The Idée Fixe
February 18, 2019
RICHARD ONG writes:
In 1938, the Sacred Congregation of Seminaries and Universities found the National Socialist doctrine untenable and erroneous that held men exist solely for the state and possess only such rights as the state grants to them. There is not a little irony in the fact that those who in our time fancy themselves implacable opponents of “fascism” devote all of their resources (bicycle locks on chains, Soros funding, media support) to reestablish that very doctrine.
Your idolatry point highlights the enthusiasm men have for ideas and things. One Femi Oyebode (who?) observed:
A frequent manifestation of … paranoid personality is the presence of an overvalued idea … a fixed idea (idée fixe) … which might seem reasonable both to the patient and to other people. However, it comes to dominate completely the person’s thinking and life. … It is quite distinct phenomenologically from both delusion and obsessional idea.
The idée fixe is characteristic of Western man for some 300 years though I am not flogging the “paranoid personality” part of the quote above and I don’t know how to parse delusion and obsession here. Simply put, otherwise seemingly-normal people can get a bee in their bonnet or a burr under their saddle, one, and it’s off we go to some amazing but hitherto-purposely-overlooked quick fix (fixe vite?) for every ill on the planet. Pol Pot, while he was a student in France, wanted to return to Cambodia and create a perfect democracy. As defined by him, of course, and what a definition it was as it turned out.
Revolution, global warming, climate change, gender, multiculturalism, diversity, reparations, white privilege, BLM, secularism, equality, identity, toxic masculinity, choice, democracy, my body, my garageful of stuff, career, free tuition, government power, race mixing, female ninja warriors, exceptional nation, et and cetera, are all ideas that create high-order spasms in people. I don’t know what the corrective is for this. Not even the murder of a German man’s daughter caused him to doubt the wisdom of wholesale, indiscriminate importation of foreigners into Europe. At Harvard, Solzhenitsyn spoke of the armor around men’s minds which can only be overcome by “the pitiless crowbar of events.” Everything less seems impotency itself.
The fundamental stupidity that has fixated mankind is “the belief that a perfect secular order will emerge from the forcible overthrow of traditional authority.” Out with the old and in with the new. This idea is absolutely impervious to actual historical experience or what can be seen with one’s own eyes. Those delightful foreigners and minorities. The source of wisdom and enlightened governance.
Laura writes:
Thank you for the insights.
Mental obsession — an unstoppable inner engine — is one thing, but the concept of idolatry fits these messianic obsessions of “global warming, climate change, gender, multiculturalism, diversity,” etc. These grand schemes for making everything better are substitute gods. They are worshipped. The corrective? That’s God.
