Split Consciousness

 I was writing in another place and context the other day about Elon Musk's disturbing pattern of extremist far-right rhetoric lately—his talk of the need to "deal with," as he puts it, "traitors and invaders"—by which he appears to mean immigrants and liberals who support welcoming policies. 

I said something at the end of the piece along the lines of: "fortunately, we're still a long ways from Elon's neo-fascist vision being realized. We don't yet have neo-Nazi thugs patrolling the streets murdering and lynching nonwhite immigrants and liberals..." etc. 

It only occurred to me after I published it to think: well, except that ICE agents did just extrajudicially execute two immigrants on U.S. soil mere weeks ago, in Biddeford, Maine and Houston, Texas. They also extrajudicially executed two U.S. citizens at the start of the year. 

Many of the young men now working for this agency were recruited using white nationalist rhetoric and imagery online. They signed up in some sense for a version of Elon's Citizen Vigilante–inspired project of dispatching "invaders"—and now they are apparently doing it. 

So have we in fact already reached the dystopian future that I was just dismissing as an improbable nightmare that we would only need to worry about in some unlikely, far-distant future? 

It's not like our government is taking steps to investigate these shootings as potential crimes. In the days after the Houston killing, the FBI did announce that they were looking into the incident—but mostly, it now appears, only in order to try to assassinate the character of the victim and establish some pretext for killing him. 

The government came out days later, after all, with lurid claims about "drugs" found in the van of the victim (as if that would give the government permission to murder someone without charge or trial anyway)—"drugs" which swiftly turned out to be salt that day laborers in the area routinely use to stave off dehydration under the hot Texas sun. 

As mentioned in the previous post, I've been reading André Brink's 1979 anti-apartheid novel A Dry White Season. The event that sets the book's plot in motion is the death in police custody of an innocent man. 

In apartheid South Africa too, actual, willful police murder of anyone—regardless of race—would be a crime. The white protagonist of the novel therefore at first places his faith in the country's legal system. They hold an inquest. He is convinced it will yield justice for the victim. 

But the police produce their version of events in court. He died by suicide in his own cell, they say. They have police witnesses to prove it. The magistrate shrugs and says he has no evidence to pursue the case further. The matter rests. The security forces get away with murder. 

As the novel progresses, the pattern continues. The police operate outside the bounds of the law, but leave themselves a margin of plausible deniability. People disappear and die under suspicious circumstances in administrative detention and security force custody. People lose their citizenship and find their passports mysteriously revoked because they have been found to be "undesirable aliens." 

At no point is the ostensible legal system of the country formally abrogated. At no point do people say: ah, this is the day we became a fascist dystopia. 

The process is more incremental than that. Police forces or people likely linked to the police ratchet up their illegality and semi-secret intimidation campaigns and tend to get away with it. One day, the people in the novel are living under a police state without knowing how they got there. 

I'm not saying our own government is already as bad as apartheid South Africa. But we appear to be somewhere on a continuum with the events in Brink's novel. Our own "security forces" gun down civilians on the streets. The government stages a nominal investigation that is in reality designed solely to exonerate its own agents and cast suspicion on the victim. 

As for revoking citizenship and disappearing people to detention camps, where they sometimes die under questionable circumstances and have reportedly been subjected to torture—these too are notorious features of our current government's apparatus of repression—just as they are of the South African security forces as depicted in Brink's book. 

Yet even I, knowing all this, found myself glibly assuming the other day that none of this had happened in our country—at least not yet. Sure, we might have to worry about dictatorship and repression some day. But not now. It can't happen here. It hasn't happened yet. 

But maybe it has. If Trump's first term taught us the lesson that "it can happen here"—perhaps now, midway through his second, we are having to learn the lesson that it did happen here. It's happening here right now.

But why, then, did it feel so natural to me the other day to talk as if it hadn't happened yet? Surely, the answer is because everything in my world on a typical day still feels so normal. 

