EH S5 E4: The Semiquincentennial Presidential Perfect Storm Special Issue
stephen colbert for president! with mr. obama (<1 min)
BEIJING (The Borowitz Report)—President Xi Jinping’s humiliation of Donald J. Trump peaked on Thursday when the Chinese leader used a joint appearance to read aloud from the Epstein Files. Standing at a podium barely three feet away from his American counterpart, a stony-faced Xi recited a series of damning allegations about Trump that the DOJ’s redaction team had somehow missed. While the assembled press listened with rapt attention, Trump appeared oblivious to Xi’s audacious effort to embarrass him. “He’s a true friend,” Trump later said of Xi. “He said my name many, many times.” |
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It didn’t help matters that Karoline Leavitt had said THIS earlier in the evening.
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the heavy shit column: (5 Oy! rating)
Why Do People Embrace Hate? Sartre Has an Answer
A classic essay examines the hidden dynamics behind modern prejudice.
What makes a person hate a particular group of people and support policies that harm them? Writing in 2020, comparative literature scholar Judith Greenberg looked at French existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre’s classic essay “Anti-Semite and Jew” in light of twenty-first-century American politics.
Sartre wrote the essay in 1944, as people around the world were learning the extent of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust. He was also grappling with the continuing power of anti-Jewish sentiment in France at the time.
Greenberg takes issue with the way that Sartre understood Jews themselves. Ignoring Jewish religious belief, history, and culture, Sartre equated Jewish identity with legitimate fear of antisemitic violence. He claimed that “it is the anti-Semite who creates the Jew.”
However, Greenberg notes that Sartre’s real interest wasn’t in Jewish perspectives but in what makes a bigot. In fact, Sartre explicitly wrote that in other contexts the same scapegoating purpose could be served by Black or Asian people. Today, Greenberg writes, we might also substitute immigrants, Muslims, or members of the LGBTQ community.
Sartre viewed antisemitism as a solution for the fundamental human problems of anxiety and alienation. In particular, he focused on how “being-for-others”—existing with the awareness of others’ perceptions—creates tension through the risks of exposing one’s inadequacies. Because of this, anyone may become overwhelmed by a social world with many different perspectives and demands, and by the possibility of getting things wrong.
To Sartre, antisemites are people who suffer from this insecurity and fear and are unwilling to do the work of adapting to cultural change and learning new things. This leaves them vulnerable to propaganda offering simple answers. The antisemite also revels in the release of constraints imposed by living peacefully in society with others and finds comfort in joining crowds of people like them.
“When gathered among other like-minded people, they celebrate their resistance to difference and difficulty,” Greenberg writes. “In creating fear for the scapegoat, they displace their existential anxiety and bolster themselves with a false sense of superiority.”
In dominating more vulnerable people, Sartre wrote, the antisemite chooses “to be nothing save the fear he inspires in others” and finds his identity in others’ reactions. Greenberg suggests that this resembles what we might call narcissism—though that’s a psychoanalytic term that Sartre would not have used.
“So this is hell. I’d never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the ”burning marl.” Old wives’ tales! There’s no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is—other people!”
---Sartre
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