Left-progressives writhe in agony when the usual suspects to the right of the ‘mainstream’ media ‘spectrum’ continue to pour bile and abuse on the likes of Howard Zinn, Edward Herman, Harold Pinter, Robert Fisk and John Pilger in the immediate aftermath of their deaths.

Where is the humanity, decency, respect? Can politics not make allowances for human feeling even in the face of death?

No, because power politics is all about subordinating life to dead capital. The terms ‘left’ and ‘right’ don’t tell us much; the fundamental problem with state-corporate power is that it subordinates people, planet, love, compassion, honesty, integrity, reason and truth to short-term profit and power. Some of us think that’s a bad idea: call us ‘left’, ‘right’, ‘up’, ‘down’, whatever you like.

A dehumanised response to the human condition must be the sworn enemy of all who promote more human priorities. Power politics can’t even prioritise human survival on a warming planet; a goal dictated by something other than the bottom line.

It is entirely understandable, then, that salaried operatives of such a system would behave in a brutal, uncompassionate way – that is the nature of the system by which they are paid. It is less clear why opponents of this system would emulate their behaviour.

On X (formerly Twitter), Australian journalist and activist Caitlin Johnstone, writing with Tim Foley, responded to news of the death of Henry Kissinger in November 2022 by posting a video clip of actor Denzel Washington smiling and clutching his heart with relief under Johnstone’s comment:

‘Phew, saw Kissinger trending and I was worried he still wasn’t dead.’

The post earned 1,700 ‘likes’. Beneath that, Johnstone wrote:

‘My birthday’s tomorrow. The universe loves me.’

Fierce expressions of moral certainty and bitter contempt play extremely well on social media. It’s not hard to divine why. The reason was indicated by Matt Kennard, then of Declassified UK:

‘Henry Kissinger came to Columbia Journalism School in 2008.

‘I put up my hand. “How do you sleep at night?” I asked.

‘There was a pause. Organiser got up from his seat.

‘”Do you think you’re morally superior to me?” Kissinger asked.

‘”Yes,” I replied. Lowest bar there is surely.’

Kennard had initially responded to the news of Kissinger’s death like this:

‘Burn in hell.’

This post received 1,100 ‘likes’.

Former British ambassador turned dissident journalist Craig Murray replied to a post by foreign secretary David Lammy:

‘Fuck off you murderous genocidal bastard.’

Johnstone also posted on the Gaza genocide:

‘Fuck you if you’re going along with this. Fuck you if you’re ignoring this. Fuck you if you’re trying to stop other people from opposing this. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you.’

This is the all-pervasive atmosphere, the standard political tone, on X: anger and outrage expressed with total, damning conviction. X is always in Warrior Mode. See here for more examples.

Anyone posting on X instinctively knows that Warrior Mode will be well-received by their followers. And we know that references to compassion and love are going to produce something close to nausea. But why?

Firstly, like violence, anger initially, of course, feels immensely powerful, certainly far more powerful than embarrassing, drippy talk of love. When we rage at some terrible crime, we feel unstoppable, as if the sheer intensity of our feeling will somehow generate change.

Secondly, like other social media, X is a deeply dehumanised form of communication. There is no face-to-face interaction, no facial or verbal cues – no smiles, no eye contact – none of the reassuring body language that fosters warmth, clarity and trust.

Released from any need for self-restraint by physical separation and anonymity, egos lock horns in a Colosseum-like arena where thousands and millions are applauding and jeering. In response, many posters behave far more aggressively, harshly and with far more grandiosity than they ever would in ‘real’ life.

The gladiatorial aspect of social media is key. We were initially astonished at times when Media Lens readers who have been long-time supporters and allies, even friends – people who have always been amiable and polite in private emails – disagree with us on a particular issue, select Warrior Mode, and publicly denounce us on X in the most damning way. Having received warm words of support for years, we suddenly find ourselves receiving our five-a-day quota of fruit and veg in the public stocks. Even more surprising, when temperatures cool, our critics often return to their previous, friendly tone on email – a curious reversal of normal life where friends tend to be more critical in private.

To spend time on X is to be bombarded with a flood of often extremely painful, even traumatising information that generates a flood of mental activity in our heads. Thinking is not neutral – the more we are in our heads, the more we are disconnected from our hearts. This is momentarily thrilling, ego-boosting, and therefore addictive; but it is not a happy place.

