The college boy who hated everyone

When I was a university student in the 1980s the system was being, particularly in the humanities, massively feminized. The administrative apparatus was even more so: if the professoriat in English and other departments was 50% female (philosophy was the exception to this; I would also its professional ethos in American universities extreme far right, though the content of what is studied may very towards the center at times) while the bureaucracy was 95% female except at the topmost levels.

As a young man, very poor though my family, which refused to support me in college since I did not follow my father's dictates, was middle class, I encountered massive intolerance.

"Feminism" made none of this in no way easier and every war far worse.

The common sense blamed me. Worse, I am white. Automatically placed in the oppressor class.

Yet I always thought of myself on the left, not the right (though certainly not a liberal). I still do. It is still something many people have doubted about me. For instance, black liberals, who define all politics in their terms, and may, like so many Americans interpret disagreements about ideas with failure to respect their persons as demonstrated by being 'nice', would assume my own radicalism is actually racism. That's their prior assumed major premise so any factual situation is useful as minor premise to draw the foregone conclusion. Imagine what would happen to me in my first effort to form a tenants association against a landlord who allowed the heat to be shut off in subzero weather and then lied about it, as landlords often do, but the black neighbors automatically read my contempt for this man as not respecting their one unbreakable rule that a white plebeian may not dislike a black master.

I'm anticapitalist, therefore on the left. My solidarity with any type of other persons is conditional based on the situation and what we really have in common. That woman chose to be a liberal and prefer black millionaires to equally poor white neighbors.

I was not successful at the university. I resentfully blame feminism for this in part. I blame liberalism in the main.

I am a radical who could be of the right or left. My analysis places me on the left. A different one could place me on the right.

Liberalism follows a different logic it shares with conservatism. It drives its politics by its moral commitments, and thus is conservative and tied to legalism. Thus in a way it is not political at all. But that is the mainstream culture.

The rise of feminism in corporate culture is not a simple matter, because there were great causes and interesting claims, and they are much further to the left and at least potentially closer to my own thinking, though on examination I find that an autonomous logic of opposing 'patriarchy' on the grounds of a theory of gender actually makes no sense.

I also think that men and women think differently, and the rise of female predominance and normative femininity meant that some of the powers of the mind are weakened in social life, and this affected the universities. The university I went to, the highest rated public university in the United States then as now, the University of California, had many brilliant professors and, in my encounter, few very interesting students, the mass of whom were only there hoping to get into a decent paying career and with little or no curiosity about much of anything. What they expected of each other was what everyone in California expects: smile like an idiot and keep on trucking as you mind your own business.

Many women are treated horribly in our society. So are many men. The liberal victimology ideology, which has nothing leftist about it, and was only a means for ambitious middle class people claiming minority status to further their own competitive bids for status by blaming social injustices easily theorized on whoever appeared to them to wear a face of that horrible evil thing known as privilege. The privilege I had was having been brought up by people who loved the arts and did not want only a bigger house and car, I grew up with notions of what is satisfying and pleasurable that involved doing things like reading books, which might or might not require being filthy rich enough that you could do so on estates and yachts where servants would do all your work, which sounds like the movie legend it is. I have always been aware that many people in our society are treated like shit, and I never saw it as obvious that this was the fault of those of them who might just be privileged enough to expect otherwise.

Therefore, I consider myself a man of the left who is not a feminist, a black nationalist, a gay liberationist, a cultivator of memorabilia of how 'our' people where specially targeted by this or that legendary massacre, which would surely be something to make a movie about and talk about with proud pleasure if you knew you could rightly identify with one of the heroes who seems just like your grandmother. And this may all sound nasty but what I mean is: if you really are sensitive or recognizant not just to the social injustices identifiable with darkest criminal sin but also those that are clearly effects of that great monster inequality, then the world we live in is awful and the word oppression may rightly be found near any decent person's speaking palette. To be against inequality and not just the sinfulness which might also be disobedience when found in the quarters not of the masterly but the servile, this I would call distaste for social injustice of left and not or not only right side of the political theater hall. And I think that matters.

Sure, I am contingently a feminist and all the rest. What I ask is is the one with the presumptively favored bottom status in fact victim of a wrong? Or just happy she sits comfortably atop a glass ceiling ledge? Yet I would not scorn her, if she might then topple, being made of glass, or rage in fury at the prospect, thinking she is. After all, Americans are touchy to provocation when it suits them. Their motto I hear, with tracks in mud that show it, is don't fuck with me. Yes ma'am he said and politely handed in his paper awaiting the mark or was it fine. Sure it is she said. And what's more I'll tell you what you impertinent writing boy.

