THE CONCRETE OBJECTIVE OF POLEMICS - Jersey Flight

There are those who complain. There are those who shame. And by so doing they believe themselves to be powerful. But the question must be asked, at what point are we actually impacting the world with our criticism? This question is vital to intellectuals. It's not enough to retreat to the subjective corner of self validation, to make ourselves feel better about the proliferation of authoritarian rule. Our criticism, in order to contain objective power, must go out into the social world and impact the narrative of the object it seeks to criticize. What does this mean? It means our polemic should deliver a blow to the object at which it is direct, and not merely in a subjective sense, not simply as a disruption of the person's image of themselves, but as a social disruption in the way the person and their ideas are viewed. This is a vital act of polemics, and it is one that is necessary to thwart tyranny from rising to power.

What do we mean, 'it should disrupt the way the person is viewed?' To be more precise, it should shatter the social respect of the person and their views. When a thinker fails to do this it means they have not risen above the level of their subjective complaint, they are still trapped in the psychology of self-validation. This polemical procedure is required because people fall into belief, not through evidence and reason, but as is most common, through emotion, through impression, through surface representation. Convictions are usually not the result of careful deliberation and evaluation, but emotion and implicit bias. No thinker is safe from this defect, which is why intellectual standards must be applied when it comes to the evaluation of information, when it comes to the procedures of thought itself.

The concrete form of criticism implies a shift in the social narrative. Where the strong man shows himself there he must be intellectually defeated, or else the masses will gravitate toward his ideology. Assertiveness comes natural to barbarians, albeit shallow and naive, but those who walk the path of careful thought have yet to learn it. We cannot permit the strong man to deceive the people with the shallow representation of his strength, it is the duty of the polemicist to shatter this false image, to explode the facade of his intellectual strength. There is only a short time to fight fascism in this way, if the window of opportunity is lost the intellectual will also lose the freedom of democratic communication, democratic resistance. And once this humane procedure of communication is lost, violence becomes the rule of the day, the means of eliminating opposition. Once power escapes the democratic realm it cannot simply be restored, when this happens the world is reduced to its most primitive state: that of physical violence. This means the power of the intellect, intelligence, has been subverted and suppressed by that which is primitive, impulsive, emotive, in every case this constitutes a regression of the species.

The duty of the intellectual is to demolish the image projected by the strong man. But this is not merely a duty, this is the requirement of intelligence. There is no way around it, precisely because intelligence discerns the danger of what happens when the strong-man's power becomes absolute, thereby suppressing all intellectual dissent.

It is a sober reality that the quality of life hinges on the power of polemics. There are those who would deny it, saying that raw power trumps polemics. Their thinking is false for one simple reason: the strong man is not a blank actor unmoved by ideas, quite the contrary, he is motivated by an ideology. And it is this intellectual domain that drives his actions in the domain of power.

A King is good or bad depending on what he believes, because his beliefs motivate his actions. If one can change the beliefs of a King, one can change the tyranny of his rule, but to do so one must win the war of ideas, one must be able to influence the thought of the King.

It's not enough to complain, our complaints must have an impact in the realm of ideas. Polemical power consists, not only in refuting error, which presupposes dialectical ability, but also in altering the public image of the strong man. Polemics are never passive, which assumes their foresight, they are deployed in the service of trying to prevent catastrophe, which is to say, social destruction and tyranny. To be a polemicist of power, as opposed to a mere, subjective complainer, one must have the ability to land a blow that reduces the social credibility of a given narrative, as well as diminish the public image of the man or woman who propagates it. To not even attempt this is simply to prove (among other things) that one is a coward. To escape into the land of theory is to evade one's responsibility as an intellectual. To never rise to this level of skill is merely to wallow in the self-delusional realm of the complainer, one proves they are lacking!

No my friends, if we want a world without physical violence, then we must use intellectual violence to destroy it before it can even begin... which is to say, we must win the war of ideas. Intellectuals who do not engage in polemics, not only abandon the hope of democratic procedure, standing idly by as it gets obliterated, but they fail to embody what it means to be an intellectual, never becoming a practitioner of its further totality. An intellectual without polemics is like a star without light.


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