really obsessed with soulmate au’s recently and it got me thinking… what if john’s soulmate was part of the boys? a girl trying to kill him with an entire group of people also trying to kill him… and he’s fated to her? could picture him finding out and just putting his hands on his hips while turning his back to her and doing that click chuckle thing. just in utter disbelief but it is definitely on track for fate’s little play with him and his life lolol

Oohhh, you know, I've never played much with the soulmate au concept, but this struck me just right because I can so clearly see the slow, building meltdown that strikes him when that reveal drops.

The mirthless laugh, shaking his head, the hapless gesture to the ceiling before his hands drop. "Of course. Of course it's you. Why wouldn't it be? I mean—Christ, it makes sense, doesn't it? Every single person who was supposed to love me has-has fucked it, so why—" he keeps cutting into this escalating, unsettling laughter. There's nothing funny about it: you're sure that you're watching someone lose the last shred of their sanity in real time. "Why would my 'soulmate'-", he says, miming big, dramatic quotation marks. "-be any different?" That manic grin has shifted into tight baring of his teeth, a vicious sneer. He closes in on you, stands so near you can feel the heat of his breath when he hisses, "I should put you in the fucking dirt with the rest of them."

It should be terrifying, but it's hard to focus on anything other than the glassiness of his eyes. The sheer devastating heartbreak of it all, telegraphed clear as day in the way he carries himself. His eyes flare red, sizzling up the tears before they can fall. "And then you really will be all alone," you say. Maybe it's the hopelessness of the moment, maybe it's the shock of learning for yourself that he's supposed to be your one and only, but you feel numb. Frayed in a way you didn't know you could be. The crimson light of his eyes disappears in an instant, revealing surprise, followed by a wounded kind of look, before that familiar seething rage returns. "We'll see about that."

When you think back, do you remember what made you ship Convin in the first place? And can you tell me a bit more about the relationship you headcanon for them? (@connor-sent-by-cyberlife)

Gosh, okay, this is such a loaded question for me, lol! Because I love them so much. It’s gonna be hard to try and distill that into one post. But I’ll try my best! XD

So, right off the bat, there are the canon characters. And, while I find canon!Gavin pretty awful and think a relationship between him and canon!Connor would be a bad idea, there’s still a very real tension between them. It’s not rooted in anything positive, for sure, but there is a lot of passion behind it. They both fill the classic enemies/rivals roles for each other and, well... I’m a really big fan of the enemies (to friends) to lovers trope. So right off the bat, they’ve already kinda sparked my interest, yeah? There’s something there, something not fully formed, but dang, it has a lot of potential! Which is where fanon comes in. I think it’ll come as a surprise to absolutely no one that I absolutely adore a fanon Gavin Reed. A more nuanced take on him where he’s not just a racist caricature and is instead a real, human person with thoughts and feelings and motivations. And, while I don’t really remember my actual introduction to fanon!Gavin, one of the earliest things I read that I remember really sticking with me was the amazing fic, Mind-Blowing, by  Redd000. That fic had such a wonderful iteration of a Gavin who not only had a very complicated backstory and a lot of interesting interpersonal relationships, but also a dynamic character arc that brought him from the canon douchebag we all know and hate to a more empathetic character who could learn and grow and admit that maybe he was wrong. Another very early fic I read that made me really fall in love with fanon!Gavin was A Scratched CD by consecrated. It was one of the first Convin fics I ever remember reading and just... really falling in love with. And it really went a long way toward making me just adore the potential relationship between the two of them.  Now, this was still back in the early days when I was still giving other ships a try and seeing what I liked and didn’t, but between already having a sort of bias for the enemies to lovers dynamic and now seeing the absolute goldmine of potential that a relationship between them could deliver on, I was kinda sold. And I think maybe the final nail in that coffin was the esteemed Traces by berryblonde. It was... such a memorable fic for me. The twists and turns of it were amazing. The backstory the author built up. The slow paradigm shifts happening throughout. The case and the way all the players fit together. It was just... It was and is still one of my favorite fics on the Archive. Highly recommend to anyone looking for not just a good Convin fic, but a great casefic/mystery/drama in general.  But the thing all of these had in common was just such a wonderfully built Gavin Reed. Seriously, I was quickly at the point where I couldn’t even read him as a villain anymore, it just seemed so strange to me. Because all of these fics painted such a nuanced, complicated man. One capable admitting he was wrong and doing his best to right his wrongs. Whether platonic or romantic, it was his interactions with Connor that always drove him forward towards becoming a better man. And, as a flawed human being myself, there is something so appealing about that. Of seeing a redemption arc play out like this again and again, of seeing that second chances can be had, that even the worst people can turn themselves around and get back on the right path. It was so... affirming. And it all just kinda tied things together in my mind, too. That Connor was this catalyst, this reagent that burst into Gavin’s cozy worldview and shook him up enough to have to reevaluate himself in the upheaval.  But what’s more than that, I also think Gavin is a great catalyst for Connor’s character growth, too. Because, much like Hank, Gavin is someone who’s character growth and dynamic shift would be such a positive influence on someone like Connor. Connor, who spent so much of his short time alive being the villain. Doing bad things for bad people. Doing his best to shut down a movement that ultimately granted him and all his people freedom. I feel like Connor wouldn’t be a stranger to regret, to that urgent desire to change, and to the fallout left in the wake of that. I think, ultimately, Connor and Gavin’s arcs would almost mirror each other. That there’s a lot both of them could take away from the other in regards to forgiveness and maturing as people and second chances to do what’s right. I think Connor needs to let go of his hatred of his machine self just as much as Gavin does. And there’s something in that symmetry that just... It speaks to such a deep understanding between them. A shared experience between a human and a machine. Something they can both empathize with in each other. And that, more than anything, is the basis of a good, healthy, long-lasting relationship in my opinion. I think they would be very good for each other once they both move past their hangups. Two people who can grow both together and as individuals. I just think it’s a beautiful dynamic and such a strong foundation to base a relationship on. It makes me believe that they would be a couple who lasts.  And then there’s the fact that they both are very competent people, too! (In fanon at least, lol! XD) I absolutely love that sort of buddy cop vibe these two would have (sometimes literally) where one of them is super analytical and the other is reckless and spontaneous? While being total badasses, too! But both working together would balance each other out perfectly. I feel like Connor would help make up for Gavin’s tactlessness while Gavin helps Connor feel more human. They’d both shake each other up, help each other out of their comfort zones and into a fuller experience of life. They’re such great foils for each other and I think it makes them so balanced in terms of a relationship, too. And that goes for the banter as well. They can both be sarcastic little shitheads and omg, it’s so funny the way some authors write that! Top tier banter is a sign of a great Convin fic imo, lol! They’re just the perfect characters for that sort of humor! XD But I really believe having a sense of humor you can share with a partner would be such a boon to a romantic relationship, too. And, y’know... seeing them laugh at and with each other just makes me smile. I love knowing they enjoy each other’s company so much and that they’re so happy together. Gah, it makes me absolutely melt. Ultimately, this is how I love to both read and write them. As two flawed individuals trying to move past their past transgressions. Growing. Changing. Learning that they’re not so dissimilar. Understanding each other more fully than they’d ever expect. Bonds deepening, affection growing, a language of their own developing between them. And then, the pin dropping. The realization. And a love that can and will last. All the while being quippy little badasses, lol! (And if you want a great example of all of this, I’d be remiss not to recommend perhaps my favorite Convin fic of all, Mission: Unexpected, by J11nxed. It’s so good. It’s the fic I always go back to when I need cheering up. And it’s absolutely the dynamic I try for when I write Convin myself. It’s a long fic but it’s so worth reading!)  So yeah... That is... the most basic answer I could give to this, lol. I just... really love this ship a whole lot and I’m actually so glad you asked about it because I love sharing my thoughts on it with others. And, y’know, hoping that maybe my words would get them to give it a chance if they haven’t before. Hopefully, there aren’t too many typos, lol! There’s no way I’m going back through this freakin essay, omg. XD But yeah, hope this answered your question sufficiently, friend! :D

How would you have written damons character as an antagonist, in a way that is believable for elena to fall for him? Or do you have any examples of shows that have done thaf dynamic well?

OK well first of all, the main thing, like I’ve always said, is that Damon can’t do what he did to her friends and family. It’s too much.

He rapes Caroline

He tries to kill her

twice

actually, no, three times

He tries to kill Bonnie

He’s responsible for Vicki

Turns out that he’s the one who killed and turned her birth mother and they’ve had sex

He kills Jeremy

Not to mention that he got Jenna stabbed

Like he causes too much carnage to Elena’s circle specifically that her falling for him in any capacity doesn’t make sense unless Elena is actually just a terrible friend and sister.

Eric doesn’t even do this much damage to Sookie’s circle, the most he does to her friends is chain Lafayette in his basement and then feed on him, which actually has context because Lafayette was selling vampire blood and that’s a grave offence among vampires.

So that’s the first thing that I’d have to change.

The second is that he has to have a story that is actually sympathetic and not just, I fell in love with a woman who told me specifically that she’s interested in me because I love her more than she loves me

because that’s stupid. I have so many different posts about this but in 1864, I would’ve made Damon a pillar of the community with a wife and kids because at that age he would’ve had a family and then Katherine comes and completely torpedoes his life, she promises him an eternity of them together and swears that her being with Stefan is just to use him, she actually seduces him and perhaps compels him and has him so wrapped up in her that he abandons his family and his wife finds out that Katherine’s a vampire and tries to out her but Katherine convinces him to put her in an asylum, like actually have Katherine be malicious in how she deals with him and have Damon do all this terrible shit, only for his father and the townspeople who he had once considered his community turn on him and kill him and he can’t see his kids again and he’s destroyed his wife’s life and he carries that guilt and that anger for over a century, just biding his time for the comet to get Katherine out because she promised him eternity only to find out that she wasn’t in the tomb, she knew where he was and she didn’t care, and she always loved Stefan and then just have him completely break. That kind of storyline doesn’t paint him in the best light but with the right acting and the right script and the right dialogue and the right chemistry, it makes him sympathetic and his hatred of Katherine and his hatred of the town is rooted in something real. So if Elena is going to feel any sense of sympathy toward him, with that kind of storyline I can understand it. And I could see her helping him realize that the people who live in the town now don’t deserve to die so when he has that whole “I came to this town wanting to destroy it but I found myself trying to save it”, it’s earned.

In terms of Elena “falling” for Damon, I have always said there are various ways this could’ve been done. Like actually make them a dark relationship:

If Elena becomes a vampire and that’s supposed to be a game-changer then she has to change internally. I would want Elena to feel constrained by Stefan and have a reason for it, like if Stefan is all about here is how you control your urges, here is how you appear as human as possible, then I would want Elena to realize that she’s actually curious about losing control, curious about the blood, curious about the freedom of vampirism and Damon gives her that.

The show thinks it did that but it didn’t because Stefan did everything right. He taught her how to hunt, how to defend herself, he stimulated her sexually, he took her to parties so she could learn how to socialize while being oversensitive, he provided opportunities like the motorcycle so she could relish the power of vampirism and he looked for the cure secretly, he consistently told her she would make it through this period, he even celebrates her being alive with champagne, like Stefan was actually perfect, the ONE thing he couldn’t do was teach her how to feed on humans, that isn’t enough of a chasm. And Elena constantly said how she didn’t want this life. If Elena didn’t actually say any of that and did things like, Maybe I should learn how to feed on humans and he shut her down, or if she compelled someone and he was like Elena, I know it’s tempting but you need to not do that and she just felt stifled then I could see why she would go to Damon.

Then when she’s with Damon, he encourages all of her worst impulses. She no longer looks at her friends as friends but as food and it’s not something that Damon helps her navigate because she’s a vampire and this is how vampires feel, they feed together, they drink like crazy together, they drive like maniacs together, she leaves school because fuck it, she has eternity, why does she need to be confined by human rules anymore

Another thing I said I would do is I could see the triangle being like Will/Elizabeth/Jack in PotC:

Elizabeth was attracted to Jack and I think that’s fair because he’s attractive and because he did everything she wanted in that he followed his impulses, he was outside the law, outside societal constructions, he did what he did because he wanted to do it and yet she knew he also had morality in him. So it was this tension of sexual curiosity and the belief that he could be redeemed. And Jack plays on her sexual curiosity, there is a ton of innuendo, a lot of flirting and when it really counts he proves her right in being a “good man” but that’s also directly related to Will, helping Will, saving Will, trusting Will and while Will believes she loves Jack for like half of POTC At World’s End, Jack and Elizabeth both know it’s always Will. There’s no question. And I think that could’ve been Delena. I think Elena could be curious about Damon and attracted to Damon and I think he could play on that because he’s Damon but when it comes down to it, for both of them, it’s about Stefan.

Jack works because he’s not bound by romance, his love is intangible, it’s the sea, it’s it’s the Black Pearl, it’s being a captain,  it’s his crew, it’s the components that construct what freedom is to him and I would’ve given Damon something like that, unconcerned with earthly preoccupations like love particularly since he’s a vampire and immortal and I think that would’ve been very interesting with Elena being there as a sort of reminder that earthly preoccupations aren’t always a waste of time, like a good bond that’s in between friendship and romance but never crosses over to either. So I could see that happening.

I have also said that I could see Elena being attracted to the idea of Damon, the way the Delena fandom is attracted to and romanticizes the idea of Damon where, like, a part of her that she really hates --- and we see that she hates it --- we get a Buffy-esque breakdown like this

likes the fact that he’d let everyone die to save her, is flattered by the fact that when she says something to hurt him, he spirals out of control, misconstrues his toxic behaviour as intense love and finds herself curious about him because he comes on strong all the time, so she wonders if being with him would be passionate and consuming, have her romanticize the idea of a consuming relationship only for them to get together and realize how unbelievably awful it is to be in that relationship where every time they fight and he storms out, she calls her friends to make sure they’re safe and tell them to avoid Damon at all costs because he’s on edge, have her feel the guilt of knowing a fight between them caused an innocent to die etc.

Who wants a middle of the chapter spoiler for Operation Bosco? 

“Hey.”

He whispered this when the hour was even later and they’d washed off again, this time together, in a hurried way. Now, in bed for the final time, Haven draped herself over his lap as Locke sat up, glancing around the room and sighing, frequently, though the noises hardly even got the smallest of peeking from his girlfriend. She laid there, eyes shut, just breathing, in and out, steady. She was topless, fully unconcerned with this fact, and seemed content to drift off this way, for as long as he would allow her.

Locke found it difficult to move her.

Though he needed to stretch out himself, get full usage of the fact they were in an inn, with a nice, cozy bed and, well, maybe questionable sheets, but way better than their sleeping bags, the man found it difficult to make the motions. He knew Haven would give easily, as she no doubt wanted to get some usage out of a fluffy pillow, more than his bony, crossed legs, anyways, but he just couldn’t bring himself to take the action.

Sometimes he forgot. About how beautiful his girlfriend was.

She was the daughter of Mirajane Strauss, a name he’d grown with and mostly ignored, hearing it exchanged with everything ranging from the guild’s barmaid to, maybe, one of it’s greatest mages.

