Totalitarianism from Below
In the Network of the Little Brothers: On the Modernity of Populism1 is the fourth in our series on Martin’s Newer Works. It is an essential Burckhardtian cornerstone of thought that’s often mentioned in our various Ex nihilo conversations – but, as we realized, was conspicuous in its absence – making this translation critical for our Englisch-speaking readers. Initially published in 2016, it lies between 2015’s All and Nothing: A Digital Apocalypse and 2018’s Philosophie der Maschine, where it captures this moment of cultural stumbling we’re currently experiencing in our social and political systems as we move forward from Foucault’s code of representation into our new code of simulation – this is the thread of scandalon that Martin’s tied together using the various leitmotifs he’s written about. Because when the conversation turns to the Attention Economy, a sense of unease often comes into play. Although everyone knows of its existence and that it has become the engine of our economy, its origins and philosophical implications remain strangely unexplained. And, in a certain sense, it’s nothing more than a reflexion of our shifting from this top-down structure of power to something operating from the bottom-up – while, at the same time, its complexities lie in the Machine’s Psychology.2 In plain terms, we’re shifting from one social operating system to another – and we’re feeling the same sense of unease our Medieval ancestors felt as their operating system moved from the comfort of their code of belief to the unknown oncoming Renaissance code of representation. For us, it’s in social media that this stumbling strangeness is so acutely born out; it’s where we see the dangers of someone’s immediate decapitation born out of another’s humiliations and resentments happening in the blink of an eye – as the Press and our Institutions immediately re-amplify these claims of victimhood injustices without first establishing their veracity – out of either moral panic, sloth, sensationalism or the strange sense of sexuality akin to the Medieval inquisitions.
When reading The Little Brothers, notice how power is always present in our social glue, even where there appears to be none. Foucault’s Dispositif (which has meanwhile become the main pillar of modern social analysis) is the one-sided architecture of a hard-powered apparatus with its ever-present sense of agency in a top-down mastery over things, even when the sovereign isn’t present in its Panopticon. In contrast, the Psychotope lacks this sense of mastery as it runs on the softly seductive Power of our Imagination driving our Psychical Economy, which provides the capital of our shared interest and the attention it gathers. As a metaphysical battery, this drives the Greek Alphabetic circularity of the Typenrad, which softly powers the primary engine of our symbolic logic that we refer to as our Universal Machines. These Universal Machines, with their unconscious Psychotopes, make our Western culture uniquely a Machine Culture with its surplus of final products – those things we know as Institutions like Rationality, Logic, Philosophy, Science, and Art. Foucault, by starting his analysis with the black boxes of our attention-riveting institutional structures – or things ‘thinging’ in Heideggerian terminology – misses that it’s the previous Universal Machine powering his Dispositif.3 Consequently, we don’t yet understand what it means to transition into a code of simulation, with its toolset that’s so much different than those of representation, as exemplified by this continued privileging of Sovereignty, except now it’s one of a Privatized Individual Sovereign playing out as an opposing hard-powered bottom-up movement of totalitarianism feeding on the victimization and resentment of Identity Politics. This is the reflexion of our social unease with becoming the softly-powered dividual using the new Universal Maschine’s digital tools of simulation, similar to Medieval society’s unease with tools of representation, making it what we refer to as the Discomfort with Modernity.
Martin Burckhardt
Jeremy Bentham, founder of philosophical utilitarianism, is best known for his invention of the Panopticon. This circular prison, with its central watchtower, allowing for surveillance not only of each cell and inmate but also of its guards, can be interpreted as the archetypical Big Brother – a panoptical surveillance machine that Michel Foucault used as a metaphor for the disciplinary society he described, exemplifying what he called an apparatus of power or his dispositif. Structurally, it’s important to note such a power apparatus continues functioning when the central perspective of its watchtower is unoccupied and seemingly void of power as its occupants continue disciplining themselves even when unobserved – meaning Panoptism doesn't just result in changed behavior, but essentially changes the subject’s underlying self-conception. Deprived of his privacy, the individual is transformed into a public person with the feeling of being observed and acting as if constantly in the public eye – a state of self-expression finding its consistent expression as the politicization of the private sphere. If Foucauldian panoptism alludes to the 20th century surveillance state (not only in its totalitarian form but also in its welfare state variant), it forgets Bentham saw panoptism not only as an extension of government power – but also as a means of controlling it. Bentham envisioned spies in public offices so ordinary citizens could monitor their public servants' actions – a logic underlying current demands for transparency.
