Les Jones

News > RNC: NYC Protestors and Fantasy Ideology

A group of bicycle-riding protestors temporarily shut down some of the streets in New York City.

This sort of thing is stupid and undemocratic. Reasonable people wonder why anyone would do something so dumb, and so likely to turn popular opinion against their side. It makes no sense: in a democracy where popular opinion rules, why stand up for your cause in such a way that you turn people against it?

The same thing happened on Sunday at the summer Olympics in Athens. A defrocked priest named Cornelius Horan attacked men's marathon leader Vanderlei de Lima. Horan had a piece of paper attached to his back that read "The Grand Prix Priest Israel Fulfillment of Prophecy Says the Bible."

Clearly, Horan doesn't represent mainstream Christian thought. Just as clearly, he won't persuade anyone to his side, and may turn some people against it. Ditto for the majority of protestors in New York City during the Republican National Convention. So what's the point? Why commit a political act that doesn't help your politics?

Lee Harris explains the phenomona, and the larger question of Al Qaeda's goals, in his essay, Al Qaeda's Fantasy Ideology. He notes that the 9/11 attacks weren't for an overt political purpose - Al Qaeda didn't follow the attacks with demands for money, or prisoner release, or any of the other conditions terrorists in the PLO or IRA request. They also didn't followup with any other attacks. Al Qaeda simply wanted to strike at the Great Satan for the greater glory of their cause, without regard to the real-world political consequences.

How do you reason or negotiate with an enemy who has no grounded political reality, who is merely playing out a fantasy in which he is the hero, regardless of goals, tactics, or collateral damage? Very simply, you can't. Anyone who tries to change their behavior to accommodate a fantasy ideology is engaging in a fantasy themselves.

Highly recommended. Read on for an excerpt.

My first encounter with this particular kind of fantasy occurred when I was in college in the late sixties. A friend of mine and I got into a heated argument. Although we were both opposed to the Vietnam War, we discovered that we differed considerably on what counted as permissible forms of anti-war protest. To me the point of such protest was simple — to turn people against the war. Hence anything that was counterproductive to this purpose was politically irresponsible and should be severely censured. My friend thought otherwise; in fact, he was planning to join what by all accounts was to be a massively disruptive demonstration in Washington, and which in fact became one.

My friend did not disagree with me as to the likely counterproductive effects of such a demonstration. Instead, he argued that this simply did not matter. His answer was that even if it was counterproductive, even if it turned people against war protesters, indeed even if it made them more likely to support the continuation of the war, he would still participate in the demonstration and he would do so for one simple reason — because it was, in his words, good for his soul.

What I saw as a political act was not, for my friend, any such thing. It was not aimed at altering the minds of other people or persuading them to act differently. Its whole point was what it did for him.

And what it did for him was to provide him with a fantasy - a fantasy, namely, of taking part in the revolutionary struggle of the oppressed against their oppressors. By participating in a violent anti-war demonstration, he was in no sense aiming at coercing conformity with his view - for that would still have been a political objective. Instead, he took his part in order to confirm his ideological fantasy of marching on the right side of history, of feeling himself among the elect few who stood with the angels of historical inevitability. Thus, when he lay down in front of hapless commuters on the bridges over the Potomac, he had no interest in changing the minds of these commuters, no concern over whether they became angry at the protesters or not. They were there merely as props, as so many supernumeraries in his private psychodrama. The protest for him was not politics, but theater; and the significance of his role lay not in the political ends his actions might achieve, but rather in their symbolic value as ritual. In short, he was acting out a fantasy.

It was not your garden-variety fantasy of life as a sexual athlete or a racecar driver, but in it, he nonetheless made himself out as a hero - a hero of the revolutionary struggle. The components of his fantasy - and that of many young intellectuals at that time - were compounded purely of ideological ingredients, smatterings of Marx and Mao, a little Fanon and perhaps a dash of Herbert Marcuse.

For want of a better term, call the phenomenon in question a fantasy ideology - by which I mean, political and ideological symbols and tropes used not for political purposes, but entirely for the benefit of furthering a specific personal or collective fantasy. It is, to be frank, something like "Dungeons and Dragons" carried out not with the trappings of medieval romances - old castles and maidens in distress - but entirely in terms of ideological symbols and emblems. The difference between them is that one is an innocent pastime while the other has proven to be one of the most terrible scourges to afflict the human race.