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EH here. I'm not much of a sci-fi fan and not a voter, but Mr Greer offers a reasonable explanation of the absurd thinking of Amoerikan voters through considering such fiction's impact on their political imaginations, so here's his take. You may want to read it from the source beccause I don't know how to get the images to show up.
Source: Ecosophia
The Three Stigmata of J.R.R. Tolkien
Understand the thoughts that a person or a nation won’t allow itself to think and you grasp something crucial about that person or nation. Find the source of the barrier that keeps either one from entertaining those forbidden thoughts and you know something even more important. As America stumbles blindly forward into an unwelcome future, the self-imposed cognitive deficits that keep so many of its inmates from doing anything constructive about their current trajectory have become a massive political fact. Anything that allows even a little additional clarity about those deficits is thus a gift worth having.
With this in mind, I’d like to suggest that some of the most crucial of the self-inflicted blind spots that burden Americans just now have a very straightforward source. They follow on the gargantuan cultural impact of a work of fiction, The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien.
I hasten to say that none of the blame belongs on Tolkien’s shoulders. John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, as I think most of my readers are aware, was an eccentric Oxford professor with one of the world’s oddest and least objectionable hobbies: he liked to create imaginary languages. Because he reached intellectual maturity when historical linguistics were all the rage, his languages had to have a history; that meant they needed peoples who spoke them, stories and poems composed in them, and a whole world to shape their development. That intersected with his habit of telling elaborate bedtime stories to his children and birthed a bestselling children’s novel, The Hobbit. When he set out to write a sequel, it spun out of control and turned into a sprawling three-volume saga for adult readers, The Lord of the Rings.
In politics, Tolkien was a stalwart conservative; in religion, he was a devout and traditionally minded Roman Catholic. His fiction was powerfully shaped by both those commitments. He never expected his trilogy to find a large audience, much less one on the other side of the political spectrum, and for the first fifteen years or so after its publication The Lord of the Rings duly found a place on the literary fringe, despised by liberal critics but treasured by a small if passionate fandom. Then—well, then the Sixties happened, and all of a sudden Tolkien’s work found a huge and enthusiastic audience among people whose values, habits, and beliefs summed up nearly everything he loathed.
(It’s intriguing to note that he wasn’t the only leading author of imaginative fiction to encounter that curious twist of literary fate. Frank Herbert, the author of Dune—widey considered the greatest science fiction novel ever written, and an equally huge influence on the counterculture in its day—was also a rock-ribbed conservative. Meanwhile the brilliant fantasy novels of William Morris, the grand old man of British socialism, languished in obscurity despite the efforts of Lin Carter and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series to find them the audience they deserve.)
Then the Tolkien knockoffs started pouring out of the nether orifices of mass market publishers. Hollywood got into the act, too—and no, I’m not talking here about Ralph Bakshi’s abortive animated version, much less the unimaginative and lumbering Peter Jackson films. George Lucas’s meretricious Star Wars franchise borrowed ideas from just about every source that didn’t run away fast enough—Akira Kurosawa’s much better movie The Hidden Fortress was only the most obvious of these—and while Lucas was careful enough with the details to dodge lawsuits from the Tolkien estate, he borrowed freely from the wider penumbra of Tolkienesque fantasy. (“Dark Lord of the Sith”? Nah, that’s not even slightly reminiscent of anything in Tolkien…)
From there it spread all through popular culture in ways direct and indirect, and shaped the thinking of an entire culture. The result was that a set of literary devices that an eccentric British professor coined for his own enjoyment and that of his friends, and wove into a brilliant but idiosyncratic novel, got turned into the common currency of thought all over the American left, not to mention its Mini-Mes in other countries too heavily influenced by the United States to think clearly. I want to talk about three of these ways in particular before we go on, with the help of a much less iconic novel by an even weirder writer, to talk about what they mean.