Presidio Modelo, Cuba, Photography; FrimanIn this respect, Bentham's panoptism is only half understood if the state's monopoly on the use of force is attributed to it. Just as it expands Big Brother's sphere of power, it also allows the countless little brothers to monitor the functioning of the ruling machine. With the development of rootless atopic and decentralized digital networks, a fundamental shift has occurred in our social and political power structures, as their axis no longer runs from top to bottom but from bottom to top. They are no longer overseen by state-controlled television towers but by a scattered, rhizome-like power structure that spreads news spreads across social networks at lightning speeds, which also changes the characteristics of Public Spaces where, previously under conditions of scarcity, the centralized guardians of good taste, expertise, and science decided what was available for public discussion. Now, you can post whatever your heart desires – indeed, these new freedoms of publication surpass all dreams of direct democracy – and yet surprisingly, this digital empowerment hasn't gained a foothold in productive politics, but primarily as an increasing sense of resentment.
Of course, while politicians bravely claim everything has remained the same beneath its surface, it’s evident the Public Sphere is undergoing a structural change, forcing us into new communication and power techniques as exemplified by the incessantly tweeting specter of the population’s representational grassroots. However, this rumbling suggests a much more fundamental tectonic shift because, in Foucault’s power dispositif, it’s not only about shifting from the bottom to the top but also about having greater access to express a diversity of opinions through political discourse and caucusing. While representative democracy has certainly faced competition in the Internet era, going far beyond anything the critical public sphere has been able to achieve to date, this shift in the balance of power isn't reflected in a fundamental change in discourse, let alone in a restructuring of institutions – quite the opposite. The reason for this denial is simple: State representatives aren't interested in displaying the depletion of their powerhouse, nor are those who’ve just seized even a sliver of this power eager to let go of their newly won participation and the consequences of this reality’s double denial can be seen everywhere. Just as panoptism robs the individual of his secret, the classical power structure also loses its cohesion. Because its magic – namely that the Panopticon still functions even when the tower is unoccupied – works only as long as the occupants believe it is occupied. And because contemporary rulers are facing a crisis of general credibility, it’s their foremost task, albeit unacknowledged, to ensure the representation of those represented. Thus, the politician is compelled to play the role of a politician, just as a State's raison d'être maintains its faith in the functioning of the Machine.
As in nature, where the death of a plant is often accompanied by hypertrophic growth, the end of representation isn't a long, insidious death; on the contrary, it’s an unleashing of all its power and might. Politics is becoming a spectacle where power can only be demanded by those who know how to perform appropriately in the art of representation. And paradoxically, since it scrupulously avoids any collision with reality, its essence no longer appears as an authoritarian, disciplining patriarchal figure but more as an overprotective mother figure. So Modernity’s power complex now bears this strange resemblance to Norman Bates' relationship with the mother figure in Hitchcock's Psycho: power as a ‘stuffed doll’ whose prohibitions are intended to contain your desires while, at the same time, it functions as a prompting amplifier of them – allowing you to give in to them without taking responsibility for them. Just as Norman Bates insists on eternal childhood, anyone identifying with the vicious disciplinary machine of today's welfare state is insisting on political infantilization.
Since the depotentiated State has been reformulated as supply machinery, we can tap into its powerhouse to assert our claims to power. This operation presupposes that the existing social system isn't thought of as a framework of order but rather with a general suspicion of being a Machine of Oppression that’s become perverse. This kind of ammunition can be used, ex negativo, to bring into play the sort of Identity Politics where someone ascribes themselves to a historically marginalized group and demands appropriate compensation.
But what kind of identity is being asserted here? In this context, it's worth remembering the strange metamorphosis the individual undergoes in Bentham's panoptism of taking on the role of a public person. Now, there are undoubtedly good reasons for providing justice for all those groups who were tortured, killed, or discriminated against under National Socialism. However, historically, the birth of Identity Politics coincides with the Revolution of ‘68, which was less about redressing historical injustice and more about resistance against the authoritarian state. That this revolt against traditional social costumes insisted on having a conventional concept of Identity is a paradox only explainable by the advantages such a March through the Institutions could offer the individual. Here, we’re encountering neoliberal ideology’s twin: a logic of privatization where constantly referencing past misdeeds gives you highly profitable advantages. While neoliberalism was able to point out State Institutions' lack of efficiency, the little brothers of Mao and Marx, Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot, exploited the guilty conscience of their fathers' generation – both with the same effect: a redistribution of power – but not a discussion of forces underlying this power shift's.
