To live knowing that you ultimately don’t know and, in fact, that it isn’t even possible to know, is to enter an abyss of profound meaninglessness. It was the experience of this abyss that Nietzsche gazed into and that Tillich, the theologian, considered the primary hallmark of our time. And in the political domain, it is this anxiety, born of meaninglessness, that plays directly into the hands of 21st Century autocrats. Here is Tillich from his book, “The Courage to Be”, which first appeared in 1952:
“Twentieth Century man has lost a meaningful world and a self, which lives in meanings out of a spiritual center. The man-created world of objects has drawn into itself him who created it and who now loses his subjectivity in it…The anxiety of doubt and meaninglessness is, as we have seen, the anxiety of our period.”
Although we in the 21st Century have given ourselves permission to rule ourselves, apparently, we don’t feel entirely up to the responsibility. The autocratic rulers of our time aren’t politicians in the real and original sense of the term, they are actually cult leaders. The difference between a politician and a cult leader is that a politician will admit what is not known and will ask for people’s courage to deal with the uncertainty, while a cult leader will offer the pretense of certainty and the reassurance that he is the one with the necessary courage to do the fighting for them.
Rather than empowerment, authoritarians offer refuge; they offer the comforting feeling of being part of a group, which grants a sense of belonging. They tap into the resident anxiety of their base and stoke it until it becomes attached to identifiable fears, which can be translated into explosive anger; and then the outburst of anger frees their followers from the feeling of helplessness, at least for a while, and alleviates the need for individual courage. Political rallies are almost indistinguishable from soccer games; they are a form of entertainment in which an audience passively watches from the stands while the leader performs. The performance is all about the home team winning and the audience participation consists of mindless mass chanting of slogans, which is not only allowed but encouraged. And afterwards the hooligans gather in the streets for a cathartic release of their rage.