But once, he heard her name used in a different way. Mentioned in passing. About magazine spreads and modeling and...she’d just always been Haven and Marin’s mom. The Master’s wife. He thought she was pretty, maybe, when he was a little boy, but once he stopped being a little boy and heard of this past, it was difficult not to spend a night up in his parent’s attic when they were gone on a job, digging through old boxes to find the old stack of Sorcerer mags that he knew his mom had, because she never threw out any written work, and it…

Made him feel gross.

The next time he saw Mirajane.

And Haven called him out on it, the way he blushed when her mom served them juices, back then, as he was still a year or so away from openly getting away with slinging beers at the hall, the blonde even longer. She couldn’t understand (and he’d have never even ventured to explain) to her what he thought of for a good month, every tie he saw her mother.

That’s what Haven could be.

Now.

In current day.

Or could have been, maybe, as she’d aged past Mira’s prime modeling days.

Still, she’d always more or less rejected this legacy in favor for the one her father had carved. The one her mother, actually, had rejected for herself.

Haven had grown into being a woman the same way she went about being a child or teen; by putting all her focus into how talented of a mage she could become. Not how to properly dress to accentuate her body or accurately match shades to her complexion.

Sometimes, when Marin became only slightly interested in the most basic of beauty concepts (and Laxus relinquished some of his leash on his youngest) and Mirajane would ecstatically give her tips or even try out different makeup with her, there was a vague offer to Haven. To join them. Or even just her mother.

But that idea felt gross and wearing dresses or even a nice top felt restrictive and it was hard enough for her to even pull on something other than a sports bra and Mirajane gave up, eventually, while her Aunt Evergreen would only sigh sometimes, at her teenage nice, chiding her in snide ways over how very little interest she’d garner this way, from boys her age.

She wasn’t interested in boys though, then. Or after, Locke thought sometimes. Even now. Or maybe he just worried.

Her feelings towards other people, or at least the other relationships she let him know about, all seemed based purely on physical power. The men were stronger than her, better connected, and this bothered her in a way that she couldn’t quite explain that eventually bled into what Haven derived as sexual attraction.

Or at least that’s how Locke viewed it, when he broke it down, and it made sense, maybe.

Maybe.

This left a rather big hole though. A him sized hole. Because he knew Haven had long surpassed him in the offensive magic field and he had no hope of catching her. He had no interest in it. He might physically be able to overpower her, but her magic was the greatest equalizer. He had no match for it. Only cures.

So what did she want with him? Anyways?

She’d call him whiny if he questioned it.

Actually, she had, any time he tried to explain it to her, growing annoyed or thinking he was passing some sort of judgment over her, over her interests and though he saw where she was coming from, was able to recognize both their person insecurities were butting up against one another, he would have liked an answer.

Why him? Or them?

She said frequently that she could feel it, when she was with him, just this absolute need to be together, and Locke guessed he felt it too, maybe, but the way Haven talked about it…

He had to address internally, at times, just why he wanted to he with her too. It was, after all, part of the equation. Sometimes he felt unsure.

When he was a teen, it kind of felt like the natural turn in their relationship. He dated most all of the girls he knew, seriously and in that stupid teenager way, where it felt serious for all of a week and then unimportant the next.

Haven was his best friend and though he was young and dumb, he wasn’t young and dumb enough to not realize that if that next week turned and it all turned out for not, then he’d be losing that. But it felt worth the risk. She was a girl, who was interested in him, and pretty.

Those were most of his only qualifications.

But Haven came with the bonus of having known one another their entire lives, so there wasn’t as much guessing over the little things. They could go on jobs together, blow their jewels together, and while she was his first, in the important way, he’d gotten all the unimportant things out of the way before while she hadn’t, which finally gave him something of an upper hand over her.

He got to play the older, cooler boyfriend for awhile, instead of the friend she tried to instigate physical fights out of at every turn.

Thing about it any deeper back then would have been dumb.

At the first chance of things possibly getting more serious, Haven ran.

He liked to think that he had no part in this, but maybe…

Had they never dated, were they not together when her father finally excommunicated her (because Locke imagined this coming to pass eventually either way), he always kinda thought that, maybe, she’d have asked him to come with her.

Like you would a best friend.

But asking him to run away away with her, taking him with her, would have implied something much deeper. Something Haven couldn’t face then.

So she ran away.

He didn’t blame her for that anymore.

He scared her, maybe, in he bedroom that day, when he offered to move in together, that they could live together, really together, and they’d figure it out.

Together.

Together took a lot longer for Haven to come to terms with.

He convinced himself sometimes, that year and some odd months, when she wouldn't talk to him, before they just happened to cross paths in Crocus, that he never really liked her. That they never really fit.

How could they?

Locke liked nice girls.

Nice people, really.

All of his friends were good guys or women who didn’t spend the free days seemingly plotting how to annoy him once he arrived home. The people he dated, the women he was serious about, even after Crocus, were all smart and sweet and they’d never purposely say something to him, to hurt his feelings, to win, in a singular moment, at all costs.

Being interested in Haven was childish.

Their relationship was rooted in how they felt, as children, when she decided she had to be the best, at everything, a goal he stood in the way of, while he attempted to do as he’d been told, ordered almost, from a young age, too early to remember, to look out for her. Haven. Make sure she was okay and watch over her, because she’d get herself in trouble, Locke, if you don’t keep her from it.

The fighting and clawing they did some times, the yelling and screaming, the way she pushed him away first, always, before accepting his affection was part of childhood quirks that they couldn’t outgrow together, that they brought out in each other, that she didn’t have.

He imagined.

When she was with other people.

That he didn’t have.

He knew.

When he was with other people.

He could be with most any woman. Or at least he liked to think. He was reasonably attractive, fit, and was the newest S-Class wizard in Fairy Tail. If his intent was to find a woman who drove him mad, he could find one that would allow him to do it from the comfort of his own home, waiting around for him after S-Class jobs, where she’d take half his money and they could hate each other too. They could hate each other just as much as Haven hated him, any time he told her off or attempted to keep her from getting herself killed, and fuck just as passionately, maybe, driven by that hatred and sick attraction, but without the constant headaches and mental turmoil that came about from loving the only woman in the world that seemed equally as pleased with your pain as she did your pleasure.

Haven’s body was scarred. And broken, in some places, reminders of hard fought battles that he hadn’t been there to heal. She seemed to fluctuate between under fed and toned depending on her current financial status and, given that they were coming off living in Magnolia to now scarping by between jobs in Bosco, she was losing definition again. Her eyes were striking, but there was something in them that wasn’t present in her mother’s. Something almost sinister.

She wasn’t perfect.

For him, he knew that, but she also just wasn’t perfect, in general, and it was easy to think of her, at times, in the way she presented herself, unstyled and almost boyish, in certain ways.

Masculine, but only parts that were toxic and cruel.

These weren’t traits that he naturally found himself attracted to, but they worked on his girlfriend and it was just easy to forget.

Not that night though, as her breasts rose and fell as she was nearly asleep, before his words, only peeking an eye open then to stare up at him, a solid, “No,” ready on his lips, no doubt expecting him to be interested in something more that night.

But he wasn’t.

Not even as he raised a hand to gently trace over her breast, where her guild marking lied now. He knew the pattern well, the emblem ingrained in his brain, but it still tripped him up at times. Seeing it there. Instead of adoring her back, not exactly centered, but slightly lower, and he used to laugh when he was a kid.

Because it reminded him of the Exceeds.

The memory was overrode now, with distant memories of making out in his bed at his parents house, cuddling or just spending time together, in his room, when his finger would stroke at her back, tracing the fairy that laid there as Haven seemed to struggle between how she felt about this.

The color had changed. Somewhere along the way. It was red now, Locke knew, instead of black like it had been when she was trying to imitate her father, maybe, as a child. It meant more now, different things at least, and he liked to think about how well it matched his eyes, even though he knew this would never be Haven’s true reasoning.

Red was for Ravan, who’d sacrificed his own in losing her.

She never told him this, out loud, but Locke was very good, he knew she had to know, at figuring most things out.

“Mmm?” Haven moaned then, softly, her eyes only blinking open from his word, no matter how soft it was.

“I just…”

And he hadn’t wanted to. The whole point was that he didn’t want to. Move. Shift. Stop whatever moment they were having, or he was having, then, because she looked too beautiful there, with the moon just peaking around the curtain of a room they’d never seen again, in a place he hoped to avoid from here on out, and he didn’t think he just should just bring it to a close.

Just like that.

“You’re my best friend.” He was moving as he spoke, shifting, so he laid long ways on the bed as well, nuzzling heaving into Haven, beneath her previously outstretched arm, into her armpit, hiding maybe, from himself and the fact he’d let it pass, forced it to fade, caused the closure of the moment. “That’s all.”

“I’m your best friend,” she muttered tiredly, “and that’s all I am?”

“No.”

He took in a slow breath and she smelled so good then, so did he, they smelled good together, and he wanted to get her under the covers, where they could snuggle and drift off.

Together.

“Then,” Haven whispered and she shifted away at first, as always, only giving in when he moved with her, “that’s all you wanted to tell me? And we can finally really go to bed?”

“No.”

It wasn’t.

All he wanted to tell her.

It’s all he could get out, because the rest would sound bad, he thought, to speak aloud, even to the only person he could speak aloud anything.

She didn’t want to fight about Porter again, and he was fine with that, he understood why she felt that way.

But the thoughts that were bothering him now went a lot deeper than that.

To explain them though, to mention her family, her mother, their upbringing, what it all meant, why she loved him or even liked him and what she thought about herself, the way she was and looked and acted, as well as what he thought about it too, as well as himself and what she thought about him and it would only end in an argument.

That night.

Because he could never get it out to her in a way that wouldn’t sound like an attack or just an attempt to bring up old wounds for the sack of rubbing it in her face that he was there, the whole time, waiting for her to come to her senses, to come back to him, and she’d been the one in the wrong, who’d gone off and ran around with the wrong people and had gotten hurt, been killed, all because she wouldn't just listen to him.

All because she couldn't be together when him, when she’d only been a week away from seventeen.

“Then what?” Haven asked, a frown present in her voice as she insisted, “What other option is there?”

“Too many.”

“Locke-”

“You’re so beautiful, Haven,” he insisted then, as she sat up some, just to frown down at him, and the man only stared back up at her, into her so deep blue eyes, the exact opposite of his flat reds, with every ounce of honesty he had to him. “You always are. And I don’t tell you that enough. I love so much about you and I think sometimes I just get so caught up in all the madness that’s constantly in front of us that I forget-”

“Shut up!” And she was moving then, to the head of the bed, shoving at him in the process, even grabbing a pillow in the end, to hit him with. “You big idiot.”

Locke only moved to lay properly in the bed as well, insisting, “It’s true. You’re the most beautiful woman I know.”

“I’m still not going to blow you.” She snatched her pillow back one she’d kicked down the covers some, only to snuggle back under them. And, after a moment’s thought, she offered him simply, “Tonight.”

He allowed himself to smile, as he tugged the blankets up around himself as well, hiding out from the moonlight with her beneath them as he whispered, “I don’t wanna fight with you. Have. I never do.”

“Liar.”

“I’m not.”

“Are too. Fighting’s part of it.”

“Part of what?”

“You know.” But she didn’t seem to, as she couldn’t quite explain it. “Locke.”

Falling onto his back, he shut his eyes and she stilled out, back to him, but beside him, close. So close.

“When it’s all over,” he muttered to the once more close to sleep woman, “and we can go back home, I’ll buy us a nice house. With my first few S-Class jobs. Bet. With a pool and one of those kitchens you can invite all your friends over to hang out in, you know? With, like, stools and space and… And an actual dining room. For when we want to have real, adult dinner parties. A pool. Room for our...our kids. Yeah?”

She was either asleep or good at faking it, either was likely. But both were enough for the man as he let out one last long, heavy sigh before deciding to join her.

What do you think about multiculturalism and it’s effects on culture loss? Please don’t interpret me as some white nationalist, I’m just curious from a culture standpoint. I’ve lived in both types(diverse & one culture) and though I love both, I feel like there’s more harmony and community when one culture is dominant. Please please don’t poison me with your serpent tongue; I don’t want to offend anybody😖

ah, no poison here, worry not - even though this question does bear the tedious trace of ill-meaning dogwhistles - I understand where you are coming from.

now, since you ask for my personal opinion, let this answer be personal, if not a tad subjective - and anecdotal, perhaps, to some degree.

I have found that harmony does not exist in communities as none are homogenous - while a country might be homogenous (or nearly so, purely homogenous states are much much rarer than anyone might think) racially or ethnically, or when it comes to religion, it will never be homogenous or equal in terms of, for example, class. wealth, education, orientation.

the lack of harmony rarely comes from the sheer fact of many cultures colliding - it happens when they collide on uneven terms. one is inferior, repressed, mocked - another claims superiority and takes hold of land, influence, media. one is agressive and another one is not - or they are both agressive, in different or similar ways. 

most often, this lack of harmony - this collision - is orchestrated by the chosen few, who have an agenda to suit their own needs. there is money to be made on hatred, money to be made on fear.

now, two of my main point:

Poland is quite a homogenous country, let us say - Catholic and /white/. the truth is of course much more complicated and there would be no Poland without the great and wonderful mixing of cultures and religions, but let us say it is homogenous.

or desires to be.

harmony aside - there is none - our culture and tradition is getting forgotten. neglected. tainted.

people are so used to this comfortable and convenient “homogeneity” that they do not seek our own culture out, they do not yearn to learn the roots. they do not cultivate it. they allow the chosen few to dictate narratives far from truth and far from care, and believe them without checking. they rely on lies, so often, attractive stories that have little to do with truth and do nothing to better us “as a naton.” they care for history only as far as it makes us out to be a hero, or a martyr. language is not being taught properly - old roots and rules get forgotten, while new fascinating phenomena are branded dumb and western (ironically). tales, folk traditions, songs, literature are being ignored. what is the point? it’s Polish so it has to be good, right? why pay attention? it’s better than that German/Ukrainian/Arab/American/Jewish shit or whatever.

there is no harmony even among people who care for this one dominant culture - because you will always be “different” and “wrong” is that is how they want to see you.