Consequently, revolutionaries disillusioned with realpolitik became opportunists like Joschka Fischer or Gerhard Schröder, who had no problems harnessing neoliberal interests as they carved out careers as ego corporations for themselves. In any case, it remained hidden that this presumed role wasn't part of a historical spectacle but just a petty-bourgeois farce prelude to a much more significant upheaval: the digital revolution, triggering a shift in the concept of Identity. Just as fundamentalism arises when people have lost their footing, Identity Politics emerges where Identity has become a rhetorical gesture. This gesture, in turn, says as much about an identity as the print on a T-shirt: a fashion statement, nothing more. Insofar as the assertion of Identity Politics results from a remix or sampling process in which free floating signifiers are taken out of the pool and mixed to form a strategically deployable decorative identity. If the Carnival of Identities represents a process of emancipation, then Identity becomes asserted as a social exchange value. Although the coordinated system of ideological values of the 68’ Revolution has long since dissolved into nothing – their trinity of race, class, and gender remains a viable narrative and, even more so, as a precious currency of exchange. And the value of such positioning increases precisely the further you move away from its center.
Consequently, we shouldn't be talking about Identity Politics but rather Alterity Politics. It’s no coincidence that the logic of feminist discourse became the blueprint for every social movement of indignation, be it against the devastation of austerity policies or migrants' immigration. These are the structures of victim culture in which you achieve political satisfaction primarily by ascribing yourself to a victim group – or by appearing to be its advocate. The extent to which this victimizing logic has entrenched itself in our society is exemplified by how not even the declared protagonists of globalization shy away from using it - like the gentleman who portrayed his caste as the pitiful 'victims of space and time' at the annual Davos Economic Summit. If we now add 99% of the Occupy Movement to this happy few, then the entire population has abdicated its responsibility, and it can be said that the world now consists only of victims.
Nevertheless, freedom of discourse from domination hasn't been achieved – quite the opposite, as if the abandoned powerhouse has become inscribed in people. Now, every king's child of modernity acts as a virtual monarch or the system's legitimate opponent, whose mission is to redress a historical injustice. This self-empowerment logic is undeniably apparent in social media, reversing the axis of power. Because under the Internet Age, digital natives no longer face each other as individuals but as population representatives,4 and its effects can be seen in the speech codes and revitalized political correctness movement rampant at American universities. There, if someone feels belittled in any way (even if it's through a ‘micro-aggression’ that the originator isn't even aware of), it's not uncommon for a social media campaign to ensue that denounces the originator as sexist, racist, or a homophobe – depending on the case – making this technique reminiscent of a kind of symbolic warfare, where the alleged delinquent is often socially killed.
A particularly revealing exemplar of this kind of tactical action is the case of Nobel Prize winner Sir Tim Hunt, whose assassination became a global media event in the summer of 2015. Invited to give a lecture in Korea on that evening's topic of Women in Science, Hunt said:
It is very strange that a chauvinist monster like me would be asked to speak to female scientists. Three things happen when they are in the lab: You fall in love with them, they fall in love with you, and if you criticize them, they cry. Should we, therefore, set up separate labs for women and men? – But seriously, I am impressed by Korea's economic development. And there is no doubt that female scientists play a role in this. Science needs women, and they should do science despite all the opposition and despite monsters like me.
As expected, the audience responded to this humorous remark with laughter. However, in attendance alongside the Korean guests was Connie St. Louis, a British science journalist who saw an opportunity to unmask a Nobel laureate as a sexist. She immediately tweeted Hunt's remark in a tone of ‘sincere’ indignation, saying the 'sexist Tim Hunt' had ruined the event by saying gender segregation should be reintroduced in laboratories. Although this volte-face had previously been agreed upon secretly, it set the scene for the public. What followed was a shitstorm in which, first, the Twitterati and then the international media tried to outdo each other in their outrage at the sexism from the day before yesterday.
