The lure of doom

FR The lure of doom Leo Fischer • 1 hour • 2 minutes reading time Column The lure of doom Nothing matters, everything is irrelevant if someone is just brutal and unscrupulous enough: How someone like Trump beguiles the powerless. The column. Nothing helps. You can prove that he has committed crimes, you can warn about the terrible consequences of his policies, you can underline his connections to fascists or his personal enrichment intentions. But he will still be elected. Not through insidious machinations, not through fraud or bought votes. But because many people really want to vote for him. It is one of the oldest anthropological observations: people worship doom in order to gain symbolic power over it, to pass it off as their own work, to pretend that it is an expression of their own will. When someone dies, people stage huge funeral rituals to mask death as a product of society; when they are hit by crop failures, people interpret them as just punishment for their own misbehavior - which at least leaves open the theoretical possibility of regaining control through good behavior. And when they see a dictator, they act as if they wanted his power over them; they identify with it in order to convince themselves that it is theirs. So they vote for Trump because they ultimately believe that this will somehow triumph, even if only symbolically: over the left, over women, over all those who always somehow know everything better, who act as moral authorities. By voting for Trump, I have not yet gained anything, perhaps even lost a lot: but others are guaranteed to be much worse off, that is the great promise. People adopt the mindset of billionaires, as if there was even the slightest chance that they could become billionaires themselves. They sit on the shoulders of cannibals so that others may be as afraid of them - even if the cannibals could eat them up in the next moment. Appeals to reason and empathy are bound to fail where people have already stopped reacting to news in any way other than with malicious laughing smileys. Trump ultimately embodies cynicism in its final stages: nothing matters, everything is irrelevant as long as someone is brutal and unscrupulous enough. This maxim, which capitalist everyday life constantly indoctrinates everyone with, is embodied in its purest form by Trump, who does not measure the world according to morality or collective interests, but rather according to winners and losers: voting for him is ultimately also a form of resignation, self-abandonment, grim acceptance of a world in which the balance in one's bank account counts for everything and appeals to reason are themselves a mockery in the face of a society that is completely irrational. They are helping to restructure society in an authoritarian way, not because they could gain authority themselves, but because authoritarian arbitrariness is their reality, because the idea that society could be malleable seems to them to be a mockery of their own powerlessness in the face of the power of the bosses, the companies, the world situation as such. The need to be able to turn this power back against those who claim to be able to break it is probably the need behind such voting decisions. Leo Fischer is an author and was editor-in-chief of the satirical magazine "Titanic".