The first of these habits of thought may as well be called the Orc Fallacy. Orcs? Those are the foot soldiers of the Dark Lord Sauron in Tolkien’s trilogy. They’re bad. They’re so bad they’re a caricature of badness. Not only that, they don’t even pretend to believe in the rightness of their own cause; they know they’re on the wrong side, and glory in it. In Tolkien’s world, no orc anywhere ever had a generous thought or did a kindly action. The closest they get to loyalty is a kind of malicious team spirit, coupled with stark terror of what their bosses will do to them if they don’t follow orders. The closest they get to courage is bloodlust coupled with a clear sense of what everyone else in Middle-earth will do to them given half a chance. When they’re winning, they swagger; when they’re losing, they panic and run. For all their apparent strength, in other words, they’re lousy soldiers, and their main function in the trilogy consists of showing up in vast numbers and then being slaughtered en masse by their outnumbered enemies.
As a literary device this sort of gimmick has its problems. As a basic assumption about reality, shaping the way that liberal politicians and bureacrats in the Western world think about the people they hate, it has much greater problems. There are plenty of examples, but the one that comes first to mind just at the moment is the fate of last summer’s Ukrainian counteroffensive.
According to recent news reports, the counteroffensive was planned out in detail by NATO generals. They’re the ones who insisted that the Ukrainian forces should drive south across Zaporhizhia province to the gates of Crimea, and their countries provided the Ukrainian army with the tanks and other equipment that would supposedly guarantee victory. They wargamed out the offensive in repeated exercises, always with the same results. At the heart of their plan, however, was the conviction that Sauron’s hosts would panic and run once the heroic defenders of the West came charging onto the scene. Since “orcs” is a standard slang term for Russians in Ukraine these days, it probably sounded like a slam-dunk.
Unfortunately for Ukraine, nobody seems to have made sure the Russian soldiers in Zaporhizhia agreed with this. As a result, those soldiers went on believing that they were the heroes of the piece, fighting to defend Mother Russia against neo-Nazis at their gates. Instead of milling around aimlessly while the Ukrainians got ready to attack, and then fleeing in terror and dying like flies once the assault began, the Russian forces dug themselves in, built three hardened defensive lines behind the line of contact, and then fought like tigers once the battle got going, mauling one elite Ukrainian armored brigade after another. By the time the counteroffensive ended this autumn, 150,000 Ukrainian soldiers had died uselessly, billions of dollars of NATO armored vehicles had been blown to smithereens, and the Russian Army still held firm.
This same debacle also displays another fatal flaw in mainstream Western thinking, which we can called the Anduril Fallacy. Anduril? That’s the Sword that was Broken, the weapon wielded by the hero Aragorn in Tolkien’s novel. It slices orc armor the way a blowtorch goes through butter. Of course Tolkien modeled this on other famous blades of legend—Excalibur, Durandal, Nothung, Gram—and there’s authentic history behind those. From the fall of Rome through the early Middle Ages the quality of steel in the West was highly variable, and a swordsmith who knew the trick of blending different grades of steel in a single blade could make a sword that would literally chop other swords in half. Such blades were treasures to fight and die for.
Those days ended a long time ago. Unfortunately for Ukraine, somebody forgot to tell NATO. Worse still, the NATO commanders who planned the counteroffensive made the lethal error of believing the sales pitches of their nation’s arms industries. The British Challenger II tank, to cite only one example, has been marketed to gullible armies in the rest of the world for years by fast-talking British arms salesmen who insist that it’s the Rolls-Royce of tanks, so powerful that it would take ten or fifteen ordinary tanks to stop one of them. The German Leopard tank got similar star billing, and so did any number of other NATO armored vehicles.
The assumption that these wonder weapons would slice through the Russian lines like Anduril chopping through a dozen orcs in a single blow played a large role in the overconfidence that sent so many Ukrainian soldiers to their deaths last year. Nor did the NATO vehicles live up to their billing. Russian rocket grenades, artillery, missiles, and suicide drones blew them up quite handily. Meanwhile plain old ordinary T-72 tanks, the backbone of the Russian tank fleet, turned out to be just as effective on the battlefield as their high-tech and far more expensive rivals. Anduril? The Sword that was Broken broke again.
