Why I’m joining the fight against extremism

Media rhetoric is usually sloppily built out of shite, but the campaign in recent years against extremism seems to me to be the sort of thing that it might be worth standing up and being counted for. I mean no-one likes extremes, do they? I say this, though, after once again I have been accused of being an extremist. It’s not an infrequent occurrence, perhaps two or three times a week. The interesting thing is quite how easily it seems to roll off the tongue in a sublime synthesis of witticism, emasculation, and personal fear. At once my views are treated as something totally other, therefore having no power to convince, and just so the man or woman who accuses me of extremism can feel safe in their bed at night that they haven’t spent the day sitting opposite a terrorist they must make a joke of it. The expression relies on a double suspension of disbelief, both that I am really not a terrorist or whatever the latest catchphrase for troublemaker is, and that I am actually so dangerous in whatever way that my views must be systematically taken down. Comprendez?

So yes, as I was saying, I think this whole business of opposing extremism is something that perhaps we ought to take a little more seriously. It seems like a decent idea. I mean when I get out of bed in the morning, read the paper, listen to the radio etc, it seems to me that the grossest extreme around is the accumulation of capital in the hands of the few. Doesn’t sound like an extreme to you? Perhaps the words are a little abstract. How about mass poverty? How about talking about the billions of people who aren’t permitted to join a union, or who can’t even get a job? How about the wars of the world so often driven by trade at the expense of millions of lives? It all seems a bit extreme to me, so I’m standing here, hopefully not alone, in my battle against extremism. I have identified my target, and I also have a means: I need to sit here at my computer and scribble down a line about the accumulation of capital that masterfully combines three components: witticism, emasculation, and my own personal fear.

Fuck, it’s going to be hard.

So there’s a factory and a worker together in a nightclub, they dance together, then the worker gives the factory a big kiss and says, “our relations of production are really good.” So the factory drops a rohypnol in the workers drink, takes him home, rapes him really hard up the arse with his chimney, and thinks to itself “yes, they are good aren’t they. Thank god he won’t remember when he comes back to work tomorrow.”

Perhaps I just suck at jokes. I get told that almost as often as being told that I’m an extremist. But the point is that although I have (I hope) combined these three key elements, and yet I have been thoroughly unsuccessful in disabling the capitalist ideal. It’s just all a bit too scary, but then Freud tells us that this is how jokes work – they are when the subconscious breaks into the conscious realm, and in reality from the moment I say that a factory and a worker are together in a nightclub the extremes of everyday existence are already too clear, we are already in the realm of the conscious and the factory must enforce unconsciousness to perpetrate its dirty little act.

On the contrary, and all joking aside here, the laughter at the accusation that I am an extremist has a totally different structure. The double suspension of disbelief can only exist when grounded on two totally separate principles: The first is the subconscious nature of the terror at extremists. It cannot be a conscious or reified terror otherwise it loses all maleability. That is, when made conscious its ability to target whoever or whatever poses a threat to the status quo disappears, and whilst it appears in the newspapers and the radio every day, it retains quite deliberately an air of mystery. The second is the tacit acknowledgment of the terror exactly of the system that the accusation of extremism hopes to protect. In a classic moment of Freudian transference the accuser is absolved of all responsibility at the expense of the accused just as, for example in Freud, the father-figure is condemned out of the will of the analysand to protect him- or herself from the admission of his or her own perversion.

And so here we are, I stand here alone in my personal battle against extremism, asking that the extremes of life in their most real forms (those of oppression, hunger, poverty) be opposed. And yes, perhaps I do wish to normalise certain ethics, certain societal structures, but it seems to me that the systematic destruction of a mode of thought and the realisation of the terror that capitalism brings is a rather poetic way to go about it.