If one is to believe Sigmund Freud, all organic processes strive to restore the original inorganic, tension-free state. The great analyst and metaphysician leaves little room for interpretation here: “The aim of all life is death”.
Somewhat surprisingly, he characterizes this death drive as conservative:
“The conservative organic drives have taken up every one of these externally imposed modifications of the course of life and preserved them for repetition, and thus must give the deceptive impression of forces striving for change and progress, while in fact they are merely seeking to attain an old goal by old and new paths”.
The aim of all politics, according to the slogan of an unsentimental realism, is power—and only power. Yet the sphere of the political does not seem entirely free of thanatic tendencies either. One might immediately think of fascism and its many variants. One of the slogans of the Spanish Falangists was “Viva la Muerte!” (“Long live death!”).
The sphere of the political is not entirely free of thanatic tendencies. One of the slogans of the Spanish Falangists was “Viva la Muerte!” (“Long live death!”).
In the face of his imminent death together with Eva Braun, Adolf Hitler is said to have lost himself, in the Führerbunker, in a final delusional rapture amid the intoxicating sounds of Richard Wagner’s death-drenched Tristan. The SS proudly adorned itself with the Totenkopf, a symbol that remains popular today among bikers and enthusiasts of physical confrontation. Japanese fascism glorified kamikaze death as the very embodiment of ecstatic, death-blissful patriotism.
This necrophilic tradition was taken up by the writer and “last samurai” Yukio Mishima, who, in his notorious seppuku (1970), distilled it into a supreme synthesis of beauty, honor, and patriotic death—a spectacle that continues to evoke a certain morbid thrill in the liberal West.
The political left, by contrast, could boldly absolve itself of all thanatic temptations. Did it not proclaim, with communism and anarchism, a great “yes” to life? Did it not promise a joyful, blissful, eternal paradise on earth?
Of course, naysayers had long pointed to the unmistakably morbid fantasies of revolutionary violence within the movement. Ernesto Che Guevara—the saintly and immaculate “Jesus Christ with a gun”—openly developed pathological fantasies of violence coram publico in an interview with Sam Russell of the Daily Worker shortly after the Cuban Missile Crisis:
“We do assert, however, that we must follow the road of liberation even though it may cost millions of nuclear war victims. In the struggle to death between two systems we cannot think of anything but the final victory of socialism or its relapse as a consequence of the nuclear victory of imperialist aggression”.
The cult of this peculiar saint has hardly to this day been diminished by such excesses. Be that as it may: with Erich Fromm—the psychoanalyst of Critical Theory and “humanist dissenter” who appealed to the taste of the masses—a herald of biophilic faith in progress rose to prominence within the emancipatory movement. The most popular slogan of the children of Marx and Coca-Cola was “Make love, not war”, and the movement’s Orpheus fervently intoned “Give peace a chance”.
“Sympathy for the Devil”? At most a marginal phenomenon.
But that has long since changed. Today, the left appears strikingly suicidal; indeed, it seems almost as though it has fallen in love with death. It has brazenly ignored the warning of the chastened conservative Thomas Mann. As is well known, the insight of Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain is that, for the sake of goodness and love, man ought not to grant death dominion over his thoughts. And with that, I awake. But for a leftist, it usually suffices to get no further than Heinrich Mann.
Today, the left appears strikingly suicidal; indeed, it seems almost as though it has fallen in love with death.
The left today displays its sympathy with death quite openly in its fascination with necrophilic movements: with organizations such as Hamas, Hezbollah, and other Shiite death cults. All the unpalatable forms of martyrdom and fanaticism have ignited its passion. Religion as the “opium of the people”? That was yesterday. All is forgiven and forgotten.
One of the few iconic figures this left has produced, the childlike empress Greta Thunberg (“How dare you!”), resembles more a character from a Stephen King novel than a traditional left-wing leader. In Germany, the type of the moralizing, affluent bourgeois with aggressive impulses is increasingly widespread—this, too, carries a distinctly eerie note.
