Spanner Themes: Superheroes and Revolution

The article: "The Dark Knight Rises: Nightmares of a Ruling Class in Crisis" (Peter Little, The Hooded Utilitarian)

First, a disclosure: I conceived of Chaos Angel Spanner in 1992, when Marvel and DC superheroes ruled the comic-book universe. Once I'd discovered anime and manga that year, I vowed to destroy the superhero universe with what I then conceived of as a comics or OEL manga series. Now on to the movie notes:

Over the past few months I've been learning about the right-wing subtext of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. The Dark Knight, for instance, is in part an allegory of the Terror War, starring the Joker as Osama bin Laden. Now it turns out that The Dark Knight Rises is how the American Overclass sees the Occupy movement. Naturally, they see it as a terrorist conspiracy led by... somebody evil. Like Bane. And the common people caught between the Man and the terrorists? Blank-out!

There are three dangerous (and traditional) assumptions behind this:

1. The Overclass is by definition the standard of the good.
2. It can only be opposed through terrorism, the political force of metaphysical evil.
3. Beneath the level of the financially (and therefore spiritually) blessed, humanity is either soulless (thus passive) or evil (and on the side of the terrorists). The Doctrine of Original Sin is true.

And these, of course, are the fundamental assumptions underlying the Conservative Revolution in Chaos Angel Spanner. But instead of a character like Batman, the reigning superhero over 2014 America is the second (Bronze Age/Cold War) successor the Golden Age superhero, the American Crusader, a cross between Superman and Captain America (and now in the public domain). Like Bruce Wayne, Henry Becket is the superhuman champion of the One Percent. But unlike him, he is a revolutionary hero. He is what Batman would be if he did successfully what Bane failed to do — which is what Batman is in Frank Miller's infamous Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again.

This seventy-something Cold War superhero, American Crusader III, sees himself as the last hope for Western civilization's survival against the onrushing barbarian hordes. He and his fellow billionaire revolutionaries refuse to realize that roots of their System's destruction lie deep within the structure of the System itself. Devout technocrats that they are, they see the Law of Entropy as not a law of nature but as metaphysical Evil. They see the suffering mundanes chafing under their control not as human beings but as "the threat from below", entropy made manifest; this is why they see liberalism, socialism, and Islamist theocracy as one and the same thing, for they see it metaphysically as entropic Evil, not as the rival alternatives to technocratic Corporatism (and to each other) they see themselves to be.

Like so many left-wing writers, Nolan cannot see his way out of the dilemma. The Corporatist System is failing, but the only alternative he sees is terrorism: either the grand terrorism of a Joker or a Bane, or the petty terrorism of a Catwoman. Like those left-wing writers, he sees the masses as passive and doomed to hopelessness — which is, in fact, one of the prerequisites for the coming of a superhero, for only a superhero can save the masses from enslavement to supervillains.

This is the fundamental premise of the entire superhero genre.

The corollary is that the superhero can never be the protagonist. He is the hero, but not the protagonist. He reacts to the actions of supervillains. Like the white-hatted gunslinger hero of the archetypical Western, the hero must never shoot first; that privilege is reserved for the black hats. The supervillain gets to be the protagonist, but at a cost: he can never be the hero, and he can never be allowed to win. The supervillain is the very archetype of terrorism: Lex Luthor demands $2 billion in 48 hours, or he will nuke Metropolis.

So what happens when a superhero defies that fundamental rule and becomes the protagonist? Watchmen is about precisely that. When Ozymandias — another billionaire superhero, like Batman and Crusader III — concludes that the Cold War will end in nuclear annihilation if he does not act, he creates his own weapon of mass destruction and destroys Manhattan. A superhero protagonist is every bit as deadly as any supervillain. And what is any terrorist in their own mind but a superhero protagonist?

The root of superheroism, and more broadly of terrorism, is substitutionism: the belief that the heroic action of a few can substitute for the collective mass action required to bring down a system as oppressive as Corporatism. Che Guevara, for instance, believed that the working masses were useless and that a small guerrilla faction fighting in rural backwaters and fired by Latin machismo was sufficient to destroy Corporatism. In fact, he wrote the book on it (called Guerrilla Warfare). Never mind that despite the Cuban anomaly, both he and his disciples failed over and over and over. Terrorists, and superheroes such as Batman and the Crusader, believe that the masses are so inherently passive that only a heroic elite, or a heroic superman, can liberate them.