Just as it was possible for the white Afrikaners in Brink's novel to simply turn away and live inside their suburban cocoon, if they wished, and tell themselves their country was still a democracy, with a "freely elected government," albeit one that was temporarily forced to resort to certain "emergency measures"—so too it is possible for people like me to look out my window right now at the people setting up for a street festival downtown on a lovely summer day and think nothing is happening yet. 

Everything is normal. Everything is fine; just as it always was. 

"Thus we all live in a state of split consciousness," as Arthur Koestler put it. "There is a tragic plane and a trivial plane, which contain two mutually incompatible kinds of experienced knowledge." 

On the trivial plane is our daily news cycle. Trump says something so absurd as to be vaguely comedic. Oftentimes, he appears to be deliberately playing for laughs. It is impossible to take his clowning seriously, and therefore we assume that his government cannot be capable of serious crimes. 

The New York Times describes a characteristic moment from the White House Correspondents' Dinner last week: 

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer welcomed a group of reporters from The Wall Street Journal to the stage to accept an award for their “courageous reporting on President Trump’s past relationship with financier Jeffrey Epstein” that “triggered the release of the so-called Epstein files.”

Mr. Blitzer reminded the crowd that “Trump quickly filed a $20 billion lawsuit against The Journal, revealing reporter Khadeeja Safdar’s home address. Her family had to be relocated. The Journal was kicked off of Air Force One.”

As the reporters took their awards, Mr. Trump threw his hands in the air theatrically, as if to say, Oh well, what can you do. Nervous laughter rippled across the ballroom.

That is the Trump era in nuce. 

On the one hand, we have a president who routinely threatens to revoke the broadcast licenses of major news outlets for daring to criticize him; who hounds and subpoenas journalists; who is openly seeking to foster the consolidation of all media in the hands of his trusted loyalists so as to silence dissent and crush civil society. The maneuver is textbook neo-authoritarianism on the Orban model. 

And yet, when people accuse him of such acts to his face, he shrugs, chuckles, and mugs for the camera. And who can help laughing along with him? Oh well, what can you do indeed. 

That is our split consciousness right there. 

I remember at the start of Trump's second term trying to tell a friend that two things were true simultaneously: 1) Yes, Trump is so absurd that he's often funny. I cited a then-recent executive order from his desk aimed at what he denounced as "weak" shower heads. He was also spending a lot of his time at that point worrying about plastic straws; just as nowadays he hunts phantom "vandals" whom he's convinced have sabotaged his reflecting pool. 

My friend laughed along with this and agreed. 

But also, I added: 2) actual human beings are suffering in very serious ways from Trump's actions. 

At the time I was speaking, people were still stranded in a Salvadoran mega-prison where they were shaved and beaten and denied contact with their families or attorneys. They had been disappeared to this torture-prison after being simply snatched off the street, without charge or trial, and trapped on a flight in violation of a federal court order to the clutches of a Trump-aligned dictator. 

That nightmare may be dismissed as old news now–but people today are still being disappeared without due process to similar fates in Eswatini, Equatorial Guinea, and the Central African Republic to this day. 

This stuff is not funny!

My friend got very quiet at this point and simply changed the subject. 

The Trump era, then, exists on both the "trivial" and the "tragic" plane, as Koestler put it. And because the two are so far apart, it seems impossible to merge them into any coherent picture of reality. We exist from moment to moment on one or the other level, and as soon as we leave one behind, we forget all about its existence. 

"People go to cinemas," Koestler writes, "they see films of Nazi tortures, of mass-shootings, of underground conspiracy and self-sacrifice. They sigh, they shake their heads, some have a good cry. But they do not connect it with the realities of their normal plane of existence."

Koestler's essay was about the problem of "disbelieving atrocities," as he put it. My friend couldn't really bring himself to believe what I was saying in that conversation about the prison in El Salvador. Or if he could believe it, he didn't want to think about it. It was too unreal—too impossible to square with the "trivial plane" on which we otherwise spend our days. 

