I listened to a lecture on Wagner the other day. In it, he played a selection from “Tristan and Isolde”. The core dramatic element of the play is that Isolde, the female, wanted to give Tristan, the male, a death potion. She wanted to die, and for his part he did as well, due to a rightfully guilty conscience. But instead of a death potion, they get a love potion. They fall deeply, madly in love, but can never requite that love due to the social context within which they live. Both of course finally die, as they must in a tragedy, and presumably meet again in another life.
The theme is longing, unscratchable, unquenchable longing. Longing was the core element of Romanticism. Wherever you were, you dreamed of distant shores, or long ago times. The pedestrian present was never enough.
I remember lectures on the German author Novalis, and his theme of “Sehnsucht nach dem (der?) Tod”. Sehnsucht is untranslatable fully, but amounts to a vigorous lust for something absent. It has always felt like there was a gap, a hole in you, that sought desperately and to no avail to be filled. Tod is death. Novalis had loved a young girl, who died. Ever after, he longed to die and be with her again.
Death and longing are connected. If you can never be fully who and where you are, restfully, then you can never be anyone at all. If there is a gap in you, can your form, your self, be said to be whole? Can you be said to be fully alive, and not existing simultaneously in some other imaginary moment?
Longing is like sand eroding under your feet at the beach. It undermines everything.
Wagner’s music made me feel weak. It was the same feeling I used to get when listening to Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon”. It is the same feeling, I suspect, that fans of Avatar and the Titanic felt. It is simultaneously sickening and addicting. It’s like sugar, and has the same effect emotionally that actual sugar does physically: it give you an energy rush, then a down, and over a long period of time it pulls you slowly into a host of preventable ailments.
Let me connect this with politics. Wagner, as I understand it, was held in very high regard by the Nazis, who saw in the quasi-religious ceremonies of his music dramas the potential of a new form of society, one based upon spectacle and shared emotions. Nazism was not just a political movement, but a lifestyle, a “Weltanschauung”–worldview–as Hitler often said.
Are people who long for more more or less susceptible to the snake oil salesmen that have plied their trade as long as societies have had kings? They are MORE vulnerable, of course.
People forget that Nazism was organic. It was about getting back to nature, caring for the “Heimat” (home, but stronger, and related to the nation as a whole), being physically fit, enthusiastic, and overall having a can-do spirit. Being recklessly alone, this is what Heidegger found so enduringly appealing about it. It made sense.
Or consider this quote from Obama’s ideological godfather:
A Marxist begins with his prime truth that all evils are caused by the exploitation of the proletariat by the capitalists. From this he logically proceeds to the revolution to end capitalism, then into the third stage of reorganization into a new social order of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and finally the last stage — the political paradise of communism.
“The political paradise of communism”: does this not seem to imply that, in the end, he has a simple minded longing for a world which does not exist? Do not most revolutionaries and radicals long for a different world, one that does not have all the limitations which our does? Do they not want the world of Avatar and not the one where their milk is pasteurized by law, and they have to live by clocks?
What does the word “Hope” connote? The satisfactory resolution of a longing.
Bottom line: the more empty people are, the more amenable they are to crazy ideas. Many more or less want to be lobotomized, to surrender their autonomy, goodwill, hope, and character, and just be told what to do. This is something aspiring tyrants are only too happy to do.