I care for our culture so much - and yet I am attacked, because I care about it wrongly. I am a woman, non-heteronormative, progressive. I want to share the culture and not hoard it until it rots - and that’s wrong, and disgusting, and I should die.

our culture dissolves, it rots, it becomes thin and superficial and weak - those proud of homogeneity care little for any actual culture, even if they shout really loud and paste national symbols over everything.

but then - another culture comes. and another one. harmony or not, there is more. and there’s a sudden drive, by those passionate and excited, and even by those who do not spend too much time thinking about such processes.

three Vietnamese families moved next to us. neighbours made faces, comments. these families were talking more among themselves, their language strange to our ears. foreigners, in culture and language and skin.

they brought some traditional Vietnamese food to greet our neighbourhood. one of the ladies showed us a traditional costume from her maiden city. children were making something inspired by their folk craft, and smugly showing it to our Polish kids.

and then? out of passion but also out of sheer spite, our families started doing stuff.

searching for old cook books to cook the most Polish dish ever, and see their reaction. finding old photos when girls danced in folk bands, all skirts and flower wreaths, and showing them off. men went on and on about Polish cars, and inventions, and the pride they took in their work here. I overheard kids saying “W Szczebrzeszynie chrząszcz brzmi w trzcinie!” to watch them be surprised, suddenly so proud of our ridiculous language.

one grandfather listened to a recording of some old Vietnamese song they played. he didn’t like it - and they asked him if he knows any old songs from when he fought in war or when he was a boy.

he did not remember any.

he spent the next entire day googling old songs with the help of his grandkids until he found one he actually remembered - he sang it with his friends a lot during the miners’ celebrations. he tried to hide his emotions, but he didn’t do too well. grandchildren helped him translate in hesitant English the meaning of the simple song, and the Vietnamese family loved it. that pride in his eyes! 

those families haven’t, for years and years, paid that much attention to our culture as they did when they wanted to brag, to share, to show that we do have culture too! 

now, this fear of the clash, lack of harmony, and strangers trying to rule over you we all understand all too well - it is a shared subconscious fear, most often. 

that is why all cultures have to learn to be better - learn to be respectful, know boundaries.

but mainly grow up. love their tradition, cultivate their language and folk customs - but abandon hatred, hunger for power and control over others (even, or especially, within their own culture). when nations grow, they learn to grow together.

we can all be so much richer - but it is far from ideal paradise. it is a difficult process that has to happen slowly and on equal terms, where all parties understand what freedom is - where it begins and where it ends.

for now there is so much inequality, war, and hatred - but multiculturalism is not the root of those. hurtful attitudes, hunger for power and control, and money are.

kylie jenner . twenty one . she and her ━━ welcome tanja ‘tana’ brooks ! our sources say you’re a 𝓂𝓊𝓈𝒾𝒸 𝒶𝓇𝓉𝒾𝓈𝓉 and 𝑒𝓃𝓉𝓇𝑒𝓅𝓇𝑒𝓃𝑒𝓊𝓇 with a net worth of 26.7m. now that you’ve signed the contract to 𝘥𝘦𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘶𝘵𝘦 , fans are thrilled to finally watch you on television and are hoping to see more of your 𝔦𝔪𝔭𝔲𝔩𝔰𝔦𝔳𝔢 yet 𝔠𝔬𝔪𝔭𝔞𝔰𝔰𝔦𝔬𝔫𝔞𝔱𝔢 traits on the show . but please leave your glossy lips, singing loudly in the back of uber’s, and neck kisses at los angeles, california because now , you’re dead broke. vc: ariana grande

asdf basically theres me, and then theres trash and honestly??? the difference is not big at all.. in shorter terms? me and introductions literally do not clash well together at all .. so i do want to apologize for the potential sucky ness ?? and rambles that are bound to happen asdf. on that note, im gigi (or gi) and if you want to know a little more about my baby tana just keep on reading !! 

trigger warning !! gang mention ! drug mention !! 

                                          the synthesis …

◜ scribbles on empty pages that equal pain, anger, and struggle. words that had only been meant for one, carved themselves into the brunettes skin the moment air filled her lungs for the first time .. screams into the air, she formed into a fear that driven those around her. a fear that was so powerful, it made even a king cower. her king. the daughter of a man who ran an empire, was vowed to be protected along with her six other siblings who stood beside her. but the life of crime and danger always tugged at their skin, forced their claws into their flesh. it was an eat or being eaten lifestyle, and without choice tanja brooks was thrown in the middle of it. it was her bloodline. and while her mother wanted to protect and shelter, her father wanted to toughen her skin and wrap the chains of their gang around her feet. she was forced into situations by loyalty, by the love she had for of those around her, by the drive that was forced within her. but, this lifestyle was not always for her. the constant fear, the murder, the dirty hands, the loss, the pain, and the anger, it sat on her shoulders like boulders. the pain and anger that latched on to her and her siblings wrist troubled their mother, at first it was an itch, and then it was a rash, and then it ate at her flesh. she was barely skin and mostly bone when she decided to take her twin boys, tanja, and her four other children out of their fathers arms, lifestyle, and curse.

             the important extras …

her oldest twin brother, has started to get back into the lifestyle their mother has done everything in her power to keep them out of- yet despite the knowledge and knowing for a fact that its not something he should be in she has kept his secret out of loyalty and has lied countless of times to not only his mother for him, but her other siblings as well as his friends and others in his life.

she once filled out a police report on her father, exposing everything he has and everything he has done. of course, it came from a place of anger and hurt, and a way to get back at him for not being in her the way she wants him to be. she never actually filed this report considering it could have gotten her into a lot of trouble with her father and his gang, not just trouble but it could’ve put her on her death bed.

despite the anger and hatred she has for her father, he use to send her along with his other kids money each month; while one of the twins refuses to touch it and her mother forbids it… she and her other siblings have used it to benefit them educational wise, as in paying for college and for their own pleasure such as brand items, cars, spring break trips to bora bora, and whatever else they can get their hands on.

at five years old, tanja had actually witnessed a murder (the reason her mother removed them from her fathers live) and to this day it still lives on in her head. so bad, that she use to have night terrors (and occasionally still does ).

family extras ...

socialites had always been a title the brook family carried, with her father hiding his dirty money behind an luxurious company ? they had always been just that one family everyone tends to talk about here and there for no other reason but because of their wealth and business strategy. 

when tana’s mother took the kids and left, the media framed it as an affair and the family has kind of just ran with that? never denying nor confirming the statement. 

her mom got remarried a few years after to an actor? and he kind of brought more attention to the brooks and their name? 

the kids went from being mob boss babies to? basically accepting their new lifestyle in not just money but fame too.. 

when tana was around sixteen, her father had got arrested on too many charges to count bringing out his gang involvement and other dirty things he has been doing . which at the time was a nightmare, but it brought the brooks family more then they could imagine. 

people wanted to know more? to see more? to learn more? and so, her mom wrote a book and with that interest the brooks were offered an reality show. 

for the last sixish years, the family has been almost like the kardashians? actually just like the kardashians minus the too problematic part.. 

she has six full siblings, two half, and one step and she honestly adores them all with everything in her.

the brook children in their own are all successful? from lawyers, to doctors, to actors/actresses, music artists, designers, and even business men and women.. 

shes also super close with her step father? like she kind of looks to him as her dad and is so grateful for him and all the love he has given her and her mom and sisters and brothers.

career extras ...

she started her following super early on social media? and kind of had her own little fanbase from just being on the show.

shes been singing ever since she was a little girl, but took it serious around the age of seventeen. 

her music career took off pretty quickly? like kind of a big star overnight type situation.

her music company kicked off when she was nineteen, and shes been expanding it ever since.

shes truly passionate about both of her careers, and is just super grateful she has the opportunity to do the two things she loves the most ! 

more extras ( am i ever going to shut up?? )

her name is tanja, but considering the media always got it wrong?? and most assumed it was tana she dropped the j for more of a stage name? 

of course, a lot of her family still calls her by her actual name! but even her close friends call her tana! 

    the personality …

known as the lion hearted, tana is light and love combined with a sense of playfulness and ebullient that you can somehow never get out of your head . she is a big hearted beauty, who loves with her all and as her sibling would tell her loves too hard. good intentions flow throughout her body, and despite her claiming up and down that she doesn’t need anybody she is truly someone who attaches themselves to you. she is always teasing somebody, and has a sense of adventure that surely comes from her upbringing. she feels most at home surrounding by friends, and family. she is someone who will drag you out of bed in the middle of the night for a late night drive with good music, and the first person who’ll jump in front of a bullet for you. she feels deeply, but does not always know how to deal with those feelings. she can be jealous, stubborn, and trust issues are rooted so deeply into her she doesnt know where they begin and she ends. she loves laughing, and feeling alive? which she will do anything to achieve. its like her own little high and shes an addict. an adrenaline junkie her father would call her. she’s affectionate with those she loves, and of course when shes drunk. she craves meaningful connections with those around her, and falls into a darkness when she feels as if shes disconnected. her father left this sense of needing to be needed and wanted within her, but shes dealing.

the connections …

platonic soulmates ! that one person who kind of just completes tana? they understand and connect in a way that even for them its hard to understand. best friends is an understatement. 

best friends ! two other people shes close as can be with. they are truly her number ones, the ill take a bullet for you kind of friendship. 

a girl group ! just a group of girls, tana is always seen with! could also be her best friends ! i just want something cute, close friendship, trouble and good memories. plus all the three way, even four way threads we can do would be magic. 

cousins ! from either her mom side and/or dad side. this could even be a cousin from her step dad side, so step cousins? either way id love all type of relationships. almost like siblings, cant stand one another, you name it, 

family friends ! someone who has known her for as long as she can remember ! they knew all about her father and everything that came with it.. 

childhood friends ! this could be neighbors she grew up playing with or even that one friend she went to elementary/middle/high school with.

the ex lover ! im such an angst kind of person so this will definitely be juicy.. they’ll definitely be her biggest muse.

on and off relationship ! a toxic kind of relationship, someone she truly loves with everything in her but it just never works the way they want it to. 

 musical duo ! someone who just? when they are together its magic. they write together, sing together, collab together, encourage one another and just ! are those people you see and know its going to be a bop. 

friends with benefits ! mutual or one sided . they could be using her, she could be using them. 

one sided friendships and relationships ! 

publicity friendships and relationships !

you can find more wanted connections in this tag !!

Deceit, Desire, and the 1980s

           Excess, greed, and apathy are words that are equally relevant in describing America in the 1980s as well as Girardian concepts persecution and mediated desire. The application of two of Rene Girard’s books, The Scapegoat and Deceit, Desire, and the Novel with American Psycho, Wallstreet, and Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, will prove that the core of these films is rooted in significantly older psychologies -- though Rene Girard would contest this term -- than the contemporary interpretations offer. My argument is that beneath the satire, exposure, and portraiture lies novelistic-mediated desire and elements of mythic persecution.

           Definitives are seldom found in nature, and the same is true of a definitive categorization of mediated desire. Several of the implementations by the old masters of the novel, Dostoyevsky; Stendhal; and Cervantes, are different forms of mediated desire and contain idiosyncratic differences among them, but all are demonstrated through the structural model of the triangle (Girard 2).

           Girard offers the triangle because it provides a spatial mode of thinking when comparing and contrasting elements of a story. He acknowledges on the second page of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel that all stories can be described with a straight line, from the subject (protagonist), and the object of desire. The object of desire can be anything, and often, anyone: primarily women. What Girard’s triangular model of mediated desire does is introduce a mediator that hovers over the straight line of subject and object and acts as the interpreter of desire. Only the great novelists can articulate this relation according to Girard.

           Stendhalian vanity is perhaps the most easily recognizable connection to the culture of the 1980s because it is centered around a protagonist that Girard labels the vaniteux (Girard 6). Stendhal demonstrates vanity through terms like “copying” and “imitating” and it is the latter that draws the most attention. “A vaniteux will desire any object so long as he is convinced that it is already desired by another person whom he admires.” (Girard 7). This quote would suffice as a summary of Patrick Bateman’s character profile in American Psycho. The following sentence further connects Bateman as a modern vaniteux by including, “The mediator here is a rival, brought into existence as a rival by vanity, and that same vanity demands his defeat.” (Girard 7). This firmly establishes an idea for Bateman’s mediator, but that will be covered later.

           Firstly, it is essential to detail the aspects of Patrick Bateman that situate him as a vaniteux, despite the description fitting so accurately. Patrick is a vessel; he states in his opening monologue that there is no Patrick Bateman, only an idea. He can only exist as a reflection of others’ perceived desire. He is capable only of wanting and imitating those around him. One of the primary objects that Patrick pursues throughout the film is a reservation at Dorsia, first for the status that comes with being able to get one and secondly because of Paul Allen’s assumed ability to get one. “Humiliation, Impotence, and Shame” are terms that can be interchanged with obstacle (Girard 178). Girard quotes from one of Denis De Rougemont’s books, Love in the Western World, and tells the reader that, “Desire should be defined as a desire of the obstacle.” Patrick desires the obstacle of obtaining the elusive reservation put in place initially by his circle of friends which mention it among their group, but Patrick’s desire is amplified when he discovers that Paul Allen supposedly frequently gets tables at Dorsia and this establishes Allen as a rival to Patrick. Allen as determined the obstacle for Patrick to pursue, it is the most serious obstruction (Girard 179). Passion intensifies throughout the film at this point, even after a modern twist to Stendhalian vanity in which the subject defeats his mediator.

           Two primary forms of mediation exist among all of the novelists’ desires, and they are external and internal. These terms are used to demonstrate proximity between the subject and mediator. External mediation exists when the subject is so far removed from the mediator that their realities cannot or would be unlikely to interact. Metaphysical desire falls into this category because a good example of external mediation is the Muslim and Mohammed or any follower of religion and cult. The novelistic example used by Girard is Don Quixote by Cervantes. The opposing side of the spectrum is internal mediation in which the spiritual distance between subject and mediator is close enough for the two spheres of possibilities to “penetrate” one other (Girard 9). Internal mediation is where rivalry begins and is the type that best describes American Psycho. The entire film revolves around class symbols such as fashion, real estate, and rank; the movie embodies physicality. Patrick is only able to imitate what he sees; he is incapable of reciprocating any emotion. He doesn’t desire to be any particular person, only to possess what others have.

           Girard says that the hero of internal mediation, or anti-hero in Patrick Bateman’s case, is careful not to have his imitations known, he carefully guards them (Girard 10). Patrick’s plots of murder and social climbing are never uttered to anyone; he does not even acknowledge them to himself through monologue. Girard explains why this is:

In the quarrel which puts him in opposition to his rival, the subject reverses the logical and chronological order of desires in order to hide his imitation. He asserts that his own desire is prior to that of his rival; according to him, it is the mediator who is responsible for the rivalry. (Girard 11)

Patrick kills out of hatred only in the murder of Paul Allen. He is subsequently the sole character that Patrick considers to be equal to, or worse, better than. He takes careful note of Allen’s successes and possessions: the Fisher account, the reservation at Dorsia, and his business card. These empty symbols elicit in Patrick two opposing feelings, that of “submissive reverence” and “the most intense malice” which constitute the passion of hatred (Girard 10).

           American Psycho as a film fits neatly within all of Stendhalian vanity because it too works to persuade the viewer that, “the values of vanity, nobility, money, power, [and] reputation only seem concrete.” (Girard 18). Mary Harron works from the source material written by Bret Easton Elis which depicts exceptional vapidity among members of significant affluent status. Patrick Bateman is in possession of all of these things, yet he simply isn’t there. The film shows the audience the danger of a perversely inflated ego, the disassociation between the wealthy and the poor as fellow human beings. There is nothing concrete about Patrick Bateman nor among any of his friends, save for Bryce who seems to have some investment in politics and social issues. It is he who at the end of the film remarks to the group about Reagan’s ability to lie in the face of American people, he is about to make a mention of what is inside Reagan’s false exterior, and Patrick intercedes:

But it doesn’t matter. There are no more barriers to cross. All I have in common with the uncontrollable and the insane, The Vicious and The Evil, all the mayhem that I have caused and my utter indifference to it, I have now surpassed. My pain is constant and sharp, and I do not hope for a better world for anyone. In fact, I want my pain to be inflicted on others. I want no one to escape. But even after admitting this, there is no catharsis. My punishment continues to elude me, and I gain no further knowledge of myself. No new knowledge can be extracted from my telling. This confession has meant nothing.