By the way, do you know what the real difference between the Irish and the Jews? (And, another story, the Blacks?) There are legends of mutual amity. The Jews, who make the best citizens of any monarchy provided they are given the chance for the same reason some of them also make its best critics (less often opponents) as long as they are tolerated, do not see oppression looming everywhere, but are only bothered by that injustice of authority that has become, exceptionally, immoral. Justice is happy for children of the divine. The Jews are the last remaining aristocracy because theirs is of the mind, and everyone knows the good has some relationship to our ability to understand matters by thinking about them, to say nothing of study, and for that alone. Most Europeans who don’t believe in God know that his idea was that of bosses, and they aren’t intimate with this deity, night or day, but have only been told about him, in the image of a tyrant, or ruler anyway, the question being that of right and left: whether tyranny is good or bad. But the Jews understand what the believers proclaim. They naturally don’t expect institutional authority to be against them, and so are quite determined it work as it should. Indeed, they almost always fear mobs more than the government or anyone associated with it, who after all tend to be educated, though this has been a bit less true in the Americas (north and south). They always hope they can somehow work with the government authorities, whose welfare they pray for, and under normal conditions conditionally trust. A doctor in charge of my imprisonment once proclaimed to me as justification, “This is a good society.” His Jewish colleagues were in position to quarrel with that, also believing something is wrong with me, and not it, a conviction Jews arrive at reluctantly and could never believe to be norm and not exception. Since I take it a radical of any kind in some way asserts the ‘badness’ either of the theoretically totalized social formation that may be represented in the instance of some practice and situation repugnant to them (we are speaking here of institutional violence legitimating itself by projecting this violent character onto the person it targets), if I am right, oppositional radicalism of any kind is only abnormally a Jewish possibility, doubtless because their experience has mostly not been that of the colonized (or enslaved) but something else. Those Irish who are inclined to be radicals think a bit more like the Blacks, not because of how they plan to change the world but how they do or did know themselves to be oppressed within it, an oppression that is lived before it is cognized, though unlike the blacks by appearance they may pass for members of the race of masters as long as they don’t say what they’re thinking. For me, like many Americans, told as soon as I started school that we are a nation founded in proud rebellion against tyranny, such legendary notions might serve as a kind of personal myth I might use to define what is perhaps a funny way of being a radical, in a way that to most people just means disobedient and unruly brat, merely afflicted with immaturity (or sickness of mind) but to me was linked to the intuitive certainty that those bossing me were nasty bastards. I recall going to school at age 5 and thinking, maybe this boss is my oppressor, and similar expectations would later be often confirmed. Punishments from teachers and parents do not have to be experienced as lessons in moral justice, as it was open for me to believe this was tyranny, a belief that reflection reveals makes more sense than the bosses’ claim that I deserved it due because I had misbehaved, for these were teachers and I believed in learning, while my stepfather, who day job was teaching teachers, was actually just a boss, and besides, how is a sanctions regime a form of learning? Isn’t it by studying texts and discussing things that young or old people learn? He wanted me to learn obedience and discipline, and unfortunately these had no content since his law was his will (I could care less if it were also ‘God’s’ nor for any other explanation of the reasons of state that we all know are always available to be presented if need be so that the subjects, assuredly loved by good tyrants and only hatefully violated by bad ones, who might be punished themselves in an imagined higher place or later time for which one might die waiting). The teacher punished transgressions immediately with transit to the isolation room, my first experience with the boredom of a prison cell. I have long noticed that every time I have told an American liberal of some injustice I experienced, they always ask, what did you do, which merely indicates that they believe the punishment state and its practices to be normal and right, and intend to confirm this prejudice by using the evidence they get me to tell them to show me that of course, as always, the state of things is just, for of course you must be a sinner and must have made some mistake, as your unconscious at work in what you say will inevitably reveal, they can be sure of that. So I was a brat, immature, and surely of some ‘mental illness’ or simply particularity of mind and behavior, all of which are either negative, which accords with a use of the dominant model of scientific knowledge which only knows mistaken theories but takes extant knowledge for true in tentative practice, applied to the technologies and techniques of management of behavior with the assumption that if anything goes wrong, it must be you. In fact, what this means is that you are like a worker in a machinic system and when there is a problem, the worker is blamed, never a boss, never the way things are managed, never the fact that the enterprise is managed, or that it makes sense for you to be there in the first place, and if you know that it doesn’t, then of course you are a potential criminal or sick person because in recognizing that the system is not there for you but to produce the docile bodies and minds of workers in some company not unlike the classroom, you have placed yourself outside the state of things, which is a definition of excludable deviant or criminal, mental illness being predicated of people who effectively are now regarded as having revealed that they are criminals in potential or liable as targets for breakdowns when their disruption is deemed obstructive rather than productive of shareholder investments, a problem that neoliberalism a bit later would begin to harnass libertarian cultural energies in order to redirect. So I was a rebel brat. Sure I overdid it, sure that is comic, but I always knew I was onto something, and it pleases me to know that very many people today agree. It may just be an American myth, but I was thinking of this in relation to some of my Jewish friends because the first ones I knew were radicals. What a shock when a few years later I found them at the core of the far right, a topic I have pondered much in print. Their official halls with their identity kits I found so fascinating if quaint. Most were fools, the others well read. It seems to me even now they divide interestingly being people who are merely rather more likely to take some ordinary matters quite seriously and those who just cherish their identity, so much that that they can do so by proclaiming it as the sole important thing they have in common while they all engage in some indifferent festive or sportive activity in a numerable congregation of persons who share an idea of who they are that means only enough to say that it must mean something, of great importance to be sure. They are less likely to be on the radical left I fetishistically cherished because they need their community with its ideas of the demanding happiness of an enchanted will to be just, but they don’t need to be oppressed. But Christ, isn’t that what ontological radicalism is?

