“We’ve got civilizational suicidal empathy going on. And it’s like, I believe in empathy. Like, I think you should care about other people, but you need to have empathy for civilisation as a whole and not commit to a civilisational suicide.”
Elon Musk, overseer for US government efficiency, was talking a few months ago to podcaster Joe Rogan. In borrowing the term from Canadian academic Gad Saad, he framed the simple virtue of compassion as a weapon that left untouched would torch the American way of life. It’s replacement theory thinking taken to another plane. It's the breath of the barbarians at the gate.
And so as the 21st century marked its first quarter, reality in the most powerful country on Earth slipped into a vortex of blurred lines of what it meant to be alive. Some lives were worth more than others, some were flung to the wolves, some no longer existed. This was the anti-fable. There was no morality at work. Its protagonists adopted the feathers, stance and attitude of an invader, come amongst villagers.
Yet they had arrived, they believed, as conquerors, barking and purring to win the voice of those who thought themselves voiceless. And they won. They strutted and preened their power. They brooked no dissent. They began hollowing out the centre. Their leader saw in his power vindication for his life. He would make by sheer dint of his will the world bow to him. He would become the most powerful man on the planet. He saw himself as Nietzsche’s super man, one who did not follow or obey others. Laws and institutions meant nothing to him.
There would be many victims, much destruction; in his mind the pillars of society would be blasted into nothingness. The loathsome landscape would be laid waste. This was the price all would pay for he and his invaders to remake the citadel in their own image. He made order upon order upon order, which all emanated from the one source: there must be only two colours. Everything and everyone must be monochrome. The spectrum would be banned, those within it ostracised, unable to work, unable to function.
The leader had no conscience, for conscience was weakness. There was no history, for history, to them, did not exist. They were deaf to the voices of the past whistling in the wind. The past was for losers. Liberty of thought was the enemy. Except for this; there was an exception for when it suited them, that is, when it was used as an evocation of myth. The myth of greatness, untrammelled, unstained greatness. Then, like a call to the distant gods of Valhalla, it was chanted, propelled into the air, bludgeoned into the layers of the day and night so as to feel like it was true. And the gods would deliver a golden age through their messengers on Earth.
At the start of the campaign to power, their ambition was propagated to the villagers as if it would make reality easier to bear, lighten the load of each day and allow a sense of ease to descend with the nightfall. The villagers could take comfort in knowing they had ownership in a story. They were no longer them, but us. Society now was a series of subtractions. It was a progression and a statis at the same time. The invader shattering the mirrors in the halls of corrupt power. That was the anti-fable come to town, born from lies and hatred, and borne with self-righteous arrogance.
And with that arrogance, then, the rest of civilisation didn’t matter. Except in what it could do for you. And in this dark equation a shadow fell over what it meant to be human. One of the foundational pillars of being human was seen as an enemy. Being able to understand and respond to another’s suffering was a negative trait. To feel for and with another group was a negative trait. Empathy was civilisation’s suicide pill. It was a fundamental weakness in society. Another people’s homeland could instead become real estate, or a mining site. Nothing else mattered but the id. One people’s mass grave was another’s golf course.
'On the marking of the first quarter of the 21st century, a type of barbarism, in the cloaks of a new order, is trying to violently and maliciously reshape reality.'
To gouge out the centre of the old ways required attacking the mind. Institutions of education, of greater learning, of investigating science, were throttled. It was an axiom of their grip on power that a captured mind was good, a free mind was bad, and worse, revolutionary. Money, the sole measure of worth to them, and the lifeblood of inquiry, was withdrawn. There were no apologies. There would be no apologies to anyone for anything. Friends beyond borders became enemies, enemies became friends.
And yet, the leader and his sycophants, like many through the passages of history they despised, were to become themselves victims of their own acts. It is a universal law of physics that for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. It is also a universal law of human conduct. Resistance is a flower that grows from a seed. The marching on the streets one of its bloom. In the crushing is the rising.
On the marking of the first quarter of the 21st century, a type of barbarism, in the cloaks of a new order, is trying to violently and maliciously reshape reality. One age carries its deeds into the next, that is its legacy. The future, of course, cannot be audited, but the present can.
So we begin a measure of the Trump regime. It is a difficult exercise for the regime’s actions slither on the floor and roil in the wind. This is the challenge of the anti-fable. The calling to account is ceaseless.
Warwick McFadyen is an award-winning journalist. He has won two Walkley Awards and four Quill Awards. He has published several books of poetry. The latest is 21+4 Poems. His prose and poems have also appeared in Quadrant, Overland and Dissent.