Sadism is indubitably a large section of Patrick’s character, but the finishing monologue introduces to the audience the closest Patrick could ever come to admitting his role as the masochist. In “Masochism and Sadism,” the eighth chapter of Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, Girard discusses the mediator and subject as Master and Slave respectively (Girard 176). These terms are more in line with external mediation rather than internal, but Girard also explains how a hero of internal mediation can eventually fall into external mediation. Recall that the difference between the two is one of spiritual distance between mediator and subject, therefore, if the mediator grows closer in a story centered in external mediation, then the desire will transform to one of internal mediation and vice versa. American Psycho performs this change at the time of Paul Allen’s murder, which is undoubtedly the most important portion of the film regardless of analysis applied. It is with the death of his rival, the overcoming of the obstacle chosen by his mediator, that Patrick Bateman is able to walk among his own Gods; we will see something similar with Wallstreet later. It is here that Patrick’s mediation is further away, more abstract, and he is even more tortured as a result. “Metaphysical desire always ends in enslavement, failure, and shame.” Patrick elects to be tortured with these tools earlier in the film, he tolerates Paul Allen’s denigration of him, calling Patrick a loser and so on, because has a hero, or rather a victim, of internal mediation, these are the terms that the masochist must accept in desiring objects through a mediator so close in proximity. Patrick deifies Paul, and it is after the acknowledgment of this that Patrick acts. He becomes aware of the connection between his desire and what it truly is, that of Paul’s. Girard says that this is the defining point of the masochist, he is aware of the machinations of mediated desire and endures it (Girard 182). The difference lies in Patrick’s acting upon the structure he assigned himself to rather than the traditional Stendhalian hero who lives to serve his master.

Both the fiction of the film Wall Street and the reality that inspired it are rife with examples that fit into, “Men Become God’s in the Eyes of Each Other.” This chapter focuses on desire as articulated by Proust and Dostoyevsky with the latter’s implementation more relevant to Wall Street. To say that a connection between Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Wall Street is a dramatic understatement. Stanley Weiser, the film’s co-writer, and Oliver Stone explicitly said to each other about making, “Crime and Punishment on Wall Street.” (Lewis) It is also interesting to note Weiser’s admission that he did not read the entirety of Dostoyevsky’s book and opted for the Cliff Notes version. He says the paradigm of the book would not translate to the story of the film, but the proof is in the finished product. What this admission says is that Weiser and Oliver read the highlights of what makes Dostoyevsky’s work effective: mediated desire.

…Dostoyevsky’s hero dreams of absorbing and assimilating the mediators Being. He Imagines a perfect synthesis of his mediator’s strength with his own ‘intelligence.’ He wants to become the Other and still be himself. (Girard 54)

Bud fits into Girard’s definition of a Dostoyevskian hero nearly perfect. Bud does not covet only Gekko’s office, cars, and women; he wants to be Gekko, filtered through what he deems his own experience. He has the grand delusion that all protagonists of mediated desire have: that what is desired can be obtained. Many different explanations exist that connect the subject to the object and Girard often goes back in forth between whether the subject truly wants the object, if he wants to want, or if he wants to be humiliated. Bud appears to fit into the masochist role. Wall Street begins in external mediation as opposed to American Psycho in which the desire mutated from internal to external.

           Before the discussion of Men and Gods, it is pertinent to speak of Bud’s fantasies and what his concept of self is. Girard says, “The subject must have placed his faith in a false promise from the outside.” (Girard 56) The false promise is metaphysical autonomy. Bud wants to be at the top, where he thinks that decisions are made. He desires to control the desires of other men as Gekko does unto him.

God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we, murderers of all murderers, console ourselves? That which was the holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet possessed has bled to death under our knives. Who will wipe this blood off us? With what water could we purify ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we need to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become gods simply to be worthy of it? There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us - for the sake of this deed he shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto." (Nietzsche, The Parable of the Madman)

Girard asks, “Why can men no longer alleviate their suffering by sharing it?” (Girard 57) He deems that solitude, a word that predates loneliness, is an allusion just as autonomous desire. A better question more fitting to this paper is, “Why can Bud not realize that his desire is not his own, why can’t he accept that neither he nor Gekko is in intellectual solitude? That they are master and slave?

           The answer is because Bud is trapped in external or metaphysical desire. I included Nietzsche’s declaration of the death of God because it relates to Dostoevsky's work greatly and Bud and Gordon Gekko’s relationship by proxy. Jordan Peterson draws the relationship between Nietzsche and Dostoyevsky as the latter predicting the former. Peterson makes clear that Dostoyevsky was not a nihilist but instead a very astute observer of culture (Peterson 213). He takes time in his argument to speak of Dostoyevsky’s prediction of the horrors of communism and how he was in favor of religion and morals over postmodernism, etcetera; however, what interests me most about this line of thought is the connection back to Wall Street. Gekko is to Nietzsche as Bud is to Dostoyevsky.  

           Gekko grew up in a world abandoned by God, where his father worked himself to an early death and one where he had to become the provider of his own prayers and fill the void. Gekko is revered to by many as a God in many ways, but the best example of praise is when Bud presents to him a cigar as an offering.

…as the gods are pulled down from heaven, the sacred flows over the earth; it separates the individual from all earthly goods… (Girard 62)

Bud sacrifices any possible claim to autonomy by affirming Gekko as his God. Autonomy in the liberal sense is an illusion according to Girard, but the subject does believe it, as many do, as an actuality. Bud cannot look freedom in the face, and as a result, he subjects himself to anguish. (Girard 65)

           Bud’s freedom gradually lessens as he grows closer to his mediator. He is a struggling yuppie in the beginning of the film and is not seeing as much progress as he envisioned. He tries to distance himself from his father and the tradition that he represents, the old Father. The destructive nature of the close interaction between mediator and subject is the driving force of the plot. Bud rises throughout the film to walk along his mediator, hand in hand with God. Bud shows all of the symptoms of a victim of metaphysical desire, much like Patrick Bateman in the latter half of his story. Bud seeks out obstacles which are presented to the audiences as “challenges” and disguise themselves as symptoms of his lust for power. They are instead examples of Bud subjecting himself to humiliation and degradation. He accepts Gekko as his master and God. He grovels beneath him and eats his scraps; he accepts the women he has already used. Girard notes a common theme in Dostoyevsky’s work whose name derives from his novella The Eternal Husband. The eternal husband, Girard’s term, is used in cases such as cuckoldry or latent homosexuality, though it is most commonly in reference to the former. Desire in the Eternal Husband stories is a competitive one, but it also relates back into Sadomasochism and the deifying of man. The story of the novella revolves around a man seeking out the lovers of his dead wife and seemingly befriending one that interests him most. What results is that the seeker finds a new wife and convinces the former lover of his wife to try and take her away from him. The analogy directly traces back to Gekko performing the same kind of play onto Bud. The difference is that the narrator of the novella is actually the mediator of the story, a clever twist. (Girard 46)

             Wall Street is confused when the Eternal Husband is applied. It introduces a symptom of external or metaphysical desire: double mediation. As Bud imitates Gekko and becomes him, Gekko reflects this desire and seeks to build a complete copy of himself. The film makes a point to relay that Gekko sees himself in Bud several times throughout and is the most explicit at the end with Gekko’s immense disappointment at the end of their reciprocated desires. This is common when mediation becomes a rivalry. Bud becomes the equal that he himself pursued from the beginning, but he is not yet the perfect copy made out of vanity by Gekko, and the result is conflict. Darien occupies various roles in the film. She is more of an indirect object, which sounds intensely misogynist but is nonetheless true. Gekko uses her as a gift to Bud, but this is not a gift given out of kindness; Gekko offers her to Bud in a mimetic way as the cigar was offered to him, but with vastly differing intention. The intention can be best described with the following quote from De Rougemont, “One reaches the point of wanting the beloved to be unfaithful so that he can court her again.” The film is a very complex retelling of the Dostoyevskian method. Characters shed and share characteristics without warning and some gain more and more over the course of the plot. Darien begins as an offering made by Gekko so that he can desire her again later and expose Bud as a masochist that is subservient to him, and what complicates her role is that the result of Bud’s awareness of his role is that he persecutes her instead. Girard discusses how mimetic rivalry ends in conflict and how it is resolved in a video interview with Hoover Institution on YouTube. The audience may see Darien as the conflicting object which directs both of the main characters’ desires, but she is instead the scapegoat that is used to resolve, though only momentarily, Bud’s anger with Gekko. She does not appear again in the film, which may suggest that Gekko has also completed his use for her. If this is the case, then she stands as a failed resolution through scapegoating, and this leads to the destruction of the mediator. Girard says that mimetic rivalry is inescapable in society and the only way for communal life to persevere is for the opponents to choose a scapegoat to explain their apparent differences and ardor. If the scapegoat fails, the result is war. Darien was an attempt by Gekko to soften future contempt by Bud in the hopes that Bud would fall blindly into masochistic desire and continue to serve him. The masochistic hero is, however, a much more lucid and dangerous kind of subject. Bud slowly learns over the course of the film that he has been used; he reflects on his humiliation and sees the structure that he had placed himself in and on his freedom that he sacrificed to pursue the ideal.

The masochistic vision is never independent. It is always in opposition to a rival masochism which is organizing the same elements into a symmetrical and inverse structure. (Girard 188)

           Of course, desire in terms of this paper cannot exist without at least two participants, but what Girard calls the masochistic vision works in a different way in contrast to what has been discussed previously. The masochistic vision is desire that is in spite. The masochist, “has a grudge against the very spirit of evil; and yet, he does not want to crush the wicked so much as to prove to them their wickedness and his own virtue; he wants to cover them with shame by making them look at the victims of their own infamy.” To see Bud’s reaction to Gekko’s betrayal as revenge is justified, but the prime motivation is not to hurt or destroy Gekko. Bud wants to shame him, to show Gekko that what he has done has negative side effects. Bud wants to surpass his mediator and teach unto him lessons that derive from his own, apparently higher morality. Hatred is observable in Bud’s actions, but he still thinks of himself as morally superior to Gekko and that his string of bad, or immoral decisions, were a result of Gekko’s manipulation. Bud has at the end come to terms with the limit of his autonomy; he recognizes the imminent destruction that comes from mimetic rivalry. This partially undercuts the primary objective of the film’s creators by trying to expose the greed of Wall Street and the culture of the ’80s, but overall it functions in the same way, just through different means.

           Both films discussed have cultural icons within them and were largely successful commercially. They both have comedic elements that produce satire and expose the immense greed and corruption that was prevalent in the time periods of their worlds. There is nothing new to be said about desire as the primary focus of the 1980s, commercially anyway, but there is more to be investigated into the why. The 1980s was an era that was symbolically in regression; it was a reversion to the 1950s, but also much further. Ancient ideas that centered around religion and tradition also brought back the largest faults of human ancestry. Girard says in his interview with Hoover Institution that mimetic desire is man-made, it does not exist in nature. It does not have to be an inevitability, just as persecution and scapegoating need not also. What both films do accurately describe the harm that comes from intense infatuation with the desire of others. There is no escaping it, as referenced earlier, but the level of interest and disassociation with oneself is up to the individual. Human beings that live within a civilization have the responsibility to become good masochists. Ones that know of the triangular structure that we have to live in and acknowledge that no alternative exists wherein a comfortable mode of living is possible. The choice lies in what and who one is her master. Girard would suggest that an abstract thing, such as a conception of the good (i.e., religion) would be a less problematic imitation because there is no chance of interaction or spiritual proximity to the divine to the rational mind. Philosophy can also occupy this role so long as the individual does not confuse the thoughts of others as their own and seek to compare themselves as equals to those whose thoughts have been stolen. More films like these two should be made so that the public can get a better understanding of what and why they want and believe.