Between the sense of oppression the Blacks had in spades and the will to study the Jews did, what did I get? The Jews mostly got wonderful careers, the Blacks mostly did not and rightly, if dangerously, resented this (while many of them bristle at any possible remark that might appear a slight to their fragile pride, issued as a kind of tax on you in the form of ‘respect’, especially since everything is racism and the liberal-left culture mostly opposes structural oppression by identifying it with culpable attitudes expressed by members of ‘oppressor’ groups, which is one reason I think we white radicals will never be appreciated by them and more generally we will never quite understand or trust one another, at least, as I see it, because they will not us, since my experience was always that black people in authority would treat me very nastily indeed, and I think part of is this overwhelming demand they make, rooted in their mostly protestant values, that we show them this respect that basically means you cannot criticize, their culture not having much of what I appreciate so much in Jewish culture which is the enjoyment of argument, which protestants white and black consider assault, or unacceptable disobedience if they are exercising authority, especially in America, whose culture is far less tolerant in everyday social life and business culture, on which it is historically and in everyday life modeled, all the more so as most Americans identify with that culture and recognize no outside of it, as we do not have a class conscious culture in the old European sense (which predated Marxism since it was based on the existence of a semi-servile peasantry, which became a class of factory workers before the rise of an office economy muddled the sharpness of class distinctions). I found American Blacks in all situations of official employment and any kind of authority to be ruthlessly intolerant of any dissent; they must be obeyed, and if you even hesitate about this, you will be hit with a fist or a sanction, and they will believe you a racist, since that is their go-to frame of reference for almost everything if you are not black, to them your being white does not mean European-American, which is all it could ever mean to me, but being somehow ‘like’ all those who wielded slavery and its brutal and ugly sequelae; if in doubt, they ‘know’ you ‘might’ hate them, just as they expect you to think they ‘might’ use criminal violence because they can’t stand the thought. Whatever group I might belong to since I obviously I was white, and everyone hates everyone, and while capital doesn’t mind, its managers want things to work well, and of course periodically things fall apart, and the lesson of the last century lost on all conservative moralists is that the by definition mental and moral as well as physical suffering that is caused by crises is not a matter of moral judgment only, and often really not at all. There is moral bad luck, the suffering of disgrazia and malediction, to say nothing of disaffection, might not be functions of conscience gone wrong (and crime portending) but something else. Fanon put it well by speaking affirmatively of the ‘damned’, his famous book given the more timid translation as ‘wretched’. Damnation and salvation in the modern world are no longer necessarily states of deserving consequence upon vice or virtue, as they might just be matters of bad luck. This is what the experience of colonialism taught much of the world. Many Jews are conservatives for the same reason many Christians are: Every psychological moralism is right-wing. Sociological moralism, or identity politics, like Stalinism, which turned class conflict into a Manichaean dualism of class hatred, also is. Governmentality, of which all religion is a form and a language, has had so many sad ideological alibis.