As I have discussed with reference to the profound personal crises afflicting intellectuals like Charles Darwin and John Stuart Mill, overthinking causes us to become cold, loveless, harsh, negatively disposed towards others, and even suicidally depressed. One long-term journalist and activist told me:

‘I have over the years grown numb to feeling, except when it comes to my children… I’ve been noticing more how little other emotional engagement I have in my life. I’ve gradually stopped watching movies, once a great passion. I don’t read books. I’ve stopped long walks and cycle rides, where I loved to be immersed in nature. I rarely listen to music, even in the car. I’m happy sitting in silence, with my thoughts… I see a small circle of friends, whose company I enjoy. But the love is gone. I’ve been hollowed out by numbness.’ (Email to David Edwards, name withheld, 16 September 2024)

I have experienced this myself when working too intensively on social media and political writing.

One of the great pleasures remaining to the disconnected, headtrapped ego on social media is attention: we feel like ‘somebody’ when people support our messages and ‘nobody’ when they are ignored.

Alas, the whole effort of the human ego is to persuade ourselves and others that we are ‘special’, ‘unique’, ‘extraordinary’. Thus, humans have a long, ugly history of dehumanising other people as ‘human animals’, as ‘savages’, as ‘Untermensch’, because in so doing we implicitly confer superiority on ourselves. Thus, the ‘white man’s burden,’ ‘la mission civilisatrice’, because ‘it’s a man’s world’, delivered by ‘special’, ‘chosen’ people of various kinds pursuing their ‘manifest destiny’.

Ironically, in condemning someone else’s inhumanity, our egos may become ‘elevated’, feel more ‘special’, and thus become more inhuman. This can’t be done directly. If we say, ‘I’m a moral exemplar’, the self-serving bias is clear for all to ridicule. But we can achieve a similar result, uncontroversially, by criticising. Even when we say: ‘He’s never on time’, we are implicitly asserting our superiority. We would never behave that way!

Complaining can become an endless process of the ego back-handedly patting itself on the back. The whole game was famously summed up in socialist and philanthropist Robert Owen’s pithy observation:

‘All the world is queer save thee and me, and even thou art a little queer.’

Which is not to say that the people being reviled as inhuman did not behave inhumanly – Kissinger’s crimes were devastating. A lot of the anger felt on X is a response to horrendous violence and injustice, but really you can’t get more ‘mainstream’ than celebrating the death of ‘The Bad Guy’.

In October 2011, in response to the torture and summary execution of injured, blood-soaked, helpless Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi, the front page of the Daily Star newspaper read:

‘Mad Dog Put Down.’

An article in the Sun was titled:

‘Dead dog.’ (24 October 2011)

The response of Hillary Clinton, then US Secretary of State, was to laugh gleefully and say:

‘We came, we saw, he died.’

British prime minister David Cameron also found mirth amid the gore in a jovial speech celebrating the Hindu festival of Diwali:

‘Obviously, Diwali being the festival of a triumph of good over evil, and also celebrating the death of a devil [audience laughter], perhaps there’s a little resonance in what I’m saying tonight.’ (BBC News at Ten, 20 October 2011)

‘The Facts Are Enough’

Noam Chomsky is a famously cool, untheatrical speaker. In conversation with David Barsamian, Chomsky explained:

‘As you know from having heard me speak, I’m not a particularly charismatic speaker, and if I had the capacity to do so I wouldn’t use it. I’m really not interested in persuading people; I don’t want to, and I try to make this point obvious. What I’d like to do is help people persuade themselves… I think there are a lot of analytic perspectives, just straight information, that people are not presented with. The only thing I would like to be able to contribute is that.’ (Noam Chomsky with David Barsamian, ‘Chronicles of Dissent’, AK Press, 1992, pp.159)

Chomsky also explained his opposition to rhetorical devices of persuasion:

‘It’s just kind of an authoritarian practice one should keep away from. The same is true for teaching. It seems to me that the best teacher would be the one who allows students to find their way through complex material as you lay out the terrain. Of course, you can’t avoid guiding, because you’re doing it a particular way and not some other way. But it seems to me that a cautionary flag should go up if you’re doing it too much, because the purpose is to enable students to be able to figure out things for themselves, not to know this thing or to understand that thing but to understand the next thing that’s going to come along; that means you’ve got to develop the skills to be able to critically analyze and inquire and be creative. This doesn’t come from persuasion or forcing things on people.’ (Noam Chomsky, ‘On Democracy and Education’, RoutledgeFalmer, 2003, p.376)

That, of course, does not mean that Chomsky cares less than the fire-breathers:

‘You can’t talk about the tremendous suffering that we’re inflicting upon people without having a good deal of emotion, either under control or actually expressed. I try to keep it under control, but it’s certainly there.’ (Chomsky and Barsamian, op. cit., p.360)

No-one has been more successful in persuading people to ‘persuade themselves’ to accept rational ideas than Chomsky. Would he have been even more successful if he had thumped a few tubs and banged a few tables? One of India’s finest legal minds, Dr Harisingh Gaur, gave this advice to his law students:

‘When you have a case which is absolutely favorable – the facts are with you, the case is going to be won by you absolutely – then be very humble before the court, very polite, just suggestive. Bring out all the facts, but don’t be aggressive; there is no need, the facts are enough…

‘But if you are one hundred percent certain that you are going to lose the case, because all the facts are against you, all the witnesses are against you – your client has been caught red-handed – then be aggressive, violent. Throw the law books, bash the books and beat the table. Be a nuisance – less than that won’t do. You don’t have any chance unless you are so violent and so aggressive, throwing the books and laws around and bashing them, that you create a confusion. Perhaps that may help.