Americans’ attitudes about fascism have always been based on the assumption that fascism, as occurred in Germany when Hitler came to power, “can’t happen here,” that we love our freedom so much we would never give in to an authoritarian populist regime. We never stopped to consider what might happen if Americans’ conception of freedom became so twisted that it came to embody the “freedom” to deprive other people of their freedoms, while preserving your own. Fascism is not just a historical relic. It remains a living and breathing phenomenon that, for the generations since World War II, had only maintained a kind of half-life on the fringes of the American right. Its constant enterprise, during all those years, was to return white supremacism to the mainstream, restore its previous legitimacy, and restore its own power within the nation’s political system. With Trump as its champion, it has finally succeeded. It’s important, first, to understand just what fascism is and what it is not. The word “fascist” has been so carelessly and readily applied as a shorthand way to demonize one’s political opposition that the word has become almost useless: used to meaning anything, it has almost come to mean nothing. One commonly, and wrongly, cited definition of fascism is attributed to Benito Mussolini: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” According to the investigative reporter John Foster “Chip” Berlet, Mussolini never said nor wrote such a thing. And neither did the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile, to whom it is also often attributed. “When Mussolini wrote about corporatism,” Berlet writes, “he was not writing about modern commercial corporations. He was writing about a form of vertical syndicalist corporatism based on early guilds.” The terms “corporatism” and “corporate” meant an entirely different thing in 1920s Italy than they mean today: “corporations” were not individual businesses, but rather were sectors of the economy, divided into corporate groups, managed and coordinated by the government. “Corporatism,” Berlet says, “meant formally ‘incorporating’ divergent interests under the state, which would resolve their differences through regulatory mechanisms.” In fact, says Berlet, this supposed definition of fascism directly contradicts many of the things that Mussolini actually did write about the nature of fascism. Another thing that fascism decidedly is not is what the right-wing pundit Jonah Goldberg says it is: a kind of socialism and therefore “properly understood as a phenomenon of the left.” This notion is such a travesty of the idea of fascism that it functionally negates its meaning. George Orwell wrote that “the idea underlying Fascism is irreconcilably different from that which underlies Socialism. Socialism aims, ultimately, at a world-state of free and equal human beings. It takes the equality of human rights for granted. Nazism assumes just the opposite.” Not only did Goldberg’s book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning, published in 2009, become a New York Times bestseller, but its thesis became widely accepted on the American right among Patriots and Tea Partiers in the years leading up to Trump’s ascension, who eagerly accused President Obama and liberal Democrats of being the real fascists. Historians of fascism were scathing in their assessment. For example, Robert O. Paxton, an American political scientist who is professor emeritus at Columbia University and the author of seminal studies of fascism, wrote: “Goldberg simply omits those parts of fascist history that fit badly with his demonstration. His method is to examine fascist rhetoric, but to ignore how fascist movements functioned in practice.” In reality, fascism is a much more complex phenomenon than Goldberg’s or the “corporate state” definition would have it. Historians have for years struggled to nail down its essential features, partly because, as Paxton notes, fascism in the 1920s “drew on both right and left, and tried to transcend that bitter division in a purified, invigorated, expansionist national community.” In the postwar years of the 1950s and ’60s, political scientists and historians tried to define it primarily by assembling a list of traits common to historical fascists. The problem with this approach was that as historians examined the record more closely, they grasped that fascism was constantly acquiring and shedding one or another of these traits. It was a protean, shape-shifting phenomenon, and a simple list of traits failed to capture this dynamic quality. In response, some scholars, notably Roger Griffin, a modern historian and political theorist at Oxford Brookes University in England, have attempted to distill fascism into a singular quality, an underlying principle that remained constant all throughout its various permutations. Griffin ultimately zeroed in on what he called “palingenetic ultranationalism”: a revolutionary movement based on the belief that a nation can be restored to glory via a process of phoenix-like rebirth by activating, or creating, national myths of original greatness (“palingenesis” is the doctrine of continual rebirth). Griffin explains fascism further as a “modern political ideology that seeks to regenerate the social, economic, and cultural life of a country by basing it on a heightened sense of national belonging or ethnic identity. Fascism rejects liberal ideas such as freedom and individual rights, and often presses for the destruction of elections, legislatures, and other elements of democracy. Despite the idealistic goals of fascism, attempts to build fascist societies have led to wars and persecutions that caused millions of deaths.” While Griffin’s approach is extraordinarily useful and insightful, it still fails to fully explain the dynamic nature of fascism. Robert Paxton’s 2005 book The Anatomy of Fascism, widely considered to be a definitive text on the subject, attempted to tackle that aspect of the phenomenon. His definition of fascism is placed in the context of the reality of its behavior: that is, fascism cannot be explained solely by its ideology; it is also identified and explained by what it does. By examining the historical record, Paxton has been able to describe its constantly mutating nature as occurring in five identifiable stages: 1. Intellectual exploration. Disillusionment with popular democracy manifests itself in discussions of lost national vigor. 2. Rooting. A fascist movement, aided by political deadlock and polarization, becomes a player on the national stage. 3. Arrival to power. Conservatives seeking to control rising leftist opposition invite the movement to share power. 4. Exercise of power. The movement and its charismatic leader control the state in balance with state institutions such as the police and traditional elites such as the clergy and business magnates. 5. Radicalization or entropy. The state either becomes increasingly radical, as did Nazi Germany, or slips into traditional authoritarian rule, as did fascist Italy. Paxton explains that “each national variant of fascism draws its legitimacy … not from some universal scripture but from what it considers the most authentic elements of its own community identity.” He also examines the underlying principles that fueled the rise of fascism, and determines that there are nine “mobilizing passions” that have fed the fires of fascist movements wherever they have arisen: 1. A sense of overwhelming crisis beyond the reach of any traditional solutions 2. The primacy of the group, toward which one has duties superior to every right, whether universal or individual, and the subordination of the individual to it 3. The belief that one’s group is a victim, a sentiment which justifies any action, without legal or moral limits, against the group’s enemies, both internal and external 4. Dread of the group’s decline under the corrosive effect of individualistic liberalism, class conflict, and alien influences 5. The need for closer integration of a purer community, by consent if possible, or by exclusionary violence if necessary 6. The need for authority by natural leaders (always male), culminating in a national chief who alone is capable of incarnating the group’s destiny 7. The superiority of the leader’s instincts over abstract and universal reason 8. The beauty of violence and the efficacy of will, when they are devoted to the group’s success 9. The right of the chosen people to dominate others without restraint from any kind of human or divine law, right being decided by the sole criterion of the group’s prowess in a Darwinian struggle. This last “passion” was explored as an essential aspect of Nazism by the Norwegian social scientist and philosopher Harald Ofstad, whose interviews with former Nazis led him to write Our Contempt for Weakness: Nazi Norms and Values—And Our Own (English translation, 1989). It described the logical extension of that Darwinian struggle against the “lesser” that pervades so much fascist literature: the deep-seated hatred and contempt in which all persons deemed “weaker”—ethnically, racially, medically, genetically, or otherwise—are held, and the desire to eliminate them entirely that it fuels. Paxton ultimately summed this all up in a single paragraph: “Fascism may be defined as a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal constraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. Fascism is both a complex and a simple phenomenon. In one sense, it resembles a dynamic human psychological pathology in that it’s made up of a complex constellation of traits that are interconnected and whose presence and importance rise and fall according to the often fast-changing stages of development it goes through; and in another, it can in many ways be boiled down to the raw, almost feral imposition of the organized violent will of an angry and fear-ridden human id upon the rest of humankind. Throughout history, it has only ever achieved real power when it was able to coalesce its many contentious and often warring factions under the banner of a unifying charismatic leader. The lack of such a figure at those periods when fascist tendencies were ascendant in the United States is one of the primary reasons historians believed that fascism never could obtain the “political space” required for obtaining power in the United States: “It can’t happen here.” That’s where Donald Trump comes in. Fascist elements and tendencies have always been part of the nation’s political DNA, even though many Americans cannot admit this. Indeed, it can be said that some of the worst traits of European fascism were borrowed from America, particularly the eliminationist tendencies, manifested in the form of genocidal violence toward indigenous peoples and racial and ethnic segregation. Hitler acknowledged at various times his admiration for the American genocide against Native Americans; for the segregationist Jim Crow regime in the South, on which the Nazis modeled the Nuremberg Race Laws; and for the deployment of mob violence by the Ku Klux Klan, which was the inspiration for the murderous street thuggery of the German Brownshirts and the Italian Black-shirts. According to Ernst Hanfstaengl, a German American who was a confidant of Hitler’s for a time, Hitler was “passionately interested in the Ku Klux Klan … He seemed to think it was a political movement similar to his own.” And it was. Despite these tendencies, the United States had never yet given way to fascism at the national level. No doubt this, in the second half of the twentieth century at least, was due to horror at what ultimately transpired under the Hitler regime—namely, the Holocaust. We were appalled by racial and ethnic hatred, by segregation and eliminationism, because we saw the pile of corpses that they produced in Europe. We didn’t make the connection with our own piles of corpses, until the civil rights movement finally redressed our own national wrongs. However, that was a different generation, one that grew up in the shadow of World War II and experienced not only McCarthyism but also the civil rights struggle. Today, it is not uncommon to see Nazi regalia treated as a kind of fashion statement and outrageous genocidal racial sentiments tossed about like popcorn, dismissed as a kind of naughtiness. White nationalism and supremacism, nativism, misogyny, conspiracism, sexual paranoia, and xenophobic hatred, once embodied in German National Socialism, have experienced a revival in twenty-first-century America in the form of the alt-right and Patriot-militia movements. Relatively early in the campaign, a flood of observers began using the word “fascist” to describe Trump’s campaign. Not all of these concerns were coming from the left: in November 2015, a number of conservatives began sounding the alarm as well, especially in response to Trump’s vows to crack down on Muslim immigrants. “Trump is a fascist. And that’s not a term I use loosely or often. But he’s earned it,” the conservative pundit Max Boot, a Marco Rubio campaign adviser, tweeted in November 2015, after Trump had retweeted a graphic from #WhiteGenocide. Steve Deace, a Ted Cruz supporter and conservative Iowa radio host, tweeted in November 2015, “If Obama proposed the same religion registry as Trump every conservative in the country would call it what it is—creeping fascism.” Even the staid, Republican-owned Seattle Times used the term to describe Trump in a November 2015 editorial: “There is a bottom line, and it’s simple: Trump’s campaign message reflects a kind of creeping fascism. It needs to be rejected.” Of course liberals, too, were alarmed: the historian Rick Perlstein, in a Washington Spectator piece titled “Donald Trump and the F Word,” explored the question of Trump’s fascist tendencies in depth, concluding that although Trump himself might not be a fascist, the phenomenon he was empowering was troublingly close to meeting Paxton’s condition of fascism at the power-acquisition stage. Trump was tapping into a wellspring of discontent: “If he’s just giving the people what they want, consider the people,” he wrote. “Consider what they want.” There is little doubt that there is a significant resemblance between Trump’s ascendance and that of previous fascist figures in history beyond Hitler, including Mussolini, Francisco Franco, and Miklos Horthy, partly because the politics he engenders indeed fill out so many of the key components that collectively create genuine fascism, as we’ve come to understand it through deep historical scholarship. A careful examination of Trump’s campaign and post-election messages in light of Paxton’s definition reveals a raft of fascist traits: 1. Eliminationist rhetoric is the backbone of Trump’s appeal. His opening salvo in the campaign —the one that first catapulted him to the forefront in the race, in the polls, and proved wildly popular with Republican voters—was his vow, and subsequent proposed program, to deport all 12 million of the United States’ undocumented immigrants (he used the deprecatory term “illegal alien”) and to erect a gigantic wall on the nation’s southern border. The language he used to justify such plans— labeling those immigrants “criminals,” “killers,” and “rapists”—is classic rhetoric designed to dehumanize an entire group of people by reducing them to objects fit only for elimination. Trump’s appeal ultimately is about forming a “purer” community, and it has been relentless and expansive: When an audience member asked him at a town-hall-style appearance when and how he was going to “get rid of all the Muslims,” he responded that “we’re going to be looking at a lot of different things.” He also claimed that if elected, he would send back all the refugees from Syria who had arrived in the United States: “If I win, they’re going back,” he told one of his approval-roaring campaign crowds. He told an interviewer that the Black Lives Matter movement was “looking for trouble” and later suggested that maybe a Black Lives Matter protester should have been “roughed up.” 2. Palingenetic ultranationalism, after race-baiting and ethnic fearmongering, is the most obviously fascistic component of Trump’s presidential election effort, embodied in those trucker hats proclaiming, “Make America Great Again.” Trump amplifies the slogan this way: “The silent majority is back, and we’re going to take the country back. We’re going to make America great again.” That’s almost the letter-perfect embodiment of palingenesis: the promise of the phoenix-like rebirth of a nation from the ashes of its “golden age.” 3. Trump’s deep contempt for both liberalism and establishment conservatism allows him to go over the heads of established political alignments. The conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh has noted, “In parlaying this outsider status of his, he’s better at playing the insiders’ game than they are … He’s running rings around all of these seasoned, lifelong, highly acclaimed professionals in both the consultant class, the adviser class, the strategist class, and the candidate class. And he’s doing it simply by being himself.” 4. Trump exploits a feeling of victimization, constantly proclaiming that America is in a state of crisis that has made it “the laughingstock” of the rest of the world, and contends that this has occurred because of the failures of (primarily liberal) politicians. 5. He himself embodies the concept of a lone male leader who considers himself a man of destiny. His refusal to acknowledge the lack of factual basis of many of his comments embodies the fascistic notion that the leader’s instincts trump logic and reason in any event. 6. Trump’s contempt for weakness was manifested practically every day on the campaign trail, ranging from his dissing of John McCain as “not a hero” because “I like people who weren’t captured,” to his onstage mockery of Serge Kovaleski, a New York Times reporter who has a disability. This list is thought-provoking—and it is meant to be thought-provoking—but as part of our exercise in examining the attributes of real fascism, we also can begin to discern the difference between that phenomenon and the Trump candidacy. For example, fascists have, in the past, always relied upon an independent, movement-driven paramilitary force capable of intimidating their opponents with various types of thuggery. In Italy these were the Blackshirts; Hitler imitated the Italian units with the formation of the Brownshirts, the Storm Division. Trump has no such paramilitary force at his disposal. Members of various white-supremacist organizations and bona fide paramilitary organizations such as the Oath Keepers and the Three Percent movement are avid Trump backers. Trump has never made known any desire to form an alliance with or to make use of such groups. However, via wink-wink nudge-nudge cues Trump has on occasion encouraged or failed to condemn spontaneous violence by some of his supporters against both protesters at rallies and groups they consider undesirable, such as when “enthusiastic supporters” committed anti-Latino hate crimes. Encouraging extralegal vigilante violence can be classified as a fascistic response. Yet a serious fascist would have called upon not just the crowd to respond with violence, but also his paramilitary allies to respond with retaliatory strikes. Trump didn’t do that. Another perhaps more basic reason that Trump cannot be categorized as a true fascist is that he is not an ideologue who acts out of a rigid adherence to a consistent worldview, as do all real fascists. Trump’s only real ideology is worship of himself, “the Donald.” He will do and say just about anything that appeals to any receptive segment of the American body politic to attract their support. One segment of the body could be called the nation’s id—groups that live on paranoia and hatred regarding those different from themselves and also the political establishment. There’s no question that these supporters brought a visceral energy to the limited universe of the GOP primary, though I don’t know anyone who, in 2015, expected that such a campaign could survive the oxygen and exposure of a general election. Those observers, including me, were all proved wrong. Few observers had any clue how successfully the Alt-America worldview could become in muscling its way into the national spotlight. However, the reason why Trump has never yet called upon the shock troops of a paramilitary wing for support, and why he has attempted to keep an arm’s-length distance from the overtly racist white nationalists and neo-Nazis who have become some of his most enthusiastic backers, is simple: he isn’t really one of them. What he is, says Chip Berlet, is a classic right-wing nativist populist demagogue: “His ideology and rhetoric are much more comparable to the European populist radical right, akin to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front, the Danish People’s Party, or Vladimir Zhirinovsky’s Liberal Democratic Party of Russia. All of them use the common radical right rhetoric of nativism, authoritarianism, and populism.” Trump himself is not a fascist primarily because he lacks any kind of coherent, or even semi-coherent, ideology, nor has he agitated for a totalitarian one-party state. What he represents instead is a sort of gut-level reactionism that lacks the rigor and absolutism, the demand for ideological purity, that are characteristic of full-bore fascism. But that does not mean that the movement he has unleashed is not potentially dangerously proto-fascist, nor that he is not dangerous to American democracy. Indeed, he has now proved to be more dangerous than an outright fascist, because such a figure would be far less appealing and far less likely to succeed in the current milieu. What Trump has succeeded in doing, by exploiting the strands of right-wing populism in the country, has been to make the large and growing number of proto-fascist groups in America larger and more vicious. In other words he is simultaneously responding to and creating the conditions that could easily lead to the genuine growth of fascism. The journalist Milton Mayer, in They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933–1945 (1955), describes how these changes happen not overnight, but incrementally: “You see,” my colleague went on, “one doesn’t see exactly where or how to move. Believe me, this is true. Each act, each occasion, is worse than the last, but only a little worse. You wait for the next and the next. You wait for one great shocking occasion, thinking that others, when such a shock comes, will join with you in resisting somehow. You don’t want to act, or even talk, alone; you don’t want to ‘go out of your way to make trouble.’ Why not?—Well, you are not in the habit of doing it. And it is not just fear, fear of standing alone, that restrains you; it is also genuine uncertainty … “Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.” We lose our humanity incrementally, in small acts of meanness. The Nazis’ regime ultimately embodied the ascension of demonic inhumanity, but they didn’t get that way overnight. They got that way through, day after day, attacking and demonizing and urging the elimination of those they deemed their enemies. And this has been happening to America—in particular, to the conservative movement and the Republican Party—for a very long time. Donald Trump represents the culmination of a trend that really began in the 1990s. That was when we first saw the popular rise of eliminationist hate talk. It was first heard in Patrick Buchanan’s 1992 declaration of a “culture war”; it was then wielded with thoughtless glee and great regularity by an increasingly rabid set of right-wing pundits led by Rush Limbaugh; then it was deeply codified by a new generation of talking heads who have subsequently marched across the sound stages at Fox News. It surfaced particularly with the birth of the Tea Party, which became perhaps the single most significant manifestation of right-wing populism in the nation’s history, certainly since the Ku Klux Klan of the 1920s. Trump aligned himself very early with the Tea Party elements, remarking in 2011, “I represent a lot of the ingredients of the Tea Party.” And indeed he does—in particular, its obeisance to the captains of industry and their untrammeled right to make profits at the expense of everyone else. Right-wing populism is essentially predicated on what today we might call the psychology of celebrity worship: convincing working-class schlubs that they, too, can someday become rich and famous—because when they do, would they want to be taxed heavily? It’s all about dangling that lottery carrot out there for the poor stiffs who delude themselves about their chances of hitting the jackpot. The thing about right-wing populism is that it’s manifestly self-defeating: those who stand to primarily benefit from this ideology are the wealthy, which is why they so willingly underwrite it. One might be inclined to dismiss it as a kind of “sucker populism.” But that would be to overlook the reasons for its appeal, which run much deeper, and are really in many ways more a product of people’s attraction to an authoritarian system. Those psychological needs often are a product of the levels of general public fear, much more so than of economic well-being or other factors. That fear is generated by a large number of factors, including the spread of unfiltered social media, as well as the rapid decline in basic journalistic standards of factuality in the larger mainstream media, as well as the mainstream media’s increasing propensity to promote information that, producers say, reflects what people want to see rather than what responsible journalistic ethics would consider more important: what they need to know. That’s how Alt-America became so powerful a political force. This right-wing populism, largely lurking on the periphery and gradually building an audience, was whipped into life by Ron Paul’s and Sarah Palin’s 2008 candidacies, and then became fully manifest as a national movement in short order with the rise of the Tea Party in 2009. Not only was the Tea Party an overtly right-wing populist movement, it soon became a major conduit for a revival of the populist Patriot-militia movement. Many of these “Tea Party Patriots” are now Oath Keepers and Three Percenters whose members widely supported Trump’s candidacy, and are now vowing to defend his presidency with their own arms. Most of these extremists are only one step removed, ideologically speaking, from the neo-Nazis and other white supremacists of the racist right, and both of those segments of the right lean heavily on nativist and authoritarian rhetoric. It’s only somewhat natural that Trump’s right-wing populism would be mistaken for fascism—they are closely related. Not every right-wing populist is a fascist, but every fascist is a right-wing populist. Thus, Donald Trump may not be a fascist, but with his vicious brand of right-wing populism he is not just empowering the latent fascist elements in America, he is leading his followers merrily down a path that leads directly to fascism. If the final result is fascism, the distinction between right-wing populism and fascism is not really significant except in understanding how it happened in the first place. The United States, thanks to Trump, has now reached a fork in the road where it must choose down which path its future lies—with democracy and its often fumbling ministrations, or with the appealing rule of plutocratic authoritarianism, ushered in on a tide of fascistic populism (if history serves as a example, the fascistic populists will eventually overwhelm their plutocrat sponsors). Trump may not be a fascist, but he is an authoritarian who, intentionally or not, is empowering the existing proto-fascist elements in American society; even more dangerously, his alt-right–Tea Party brand of right-wing populism is helping these groups grow their ranks and their potential to recruit new members by leaps and bounds. Not only that, he is making thuggery seem normal and inevitable. And that is a serious problem. How can you talk with a diehard Alt-American if you are a dedicated mainstream liberal? Many Americans confronted that question over their family Thanksgiving tables a couple of weeks after the election. The conversations often did not turn out well. But it is no longer a question we can pretend away, perhaps by choosing to stay away from those tables altogether. The American radical right is a real force with real power—both political and cultural—and it is no longer alarmist to point that out. Nor is it a problem that we can hope to attack head-on through blunt political force, though without question the barrage of attacks on Americans’ civil rights that very likely now await us in the coming years will require our most vocal opposition. It will be incumbent upon this political opposition to be totally dedicated to the principles of nonviolent resistance. During the anti-Trump protests that immediately followed his election, the liberal mainstream media characterized a handful of violent incidents as riots. That undermines the aims of the anti-Trump protest. Fascist movements have a long-documented history of converting any violence they encounter after having provoked it into a justification for further violence that far outpaces anything that the opposing left might be capable of mustering. The rise of the radical right is a symptom of problems more deep-seated than the purely political level. Fascism, at its base, is fueled by hate and the pure objectification of an utter lack of empathy for other human beings. Thus, the negation of this negative emotion is not love, but empathy. Confronting fascism—as J. K. Rowling suggests with a theme running through her popular “Harry Potter” series of children’s books—means first embracing humanity, both ours and theirs; from that embrace we can make the personal choices that define what kind of people we are. We need to be able to put ourselves in other people’s shoes, even if we do not agree with them, for our own sake as well as theirs. Harry’s experiences observing young Tom Riddle, the nascent Lord Voldemort, through the magical “Pensieve” gave these stories a surprisingly profound depth of meaning. Empathy as an essential political principle actually comes naturally to progressives as a policy imperative. Certainly the liberal social policies that have created wealthy liberal urban enclaves that were the base of the Democratic Party’s support in the 2016 election reflect that empathetic impulse, in the form of broad social safety nets, supportive urban-oriented programs, high-powered educational systems, and bustling economies. The impulse behind most modern liberal programs has been to raise the standard of living for ordinary people and to defend the civil rights of everyone, especially those who have not enjoyed them for much of the nation’s history. That’s a fairly empathetic agenda. Liberals’ dealings regarding rural and Rust Belt America, however, have over the past forty years largely been characterized by at best benign neglect, in terms of both economic policy and culture: wealthy urbanites do often look down their noses at rural and working-class citizens and consider their concerns and attitudes at best antiquated and at worst backward and stupid. This political disconnect emerges in all kinds of cultural expressions, from movie stereotypes to thoughtless remarks from liberal politicians. Which is perhaps why the conversations around our Thanksgiving tables were so deeply awkward, if not deeply disturbing, in the wake of Donald Trump’s surprise election. And yet that is the kind of place where the deeper change that needs to occur in our relationships with each other as Americans can happen. One healing conversation at a time. If Americans of goodwill—including mainstream conservatives who recognize how their movement has been hijacked by radicals—can learn to start talking to each other again, and maybe even pull a few Alt-Americans out of their abyss along the way, then perhaps we can start to genuinely heal our divisions instead of relegating each other into social oblivion and, maybe eventually, civil war. Some kind of cultural or political civil war is clearly already on many minds. The bottom-line issue is really an epistemological one: how is a rational exchange possible when we can’t even agree on what constitutes a fact and factuality? Most liberals (certainly not all) tend to prefer traditional standards of factuality and evidence in which concrete information from reliable sources is accepted as fact, and scientific evidence obtained through peer-reviewed methods is considered the gold standard for presentable evidence in a discussion. Pretty much the opposite is true in Alt-America. Science and scientists are viewed with suspicion as participants in the “conspiracy,” and so their contributions are instantly discarded as worthless, as is the work of any kind of academic in any field, including history and the law. The only sources of information they accept as “factual” are tendentious right-wing propaganda riddled with false facts, wild distortions, and risible conspiracist hyperbole. Fox News—whose mass failures regarding factual accuracy are now the stuff of legend—is considered by Alt-Americans to be the only “balanced and accurate” news source, though even it is viewed with deep suspicion by alt-righters, Patriots, and Alex Jones acolytes. Breaking through that wall is at best difficult, and in the case of dedicated and fanatical Alt- Americans, probably not worth the personal costs in terms of the emotional abuse they like to heap on those with whom they disagree. But finding people who remain within reach—those for whom common decency and respectful discourse and Christian kindness are still important values, even though they may have voted for Trump—may provide an avenue for deeper social change. At some point, there will have to be a discussion about just what is a fact and what isn’t, because that eventually will determine whether or not you can ever come to a rational common ground. But getting there first will take a lot of empathy. The communications expert Sharon Ellison specializes in what she calls “powerful nondefensive communication”; she has developed an effective empathy-driven model that she has shown can be effective in at least breaking down the interpersonal barriers that modern politics have erected, and upon which the radical right thrives. The starting place, she says, is curiosity: "Instead of blasting Trump or insulting the morality or intelligence of his supporters, first, just get curious. You don’t have to agree; you’re simply gathering information and trying to understand where they’re coming from, even if you believe they’re deeply misguided. "Make it a dialogue, not a debate or an inquisition. No matter how true and rational your analysis is, force-feeding it will not go down well. Nor will a premeditated series of sugar-coated questions designed to subtly lead the person to “get it.” The right question, skillfully and non-aggressively posed, could prompt someone to gain unexpected insights, and when they realize something for themselves, they can more easily accept it. "Your questions should be very specific but posed in a non-judgmental way. (Note that I’m calling the questions “specific” rather than “pointed,” which implies that a question is a weapon.)" Ellison cautions against using general, open-ended questions such as whether people can ever learn to get along. Some of us gravitate toward these because they feel softer, but they can wind up serving as an invitation to rant. The key to understanding people who have become drawn into the Alt-America universe is the role that the hero myth plays in framing their worldview. Dedicated Patriots and white nationalists, just like the hate criminals they inspire, genuinely envision themselves as heroes. They are saving the country, or perhaps the white race, or perhaps just their local community. And so anything, anything they might do in that act of defense is excusable, even laudable. This embrace of the heroic is what ultimately poisons us all. The sociologist James Aho has explored this concept of the hero: "The warrior needs an enemy. Without one there is nothing against which to fight, nothing from which to save the world, nothing to give his life meaning. What this means, of course, is that if an enemy is not ontologically present in the nature of things, one must be manufactured. The Nazi needs an international Jewish banker and conspiratorial Mason to serve his purposes of self- aggrandizement, and thus sets about creating one, at least unconsciously. By the same token, the radical Zionist locks himself in perverse symbiosis with his Palestinian “persecutors,” the Communist with his “imperialistic capitalist running dogs,” the capitalist with his Communist “subversives.” Aho goes on to describe how the enemy is constructed as embodying “putrefaction and death,” is experienced “as issuing from the ‘dregs’ of society,” whose “visitation on our borders is tantamount to impending pestilence … The enemy’s presence in our midst is a pathology of the social organism serious enough to require the most far-reaching remedies: quarantine, political excision, or, to use a particularly revealing expression, liquidation and expulsion.” What Aho describes is a dynamic latent in all sectors of American society but finding a virulent expression in right-wing extremism. It is one in which both sides—the heroic exemplars of the far right and their named “enemies,” that is, Jews, civil-rights advocates, and the government— essentially exchange roles in their respective perceptions; the self is always heroic, the other always the enemy. Each sees the other as the demonic enemy, feeding the other’s fears and paranoias in an increasingly threatening spiral that eventually breaks out in the form of real violence. There is, as Aho suggests, a way to escape this dynamic, to break the cycle. And it requires, on the part of those seeking to oppose this kind of extremism, a recognition of their own propensity toward naming the enemy and adopting the self-aggrandizing pose of the hero: "As [the cultural anthropologist] Ernest Becker has convincingly shown, the call to heroism still resonates in modern hearts. However, we are in the habit of either equating heroism with celebrity (“TV Actress Tops List of Students’ Heroes”) or caricaturing the hero as a bluff-and-swagger patriot/soldier making the world safe for, say, Christian democracy. In these ways heroism is portrayed as a rather happy if not entirely risk-free venture that earns one public plaudits. Today we are asked to learn that, in the deepest and truest sense, heroism is really none of these things, but a largely private vocation requiring stamina, discipline, responsibility, and above all courage. Not just the ascetic courage to cleanse our personal lives of what we have been taught is filth, or even less to cleanse society of the alleged carriers of this filth, but, as Jung displayed, the fortitude to release our claim on moral purity and perfection. At a personal and cultural level, I believe this is the only way to transcend the logic of enemies." For all of its logic and love of science, modern liberalism as a social force is weighed down by its most consistent flaw: an overweening belief in its own moral superiority, its heroism, as it were. (Not, of course, that conservatives are any better in this regard; if one factors in the religious right and the “moral values” vote, they are objectively worse.) This tendency becomes especially noticeable in urban liberal societies, which for all their enlightenment and love of tolerance are maddeningly smug, intolerant of the “ignorance” of their rural and “fly-over country” counterparts. It’s not an omnipresent attitude, but it is pervasive enough that others’ perceptions of it are certainly not without basis. There’s a similar stigma attached to religious beliefs as well, especially among more secular liberals, and that in turn has given birth to a predictable counterreaction that is only partially a result of misunderstanding. If we look at the 2016 electoral map, and see all those red rural counties and come to terms with the reasons why none of them ever turn blue, it’s important to come to terms with our own prejudices and our easy willingness to treat our fellow Americans—the ones who are not like us—with contempt and disrespect. Simply beginning the change will require both humility and empathy. That’s not to suggest that we respond to racist or violent provocations with touchy-feely attempts at “reaching out” to the other side; these are always rejected with contempt, or viewed as a sign of weakness. Certainly it does not mean we need to “reach out” to the rural haters and the conspiracy-spewing Patriots. I grew up in rural America, and I’m all too familiar with the bullies and swaggering ignoramuses who hold too much sway in that culture, and whose politics and worldview are now ascendant beyond their wildest imaginings (and they are wild, trust me). There’s really no point in trying to reach out to people who will only return your hand as a bloody stump. The only thing they understand, in the end, is brute political force: being thrashed at the ballot box, and in the public discourse. So it is vital for liberals, progressives, moderates, and genuine conservatives to link arms in the coming years to fight back against the fascist tide. It will require organizing, and it will require real outreach. And if this coalition wants to succeed, its members will need to break the vicious circular social dynamic that right-wing extremists always create, particularly in rural communities where their bullying style of discourse can stifle honest discourse. To do that, some self-reflection will go a long way. Respecting those from rural areas, those who hold deep religious beliefs, doesn’t force progressives to compromise their own beliefs or standards. It simply means being part of a democracy, which is enriched by its diversity. It means once again empowering the many rural progressives who have lived there all along, fighting the good fight against all odds, because they are the people who are best equipped to have those many dinner-table conversations. Certainly traditional rural values such as communitarianism, common decency, mutual respect, and respect for tradition should have a place among all that diversity that liberals are fond of celebrating. Because until urban progressives learn to accord them that respect, they are doomed to remain trapped in the vicious cycle being fueled on both sides. For liberals and moderates, breaking out may be a matter of survival—especially as the rabid right’s fantasies begin coming to fruition. Alt-America, thanks to Donald Trump, is no longer merely the stuff of these fantasies. It will take the best of us, the most decent part of us—the better angels of our nature, as Abraham Lincoln invoked in his first inaugural address—to prevent right-wing dreams from becoming realities. David Neiwert