I was thus left in the role of the Cassandras—the "screamers," as Koestler calls them—who are shouting from the rooftops about something no one else wants to hear. 

Except, as we've seen, that I too then proceed to forget what I have just been proclaiming. I climb back down into the trivial plane as well, where all of those atrocities seem like a bad dream that has just been dissipated in the daylight and doesn't have to be worried about any more. 

I too agree with Nate Silver's recent observation on X:  "Most of the Trump-related stories this summer have been boring and dumb." Trump has been fully trivialized to the point that no one cares enough to pay attention anymore—even though he is still the president and still has the power to destroy our democracy—and is still actively seeking to do so!

Even the torture-prison in El Salvador can be reduced back to the trivial plane again, with enough time. Months after people left this prison in what was effectively a hostage exchange with the Maduro government, the newly-Trumpified CBS news notoriously paused a heavily-researched 60 Minutes segment about the abductions. 

One of the reasons for holding off on the story that Bari Weiss reportedly cited internally was that: "The public knows that Venezuelans have been subjected to horrific treatment in this prison" and so their story has to "do more." 

In other words, this story wasn't worth reporting because it was old hat. Yeah, yeah, our government—the one that I'm ideologically aligned with—sent hundreds of asylum-seekers without due process to a secret torture prison where they were brutalized for months with no guarantee the torment would ever end this side of the grave. Why bring that up again now? Don't we already know all that? 

Arthur Schopenhauer once observed that "the truth [...] is allotted only a short celebration of victory between the two long periods in which it is condemned as paradoxical and deprecated as trivial." (Aquila/Carus trans.) The government at first denied the asylum-seekers sent to this prison were anything but "terrorists" and "criminals" and suggested nothing bad had happened to them there anyways. 

Yet, within a few months, apparently all the world—the whole "public"—already knew what had happened to them in this dungeon, and knew it so thoroughly that our propagandist in chief can absolve herself of any responsibility to call further attention to it. 

What, that torture-prison? That old thing? Who's talking about that anymore? 

It had completed its journey from being "condemned as paradoxical" to being "deprecated as trivial." It had been taken out of the "tragic plane" and reduced and made to fit back into the merely "trivial plane" of prosaic existence. 

"[N]ever did human psychology reach such a height of phoniness," Koestler writes. "Our awareness seems to shrink in direct ratio as communications expand; the world is open to us as never before, and we walk about as prisoners, each in his private portable cage." 

Koeslter was writing this long, long before the age of smartphones, and his words seem even more true now. Communication technology has expanded even further since he wrote, and each of us walks around with our heads bent over a "doomscrolling" stream of nightmarish material that manages both to inundate us with dispatches from the "tragic plane" of suffering and atrocity—while simultaneously reducing it all to the merest triviality. 

Hugh MacDiarmid once captured this "split consciousness" well in a poem protesting against the death penalty. He spoke of how two incompatible realities could exist in the same society: on the one hand—out there in the sunny summer day, like the people I see outside my window right now, there can be "men and women/ Respectable and respected and professedly Christian/ Idle-busy among the flowers of their garden,"—and yet, at the same time, there can be "men as innocent as I am / Pent in a cold unjust walk between steel bars."

Men like those men confined in the torture-prison in El Salvador last summer. Or those men and women still trapped today behind steel bars in Eswatini, in the C.A.R., in Cameroon—on our government's orders. Or the men and women pining out their existences in indefinite detention camps here on U.S. soil, facing deportation to the hands of kidnappers, persecutors, and extortionists in Haiti, say—to which our government is currently trying to send 350,000 people in the midst of a humanitarian crisis. 

These people exist on the "tragic plane." There is no way to merge their horrific experience with the reality of our trivial lives—as we go about here on our summer day, "idle-busy" in our gardens. 

And until every single person is rescued from such a fate, our consciousness will remain fatally dived against itself in this way; ours will remain a sick and schizoid world. 

"For as long as there are people on the road and victims in the thicket, divided by dream barriers," Koestler concludes his essay, "this will remain a phoney civilization."