Even before Hunt set foot on English soil again, he'd already lost his professorship at University College London, his honorary seat at the Royal Society, and his position at the European Research Council. Even the Korean organizers felt compelled to distance themselves from his appearance afterward. His claim that he had only wanted to make a joke was seen as an admission of his misconduct, as was a tearful public apology. Not only was the accusation based on a gross distortion of what had happened, but the accuser, Connie St. Louis, was more than a dubious person – the CV she published on her website was full of false and grossly misleading information – leaving it to the conference participants to bring into relief the differences between her memory and the way she portrayed herself in the media. As the objections mounted, Connie St. Louis countered that she wasn't the only one who had reacted to Hunt's remarks with deadly silence. Although more and more strangeness about the science journalist's pseudologies came to light, it was only when a video emerged showing Hunt surrounded by a good-humored, applauding crowd of spectators that the story collapsed. However, by this point, Hunt had long since become a non-person.
More important than an individual's fate, it’s what the affair says about a society where this kind of thing is allowed to occur. While this media witch hunt recalls the persecution of communists in the McCarthy era, it also highlights the differences as the Cold War involved reasons of state5, while Tim Hunt's case is all about Identity Politics. And because here you can’t allow anyone declared ‘sexist,’ whatever merits he or she may have, they aren't allowed to play any role in this process, the little brothers and little sisters immediately rushed in to declare Hunt an Un-person. It’s precisely the essentially informal, non-institutional character of the process that describes the new power relations to which the institutions involved all too willingly submitted. If this story begins with the gesture of humility of a Nobel laureate ingratiating himself to his audience and the zeitgeist as a "chauvinist monster" – and continues in the Twitter campaign, which can be understood as a form of asymmetric warfare – this is a testament to the speed with which the participating institutions ultimately bowed to the pressure of public opinion without even once listening to Hunt – it’s, first and foremost, about paying homage to the new power relations.
Even traditional media, failing to uphold their journalistic due diligence duties, were prepared to act as megaphones for the outraged. This indicates the extent to which opinion-forming is already functioning over the new rootless decentralized networks. Therefore, we can assume that traditional media and institutions can also be seen as symptoms of the electronic space while this new power remains strangely shapeless. You could say that here, a headless sovereign is rearing its head as a collective figure that – architecturally speaking – feeds itself from the countless interconnected network nodes and ideologically from the excitation potential generated by a comment’s transgression. But since this sovereign hasn't even become aware of its power, let alone articulated itself as a transformed institutional structure – it technically has an organized form but not a corresponding Political Philosophy. Taken methodically, we find ourselves in the combat zone of Identity Politics and a discourse where Identity is used as an asymmetrical weapon of civil war to either gain an advantage or discredit an opponent while, at the same time, the other’s actual concrete intentions play no relevant role – instead, he or she simply becomes a collective figure held liable for the story itself. As a result, Sir Tim Hunt was essentially a puppet forced to play the part of a bad guy in a ‘sexism in science’ narrative. It didn't help that Hunt had drawn up an equality plan for the European Commission or campaigned for a daycare center at the Cricks Institute in London.
The case of Tim Hunt is exemplary in that, while it brings into relief the new power complex's communicative logic, it also relieves-out the necessary presupposition of an underlying phantasm of resentment against that which it strives to eliminate – demonstrating how its intrigue's ringleader was able to stage herself as a symbolic victim while holding the perpetrator responsible for sexism in science as a whole. That this melodrama met with such a global response also shows the extent to which a handful of people can easily tap into the power of large sections of journalism and instrumentalize it as an amplifier of ressentiment because, in defiance of all speech policies, all arguments put forward are ad hominem, thus: aimed at the symbolic destruction of the perpetrator.
Now, we probably wouldn’t be paying much attention to such an intrigue if it weren’t for the strange alliance between this new kind of political power bloc and this ideological backwardness – which, as a moral corset, seems so regressive you could easily think you were transported back to a Victorian era, or at the very least to a pre-psychoanalytical one. Social media’s endowment of individuals with this historically unprecedented power has led to the emergence of a new type of political animal: the Social Media Guerrilla who uses his followers like a Warlord deploying his troops. It’s primarily visceral instincts spreading to a larger community, as gross simplifications are particularly suitable for mobilizing followers when attention spans are noticeably shorter. Because of this structural change in the public sphere, its traditional guardians are no longer responsible for determining if and when a particular topic is considered hype – instead, social media now negotiates its integrity in real time. And since the Panopticon's totalitarian logic can now be privatized rather than serving the interests of the state alone, totalitarianism from below is coming into play.
