Discipline, Community, Action, Pride

(Working title: Third Wave Whateverism.)
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"Enlisting held another attraction: it would give pattern to his life. He was beginning to feel the basic, gnawing tragedy of the wartime displaced person, the loss of roots. Man needs freedom, but  few men are so strong as to be happy with complete freedom. A man needs to be part of a group, with accepted and respected relationships. Some men join foreign legions for adventure; still more swear on a bit of paper in order to acquire a framework of duties and obligations, customs and taboos, a time to work and a time to loaf, a comrade to dispute with and a sergeant to hate - in short, to belong."


Robert A. Heinlein - Between Planets (1951)
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"Freedom is slavery"
George Orwell - 1984

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Not content with reporting from behind the Iron Curtain before its fall, Christopher Hitchens also visited Iraq, North Korea and Iran to round out his understanding of totalitarianism. Or maybe just to garner some hefty hazard pay. His 2001 article Visit to a Small Planet after visiting North Korea makes a damn fine read in its own right. His later speeches on the Axis of Evil regimes can easily glue you to your seat. From the 2009 speech:

"The North Korean state was founded in 1950-51, that's the year 1984 was published for the first time*. You think, could it be that someone handed a Korean translation of this to Kim Il-Sung and said 'Do you think we could make this fly?' and he paged through it, said 'I don't know. But we could sure give it the old college try.' Because that's what it looks as if they did."

On a completely unrelated topic, a Californian high school teacher was trying to explain to his sophomore history class in 1967 how the German masses could have gone along with the Nazi programs back in the 1930s, how so much wilful ignorance and collusion could have been generated. Having some semester time to burn, he decided to take a few days to demonstrate it instead. Before the week was out, he'd cobbled together his own incipient pubescent Third Reich out of sitting at attention, a special salute, slogan-chanting, rampant snitching and a newspaper ad for lumber (it makes more sense in context.) The Third Wave (as he decided to label it) instilled the same astonishing fervor in its subjects as the Milgram or Zimbardo experiments cited in every introductory Psychology course. Whether students had or had not initially realized the purpose of the exercise simply ceased to matter as they immersed themselves in the pageantry and statutory competence of mass obedience. Ron Jones rapidly found himself re-cast as a Tyler Durden heading his very own cabal of space monkeys.** And he was just as rapidly running out of bananas. The students themselves began eagerly spreading the Third Wave philosophy, recruiting and policing others.

Before nipping that disaster in the bud, Jones had dedicated each day of class to a new facet of totalitarianism. Monday was Discipline, and fostering a sense of accomplishment in students for following orders. Tuesday came Community through group recitation. Wednesday the students brought Action against each other, creating their own propaganda banners and ratting each other out for complaining or failing to obey orders. Thursday they Prided themselves in their waviness, subsuming individual personae in service to an invisible Leader. Friday burn Faulkner... wait, no, different story.

But, as Hitchens noted about North Korea, there are always people willing to take a cautionary tale as an instruction manual. Where I see in the Third Wave a fearsome warning against zombification, activists see a recipe for recruiting useful idiots while they're young, albeit with the order somewhat altered. After all, Jones started out in a position of authority as a teacher, but most movements must first offer a carrot before the stick of discipline.
First comes Pride, whether in the form of a gay old parade or simply a vague notion of specialness, an excuse for living divorced from any personal quality.
Second, Community complete with a slogan-chanting subreddit or other echo chamber.
Third, Action against all those "shitlords" and "neckbeards" out there who dare question the one true faith.
Finally, Discipline, adherence to ever more absolute dogma and inevitable purges as different leaders within the movement attempt to solidify their power-base, demanding ever more fanatical proselytism from the lower ranks to sate the Whateverist Inquisition. Jones himself cleverly staged his own Operation Hummingbird by exiling three students who had voiced reticence.

Though deliberately cribbed from the Nazi Party for didactic purposes, the Third Wave's tactics were no new invention and by no means fundamentally right-wing or left-wing. The organizations which adopt it come and go, but the memetic virus of group belonging continues to rampage unimpeded, as it has since the dawn of our social ape species. Why should social justice activism be any different? Why should hashtag mobs act any differently from illiterate Luddite peasants with pitchforks and torches? Every organization which seeks to enroll the masses (from major religions to commercial pyramid schemes to high school sports teams) tends to supply its underlings with gratuitous self-righteousness, a sense of belonging and agency and nominal targets for a two minutes hate. In other words they furnish the "duties and obligations, customs and taboos" for which youths like Heinlein's protagonist in Between Planets have joined foreign legions throughout history.

How demeaning this basic human slavishness strikes you will depend on the you. Heinlein himself was rather thoroughly a military man whose protagonists displayed a great deal of loyalty once they'd chosen a cause. Yet they also maintained a harsh awareness of their own motivations, and this seems critical. As disastrous as it can be to indulge our baser animal nature, keeping ourselves willfully ignorant of it only leaves us vulnerable to manipulation. Then, having succumbed, it becomes that much harder to admit such weakness, likelier to repeat history for failing to remember it.
Saturday. Strength through Ignorance.
Ignorance is strength.

"If our enactment of the Fascist mentality is complete not one of you will ever admit to being at this final Third Wave rally."


I have to wonder how many of today's snowflakes will admit to attending all their rallies twenty years from now, to rioting and yelling insults in the faces of visiting professors. Or how fervently today's neon-haired "non-binary" space monkeys will be chanting along to the latest right-wing charlatan in twenty years, desperate to protect their alimony checks, property values, two point five cars and two-kid garages against those decadent liberal foreigners. Isn't it amazing how many fish from the '70s bought bicycles in the '80s?

"And yet the rage that one felt was an abstract, undirected emotion which could be switched from one object to another like the flame of a blowlamp." - 1984








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*Hitchens was off by a year or two on both counts, apparently, though that's easy for me to say sitting here with Wikipedia tabs open.

** His name is Robert Paulson. His name is Robert Paulson.
"Robert was big for his age and displayed very few academic skills. [...] Well, the Third Wave gave Robert a place in school. At least he was equal to everyone. He could do something. Take part. Be meaningful. That's just what Robert did. Late Wednesday afternoon I found Robert following me and asked what in the world was he doing. He smiled (I don't think I had ever seen him smile) and announced, "Mr. Jones I'm your bodyguard. I'm afraid something will happen to you. Can I do it Mr. Jones, please?""
And no, I can't find any reference confirming Palahniuk had read Jones' article. If accidental it's a funny coincidence. Unless, possibly, you happen to be Robert.