The problem being that once the heroes liberate the passive masses, they remain passive and incapable of heroism. Thus the revolutionary superheroes end up becoming the same kind of oppressors the enemies they overthrew were. That's because they're acting on the identical premises.

This is where Henry Becket and his Conservative Revolution begin. The American Crusader of the Cold War era is now the savior of the American Empire. Now what? Being the black-and-white thinker he is, he can only be offended by the accusation (also thrown at his ancestor Oliver Cromwell) that he is now the oppressor. But he, superheroic defender of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, cannot see himself as anything but the epitome of all that is good and righteous! Therefore, his accusers are by definition evil, in the metaphysical sense. And so he throws the Populists, a category to which the Occupy movement properly belongs, into the same category as the terrorists of Al-Qaeda in America and the Socialist Revolutionary Organization, and sends the United States Police Force (a military branch) to crush them accordingly.

Now you know why Spanner must misdirect. The right-wing vanguardist tyranny of revolutionary righteousness, which could as easily have been left-wing (Green Arrow instead of Batman, the Proletarian instead of the American Crusader), has no tolerance of the unheroic masses; nor can it see them as anything but the passive instrument of the enemy left- (or right-)wing vanguardist tyranny of revolutionary righteousness. It's a black-and-white double bind. Into this stalemate, Spanner throws his monkeywrench.

Now here is the key to understanding Spanner — let's think dialectically, the way Marxists were supposed to once upon a time:

1. Thesis: the oppressive Corporatist System.
2. Antithesis: the terrorist program of violent heroic resistance.
3. Synthesis: the collective revolt of the masses, properly against both sides.

The relevant trope is, of course, Take a Third Option. The choice between tyranny and terrorism is lose-lose. The only way out is for the masses to stop being passive and taking control of society for themselves, in effect telling the tyrants and the terrorists to butt out or face the consequences. Only the "threat from below", the "mundanes", despised and feared by tyrants and terrorists alike, can pull a successful and genuine revolution.

Spanner is really the epic clash between two kinds of heroes: those (both right-wing revolutionaries and left-wing counterrevolutionaries) who believe that only heroes deserve to rule and the unheroic may not even deserve to exist, and those who in effect sacrifice their own heroism in order to call the masses to action. The latter are the protagonists and the heroes of Spanner. To Shira, Jennifer, and Karen, Batman and Bane are just the two sides of Two-Face's defaced coin.

Little writes: "Who is Batman in this context? The dream of a technocratic solution to a problem of social contradictions." What I learned from John Ralston Saul is that the one-size-fits-all technocratic solution eventually ends up being worse than the problem. Little also admits that he agrees with both the tyrants and the terrorists when they insist that the working masses are passive, petty, and malicious "sheeple".

Now a Voltaire quote goes: "When the masses begin to reason, all is lost!" Enter a certain charismatic Charmer with an apparently unrealistic confidence that she can wake the sleepers up...

Spanner Influences: Ayn Rand and Her Un-Capitalistic Sense of Life

The article: "Defending Capitalism Against Ayn Rand" (Steven Farron, Liberty Magazine)

Steven Farron says Ayn Rand is the greatest novelist. My opinion of her fiction is not quite so exalted, but both her fiction and her philosophy were major influences on mine, since I was under her influence for about 15 years. But we agree that she has one big weakness: her sense of life. In his article, he says Rand's sense of life is too heroic for capitalism. In fact, it comes right out of revolutionary Russia.

This, therefore, is a study in the anxiety of influence.

Here's the contradiction:

1. Her sense of life is heroic, inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche, High Romanticism, British adventure fiction, and (this is rarely mentioned) the heroic environment of the Russian Revolution. Her heroes do not deal with the "penny-ante".
2. Capitalism is about making money from anything you can make money from. You can definitely make money off the "penny-ante".

So she exalted the mighty captains of industry and the great innovators, while she despised the shopkeepers and small enterprisers who make the free market run. Her father, Zinovy Rosenbaum, was one of those small shopkeepers dispossessed by the Bolsheviks. Yet her sense of life is suspiciously similar to the revolutionaries who dispossessed her father: they were driven by the certainty that they were heroes creating a new world. In fact, though her fundamentalist approach to philosophy is that of her enemy Stalin and her politics and economics are deliberately the exact opposite of his, her sense of life reminds me more of Trotsky because he himself was a hero. Naturally, she hated workers (her stock example was the grocery clerk).

(Here is where I ransack the bookcase in my computer room to find my copies of The Romantic Manifesto and The Virtue of Selfishness.)