Perhaps the most extreme yet most revealing example of this political schizophrenia is the ISIS State Media Department; although they operate with a technical affinity for the internet’s use, this doesn’t prevent them from wanting to bomb the whole world back into its imagined 7th-century intellectual world. They consistently use Hollywood imagery to effectively stage the crucifixions, shootings, and beheadings of the kuffar by making the iconoclastically motivated destruction of Palmyra available as a YouTube video. This allows the combination of snuff video aesthetics with the conviction they are performing the political revenge for which Allah has chosen them. Where the cult of martyrdom is combined with Anything Goes and the logic of outdoing an unleashed image production, self-empowerment is no longer limited by inner-worldly rationality – thus, empowered by pure phantasm, they can use the media without imposing even the slightest restriction on the enemy. Taking this schizophrenia as a characteristic element, it is astonishing that all populist movements ultimately refer to such a pattern. Sectarian groups such as Pegida, AfD, National Front, and even those conspiracy-theory-inspired micro-groups that see chemtrails as the program for humanity's eradication aren’t mobilized through actions in public spaces but by the internet. Hearing more and more voices lamenting the presence of discursive no-go areas is strange, given the general climate of social permissiveness. However, the fears don't stem from the arbitrary acts of overpowering state power but from the unfettered spreading of War Zones across social media. Just how dangerous this terrain is can be seen from how a thoughtless comment can result in a shitstorm turning you into an ostracized non-person in a matter of days, a process that, in its brevity and brutality, revives all of those fears we thought that had been overcome.
Their toxicity stems less from new technological conditions but rather from that phantasm of ressentiment knowing how to seize its power for their own use. The cause itself may be trivial, a few grams too much in the wrong place, a failed cosmetic operation, or a slipped phrase – a mob gathers to descend on the victim in no time. Here, a largely anomic space opens up in which symbolic and legal boundaries are first crossed – without those involved even realizing the consequences of their actions. Even if populism demands the restoration of some former state, it has structurally emigrated away from the existing order. As Nietzsche noted, resentment is highly creative – not in the creative sense, of course, but only in the negating sense. If slave morality ‘requires as the condition of its existence an external and objective world,’ this means that ‘its action is fundamentally reaction6.’ This goes to the heart of what is called Identity Politics today. Identity Politics means negation, not with the aim of social upheaval, but of conquering a larger share of the social cake for yourself in the struggle for distribution. Because this is essentially a reactionary moment, the actual driver of change, as a material change in the power structure, is ignored. People prefer to make a scapegoat pay for the impositions they’ve suffered.
On such a soil of self-contempt, a veritable swamp soil, grows that weed, that poisonous growth, and all so tiny, so hidden, so ignoble, sugary. Here teem the worms of revenge and vindictiveness; here the air reeks of things secret and unmentionable; here is ever spun the net of the most malignant conspiracy...7
Where does this self-loathing come from? With this question, we hit on the matter’s most sensitive point. That is because the loss of self-respect is inextricably linked to how an all-encompassing idea of victimization has become ingrained in culture. If we pursue this question, it becomes clear the various forms of resentment all have to do with technological change – or, more precisely, the overwhelming feeling of being robbed of familiar certainties. So, the evocation of diverse identities can be understood as phantom pain, as a protective architecture whose purpose is simulating the continued existence of what's been lost instead of realizing the reasons for its loss. Fundamentalism arises where the foundations have already collapsed – and paradoxically uses the very means held responsible for this collapse. This social dislocation not only affects the classic victims of globalization, that even the elites themselves are at a loss to understand the workings of the world, but should lead to the conclusion that the digital revolution represents a profound historical shift: a revolution of written culture which recodes the transmission, storage, and processing of knowledge.
