If civilization imposes such great sacrifices not only on man’s sexuality but on his aggressivity, we can understand better why it is hard for him to be happy in civilization.
Freud, Civilization and its Discontents

I’m increasingly convinced that psychoanalysis is a necessary tool for diagnosing contemporary social and political realities. The ‘right’ tends towards clarity in articulating national values while the ‘left’ prioritizes an idea of inclusivity that can only regard the right’s rejection as ignorant. This remains a huge problem for the center and the left. Those who do not recognize leftist or liberal values are uneducated or greedy.

Positing the reality of an unconscious demands we consider that perhaps not all forces within and around are or can be fully transparent. Drives and desires work at cross and contradictory purposes at times. Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents remains relevant. The existence of society produces a subject that is necessarily conflicted. To enjoy the security and order of society one must constrain personal impulses and desires. One feels threatened at the prospect of an individual free for all and one feels repressed or at least discontent within society. This fundamental antagonism is a thread running through Klaus Theweleit’s Male Fantasies. This work explores the imagery and practices of fascist German soldiers and culture through a largely psychoanalytic frame. This does not mean these soldiers were acting ‘unconsciously’ but that our drives and desires when unexamined can lead violent social forms.

I recently finished volume 1 and was struck by its relevance to the recent ‘convoy’ movement in Canada that has reacted to COVID restrictions and mandates under the banner of ‘freedom’. Again, the movement fit almost perfectly into Freud’s basic paradigm. The convoy movement is most known for organizing large convoys of trucks and tractor-trailers that flow into and around cities. It was this imagery of the movement as ‘enlarged’ through vehicles and the ‘flow’ it creates that tied so closely to Theweleit’s conclusion. Large sections of last few pages can almost stand alone in their commentary on the present moment. A moment which of course includes rising backlash against gender fluidity and change as well as the reaction against collective or socialist alternatives.

Theweleit concludes acknowledging and analysing the attraction of fascist celebrations as ‘symbolic liberation of desires’.

[This is] fascism’s way of depicting the dawn of freedom, a freedom in which the fascist does not have dissolve himself [in the threatening flood effeminate liberalism].

“Deleuze and Guattari are probably right when they suggest in passing that Hitler enabled fascists to have an erection. ‘At last, not to be castrated for once!’ In a ritual that allowed the enis itself (the penis no one had) to be represented in abstract form (the seven columns), the individual, for once, was no longer castrated; he became part of the transcendental phallus that gave meaning to everything.

The imagery here is the large Nazi procession of columns but the imagery of trucks stretched out for miles makes for unnervingly smooth transition.

For the moment at least, he felt privileged to be a stream himself [in the flow of trucks], one small part of an enormous tamed flood. … In the course of the ritual, the fascist came to represent both his own liberated drives and the principle that suppressed them. This inherent contradiction never manifested itself because, during the staging of the ritual, the individual participated in power. … It is far more important to stress the sense of relief, the Utopia of deliverance, which participants in such rituals find: ‘At last I don’t have to hide anymore. . . . At last, I can see and sense that other people feel the same way I do.’

That is how fascism translates internal states into massive, external monuments or ornaments as a canalization system, which large numbers of people flow into; where their desire can flow, at least within (monumentally enlarged) preordained channels; where they can discover that they are not split off and isolated, but that they are sharing the violation of prohibitions with so many others.

Fine, except for one thing: All of that affirmation is theatrical; it never gets beyond representation, the illusion of production. Benjamin is right in saying that fascism may help the masses to express themselves, but that certainly doesn’t help them gain their rights. … No, what fascism allows the masses to express are suppressed drives, imprisoned desires. Fascist masses may portray their desire for deliverance from the social double bind, for lives that are not inevitably entrapping (a la Freud’s C&D), but not their desire for full stomachs. The success of fascism demonstrates that masses who become fascist suffer more from their internal states of being than from hunger or unemployment. Fascism teaches us that under certain circumstances, human beings imprisoned within themselves … would rather break out than fill their stomachs; and their politics may consist in organizing that escape, rather than an economic order that promises future generations full stomachs for life. The utopia of fascism is an edenic freedom from responsibility. … Meanwhile, communists and the left in general still stubbornly refuse to accept fascism’s horrifying proof that the materialism they preach and practice only goes halfway.

We need to account for the non-rational aspects of life. This is not an evaluative statement on reason. Reason can serve as many horrible purposes as noble. We are simply more and other than reasonable. To over emphasize reason is one of our many methods of disavowing the contradictions and antagonisms of being a subject in society. In my view this account gives far greater clarity to the types of impulses and expressions we are seeing today. It shows them as ‘rational’ in relation to disavowed impulses and desires. It shows why these forms are pleasurable but ultimately play into our own oppression. And it helps the left discard persistent ideas of materialism as sufficient in and of itself. Which just feeds into the cycle of calling out the right as ignorant for not seeing it clearly. Further, I would hope these insights would go some way to internal examination of leftist movements and individuals who are not immune to these desires and antagonisms.