it impossible to demonstrate the existence of God as one demonstrates a physical or mathematical truth? Addressing believers as well as atheists and agnostics, Luc Ferry, follower of a secular spirituality, highlights the multiple meanings of the main themes of the Christianity Rather than writing a history of theology, Luc Ferry attaches "Philosophy and Christianity for Dummies" published by First Editions,??to explain the strictly philosophical part of Christianity, with regard to Judaism and Hellenism as well as certain great secular spiritualities. https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceinter/podcasts/l-heure-philo/l-heure-philo-du-vendredi-25-novembre-2022-7193218

[v] The Three Worlds of the Welfare State : Essay on Modern Capitalism: Esping - Andersen , Gosta : PUF 2007

[vi] DIOGENES?209:44-61 ISSN0392-1921 UTOPIA 9/11 A PLEA FOR A NEW WORLD

[vii] Nicole Morgan "Red Hate and White Fear" The Agora Encyclopedia https://agora.qc.ca/nicole-morgan/haine-rouge-et-peur-blanche

[viii]"Atheists Are Sometimes More Religious Than Christians." A new study shows how poorly we understand the beliefs of people who identify as atheist, agnostic, or nothing in particular. The Atlantic Monthly. May 2018

[ix]Paula White, the multi-millionaire pastor who whispers in the ear of Donald Trump. https://madame.lefigaro.fr/societe/portrait-paula-white-la-riche-pasteure-qui-preche-pour-donald-trump-president-etats-unis-151119-16791

[x] Nicole Morgan. Haine Froisde ? Paris Le Seuil, 2012

[xi] Paul Laurent Assoun. Freud-Einstein correspondence. FREUD-EINSTEIN CORRESPONDENCE

(July-September 1932) Paul-Laurent Assoun CNRS éditions | “Hermès, The Review”

1989/2 n° 5-6 | pages 261 to 273

[xii] One such person is Bandy X. Lee, a forensic psychiatrist and president of the World Mental Health Coalition . by Donald Trump: 27 psychiatrists and mental health experts rate a president . https://www-scientificamerican-com.translate.goog/article/the-shared-psychosis-of-donald-trump-and-his-loyalists/?_x_tr_sl=en&_x_tr_tl=fr&_x_tr_hl=fr&_x_tr_pto=sc

[xiii]Eopoché # 20 Eros and Thanatos: Freud's two dundamental Driveshttps://epochemagazine.org/20/eros-and-thanatos-freuds-two-fundamental-drives/        

[xiv] Henry Quantin. Aleteia. July 22, 2021 https://fr.aleteia.org/2021/07/22/baudelaire-et-la-plus-belle-des-ruses-du-diable-2-4/