Not long ago, we sat in Steve Bannon’s Capitol Hill rowhouse, where he records his War Room podcast, pressing him on Trump’s refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election, and his denial of what transpired on January 6. “Our reality is that we won” and that January 6 was a “fedsurrection,” Bannon said, referring to the conspiracy theory that FBI agents had incited the crowd on the Ellipse that day.
But this reality, we pointed out to Bannon, is simply not true.
“Now, here’s the interesting thing,” Bannon said. “Who’s won that argument? I think we have.”
Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer in "I run the Country and the World"
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
Ron Susskind, "Faith, Certainty, and the Presidency of George W. Bush"
Here's the thing: Reality is what it is, and it can't be what we just wish it would be. We can work on it, shape it, transform it--but there are rules. There are laws. There's a Tao to things. And you can break the law and in the short run seem to get away with it, but in the long run reality reasserts itself. You can fight the law, but you can't win--even if for a while you think you are winning.
Parker and Scherer's long Atlantic article that appeared earlier this week recounts the astonishing story about how Trump's story seems proof of the opposite conclusion: he has flouted the law in almost every conceivable way any kind of law can be flouted, and despite temporary setbacks he always wins. He is a truly remarkable Mephistophelian figure in that respect. Say what you will about his lies and his ignorance, he has been remarkably successful at bending reality to his will.
Years ago, I wrote a piece called "Metaxis" in which I wrote about the "discovery" of the German Romantics who became infatuated with the power of imagination and the individual's power to shape his own reality--
In the late 18th and early 19th century, Kant’s philosophy caused an intellectual euphoria among a group of philosophers, poets, and artists, the aforementioned Idealists and Romantics. His philosophy had the effect of turning the world on its head in his emphasizing the centrality of the meaning-creating function of the human “I”. If the world-constituting ego is the source of all meaning, then the extra-mental world is no longer a constraint on human possibility. Human possibility is constrained only by the limits of the human mind’s capacity for creative thought. And so Kant’s philosophy created the conditions for what became the wildest kind of metaphysical speculation. His world-constituting ego was a huge theme in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel who took it much farther than Kant would ever have allowed—Kant’s philosophy was quite clear in proscribing metaphysics as beyond the scope of reason.
Nevertheless the Romantics, intoxicated with this new idea, were not to be constrained. And at this time was born a tremendous optimism that a new kind of free human being was possible. Such a being would be freed from the shackles of oppressive traditions and would with the unlimited capacity of the free human imagination create a new world. And in the middle of all this exuberance occurred the French Revolution, which Romantics and Idealists at first embraced as the world-historical movement by which this liberation would be delivered to Europe and then to all of mankind. And if their optimism was curbed by the excesses of the Terror, it was fanned back into full flame by the emergence of Napoleon, who they felt would demonstrate to the world what a world-class, world-constituting Ego could do.
By 1848, the last breath of this kind of revolutionary hope had been gasped. Reaction had set in, and a new mood quite cynical about the grandiose assertions of the Romantics took over. In the absence of any high, spiritually oriented metaphysical aspirations, the culture of the West took a very materialistic turn in light of the ideas about human origins proposed by Darwin and the human economically driven future by the progress-minded commercial- and technology-infatuated bourgeois. In a post-Darwinian world any talk of the progressive self-revelation of the Hegelian Absolute or world-constituting egos as a force driving history seemed a little nutty. All such lofty idealism evaporates when confronted with the grittier ‘scientific’ explanation offered by the Darwinians and a new breed of pragmatic materialist thinkers for whom talk about Absolutes was nonsense. The more modest claims for metaphysics elucidated by Kant were once again adopted, Western culture was left with no 'out there' anymore that was thought plausibly spiritual. If there was a spiritual dimension in reality, it had collapsed to exist exclusively within the human being, but because so many humans didn't feel particularly spiritual, and because the new science emphasized the animal origins of the human being, the spiritual dimension of the human being became at best optional in late modern and now postmodern thought.
I can well understand what a rush it must be to be so inflated and to entertain such grandiose ideas and to succeed to the extent that they have, especially Trump. He is a Napoleonic figure in that sense. For a decade and a half it seemed as if there was nothing that Napoleon could do that wouldn't succeed. He defied the laws of gravity, much in the way Trump has done, and very much in the way Hitler did as well in the decade or so nobody could stop him. But reality has the last word. It happened to Napoleon and Hitler, and it will happen for Trump.
On the other hand, I do believe positive transformation of reality is possible, but it has to be lawful. It has to have some Tao to it. That's an element that was missing in many of the Romantics, and it's for that reason that Romanticism has been called "spilt religion", a religion of surrender to a convention-shattering, chaotic vitalism. They wanted to bring some chaos to a cultural world that had become rigidly formulaic. But many of the Romantics surrendered to the chaos rather than seeing that their role was to work with its energies to shape something that was both new and lawful because drawing from the deep origins of the Living Real. They rejected the lawfulness of things as too restricting on their freedom. Form without chaos is death by desiccation; chaos without form is death by dissolution. That idea of unbounded freedom is a negative legacy of the Romantics that we see celebrated in figures like Nietzsche and Sartre, and in the anti-Oedipal doctrine of Deleuze and Guattari to de-territorialize and take flight.
I understand the exhilaration people feel when they embrace such an intoxicating idea of freedom. But there are laws, and they cannot be flouted indefinitely. Ask Icarus. The laws don't prevent one from learning to fly, but rather they lay out a path of discovery that leads one to eudaimonic fulfillment. If we ever find our way to a cultural renaissance, it will be led by a new breed of culture heroes who understand this and model it.