The third bad habit of thought I have in mind didn’t feature so obviously in the total failure of the Ukrainian counteroffensive, but it’s had an overwhelming role in the entire Western response to the Russo-Ukrainian war. We can call this one the Sauron Fallacy: the conviction that the only reason there’s any trouble at all anywhere in the world is that some wicked individual makes it happen out of pure malicious evil, and somehow comes up with armies of orcs that have to be slain by Anduril. Sauron the Dark Lord, the Enemy, the Shadow in the East, is Tolkien’s most disastrous invention, and that same invention has been rehashed over, and over, and over again in the pop culture of our age. Lord Voldemort, Emperor Palpatine, Donald Trump—why, the list goes on and on.
It’s a very convenient mental habit if you don’t want to think about why other people might not appreciate the consequences of your actions. “Always, after a defeat and a respite, the Shadow takes another shape and grows again”—if this happens to you, dear reader, you need to reflect seriously on the possibility that the Shadow in question is one that you yourself are casting, and your own actions are making it rise anew. That’s certainly what happens when, as Tolkien did, you live in an empire in decline that’s propping up its faltering prosperity by stripping wealth from the rest of the planet, and trying to fight off jealous rivals who want to do the same thing for their own benefit rather than yours. Blame it on the Kaiser—or, if you prefer, Putin.
Thus you’ll hear endless diatribes by American pundits—again, seconded by their Mini-Mes in other countries—insisting that if only something happened to Vladimir Putin, surely the Russians would happily consent to the dismemberment and despoliation of their country that think tanks in the West have been planning right out there in public for decades. It’s all got to be Putin’s fault! If you believe this, dear reader, I have a pair of Russians to introduce to you.
The man on the left is Nikolai Patrushev. He’s the secretary of Russia’s Security Council, a leading figure in the current Russian government, a close ally and adviser of Putin, and is widely thought to be the most likely person to succeed to the presidency if Putin dies. The man below on the right is Dmitry Medvedev. He’s the most influential of the younger generation of Russian politicians, the deputy chairman of the Security Council, and has also been named as a potential Putin successor. What makes these men relevant to our present discussion is that they’re both far more hostile to the West than Putin is.
Both of them, like Putin, belong to the leading party in Russian politics, the United Russia Party, which is squarely behind Putin’s war aims. So are most Russians—Putin currently has an 80% approval rating among the Russian public, which makes an interesting contrast with Biden’s far more flaccid ratings. Most of the people who don’t approve of Putin, by the way, think that he’s too soft on the West. The #2 party in Russian politics? That’s our old friend the Communist Party, whose members consider the fall of the Berlin Wall to be one of the great tragedies of the twentieth century, and look back fondly to the days of the Cold War.
The point of this quick lesson in current Russian politics, of course, is that if Putin dies suddenly, the Russian forces in Ukraine won’t break and run, the way the orcs did when Sauron suffered his improbable defeat via a couple of hobbits and a magic ring. They’ll do the same thing that the US forces in the Second World War did when Franklin Roosevelt died: they’ll brush aside a tear for someone they’ll consider a fallen hero, and keep on fighting under new leadership. They might find themselves fighting alongside a few hundred thousand more Russian soldiers, too, because Putin is a cold, cautious bureaucrat who’s held back most of Russia’s military strength from the Ukrainian war. Patrushev is unlikely to be so restrained.
And of course many of these same points can be made of that Dark (or rather Orange) Lord of current American politics, Donald Trump. It’s astonishing to watch the political establishment scurrying around like a mob of drunken hobbits, flinging every available scrap of magic jewelry into every volcano in sight, under the frantic delusion that if only they can make Trump go away, the populist movement that adopted him for its leader will vanish in a puff of smoke. Not so; once again, the Shadow will take another shape and grow again, because what drives that movement is the embarrassing failure of the current managerial class to address the problems that matter to most Americans, coupled with the shrill hatred that this same class directs toward every American who doesn’t instantly kowtow to the latest twist of the party line.
