20.09. – 25.09.2022
What is hate? What is its destructive power? And why is it so easy to whip up? This year’s Philosophicum Lech examines the anatomy of hate.
The philosopher Barbara Zehnpfennig compares three major ideological systems; National Socialism, Islamism and Marxism. She concludes: The most powerful driving force behind all great ideologies is hate. The essence of every ideology is that it starts from a basic premise that can no longer be questioned: The “Aryan people” are destined for world domination. Unbelievers must be fought. Capitalism is exploitation. The corrupt, threatening world in the present that needs to be destroyed and overcome is contrasted with the comprehensive narrative of salvation, either against a glorious past in which the world was still in order or against a happy future in which it would be. Everything else is derives from that. Anything that doesn’t fit into this scheme is made to fit or must be destroyed.
In order to unleash the necessary revolutionary destructive power that is necessary to realize these promises of happiness, ideologies need to mobilize the masses with the strongest driving force that completely grips people: hate.
While the major ideologies that we are discussing today still claim to to offer a comprehensive model for explaining the world, this holistic aspect is largely lost in the hate-driven mass mobilizations of the social media age. The storming of the Capitol, the mass demonstrations by the opponents of the Corona measures, the hateful houndings against individuals in social media largely do without a comprehensively formulated ideological vision.
They draw their strength only from the demarcation itself in which a complex, no longer understandable “hostile” world is generalized as malicious, threatening, “conspiratorially controlled” by “secret powers” against which one has to defend oneself . A revolutionary, ideologically formulated explanation of salvation for the world is no longer needed and no longer offered.
The power of this hatred stems from the individual’s feeling of powerlessness, who generally feel that they are victims of the current situation. This powerlessness is felt to be all the greater the more incomprehensible the world around you is.
That is why populists like Trump, Bolsonaro, Farrage or Kickl also rely on maximum noise and maximum confusion, as well as the discrediting and delegitimization of science and the media, because they want to stir up precisely that state of impotent confusion among the masses in which the world no longer seems understandable in a rational way. This is the basis for inciting the masses and igniting hatred: The storming of the Capitol was a result of the delegitimization of knowledge and education. The Philosophicum in Lech is a homeopathic antidote.
Philosophicum Lech 2022
20.09. – 25.09.2022
Various locations, Lech am Arlberg
www.philosophicum.com