‘Just confuse the court, and let the court know…. If a man is so assertive and so violent and so certain, then there must be something in it, that he is so bravely facing them; otherwise…. So, create the suspicion, the doubt, and take advantage of the doubt.’

Chomsky is so persuasive because he has a case ‘which is absolutely favourable’, so that ‘the facts are enough’. Millions of people have been convinced by him precisely because he doesn’t bang tables. We instinctively know that red-faced bluster is associated, at best, with egotism; at worst, with the kind of Machiavellian cynicism of ‘mainstream’ politicians who have no case at all.

In similar vein, in the video linked here, a sweetly smiling Professor Jeffrey Sachs responds to Piers Morgan’s provocative question with five minutes of truth on the history of the Ukraine war. Again, ‘the facts are enough’.

In response to Johnstone’s celebration of Kissinger’s death, I posted a sentiment that has been a civilising thread running through many human cultures for millennia:

‘There is, of course, the other argument: if enough people are able to feel compassion even for the likes of Kissinger, then we’ll be developing a level of compassion that can start to genuinely drain the hatred and cruelty from the world.’

A poster on X replied:

‘oh fuck off with that sanctimonious nonsense

‘that man was a demon and may he rest in piss.’

It was obvious from everything that appears on X that my comment would generate this kind of reaction. And yet, some of the most inspiring and least naïve humans who ever lived have made this idea their prime focus. Jesus said:

‘But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you.’ (Matthew 5:44)

Buddha said:

‘Hatred can never put an end to hatred; love alone can. This is an unalterable law.’ (Cited, Eknath Easwaran, ‘The Dhammapada’, Arkana, 2009, p.78)

Indeed, the Buddha’s comment speaks to the strange impotence of the crazed violence currently being unleashed by Israel in Gaza and Lebanon. The longer the carnage continues, the more we sense its impotence in putting an end to the hatred, outrage and resistance it is seeking to crush. Every bomb kills one seed but sows a thousand more. This is indeed an unalterable law.

If we understand that our ego receives a backhanded boost when we revile Kissinger, then we can understand that anything suggesting doubt or complexity – that is, anything that keeps the ego from its trough – will be experienced as viscerally frustrating and, in fact, offensive. And notice, I did not question the truth or gravity of Kissinger’s crimes – I wasn’t ‘gaslighting’, trying to muddy the waters. More reasonably, another poster commented on my message:

‘It’s difficult to feel compassion for anyone whose “difficult” decisions result in the deaths of millions simply to satisfy powerful interests. It’s not as if he ever seriously repented or apologised for the outcomes of policies he advocated.’

This is true, of course. But in many spiritual traditions, it is the very fact that it is difficult to feel compassion for ‘The Bad Guy’ that creates an opportunity. After all, it is easy to feel compassion for a suffering child, or a beloved relative. But if we believe it is a good thing to feel compassion, if the capacity to feel unbearable compassion is a key difference between people willing to sell their souls to state-corporate power and those who don’t, and if we believe that compassion can be strengthened through practice, then ‘lifting’ the heavyweight criminal Kissinger is like a weight-lifter pumping a heavy weight to become stronger. The Dalai Lama commented:

‘It is like removing a huge stone that has been blocking the flow of water in a canal. Once you remove the stone, the water immediately starts to flow. Similarly, once you are able to cultivate loving-kindness and compassion toward your enemy, you will easily be able to cultivate loving-kindness and compassion toward all sentient beings. Therefore, if you are able to see the enemy as the supreme basis of the practice of patience, and if you are able to generate a stronger kind of compassion in relation to your enemy, this indicates success in your practice.’ (The Dalai Lama, ‘The Joy of Living and Dying in Peace’, Thorsons, 1998, pp.108-109)

In one of the foundational texts of Tibetan Buddhism, ‘Bodhicaryāvatāra’, the 9^th century sage Shantideva devotes a whole chapter to thoughts of this kind:

‘If those who are like wanton children

Are by nature prone to injure others,

There’s no reason for our rage;

It’s like resenting fire for being hot.