This literacy shock can explain our feelings of loss as a denial of reality or nostalgic longings. It’s characteristic of this moment of displacement that the coin with which the resentment wants to pay for marginalization is issued to an ‘identity’ that only becomes visible in its injury – which is often claimed under the digital cloak’s protection of invisibility. Thus, creative resentment relies on the very Machine it detests and identifies as a source of this exploitation. Paradoxically, this leads to an identification with the enemy, with the advantage that it’s not you but the other who pays the price. Where Identity is addressed and claimed, it has actually disappeared. And even where people still try to catch up with their faith in it, as a representation of representation, it amounts to a disappearance, or as Slavoj Žižek put it very nicely: sex without a body, decaffeinated coffee, non-alcoholic beer. As a result, although we talk incessantly about alterity, we can no longer tolerate the proximity of a concrete other. Structurally speaking, the discourse of Identity Politics marks a maximum of social alienation. Firstly, people no longer face each other as individuals but as representatives; secondly, they seek to compensate for their emptiness with a technical prosthesis of power; and thirdly, they deny the extent to which this prosthesis already structures their thinking. This threefold denial (of the other, of one's self, and of the symbolic order) creates a climate where the world is either talked up to or talked down to – but, in any case, it’s buried under words. On this fertile humus, a nominalism blossoms, which no longer deals with the world but solely with questions of naming. From then on, it’s no longer extended actions but words that are bearers of evil – regardless of the actual intention with which they are used. Consequently, apotropaic gestures or linguistic cleansing measures are taken into account.
The devastating effects such a mindset can have is reflected in what happened in the English town of Rotherham, where a multiculturally open-minded council committed to diversity ignored thousands of cases of sexual abuse for over a decade. The decisive factor was that the offenders were predominantly of Pakistani origin. As the city authorities had no interest in upsetting the fragile balance between the population groups, allegations weren't investigated – instead, the authorities did everything they could to sweep the affair under the carpet. Even naming the group of perpetrators was a taboo that clashed with the city's open-minded self-image and external image. So, under the watchful eyes of the city council, police, and youth welfare offices, and in some cases even with their help, a parallel world was allowed to spread that sexually exploited minors from problematic family backgrounds, commonly referred to as White Trash – and this in a society that applies Victorian strictness in its speech codes and mercilessly sanctions aberrations such as in Tim Hunt's case.
What’s most remarkable about the Rotherham events was the willingness of civil servants to submit to informal expectations. They saw nothing wrong with transforming the State's institutions into a collective repression apparatus – which was something like a coup d'état taking place from within. For here, the authority to which obedience is paid has nothing in common with the Law’s Spirit but instead with the unwritten commentary that emerged from its world of social networks. Of course, this paves the way that leads straight into that ghost train in which only the deceptions of a long-gone past guarantee the world's survival. However, if you close your eyes, you realize you are inside a new kind of Machine where talking about "identity" or "representation" no longer makes sense – which shouldn't be a darkening but a moment of enlightenment and the moment when you wake up from a bad dream.
Translation Hopkins Stanley & Martin Burckhardt
1Burckhardt, M. – Im Netz der kleinen Brüder. Über die Modernität der Populismen, Merkur, 6/2016, Vol. 805.
2The consequences of this sin of omission are nevertheless radical. Because if everything is understood as an expression of a mindless, systemic, and oppressive system of power, the only plausible identity that can be offered is one of 'victim' status, which then again becomes interpreted as an invitation to position yourself as a counter-power against it. And, in doing so, you become entangled in the web of the little brothers within its totalitarian way of thinking – this is remarkable in its astonishment because it’s no longer coming from above: but from below. Importantly, we’re currently in the interregnum between the second and the third Universal Machines, the period Heidegger called the End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking (in On Time and Being, trans. J. Stambaugh, 1972), but couldn’t see the path moving forward into its open future. This open future is the subject of Martin’s The Psychology of the Machine series; the first is Über dem Luftmeer: Unbehagen in der Moderne, and volume II, Die Fremde, will be published later this year.
3This term alone, which is borrowed from rhetoric and therefore turns the question of power into a speech act, is basically evidence of an intellectual hysteresis - all the material conditions that precede this 2nd century BC figure of thought are simply ignored. Thereby, powers turns into a black hole, a metaphysical battery. [Translator’s note]
4I’ve formulated the idea that the computer must be understood as a Machine for population management as articulated in the Boolean formula of x=xn. See Burckhardt, M. & Höfer, D. See Burckhardt, M. & Höfer, D. – All and Nothing: A Digital Apocalypse, Massachusetts, 2017.
5McCarthy's activities were, mind you, the initiative of a senator from Wisconsin, not government action – while here, we're already dealing with a deployment of power from the bottom-up.
6Nietzsche, F. – The Genealogy of Morals, trans. Horace B. Samuel, Modern Library, New York, p. 17. [Translator’s note]
7Id., p. 128. [Translator’s note]