Inside Spanner: Memetic Drift and the Ayn Rand Problem

There's a lot of Objectivists among the Corporates in Spanner, or at least they like to think they are. Problem: the Corporates are essentially the same as the villains of Atlas Shrugged. Spanner's "church of Ayn Rand" is no more similar to Ayn Rand's or Nathaniel Branden's Objectivism than the Catholic Church is to Jesus' religion or early Jewish Christianity. However, there is one crucial similarity, which I consider the fatal weakness of Objectivism and especially its ethics:

Social denialism.

That's the denial that humans have a social nature. In the infamous words of former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher: "Society does not exist." In other words, humans are by nature solitary predators — or should be. That "should be" is the core of Rand's egoist ethics — and of Max Stirner's philosophy of extreme egoism. This works to the benefit of those at the top of the Corporate hierarchy, the High Corporates who bear the titles "MBA" and especially "Incorporated". It doesn't work too well for ordinary civilians, who possess the social nature Corporates do not.

Here's the mutation: what if Rand's corporatist villains were her most fanatical believers? This, in fact, is what's happened in real life: only the James Taggarts and Orren Boyles are left when the religious Objectivists have left for real cults and the irreligious ones have grown tired of the philosophy's many contradictions and increasingly archaic errors (it is, after all, a distilled version of the worldview of the Gilded Age that lasted from the end of the Civil War to the beginning of the Great Depression, roughly 1870-1930). Once the religionists and the realists have left, then, you have the corporatists. I've observed that these people, including the Koch and Romney clans, are predominantly billionaire heirs, some separated from their Enterpriser clan founders by five generations or more. They believe in the virtue of aristocracy for its own sake, because they see their inherited wealth as a gift from God or whatever. They believe that democracy is a vice because to lack money is by definition to lack virtue.

Egoism has become the religion of the Orren Boyle crowd. In Spanner as in Atlas Shrugged, these people have no genuine sense of self, so they must build their false self (the colloquial definition of "ego") to compensate. As it turns out, Rand herself has become their guide, their master in ego-building! And so they build their egos into giant monsters. They deify their egos and build temples to themselves. They demand that all "lesser" people bow down and worship their egos as gods Or Else. And of course they build theocratic dictatorships dedicated to the glory of their egos. Now you understand the Corporate caste in Spanner.

Now witness their leader, one Prince William Richard Astor Cromwell-Becket of Dictel, Incorporated, Chairman of the United Corporations. Richard Becket used to be a superhero codenamed Neron back in the Cold War. He's the answer to the question, what if an older version of Ozymandias from Watchmen took over the world? He prides himself on doing deals during sex. His grandmastership of the Illuminati, however, is the subject of another post, on the elitist premises of fundamentalist "Nicolaitan" Gnosticism. But how can this guy reconcile Objectivist materialism with unworldly Gnosticism? In the way he deifies his ego, of course! This contradiction first comes to a head in Chapter 15, in which the Becket brothers and their sister Drusilla get their egos smacked by it.

Any meme can mutate into something radically different from what it claims to be. But some weaknesses in its philosophy encourage some very undesirable mutations. Ayn Rand's social denialism is a particularly pertinent case in point. That's not just because it's central to the Corporate worldview in Spanner, but also because it's become the elite consensus in America today, and the non-elite are suffering the consequences...

Spanner: Willa Explains Class Conflict, the Objectivist Way

As I continue to struggle with the Spanner TV series for Script Frenzy, I've been procrastinating on TV Tropes again and found this "useful notes" page on Objectivism. Ayn Rand famously opposed altruism in its strong form (as defined by the philosopher who coined the term, Auguste Comte) in the name of her form of classical egoism. The strong definition of "altruism", of course, is "live for others [vivre pour autrui] at the expense of oneself." In short: love others, hate self. Comte believed altruism justified an ideal dictatorship; his description of it became the political ideal of a very influential later disciple, right-wing occultist Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, and his disciples, the Synarchists and their successors the Fascists and Stalinists. You can find an informative discussion of the issue here.

