Horizon

31 Flavors of Monomania

Theodore Dalrymple in this Times article makes a great point about widening consumer choice for fanaticism:

When the Soviet Union de facto acknowledged that it had lost the Cold War, I thought that we had seen the end of ideological politics. Marxism being dead, I thought that we had entered an era of rational, if rather dull, compromise: instead of which we have seen the ideological impulse survive and flourish, but in the form of a hundred monomanias. Ideology was privatised along with nationalised companies.

Some people began to understand the world through the distorting lens of one issue: abortion, animal rights, globalisation, anti-racism, even various illnesses, and they formed themselves into pressure groups that in some cases were ready to resort to intimidation, violence and even murder to achieve their ends.

I take it as axiomatic first that human existence is always to some extent unsatisfactory, and second by that most, or at least many, men desire transcendence in the sense that they want their lives to have some larger purpose than the flux of day-to-day existence. Shopping and going to the pub are all very well in their way, but for people of larger spirit they are not enough.

Radical politics answers the need for transcendence and provides a plausible, though erroneous, explanation for the existential shortcomings of human existence. It kills two birds with one stone. It gives a transcendent purpose to life, by allowing participants the illusion that they are helping to bring about a life that is completely without dissatisfaction.

Via Done With Mirrors