Now There’s No Doubt Meghan and Harry Had to Leave

Caught between a hate-filled media and a terrified royal family, the surprise is not that the couple struck out on their own. It’s that they didn’t escape much sooner

Harry says racism ‘large part’ of reason why couple left UK

Shola Mos-Shogbamimu: Meghan has been mistreated for years

Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, speaking to Oprah Winfrey on US television. Photograph: Joe Pugliese/Harpo Productions/PA

seldom remembered fact about the royal family is that, before the death of Princess Diana, it was not normal to be interested in them. Tabloids were fascinated, but it was more of a convention than news – like a splash about tomatoes causing cancer, it was the out-of-office auto reply of the industry, a fallback. The family (I seriously dislike the affectation of calling them “the Firm”) survived while there was nothing to see. They were caught between two irreconcilable forces – their own culture of discretion, on one side, and intense, 24-hour scrutiny on the other – and they navigated that with a studied blandness. What did they actually care about? Manners, duty, causes, the Commonwealth. Whatever curiosity surrounded them, they simply did not reward it, and the regular response to that, after a few centuries and whatnot, was to not be terribly curious.

You may recall David Blaine, the magician who lived in a glass box above the Thames for 44 days in 2003: people really wanted to know what he was doing, even though we could see what he was doing – and that was mainly nothing. There grew a peculiar resentment of gawping at something that was only interesting because it was untouchable. But we could see for ourselves that it was not interesting – and then everyone got annoyed and some of us (not me) threw eggs. Eventually, hawkers started selling eggs. That pretty much sums up the experience of the royals pre-1997.

The death of Diana changed all that, but in a counterintuitive way. Curiosity had driven a woman into a pillar, so you might expect a generalised reflection on the nature of it – what were the paparazzi hoping to see? A divorcee, going about her business, with a gentleman caller. Was there not a case for just giving it all a rest, especially given that the core traits of royalty, the bits that made them so unusual – restraint, self-abnegation, respectability – had been more or less torched by Prince Charles’s generation, anyway (it wasn’t just Camilla and Fergie and their antics; Prince Andrew, who, of course, was then still just a buffoon with no Jeffrey Epstein taint, had added to it with It’s a Knockout).

Instead, the opposite happened: far from posing difficult questions about whether all this invasive scrutiny was warranted or humane, the tragedy seemed to elevate it, to usher in a belief that this obsessiveness between a society and its head of state and her offspring and in-laws was somehow natural. The post-rationalisation of Diana and her place in culture is almost hallucinatory at times.

If you are of a certain age, you might recall that before she died, we were not all trying to dress like her. She was not our people’s princess; we may have watched Martin Bashir’s Panorama interview but with an idle rather than passionate interest. She was neither a feminist nor any other kind of icon. Fair play, it was a decent thing, when she held hands with HIV patients, but generally speaking, she was just a Sloane in an egalitarian age, a pretty relic. Her death should have sparked a conversation not just about an intrusive press but about what the family represented, whether its hierarchies and rules could survive any more contact with living, sentient modern souls.

Instead, it catalysed quite a cunning, self-justifying switcheroo from the gutter press: we had to hound the woman because the public demands it, the public is just so interested. This buried a landmine that has detonated a quarter of a century later, upon contact with that other fixation of the same media, race: or, more specifically, dog-whistling racist tropes.

Harry and Meghan in 2018. Photograph: Neil Mockford/GC Images

And so we come to last night’s interview. It’s possible, of course, in any clash between two factions, for everyone to be in the wrong. It’s possible, for instance, for the royal family to be inhumane, hierarchical to the point of lunacy, snobbish and racist – and simultaneously for Prince Harry and Meghan to be spoilt and high-handed. On the eve of the Oprah interview with the couple, which aired on CBS on Monday at 1am GMT, it was indeed fair to expect that the impartial viewer would come away thinking: “Six of one, half a dozen of the other.” For those who were already Team Windsor, there were aspects that would grate enough to confirm their views: Oprah’s faux toughness, the mad opulence of the garden backdrop, the very carefully choreographed frankness. But in the end what swung it so far the other way certainly wasn’t the cute gender-reveal (the couple are expecting a girl). Instead, it was something much darker: Meghan’s disclosure that she “didn’t want to be alive any more” at one point, while pregnant with their first child, Archie. “That was a very clear and real and frightening, constant thought,” she said.

When I spoke to Katie Nicholl, royal reporter and the author of Harry and Meghan: Life, Love and Loss, before the broadcast, she had said, judiciously: “I think she perhaps didn’t give it long enough. Within 18 months they were off – that was no time at all. Fergie and Diana both gave it longer than that.”

That made sense when we spoke: what’s 18 months to get used to your in-laws? It’s the blink of an eye. But making the briefest survey of the kind of coverage Meghan received, the vehemence and double standards are breathtaking. It also goes some way towards explaining why she couldn’t just give it another year: the press seemed to be whipping itself into a frenzy; every negative story generated 10 more. If she ate an avocado, she was “wolfing down a fruit linked to water shortages, illegal deforestation and all-round general environmental devastation”. If she used lily of the valley in her bridesmaid’s flowers, she was potentially risking the lives of tiny children. She was portrayed as having bullied Kate, Duchess of Cambridge, to the point of tears over flower girl dresses for the wedding (the opposite was true, she told Oprah, God knows what was the root of all that) and routinely disregarded the Queen. And before very long, she was in despair. So you have to wonder, what is a reasonable amount of despair for a person to live with, and to what purpose? When were the smears ever likely to end? Do you have to be Californian and touchy-feely to ask whether that intensity of hatred is worth it, just to have people who will open your curtains and run you a bath?

Harry put it surprisingly strongly, when he said he’s “acutely aware of where my family stand and how acutely scared they are of the tabloids turning on them”. In this he gave the kindest possible reading of the situation, not a family closing ranks against its own, but one cowering in terror and simply not strong enough to protect itself. Whatever the truth of that, the individuals and their possible shortcomings are less interesting than the central question, which is not why Meghan and Harry left, but why any of them stay.

Certainly, the most shocking part of Oprah’s interview were the revelations that Harry was asked by unnamed members of his family how dark his first child’s skin was likely to be – and that, whether relatedly or not, they discovered that Archie would not have a title or, accordingly, any security. So. Many. Questions. Not least, how was Harry supposed to make a guess at his unborn son’s skin colour? But panning out to the general vilification of Meghan, the she-said-he-said mysteries that remain become more or less irrelevant. Irrespective of which earrings she wore and who she got on with or didn’t in the royal household, it was impossible to ignore from the start of the couple’s relationship that she had become the cipher for racial slurs that were, in general terms, unsayable.

Kehinde Andrews, professor of Black studies at Birmingham City University, traces the timeline: when they first met, the Daily Mail imagineered a “satirical” scene in which the Queen meets Meghan’s mother, who’s “straight outta Compton” living in a “gang-scarred home”. Upon the occasion of their marriage – another revelation of the interview is that they actually married three days before that ceremony; I’m not sure how important that is in the grand scheme of things – there was an outpouring of colour-blind celebration. That “just showed how little understanding we have of racism,” Andrews says, “if you think that Meghan Markle would make any difference at all. The monarchy is probably the primary symbol of white supremacy in the world; the idea that one black woman could make a difference to that is just facile.” He compares her fall from grace to that of Barack Obama, “the early celebration, racism’s over, which then switches to: ‘This isn’t about race, this is about you being problematic.’”

When you look at the build up of negative press, it was focused on Meghan as aggressive, bullying and angry, with a secondary motif of her being inauthentic and devious and having hoodwinked Harry, who is typically portrayed as the hapless idiot in what has unfolded. “No one’s called her a racial slur,” Andrews says, “but you can see the stereotypes, she’s basically being treated like most black people in elite white institutions.” She doesn’t belong there, so she must have used cunning to get there, and naturally she wouldn’t know how to behave once she arrived.

Let’s not pretend rich people don’t also kill themselves or experience depression’ ... Meghan during her interview with Oprah Winfrey on Sunday. Photograph: CBS

Here the idea that her predicament was in any way similar to Diana’s or Fergie’s comes apart. Yes, it would be a difficult adaptation for anyone, to suddenly be subject to protocols in which their individuality counted for nothing and all that mattered was the birth order of their spouse. But there was a particular timbre to the coverage of Meghan, that she was matter out of place – and what you’re dealing with there is not so much a hierarchy as a caste system.

In the end, Prince Charles probably emerges worst from the interview, with Harry’s disclosure that his father stopped taking his calls. Prince William comes off relatively unscathed; the Queen, likewise. The damage done to the institution is that one person leaving breaks the spell, and you wonder why, if they are all “trapped”, as Harry says, they can’t just … change. But the hangover from the affair is the tenacious media vindictiveness that, once it finds its target, doesn’t seem able to let go. We accept it as a caper, a game, but the despair it causes is real.

— The Guardian USA | Zoe Williams @zoesqwilliams | Monday, March 8, 2021

24th January >> (@romereports) Pope Francis’ Message for the 51th World Communications Day | Dear Brothers and Sisters, Communication is part of God’s plan for us and an essential way to experience fellowship. Made in the image and likeness of our Creator, we are able to express and share all that is true, good, and beautiful. We are able to describe our own experiences and the world around us, and thus to create historical memory and the understanding of events. But when we yield to our own pride and selfishness, we can also distort the way we use our ability to communicate. This can be seen from the earliest times, in the biblical stories of Cain and Abel and the Tower of Babel (cf. Gen 4:4-16; 11:1-9). The capacity to twist the truth is symptomatic of our condition, both as individuals and communities. On the other hand, when we are faithful to God’s plan, communication becomes an effective expression of our responsible search for truth and our pursuit of goodness. In today’s fast-changing world of communications and digital systems, we are witnessing the spread of what has come to be known as “fake news”. This calls for reflection, which is why I have decided to return in this World Communications Day Message to the issue of truth, which was raised time and time again by my predecessors, beginning with Pope Paul VI, whose 1972 Message took as its theme: “Social Communications at the Service of Truth”. In this way, I would like to contribute to our shared commitment to stemming the spread of fake news and to rediscovering the dignity of journalism and the personal responsibility of journalists to communicate the truth. 1. What is “fake” about fake news? The term “fake news” has been the object of great discussion and debate. In general, it refers to the spreading of disinformation on line or in the traditional media. It has to do with false information based on non-existent or distorted data meant to deceive and manipulate the reader. Spreading fake news can serve to advance specific goals, influence political decisions, and serve economic interests. The effectiveness of fake news is primarily due to its ability to mimic real news, to seem plausible. Secondly, this false but believable news is “captious”, inasmuch as it grasps people’s attention by appealing to stereotypes and common social prejudices, and exploiting instantaneous emotions like anxiety, contempt, anger and frustration. The ability to spread such fake news often relies on a manipulative use of the social networks and the way they function. Untrue stories can spread so quickly that even authoritative denials fail to contain the damage. The difficulty of unmasking and eliminating fake news is due also to the fact that many people interact in homogeneous digital environments impervious to differing perspectives and opinions. Disinformation thus thrives on the absence of healthy confrontation with other sources of information that could effectively challenge prejudices and generate constructive dialogue; instead, it risks turning people into unwilling accomplices in spreading biased and baseless ideas. The tragedy of disinformation is that it discredits others, presenting them as enemies, to the point of demonizing them and fomenting conflict. Fake news is a sign of intolerant and hypersensitive attitudes, and leads only to the spread of arrogance and hatred. That is the end result of untruth. 2. How can we recognize fake news? None of us can feel exempted from the duty of countering these falsehoods. This is no easy task, since disinformation is often based on deliberately evasive and subtly misleading rhetoric and at times the use of sophisticated psychological mechanisms. Praiseworthy efforts are being made to create educational programmes aimed at helping people to interpret and assess information provided by the media, and teaching them to take an active part in unmasking falsehoods, rather than unwittingly contributing to the spread of disinformation. Praiseworthy too are those institutional and legal initiatives aimed at developing regulations for curbing the phenomenon, to say nothing of the work being done by tech and media companies in coming up with new criteria for verifying the personal identities concealed behind millions of digital profiles. Yet preventing and identifying the way disinformation works also calls for a profound and careful process of discernment. We need to unmask what could be called the "snake-tactics" used by those who disguise themselves in order to strike at any time and place. This was the strategy employed by the "crafty serpent" in the Book of Genesis, who, at the dawn of humanity, created the first fake news (cf. Gen 3:1-15), which began the tragic history of human sin, beginning with the first fratricide (cf. Gen 4) and issuing in the countless other evils committed against God, neighbour, society and creation. The strategy of this skilled "Father of Lies" (Jn 8:44) is precisely mimicry, that sly and dangerous form of seduction that worms its way into the heart with false and alluring arguments. In the account of the first sin, the tempter approaches the woman by pretending to be her friend, concerned only for her welfare, and begins by saying something only partly true: "Did God really say you were not to eat from any of the trees in the garden?" (Gen 3:1). In fact, God never told Adam not to eat from any tree, but only from the one tree: "Of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you are not to eat" (Gen 2:17). The woman corrects the serpent, but lets herself be taken in by his provocation: "Of the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden God said, “You must not eat it nor touch it, under pain of death" (Gen 3:2). Her answer is couched in legalistic and negative terms; after listening to the deceiver and letting herself be taken in by his version of the facts, the woman is misled. So she heeds his words of reassurance: "You will not die!" (Gen 3:4). The tempter’s “deconstruction” then takes on an appearance of truth: "God knows that on the day you eat it your eyes will be opened and you will be like gods, knowing good and evil" (Gen3:5). God’s paternal command, meant for their good, is discredited by the seductive enticement of the enemy: "The woman saw that the tree was good to eat and pleasing to the eye and desirable" (Gen 3:6). This biblical episode brings to light an essential element for our reflection: there is no such thing as harmless disinformation; on the contrary, trusting in falsehood can have dire consequences. Even a seemingly slight distortion of the truth can have dangerous effects. What is at stake is our greed. Fake news often goes viral, spreading so fast that it is hard to stop, not because of the sense of sharing that inspires the social media, but because it appeals to the insatiable greed so easily aroused in human beings. The economic and manipulative aims that feed disinformation are rooted in a thirst for power, a desire to possess and enjoy, which ultimately makes us victims of something much more tragic: the deceptive power of evil that moves from one lie to another in order to rob us of our interior freedom. That is why education for truth means teaching people how to discern, evaluate and understand our deepest desires and inclinations, lest we lose sight of what is good and yield to every temptation. 3. "The truth will set you free" (Jn 8:32) Constant contamination by deceptive language can end up darkening our interior life. Dostoevsky’s observation is illuminating: "People who lie to themselves and listen to their own lie come to such a pass that they cannot distinguish the truth within them, or around them, and so lose all respect for themselves and for others. And having no respect, they cease to love, and in order to occupy and distract themselves without love they give way to passions and to coarse pleasures, and sink to bestiality in their vices, all from continual lying to others and to themselves.” (The Brothers Karamazov, II, 2). So how do we defend ourselves? The most radical antidote to the virus of falsehood is purification by the truth. In Christianity, truth is not just a conceptual reality that regards how we judge things, defining them as true or false. The truth is not just bringing to light things that are concealed, "revealing reality", as the ancient Greek term aletheia (from a-lethès, "not hidden") might lead us to believe. Truth involves our whole life. In the Bible, it carries with it the sense of support, solidity, and trust, as implied by the root 'aman, the source of our liturgical expression Amen. Truth is something you can lean on, so as not to fall. In this relational sense, the only truly reliable and trustworthy One – the One on whom we can count – is the living God. Hence, Jesus can say: "I am the truth" (Jn 14:6). We discover and rediscover the truth when we experience it within ourselves in the loyalty and trustworthiness of the One who loves us. This alone can liberate us: "The truth will set you free" (Jn 8:32). Freedom from falsehood and the search for relationship: these two ingredients cannot be lacking if our words and gestures are to be true, authentic, and trustworthy. To discern the truth, we need to discern everything that encourages communion and promotes goodness from whatever instead tends to isolate, divide, and oppose. Truth, therefore, is not really grasped when it is imposed from without as something impersonal, but only when it flows from free relationships between persons, from listening to one another. Nor can we ever stop seeking the truth, because falsehood can always creep in, even when we state things that are true. An impeccable argument can indeed rest on undeniable facts, but if it is used to hurt another and to discredit that person in the eyes of others, however correct it may appear, it is not truthful. We can recognize the truth of statements from their fruits: whether they provoke quarrels, foment division, encourage resignation; or, on the other hand, they promote informed and mature reflection leading to constructive dialogue and fruitful results. 4. Peace is the true news The best antidotes to falsehoods are not strategies, but people: people who are not greedy but ready to listen, people who make the effort to engage in sincere dialogue so that the truth can emerge; people who are attracted by goodness and take responsibility for how they use language. If responsibility is the answer to the spread of fake news, then a weighty responsibility rests on the shoulders of those whose job is to provide information, namely, journalists, the protectors of news. In today’s world, theirs is, in every sense, not just a job; it is a mission. Amid feeding frenzies and the mad rush for a scoop, they must remember that the heart of information is not the speed with which it is reported or its audience impact, but persons. Informing others means forming others; it means being in touch with people’s lives. That is why ensuring the accuracy of sources and protecting communication are real means of promoting goodness, generating trust, and opening the way to communion and peace. I would like, then, to invite everyone to promote a journalism of peace. By that, I do not mean the saccharine kind of journalism that refuses to acknowledge the existence of serious problems or smacks of sentimentalism. On the contrary, I mean a journalism that is truthful and opposed to falsehoods, rhetorical slogans, and sensational headlines. A journalism created by people for people, one that is at the service of all, especially those – and they are the majority in our world – who have no voice. A journalism less concentrated on breaking news than on exploring the underlying causes of conflicts, in order to promote deeper understanding and contribute to their resolution by setting in place virtuous processes. A journalism committed to pointing out alternatives to the escalation of shouting matches and verbal violence. To this end, drawing inspiration from a Franciscan prayer, we might turn to the Truth in person: Lord, make us instruments of your peace. Help us to recognize the evil latent in a communication that does not build communion. Help us to remove the venom from our judgements. Help us to speak about others as our brothers and sisters. You are faithful and trustworthy; may our words be seeds of goodness for the world: where there is shouting, let us practise listening; where there is confusion, let us inspire harmony; where there is ambiguity, let us bring clarity; where there is exclusion, let us offer solidarity; where there is sensationalism, let us use sobriety; where there is superficiality, let us raise real questions; where there is prejudice, let us awaken trust; where there is hostility, let us bring respect; where there is falsehood, let us bring truth. Amen. From the Vatican, 24 January 2018, the Memorial of Saint Francis de Sales. FRANCIS.