Of course it’s not hard to see what underlies all three of the habits of thought I’ve sketched out above. All of them are attempts to insist that nobody really disagrees with the political class, the self-anointed Good People of the tawdry narrative we’re discussing. In their imaginations, there can be no other side of the story, no counterpoint to the monotonous theme brayed out endlessly by the trumpets of the status quo. No, the orcs have to know that they’re orcs—they have to recognize that they’re on the wrong side of history, and flee in terror once somebody draws some simulacrum of Anduril and waves it in their general direction—and the only reason the Good People haven’t achieved everything they want has to be the evil actions of some titanic scapegoat who can be blamed for everything and then, at least in theory, banished forever by some gimmick or other.
It’s not at all uncommon for the decadent aristocracy of failing imperial powers to fall into such counterproductive habits of thought in the last years of their power. I’m reminded just now of the plaintive words Nicholas II, the last Tsar of All the Russias, said to the people who came to let him know that the Russian Revolution had just broken out: “But the Russian people love me!” The one great difference, of course, is that Nicholas understood that he was living in Russia. He never made the mistake our current political class is making; he didn’t convince himself that he lived in Middle-earth.
It’s at this point I want to turn to the other author whose work inspired these reflections, the American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick. Dick wasn’t simply eccentric; he was quite literally crazy. He belongs to that select roster of people who have turned serious mental illness into the raw material for significant works of literature. It’s not uncommon for the cracked mirror of a mind in chaos to offer an unexpected glimpse into the heart of things, and Dick was remarkably good at doing that; it’s one of the things that makes his novels worth reading.
The work of his that I have in mind just now, as SF aficionados will have guessed already from this essay’s title, is his novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. I’m not even going to try to summarize the plot, to the extent that it has one—some of Dick’s novels have plots, others have no more narrative structure than your average psychotic break, and this one falls about halfway between. What matters for the purpose of this essay is the future in which it’s set, and the desperate means humanity uses to deal, or rather avoid dealing, with that future.
Dystopian? You bet. (Dick effectively reinvented the entire genre of dystopian SF.) The Earth is so far gone into global warming that a summer day in New York City hits 180°F in the shade—you die in minutes if you go outside without a cooling suit—and people vacation in Antarctica if they’re rich enough. There are human colonies on three planets and six moons, and those are even worse, so much worse that nobody moves there voluntarily. You get a draft notice in the mail and, unless you can get a deferment, away you go to a bleak and barren world with no way back. Once you’re there, slogging through a hopeless routine that maybe someday will make the colonies self-sustaining, your only refuge is Perky Pat.
Perky Pat is Dick’s version of Barbie—you know, the tacky little plastic doll that got a bunch of regurgitated Hollywood clichés spewed onto screens in her name last year. Perky Pat and her boyfriend Walt live in an imaginary world where the climate didn’t go crazy, so they can lounge on the beach without getting broiled alive. People on the colony worlds frantically collect Perky Pat accessories, because there’s also a hallucinogenic drug—illegal but tolerated—that will allow the wretched colonists to become Perky Pat or Walt for a few precious hours, basking in a simulacrum of luxuries none of them will ever know in the real world.
It’s a brilliant and harrowing bit of satire. In 1966, when Dick’s novel first saw print, it had a lot to say about the media culture of the time, especially but not only channeled through television. Now it’s even more apropos. In a very real sense, the people I’ve been discussing—the ones who insist that everyone who opposes them must be an orc, everything that supports their side of the question must be Anduril, and there must be some one Great Evil Scapegoat behind it all who can be banished by some simple trick and will carry the blame for their failures away with him forever when he goes—are spending their time hallucinating that they’re Perky Frodo Baggins, or Perky Luke Skywalker, or Perky Harry Potter, or one of the endless, dreary rehashes of the same overworked clichés. They’ve fled into an imaginary world where they never, ever have to face the possibility that they might be wrong.
A great many people have followed them there, and not necessarily for the same reasons. It’s occurred to me more than once recently that one of the most distinctive things about the Western cultures of the last century or so is the way it’s become so obsessed with wholly imaginary worlds, as different as possible from the one we actually inhabit. That’s a very odd habit, when you stop and think about it. Is it possible that, for all our lavish material abundance, we’ve made a world so miserably antihuman that most of us would rather copy Dick’s colonists and flee into worlds that don’t exist?
*****
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