‘And if their faults are fleeting and contingent,

If living beings are by nature mild,

It’s likewise senseless to resent them –

As well be angry at the sky when it is full of smoke!’ (Shantideva, ‘The Way of the Bodhisattva’, Shambhala Classics, 2006, pp.82-83)

As a 15-year-old boy in the United States, Kip Kenkel’s brain was ‘full of smoke’ when he shot his father through the back of his head one morning, then murdered his mother, and then killed two students at his school, shooting two dozen others. Brain disorder specialist and psychologist Dr Daniel Amen, who has scanned over 200,000 brains, checked Kenkel’s for signs of damage:

‘His brain was so awful, like I’d never seen a 15-year-old that had a brain so damaged, and his life reflected it.’

Dr Amen described Kenkel’s brain as ‘shrivelled’, speculating that it could have been severely damaged by oxygen deprivation at birth, or as the result of an infection, or poisoning of some kind, possibly lead. Dr Amen’s clinics have scanned the brains of over 1,000 convicted criminals, including more than 100 murderers:

‘Many Amen Clinics patients who exhibited violence… had left temporal lobe abnormalities… Assault, murder, rape, arson, and other criminal behaviors are often associated with problems in this part of the brain.’

Having spent 30 years as a forensic psychologist and psychotherapist interviewing ‘hundreds of criminals who have committed terrible offences’, Dr Gwen Adshead asserts that ‘people who kill are not mindless monsters who are born that way’. Therefore, Dr Adshead argues:

‘… monstering people is not helpful. It is simply one way to deal with rage and fear. And we miss a chance to reduce and prevent violence if we write off everyone who has murdered or abused in that way’.

As Shantideva said, if Kissinger was born bad – if it was his nature to be destructive – then there is no basis for being angry with a helpless product of natural processes. On the other hand, if he was born good but was made toxic by familial, cultural and environmental conditions, then we would do better to blame the ‘smoke’, the conditions, not the initially healthy human ‘shrivelled’ by them.

This is all perfectly rational, but it is not popular with the ego at feeding time (and it is always feeding time!). It is a conflict which accounts for the remarkable phenomenon noted by psychologist Erich Fromm when he described:

‘… man’s capacity of not observing what he does not want to observe; hence, that he may be sincere in denying a knowledge which he would have, if he wanted only to have it (H.S. Sullivan coined the very appropriate term “selective inattention”).’ (Fromm, ‘Beyond the Chains of Illusion’, Abacus, 1989, p.94)

Alas, this ‘selective inattention’ tends to spread – we may end up complaining about everyone and everything, with miserable consequences for our close relationships and wider society. In a reversal of the Dalai Lama’s practice, if we decide Kissinger is to be loathed, we can end up bashing our car with a tree branch because it refuses to start or kicking a table because we banged our knee on it.

Another response to my message on X read:

‘It’s not “we” who need to feel the compassion it’s “they” who need to feel it. I’ve known a few psychopaths in my 74yrs, some were even friends for awhile. I listened to them many times, and I can assure you that feeling compassion for them doesn’t help their victims one bit.’

But the point is that it is important for us to feel compassion – it helps us. In ‘Altered Traits’, psychologist Daniel Goleman and Richard J. Davidson, professor of psychology and psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, sketch a miniature portrait of the master meditator Neem Karoli, known as Maharaji:

‘Maharaji seemed always to be absorbed in some state of ongoing, quiet rapture, and, paradoxically, at the same time was attentive to whoever was with him. What struck Dan [Goleman] was how utterly at peace and how kind Maharaji was…

‘There was something about his ineffable state of mind that Dan had never sensed in anyone before meeting Maharaji. No matter what he was doing, he seemed to remain effortlessly in a blissful, loving space, perpetually at ease. Whatever state Maharaji was in seemed not some temporary oasis of the mind, but a lasting way of being: a trait of utter wellness.’ (Goleman and Davidson, ‘Altered Traits’, Penguin, 2018, p.21)

Witnessing someone permanently living in this loving state was a life-changing experience for Goleman. But people like Maharaji are not extra-terrestrials; they are not supermen or superwomen. They are ordinary people who have spent time mastering the art of meditation.

This loving state – the natural state of a human being liberated from obsessive thinking – is completely indiscriminate. If our beloved is heard moving in the next room, love is felt for her. If a bird chirrups, the heart resonates with love for the bird. If some auld enemy on X comes to mind, even that name or face is embraced with love. In this condition, if Henry Kissinger’s demise pops into the mind, we feel compassion for a 100-year-old man helpless and alone in the face of death.

Does this mean we ignore, excuse or condone his crimes? On the contrary, it means we have a greater loving, dissident impetus to prevent similar people from committing similar crimes, to protect more innocents from suffering the consequences.

Hate certainly empowers the activist ego but it incinerates the compassion that was the motive for activism in the first place.

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