2.2 The existence of "Devils"/"Demons"

Devils of Paradis (AOT), Demons (TPN)

When we think of demons, we often immediately think of evil creatures, those that come from hell and are vessels of sin. In the same way, both AOT and TPN involve the existence of ‘demons’. These ‘demons’ however, are not inherently evil, rather, this term is used to describe races that are different from that of the characters This brings about the topic of racism due to the prejudice towards other races and the feeling that it is permissible to annihilate them. This research juxtaposes the “devils” of AOT and “demons” of TPN as both series focus on opposing viewpoints. In AOT, the protagonists (The Eldians) are the “devils” and the world refers to them as such because they have the ability to shift into titans with the necessary material. These titans can then wreak havoc on the rest of the world. On the other hand, TPN has the more traditional “demons” which are creatures that resemble traditional caricatures of demons but these “demons” have a varying range in intelligence as some are considered wild while those who consume more human meat are highly intellectual and even have the silhouettes of humans. The common point however of the two series is that there is a continued cycle of hatred for these “demons/devils” which is explored in different points-of-view.

The isolated island of Paradis, where the "devils" reside

In Attack on Titan, the Eldians only realize that they have been isolated from the rest of the world due to the belief that they are “devils” during the confrontation with the undercover Marleyan warriors (Reiner, Bertholdt, Annie) and when they visited Marley undercover as well. In Marley, the Eldians who remain in the country are heavily discriminated against and are segregated from native Marleyans by having them live in separate areas. While Eldians are also allowed in Marley territory to work, they are required to wear Eldian armbands that indicate them of being “devil blood”. In fact, all the soldiers in Marley are made up of Eldians so that no Marleyeans die in the process. Eldian soldiers who do well in their training are selected to become Warriors and inheritors of the original 9 Titans (Well, 7 because Paradis has two of them). In doing so, they become “honorary Marleyans”, although this doesn’t really mean anything because they are still discriminated against. Still, this doesn’t stop Eldians from wanting to be honorary Marleyans due to the brainwash of their propaganda that the people of Paradis Island are devils. It is especially interesting how they got this propaganda to work because it means that the Eldians are essentially trained to fight and massacre the people of the same race. Marley does this by brainwashing Eldians in Marley to strive to be good Eldians in order to differentiate them from the uncivilized Paradis evil devils.

Gabi Braun - An Eldian Warrior fighting for Marley. She wears her Eldian armband on her left arm.

The whole world in Attack on Titan wants to eliminate Paradis Island and grab their resources in order to “restore” the order of the world and remove the threat of the rumbling. This is why the Marleyan Warriors namely Reiner, Bertholdt, and Annie were sent out to disguise themselves as Cadet Corps in order to infiltrate Paradis and get back the Founding Titan. The three young warriors thought their mission would be relatively easy because they were trained to hate the Paradis devils, however, upon knowing them better, they found themselves to be legitimate comrades of these “dirty-blooded” people. This actually causes Reiner to form a split-personality because of the dissonance he felt as he was torn between being a good warrior and a good soldier. It was evident that he realized that the Paradis Eldians were not inherently bad, and they were actually exactly like him but on the other side of the world. However, in order to finish his mission, he had to go back to his roots of being a Marleyan warrior, but his soldier persona would come back to haunt him time and time again. The same goes for Gabi Braun, part of the newer generation of Marleyan warriors. However unlike Reiner, Gabi was deeply brainwashed by propaganda, and despite the kindness shown to her by several Eldians, she would call them devils to their faces and treat them discriminatory. It was only after several Eldians saved her from life-threatening situations and a talk from Falco that she realized that Eldians are exactly like her. It is only here that she feels remorse for her attitudes in the past.

The demons of The Promised Neverland

In The Promised Neverland, the demons are the creatures who run the human farms. This is because the demons are naturally wild creatures and their intellect only comes from devouring humans. Those who only eat animals and creatures of lower intelligence remain to be wild and those who are unable to eat humans would continue to degenerate. This is why human farms were established to create a solid supply of food, which guarantees their intelligence. The children of Gracefield immediately developed hatred towards the creatures that ate their siblings with no mercy or acknowledgement whatsoever that they were beings with feelings and life. This was further emphasized by the fact that the ‘cattle children’ were referred to using the identification numbers on their necks and their age, rather than their names. This creates the distance and makes the whole experience more impersonal between the hunter and the hunted. However, the hatred and fear of the children towards the demons were immediately broken when they were rescued by Sonju and Mujika from wild demons. It was here they realized that not all demons were bad, and they really just needed to consume humans for survival. During this encounter, they also learned that demons did not have to consume human flesh to survive because of Mujika’s blood where consuming even a single drop forbids a demon from degenerating ever. However, this was forbidden to be distributed in order to uphold the human farm monopoly and keep the power between the elites. The children and the two demons form a strong bond, and even when Norman started his genocidal attacks, the Gracefield children immediately thought of checking up on these two. Emma realized through time that the demons were just like humans and had children, passions, and feelings as well.

Norman while in Lambda

On the other hand, Norman and the other children from Lambda had developed a deep and personal hatred towards the demons due to the physical, emotional, and mental torture they had to endure as experiments. This is why the group was absolutely appalled when Emma mentioned being friends with Mujika, who is known in the demon world as the “evil-blooded” girl. Norman was convinced that there was no way to assure the safety of humans unless all the demons were exterminated. One interesting point he brings up is that even if the demons did not have to eat humans to keep their intelligence, what’s stopping them from consuming humans due to enjoyment? He asks Emma if she would stop eating chicken or other food just because they begged for mercy. Deep inside, Norman did not want to annihilate all the demons, but he felt the pressure he brought by himself of having to be a savior and a leader. He felt unsure of the plan, but like Eren, he believed that the cycle of hatred would not stop unless the other was exterminated. This view eventually changed when Norman saw the destruction he brought about as he realized that the innocent lives lost had nothing to do with his own suffering.

The "devils" and "demons" in question

In both series, there is a realization that the so-called “demons/devils” was only a concept that took away from the actual reality of these beings. Them being “evil” is not actually rooted in heinous acts, but rather, the threat they bore for their mere existence. The AOT devils were resented for their titan abilities and the TPN demons were feared for their craving for human consumption. Both series actually shed light on the consequences of this attitude and one of the best quotes to encapsulate the message of both series is said by Eren Kruger (Not to be confused with Eren Jaeger) who states that “The only way for this to end is to break the cycle of hatred. Love someone inside the walls or else history will repeat itself.” A shared understanding must be forged or else everyone will just keep destroying the other.

What is Identity?

How do you identify others?  How do you identify yourself? Is it by appearance? Undoubtedly this is an important means of identification otherwise we would not have to include up-to-date photographs in important documents such as passports. Is your identity defined by familial or social relations? You are so-and-so’s son, daughter, mother, father, spouse or you belong to a particular church or denomination or are a citizen of a particular country. Or is perhaps your identity tied to particular interests you have in music, sport, entertainment or by sexual preference? Which of these definitions of identity is the most valuable and important and which can be disregarded and why are they even necessary?

In the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali five klesha or causes of suffering in this world are defined. I quite like the Sanskrit word klesha as it seems very onomatopoeic like the English word “clash”. The first of these is avidya, ignorance, which is clearly a great cause of suffering and is pretty self-explanatory although I will mention it again later. The second one which is very relevant to what I’ve been discussing is asmita, which in the version of the Yoga Sutras I have by Swami Vishnudevananda is translated as “egoism” or “I-ness”. Interestingly this is very close to the Gaelic expression “Is mise” which is used before giving your name and means “I am”. Sanskrit and Gaelic are quite closely related and share many similarities which are also common to most European languages. However the point I’m making is that whenever you use the term “I am” you are basically defining your own identity. “I am Drew McNaughton”, “I am a writer”, “I am an American”, etc., etc. Of course other people can do it to you as well: “He is my son”; “You are white”; etc. All of these instances come under the category of asmita and can cause problems.

The next two klesha to be defined are raga and dvesha which in the translation I have mean likes and dislikes and also attraction and aversion respectively. You would think that only the latter of these would be a problem but let’s look at them from a different angle to see why they are both included. In chemistry there are two key physical properties that can be attributed to chemicals: hydrophilia (water loving) and hydrophobia (water hating). These two extremes can be demonstrated in the fact that oil and water do not mix. Water is a polar substance and a characteristic of these is that they are hydrophilic, whereas oil is a non-polar substance and hydrophobic, hence they cannot be dissolved in one another and remain separate. Certain substances however can be both hydrophilic and hydrophobic and some of these make up the outer membrane of our cells and thus life as we know it depends on them. Why am I digressing into chemistry? Well the two terms philia and phobia are the key terms I want to focus on and these I think make a good analogy for raga and dvesha. For example, if you are really interested or even passionate about music, you are an audiophile or if you really like things to do with France, you are a Francophile, but note that again I’m using the term “you are” which again identifies you in a particular way. Some individuals or groups take the opposite stance and their identity can be defined by the objects of their hatred. This is a well known and unfortunately growing phenomenon. So we have islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia and so on. As I said before it is clear that these identities are sources of suffering, usually because the people who hold these views inflict some kind of injury, psychological or physical, on the subjects of their hatred. Both the philic and phobic inclinations can be seen then as problematic and this is why I think Stoicism is so similar to Yoga philosophy. There were probably Stoics in ancient times who were aware of Yoga and vice versa due to transmission of philosophies across large geographical distances. Travel, even back then, was difficult but not impossible. Both schools also held that unbridled hedonism didn’t lead to the best results and dealings with society at large should be conducted compassionately.

The last of the klesha to be defined is a rather important one as well. Abhinivesha translates as “fear of death”. I should say at this point that Patanjali in his thorough manner in the subsequent sutras gives definitions for each of the klesha in order to clarify his statements. This is the classic rhetorical device for the sutra form. And his definition of abhinivesha is remarkably succinct as he says that “Fear of death is the continuous desire to live which is rooted even in the minds of the wise.” It is essentially our instinct for survival. But what is it that we are trying to preserve? Ourselves? But who are we ourselves? Ach cò a tha sinn fhéin? And we come back to the original question of what is identity? At our death we merely are losing this sense of identity which we are so strongly identified with. It is such a strong identification that it even exists in the minds of the wisest beings who have ever walked on this Earth, who dwell here now and who will ever dwell here in the future. But these body tissues that are made of flesh and bone, of the very cells that were mentioned earlier and consist of nothing more than a collection of polar, non-polar and hybrid molecules and even more basic elements and sub-atomic particles will disintegrate and re-coalesce into other forms both living and inanimate for vast stretches of time well beyond our limited human lifespan. It is perhaps because of the ignorance (avidya) of this and the wondrous workings of Nature and the Universe that avidya can be considered the root of all the other klesha and the greatest cause of suffering of them all.

However on a final note, because I don’t really think I have managed to answer the question I first set out to answer, I just want to mention that in Gaelic the term for “self-identity” is féin-aithne. I think this term was coined relatively recently as it doesn’t have an entry in Dwelly’s dictionary and this perhaps reflects the modern fascination with the ability to make a conscious decision to identify yourself in some way for reasons that may be bound up in identity politics and relationships of power. Language itself is a potent symbol of identity and the language and even accent you use can greatly define your identity. Returning to the Gaelic word aithne which formed part of the compound word for self-identity, it has an interesting usage and one which I have to admit I struggled with understanding when I first started learning the language. It is worth remarking that it seems to echo the English word “identity” and perhaps comes from the same historic root. Its use when I first came across it was as a form of knowledge or acknowledgement particularly in relation to people with whom you have an acquaintance. The closely related word aithneachd (both are feminine nouns by the way) also means “knowledge” but also “recognition”. Does this once again refer back to a person’s appearance or is it more than that? One way or the other the specialised use of the word indicates that identity, for all its complexity, is deeply rooted in human, and perhaps even non-human, experience.