The Idiots’ Conspiracy
One afternoon in the early 1970s, journalist John Gerassi stepped into the Paris restaurant La Palette, at the intersection of Rue de Seine and Rue Jacques-Callot. He was late for a lunch with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and was visibly upset. The existentialists were the wrong people to annoy, but Sartre and de Beauvoir had spent time with Gerassi’s parents and had known him since he was a little boy. They showed patience with the young man’s middle-class sentimentality.
”Where is la petite?” said Sartre, with his usual nickname for Gerassi’s girlfriend.
”It’s over,” said Gerassi.
Sartre, who in old age has become almost blind, peered for a long time at the young man.
”Well, I envy you. I have never in my life cried over a woman,” he said then.
At his side was sitting his life-companion for over forty years. Later Gerassi told how de Beauvoir was ”devastated” by Sartre’s chilly words. Apparently, she at least had ”shed tears over her lover.”
Sartre, who suspected that he had made a mistake, tried to nuance:
When Castor [Sartre’s nickname for de Beauvoir, French for beaver] and I decided to have what is called an ‘open relationship’, we realised that passion inevitably leads to feelings of ownership and envy. So we decided, as you well know, that our relationship would be ‘necessary’, but that we would have the freedom to also have others, which we called ‘contingent’. It demanded that we eliminated the passion – the sort of hard feelings that often manifests itself in the form of tears.
The statement comes from the past modernity’s answer to Dr. Phil. In typical aesthetics, Sartre offers existentialism’s solution to our own time’s primary conundrum, formulated in debugged ‘consultant Swedish’: how do we solve the puzzle of life?
We now move from La Rive Gauche and the smoky cafes of Paris to the light and private dwellings (which have just been rented out) on NorrMalarstrand in Stockholm. It is the time of the political breakthroughs of the Green Party and the Sweden Democrats. At the home of the Kungsholm liberals, there hangs a black and white portrait of Sartre in the guest bathroom; on the bookshelf is The Second Sex, unread. Here there is no contract between lovers of strange philosophical terms, it is characterised by the schedules on stainless steel refrigerator doors, or on digital calendars. Download times are reconciled with work and training sessions, romantic rendezvous are pencilled in when the babysitter allows, and every other month individual men’s and women’s dinners – a combination of ironic gesture and a concession to something you would rather ignore. Then fill the existential void: tasting different olive oils (nutty or earthy); making sourdough and grinding coffee beans; sharpening knives of Shirogami steel and placing them above the new kitchen counter of brushed marble; choosing an HBO series from the collection; picking a slice of air-cured salami and taleggio (bought from the delicatessen), stylishly laid out on the designer tiles of the unique coffee table in front of the 46-inch television, sipping an Amarone.
And you also have to have a better preschool; trains running on time and assisted euthanasia – when that day comes – in private, but tax-funded clinics, where Schumann plays gently in the background, organic scented candles burn, the considerate staff dress in their regular clothes, where there are no white coats, and where a glass of wine is complementary. Now this is dignified! Nice, not gloomy, maybe a little sad, but death is actually sad, it must not be forgotten. Drink up now, to the last drop!
Posterity does not consider Sartre as an original philosopher. He confined himself to areas of conflict that had already been identified and studied more deeply by previous thinkers. But he possessed an intuitive ability to create a special air about his person, and he possessed a singular ability to come up with philosophical one-liners and anecdotes. He wrote about philosophy in American Vogue; the girl’s magazine Mademoiselle published an article with tips for teens on existentialist literature; in 1947 Boris Vian made him the central figure in his surrealistic short novel The Foam of the Days, in which the stalker Chick bankrupts himself to buy everything ever written by ‘Jean-Sol Patre’, the philosopher of the moment; on 12 August, 1950, Pius XII’s encyclical Humani Generis, was published with explicit reading instructions that it should be understood as a rebuttal of existentialism; when Sartre was arrested in connection with the 1968 student demonstrations, President de Gaulle dismissed the thought of legal penalties, saying: ”You do not arrest Voltaire.” And Sartre’s allure has been sustained. On 21 June, 2010, when he would have turned 105 years old, Google changed its French and German logos to a black and white illustration with a cartoon picture of Sartre in didactic pose. On NorrMalarstrand it would probably be said that he has ‘cared for his brand well’.
This meant that Sartre both personified and legitimised the practical recommendations of the zeitgeist. Justification was found in authority, not argument. If I may permit myself to wax post-structuralist: Sartre – the person – became a dogma.
But trends get their meaning from their ephemeral nature. It was about the time of Gerassi’s meeting with Sartre that he also ‘became a joke’. In Woody Allen’s film Play It Again Sam (1972) the director’s alter ego, Allan Felix, is pacing around in a museum, when he spots a young woman:
Allan Felix: That’s quite a lovely Jackson Pollock, isn’t it?
Woman: Yes, it is.