A virus has infected the movement. The unmistakable sign of the onset of the illness is the evident loss of the instinct for self-preservation. Anyone who expresses solidarity with Hamas under a rainbow flag is not only bereft of all good sense, but no less suicidal than the martyr he secretly admires. Feminists advocate the headscarf, socialists the Iranian mullah regime, and cultural figures a culture in which they themselves would be the first victims.
But surely, sir! This is once again one of those typical over-intellectualized philosophical fantasies. Death drive? Useless speculation! There are rational reasons for all this: do not left-wing political parties benefit quite concretely from their rapprochement with Islam? After all, it is a large and steadily growing voter base. And is there not within Islam an idea of collectivism, and thus a kind of natural affinity between Islam and socialism?
To call such sophistries flimsy would amount to a pathological trivialization: strained rationalizations quickly reach their limits here. The proportion of Muslim voters in Germany stands at around 4–5 percent. The Social Democratic Party of Germany did not start courting Islamic voter groups yesterday—something that will surely have been noted at the Willy-Brandt-Haus. Superficial parallels (zakat, umma) do exist, but real-world Islam is hierarchical, theocratic and anti-egalitarian, whereas socialism claims to be atheistic, materialist and emancipatory. At most, a genuine parallel lies in a shared necrotic fascination with violent rule.
Anyone who expresses solidarity with Hamas under a rainbow flag is not only bereft of all good sense, but no less suicidal than the martyr he secretly admires.
Friedrich Nietzsche misjudged Islam naively, registering only its combative, life-affirming side—in his time, there was no mass Islamic immigration. Today he would likely see things differently: Islamists and socialists are united by a diffuse, stubborn sense of having somehow been short-changed in world history, an elusive but persistent mood of grievance that, as a ressentiment-laden guiding force, poisons thought and action. The degree to which they themselves bear responsibility for their predicament is so evident that repressing it succeeds only with difficulty, and at the cost of grotesque contortions and distortions—perhaps explaining the excessiveness of the aggression.
Islamists and socialists are united by a stubborn sense of having somehow been shortchanged in world history, a ressentiment-laden guiding force that poisons thought and action.
To understand a thing, Nietzsche teaches us—and I gladly repeat this—is to know how it came into being. A tricky question, since monocausal explanations are, of course, ruled out from the outset.
It is fairly certain that the academic trivialization of progressive thought—“woke” discourse, postcolonialism, identity philosophy, and debates around trans and gender issues—around the turn of the millennium bears no small share in causing the malaise, though I cannot elaborate on this here. After the 1973 oil crisis and the spectacular resistance of the winegrowers of the Kaiserstuhl against the planned nuclear power plant in Germany’s Wyhl in 1976, apocalyptic visions spread through the green-alternative milieu like a contagious epidemic.
Where a rational problem-solving approach initially still prevailed, it gradually mutated—under the inflation of multiple scenarios of catastrophe—into an ideology charged with an anxious fascination for submission. A danse macabre, an entropy of life. An ideological Stockholm syndrome first gripped culture and the public sphere, and then party politics.
Decadent societies are marked not only by a lively interest in all forms of moral deviation and the decay of meaning-giving narratives, but above all by the loss of basic instincts: the will to self-preservation erodes both at the level of society as a whole and across wide segments of it. To the dismay of more sensitive observers, the phenomenon reveals itself first and foremost in the most reliable collective seismographs—in art and culture—but that is too vast a field to pursue here.
To the dismay of more sensitive observers, the loss of the sense of self-preservation reveals itself first and foremost in the most reliable collective seismographs—in art and culture.
At times, the political death drive and its pleasurable return to the inorganic even takes on amusing traits. When a Social Democratic state parliamentary candidate, during a recent PR appearance at a food bank, sends his chauffeur off—before rolling cameras—to nearby Alsace in order to fetch some foie gras, this is more than just a knee-slapper, more than a self-destructive act, more than the impulse of a pathological compulsion. Above all, it is a depth-psychological revelation of a concealed wish: I no longer want to be a Social Democrat. A sad affair.
Dante Alighieri consigned the gluttons to the third circle of Hell, but the suicides to the seventh.
