Greetings all,

Democracies have rarely struggled with fascist ideologies. The early part of the 20th century shows us that fascism does indeed emerge from democratic regimes, just as communism does. But, for the most part, I believe that democracies have “solved” fascism. It may still threaten us, but almost everyone agrees that fascism is indeed a threat.

Not so communism and Marxism. On this topic, democracies have a much more difficult time pinning down the nature of the problem. This remains true despite the fact that wherever communism has been tried (Soviet Union, China, North Korea, Cambodia, Romania, etc., etc.) it has resulted in, at minimum, low living standards and loss of civil liberties, and at maximum, mass psychosis and murder. Yet still it persists as a viable option in much our culture and political discourse.

Nearly two centuries ago Tocqueville noted that democracies, when forced to choose, will always pick equality over liberty, writing in a famous passage,

That political freedom may compromise in its excesses the tranquillity, the property, the lives of individuals, is obvious to the narrowest and most unthinking minds. But, on the contrary, none but attentive and clear-sighted men perceive the perils with which equality threatens us, and they commonly avoid pointing them out. They know that the calamities they apprehend are remote, and flatter themselves that they will only fall upon future generations, for which the present generation takes but little thought. The evils which freedom sometimes brings with it are immediate; they are apparent to all, and all are more or less affected by them. The evils which extreme equality may produce are slowly disclosed; they creep gradually into the social frame; they are only seen at intervals, and at the moment at which they become most violent habit already causes them to be no longer felt. The advantages which freedom brings are only shown by length of time; and it is always easy to mistake the cause in which they originate. The advantages of equality are instantaneous, and they may constantly be traced from their source. Political liberty bestows exalted pleasures, from time to time, upon a certain number of citizens. Equality every day confers a number of small enjoyments on every man. The charms of equality are every instant felt, and are within the reach of all; the noblest hearts are not insensible to them, and the most vulgar souls exult in them. The passion which equality engenders must therefore be at once strong and general. Men cannot enjoy political liberty unpurchased by some sacrifices, and they never obtain it without great exertions. But the pleasures of equality are self-proffered: each of the petty incidents of life seems to occasion them, and in order to taste them nothing is required but to live.

Democratic nations are at all times fond of equality, but there are certain epochs at which the passion they entertain for it swells to the height of fury.

His comments make historical sense if we remember that democracies made their entrance into the modern world in America, and especially in France, with the rejection of hierarchy at its intellectual root. Obviously every socieity needs some form of hierarchy, and so democracies have to develop structures of authority. However, democracies have never been entirely comfortable with such structures. So, communism, which promises equality in misery if nothing else, will always whisper lovingly in the ear of any democracy.

But a more pointed reason for its emergence in our modern discourse has to do with the collapse of the world W.W. II made, and the faustian bargain the United States and England made with the Stalin and the Soviet Union to win that war.

Jonathan Pageau makes a number of incisive points in his video on the narrative confusion of the modern world, which he relates to the “death” of the world made by W.W. II.

Pageau notes that every creation narrative has dark secret of sorts, or something that is brushed aside for the sake of the coherence of the narrative. Sometimes this takes the form of murdered gods (Tiamat for the Babylonians, Ymir for the Norse, etc.), other times murdered siblings (such as Remus for Rome). For any world-founding event, a meta-narrative develops that functions akin to a creation account. The dark secret of WW II, according to Pageau, was that western democracies did not win the war against fascism. For the most part at least, the Soviet Union, a nation led by a paranoid mass murderer (Stalin) dedicated to communist totalitarianism, actually did the most to win the war against Germany.

A war of democracies against the totalitarian societies of German and the Soviet Union would have been more coherent, but history had other ideas. Our alliance with Stalin meant that we had to entirely whitewash the reality of the Soviet Union. Many in the west had already been duped by Stalin in the 1930’s, as journalist after journalist reported how rosy things were there in the 1930’s. Time magazine named Stalin their “Man of the Year” twice (1939, 1943).

Even before the war ended, Stalin won over Roosevelt to a degree that allowed him to spread his influence throughout eastern and central Europe. The evils of Stalin were fully exposed by another Soviet dictator, and yet still Che Guevara, Castro, and Viet Cong fighters functioned as folk heroes for much of the western world.

All of this proves what Tocqueville wrote, but Tocqueville has no solution for the problem. For that, we look beyond political analysis, and examine something more fundamental, the realm of folklore. I am hardly qualified to write about the merits of folklore. I still confidently assert however, that folktales reveal deep truths. The stories have lasted for generations for a reason, honed and refined as they are by history not just for their entertainment value, but also their wisdom.

In case you are not familiar with the story of Rumplestiltskin, it goes something like this:

• A poor peasant, eager for status, boasts to the king that his daughter can spin gold out of straw.
• The king invites the daughter to the castle, but threatens her with death if she fails to fulfill her father’s word and make gold out of the pile of straw.
• The daughter, distraught and weeping, is visited by a strange little man who offers to do the job for her, if she gives him the ring on her finger. She gladly parts with the ring and the next morning, the king discovers a pile of gold.
• This happens again, and then a third time. On the third visit, the daughter promises the man her first child should she ever marry the king. She agrees, thinking nothing of such a pledge. What are the chances?
• Well, the king does marry her, and she becomes queen and gives birth to a son. The strange man appears again and demands that she fulfill her pledge. The queen weeps and wails. The little man feels sorry for her, and gives her three days to discover his name. If she can do so, she will be freed from the pledge.
• By good fortune, the queen finds out that his name is Rumplestiltskin, and the man is so enraged that he splits in two and is no more. The queen’s family can continue their happy life together.

First, we can note that Rumplestiltskin stands for anything we use as a supplement that at its root, threatens us. We could do this even with something very minor like caffeine. We need to get through the day and use caffeine to prop us up. Relying on this supplement can be fine or even proper if done occassionally. If we do this continually, caffeine will eventually become the master, and not the servant. We will be at its beck and call. One cup a day becomes several. This happens because we have failed to adequately “name” caffeine, to call a spade a spade about what we are doing. At the start, perhaps we understood the tradeoffs. But now . . . now we are lost, and so we pass off our addiction as no big deal, or reseach all the health benefits of coffee, and so on.

We can regain our freedom only come when we know how to define our actions, to give it a proper name. Once we have the wisdom and the courage to say, “I’m a caffeine addict,” then we can go through the aggravating process of severing our ties. This is why Adam naming the animals in Genesis 2 is such an important part of the creation narrative. Naming allows him to particpate in the differentiation of creation, of separating one thing from another, of making order out of chaos.

Without proper names, we have the chaos of Genesis 1:2. For our purposes the US/England is the peasant’s daughter, and Rumplestiltskin is Stalin. We needed him as a supplement to the war effort, and then, he came to collect in the form of ideological confusion.

One of my frustrations is how effective contemporary Marxists are at avoiding being named. Somehow, neither Stalin, Maoist China, Pol Pot, North Korea, etc., etc. are actually Marxists despite basing their societies on his ideas. Fascists, thankfully, we properly categorize, though sometimes overzealously. Rumplestiltskin inutuitively knew something that many of us have forgotten. We cannot get the ugly little demons to truly disappear until we give them a name.

Dave