Allan Felix: What does it say to you?
Woman: It restates the negativeness of the universe, the hideous lonely emptiness of existence, nothingness, the predicament of man, forced to live in a barren, godless eternity, like a tiny flame flickering in an immense void with nothing but waste, horror and degradation, forming a useless, bleak straitjacket, in a black, absurd cosmos.
Allan Felix: What are you doing on Saturday night?
Woman: Committing suicide.
Allan Felix: What about Friday night?
It is easy to see this shift in perception as a symbolic end-point for Sartre’s symbiosis with the present. The sullen protesters of 1968’s Protests-Against-Everything have become today’s enthusiastic Connoisseurs-Of-Everything. Slowly Sartre’s ghost is being dissolved. The influence of the worldview he embodied, however, has lingered outside academia, in politics and among its supporters; only now are we seriously starting to leave it behind us.
Sartre’s point was that God had died and abandoned man. The inspiration came from Friedrich Nietzsche:
The madman rushed into their midst and pierced them with his glances. ”Where has God gone?” he cried, ”I’ll tell you! We have killed Him – you and I! We are all His murderers! […] Are we not straying, as through an infinite nothing? Do we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night continually closing in on us? Do we not need to light lanterns in the morning? Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying God? Do we smell nothing as yet of the divine decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead. Dead forever. And we have killed Him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers?
Nietzsche’s lines drip with despair, but for the cooler Sartre there had never been any God. It was the illusion of divine meaning that had been killed – in Sartre’s plain language, the middle-class values and traditions that underpin capitalist society.
In Existentialism is a Humanism he explains what’s left of mankind after the dead flesh has withered away:
… There remains one thing in which the existence precedes the essence … […] That is, there is no human nature, because there is no God who can imagine it. […] Man is nothing more than what he makes himself into.
The only thing that gives us a value greater than ”a piece of moss, a bag of garbage or a head of cauliflower” is the ability to imagine ourselves in the future. When we envisage the future we are alone, without the support of God, human beings, nature, tradition and values. This freedom is the source of our existential anxiety: we are ”condemned to be free.” In 1880, Fyodor Dostoevsky writes in The Brothers Karamazov: ”If God did not exist, everything would be possible.” Sartre, who nominates that exact quote as existentialism’s zero point goes, just over half a century later, further: “if God does not exist everything is permitted, nothing is ex ante good or bad, valuable or worthless, beautiful or ugly. We had become our own Creator.”
It sounds like an impossible vision, and Sartre (who himself was a human being) sensed early on that existentialism’s demands were literally inhuman. Thus, his deeply isolationist philosophy remained a product of his youth. The road away from this philosophical hopelessness became policy. For the rest of his life, he wrestled to fuse existentialism with Marxism – the unlimited freedom of man in union with man as utterly encumbered.
Existentialism’s extreme inflation of human freedom represented the opposite of Marxism, according to which individual positions are always illusions, and values and opinions are often in direct conflict with the self-interest. Genuine choice is a bourgeois propaganda myth; free will – a Christian heresy. The categories we belong to give us an impersonal identity. You are workers. You are citizens. You are a capitalist. You are proletarians. You are a woman. You are a man. But you’re never anything other than the derivative sense of your own self.
Between the two there was a fundamental strategic conflict. Marx sought political revolution and predicted that its impact would free man; Sartre wanted to create a new man in order to achieve political change. The moral tension between the two perspectives did not escape attention. When existentialism emerged it was regarded by orthodox Marxists as another version of the bourgeoisie’s individualistic myth.
So why did Sartre seek an alliance when the relationship basically consisted of conflict? In Les Aventures de la Dialectique (1955) Merleau-Ponty tested a political-psychological explanation: it was the communist totalitarian approach that attracted Sartre. If each individual is existentially shielded from other people, then there is no reason to expect any change in society. Therefore, Sartre saw no other way than political compulsion to overturn the existing order. Underlying the instinct was his profound contempt for the bourgeois lifestyle, something he instinctively had to live out in a more expansive way than just by unilaterally choosing a bohemian life on the left bank – he demanded of himself that he eliminate the phenomenon completely, once and for all.
In Marxism, he saw the tool. But as the ultimate truth of Marxism was the analysis of the individual as alienated from his own self as a result of bourgeois structures, practical success depended on people being subject to an insightful, political authority. The conclusion is obviously perverse: the realisation of liberty requires compulsion. This conclusion has never been alien to the Left, but was then formulated in terms of economic freedom. Sartre’s fusion of isms turned the thumbscrews a few more turns to apply also our existential freedom.
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The individual’s anxiety was deepened by the fact that her personal choice applies to all humanity. We are burdened like legislators by our decisions’ universal demands. The burden does not consist of humdrum life-choices, but of the values, opportunities, obligations and rights that should be associated with being human. We are obliged to choose our own lives, but we do not have the right to choose from a personal perspective. Example: the family that lives the bourgeois myth hurts itself, but the real problem is that by such conduct it curtails freedom for all other families. To allow themselves to be subjected to the bourgeoisie’s dictates is thus not only a self-injury, it is above all a behaviour that runs contrary to unity.