My last post, once you get past the indignation, is about how the more dubious parts of Rand's personal history were reflected in parts of her ethical system that were interpreted to justify the extreme forms of "rugged individualism" behind the current manifestation of American corporatism and leading up to the corporate dictatorship in Spanner. Here, my character Willa Richter-Thomas explains (not necessarily in these exact words) that the classical egoist ethics of Rand and her hero Aristotle turn out to have completely different implications according to social class:

For the Corporate oligarch, concern for others can only be at the expense of concern for oneself. The world of business is a non-stop battle royal, you see, and all the other dogs are out to eat you. Our Corporate frenemies call this "rugged individualism." But for the ordinary working people, concern for others is concern for oneself. Their predicament was elegantly summed up by Ben Franklin: "We must all hang together, or we shall all hang separately."

My guess is that any worker with a sufficient knowledge of both Rand and Marx can correct the most unpleasant parts of Rand by using her philosophy, including her ethics, to bolster Marx. But if you're Corporate, Rand means Stirnerism and Social Darwinism. The same thing can have completely different meaning depending on where you are in the hierarchy.

Rand put great emphasis on the importance of context. In the case of her egoistic ethics, context changes everything when the context is social class. The Corporate oligarch takes egoism to the extremes of militant egotism; that is, after all, required to succeed in business, in which all your competitors are eternally out to destroy you. But in the lower reaches of the social hierarchy, among the working people Rand so disdained, egoism and the fact (which Aristotle famously pointed out) that man is a social animal have equal emphasis, reinforced by necessity: one worker is insignificant, but masses of workers united are very powerful indeed. This is the principle behind trade unionism; combined with the phenomenon known as "the wisdom of crowds", it is also the foundation of democracy itself (which, of course, Rand also disdained).

The political consequences are likewise opposite. The upper-class interpretation Rand preferred ultimately leads, as we are finding out here in America, to authoritarian plutocratic oligarchism in politics and monopoly corporatism in economics. Never mind that Rand was attacking just that in the character of Nietzschean media lord Gail Wynand in The Fountainhead and the "looter" corporatists in Atlas Shrugged, even going so far as to call the latter altruists. The working-class interpretation, by contrast, justifies democracy and the corresponding democratic form of socialism (as opposed to conventional state socialism, which is little more than state corporatism and frequently overlaps with the plutocratic variety as in China).

What's missing, of course, is the free market Rand championed. That's strictly a middle-class ideal. Libertarianism is the radical politics native to the independent petite bourgeoisie which is the "threat from below" that the oligarchs are most determined to destroy. Willa (a professional, either as outcast psychologist or outlaw musician) does not see much evidence of this class' survival in the reactionary plutocratic dictatorship of Spanner's Imperial Confederacy. And it isn't the independent businesspeople who are protesting the TEA Party corporatists' jihad to either enslave or starve them in the name of the Free Market.

Even if you start from the identical premises, class context produces opposite perspectives and thus opposite politics. Context matters indeed.

Spanner: Morality Is Not the Point

Lately I've been paying too much attention to a site called Television Tropes & Idioms and listing the tropes relevant to Spanner in a Microsoft Word document. When I got to Character Alignment, I realized, for the first time since I started my first preliminary work on this story in 1992, that in a story about a revolution sparked by a monkeywrencher against an oppressive technocracy, morality is not the point. In most stories, the vertical axis on the alignment chart (good vs. evil) is the focus, and most writers (and moralists) conflate "order" with "good" and likewise "chaos" with "evil" (hence the trope Anarchy Is Chaos and its twin, Democracy Is Bad, which Spanner puts in the mouths of Lawful Evil villains but utterly rejects). Spanner is about freedom, not morality.

Future Shock

Remember future shock? It's the shock that overcomes you when you can't handle what you perceive as too much change in too little time. The term was coined by futurist Alvin Toffler, and it's the subject of the book that made him famous. If anything, the speed of change has accelerated since the book came out in 1970, and the shock registered by those who can't handle it has become more extreme, to the point of madness. The ultimate expression of that madness is 9/11 — so far. But far more people have come to adapt to the accelerating rate of change; some of us can even be said to surf evolution. The 21st-century world we live in today was nothing but science fiction in the 20th century.

In this entry, I'll be dealing with fiction as well as society. We tell ourselves who we are through the stories we tell.

Sex, Dreams, and Storytelling: My Artistic Philosophy

Before I get to the world building, I first want to state my philosophy of storytelling. The short form:

1. A story is a collective dream. Likewise, a dream is a personal story.
2. Storytelling is like sex, including something called a "climax". The lover makes love to (usually) one person, but the storyteller makes love to huge audiences.
3. Story is conflict. Without conflict, there can be no story.

These three principles are the keys to my understanding of storytelling and my way of writing fiction. (Note: The first version of this entry was incomplete. I have now finished it.)