It is in light of this view of human beings that it may still be permissible, even mandatory, to be a revolutionary today on NorrMalarstrand or in the Liberal Party or as the minister of finance (with a norm-breaking ponytail). Repression is not bark bread and workers housing; it is quiet family evenings, the nuclear family, the mum popping popcorn while dad has a whiskey, the little girl in her pink nightgown with frills, and the boy in Superman pyjamas. They have the gall to believe, this poor family, that they are actually having a good time of their own volition, when the truth is that they are trapped in the iron structures that eliminate their apparent freedom of choice – and thereby we are each other’s jailers. Those that choose not to chart their own path fall prey to what Sartre called mauvaisefoi, or bad faith, and ”hiding an unpleasant truth or claiming an unpleasant falsehood as truth. The structure appears therefore as bad faith, as a falsehood. That which changes everything is bad faith, it is from myself that I conceal the truth.”
People’s self-harm in the existential sense justifies a new kind of political coercion, which is justified by being morally superior. It has been practiced both with iron gauntlet and silk glove, but it has been present in the West throughout the late- and post-modern periods – also in Sweden.
There is thus a view of a gigantic hoax. Its expression during much of the 1900s focused on notions of labour, value and ownership, but has, since Marxism’s death, come to be channelled in terms of social constructivism and intersectionality. The brightest flower in the bouquet has been feminism and its academic bastard gender studies, with its associated policy recommendations. The bourgeois ideas and the corruption of prosperity makes the gender power structure into ”the oppressed creature’s sigh, the heart in a heartless world and the soul in soulless conditions”, to use Marx’s characterisation of religion. Security masks oppression, equally for the slave as for the woman. The heart and soul are self-deceptions; a cosy Friday evening in the family home is the opium of the masses. The individual, of course, still acts as a member of a made-up category, but now the invisible power divides us not into classes, but into sexes. We are all, except for the enlightened politicians on the Left (in which we, in this context, include the entire Swedish political establishment) and their backing choir, like rubbish floating in a stream: and to the same extent as rubbish we will determine our life directions.
What was the 1900s most idiotic idea? Was it that man can only live a meaningful life in distress or rebellion? Was it the person living a lie who thinks he can get happiness from his trouble-free day, and would rather see more of such predictability everyday, than less? Or was it the idea that the adult, well-educated man, in his right mind, and after careful consideration, is not even able to judge whether he is happy in everyday life?
All these thoughts can be derived from a philosophical idiots’ conspiracy: Marxism’s alienation, existentialism’s bad faith, structuralism and historical materialism. But the isms had not survived the metamorphosis from the late-modern period to the present day, if they haven’t phased into a further postmodernity, which in its practice was given exponential growth by the liberal and socialist political parties. Today, existentialism as a philosophy is as dead as Marxism, but after its death, it lives on as a ghost in the political weeklies.
I have elsewhere compared feminism to phrenology. Research on the skull arch – whose popularity peaked in the first half of the 1800s – taught that different parts of the brain represent different talents and abilities. You could feel the personality of the skull shape: if part of the brain responsible for thrift was extra large, so was shaped the skull and resulted in a bulge that revealed stinginess.
The comparison consists in that phrenology, as well as gender studies, to an unscientifically low degree uses very slick concepts and empirical evidence; that gender studies had a large impact through mechanisms similar to those that drive the paradigm of art; that gender studies passes detrimental judgements on people in the light of lax theory; and that gender studies, like phrenology, is dead. The echoes of gender studies, in the form of institutionalised decisions and deluded guerrilla fighters, still live, but the spirit of enterprise has turned into a defensive anger.
The response to this was pleasant, particularly comparing me to Hitler on the public service channel P3, other voices in the debate returned again and again to claim that I was against women’s suffrage. But of course there is no reason to identify gender studies with the struggle for justice. Such mistakes are recent, politically motivated, and based on the view of humanity advanced by the merger of existentialism and Marxism. Before late-modernism, it was expected that adults, well-educated people, in their right minds, and after careful consideration, would in fact be reliable in their self-assessments. Then women realised that they should have the right to vote. Today’s women are not looking for feminism’s list of demands. The struggle’s justification therefore requires Sartre and Marx’s stale view of humanity, which makes such an observation irrelevant.
Today we laugh at phrenology. We will laugh about gender studies soon, but we will also feel uncomfortable when we consider how casually leading politicians abandoned their democratic values. There runs a red and unbroken thread from forced sterilisation to today’s political parties, including the Conservative and the Liberal parties: that political compulsion can create the perfect man at the cost of ordinary decency, respect for each other, and fundamental freedoms.
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