The word fascination shares a root with fascist and fascism. I’ve been wondering about their connection. Just now, reading a quote of Bertrand Russell, “First they fascinate the fools. Then they muzzle the intelligent.” And it just hit me over the head like a bundle of axe handles! To be fascinated is to be tied up in a specific manner. Not against one’s will. Not after having asked for it. It is to be drawn into a lock on one’s attention that is strong enough to overwhelm one’s defenses, leaving us neither resisting nor demanding; just compliant.
We forget the particularity of fascination. Spock would always say, “Fascinating…” while raising an eyebrow as he waved his scanner.
The industry of spectacle has always found fascination to be its most powerful tool. No wonder so much effort has been spent on making it sound innocuous. It’s not. Never was.
To be fascinated is to be pulled off-balance. To have our natural instincts to regain balance over-ridden by a particular manufactured manipulation of our perception, beginning with a limiting and focusing of what is available to our attention by creating and maintaining a chimerical pseudo-reality and convincing us that this is everything that can be perceived, noticed. That this is all that is in need of our attention.
“Fascinating….”
It feels a certain way to be fascinated. Not the watered-down “Entertaining our curiosity” kind; but real fascination. It is a drawing of a spell cast upon us and even while it erodes our capacities to resist we can always notice the particular slide, the passing tingle of vertigo as it takes hold.
Develop that instinct. Learn to distinguish between curiosity and fascination. Learn to block fascination as it arises. This can be done. Otherwise the mind boggling expense those chasing power take-on every single day to keep us fascinated would not be required. Learn to recognize bad-faith and connect the dots between those willing to let it all slide and those who profit from our ongoing fascination.
It’s a question of hygiene. A concept I have been horrified to discover over the last five years to have been largely abandoned by just about everyone. We are repulsed when we taste something rotten. We instinctively spit it out like a MacDonald’s French Fry soaked in rancid trans-fats. Except so many don’t even do that! Why? Because they’ve been fascinated into ignoring fundamental instinct through daily acts of indoctrination and fascination.
Who are the “fools” Russel is talking about?
A fool is someone acting stupidly. Stupidity is a learned attitude. A surrender of one’s own faculties and a turning towards frustration-based reactivity as a default response to any perceived question of uncertainty.
Schools exist to make most people stupid. That is to say to stupify. Fascinated we fall into a stupor.
The language of dividing people into categories of intelligent versus stupid is itself a weapon of fascination. Creating a state of grievance within those who’ve been fascinated so that they will aid in their own subjugation and resist any attempt to show them any potentially feasible alternative to stupidity, to acting the fool.
The kind of stupidity taught and ladled out in schools includes the obvious kind of stupidity. The caricature of the “Silent Majority” or “regular folks.” It also teaches another kind of stupidity. The mistake of thinking that cleverness and “success” are signs of intelligence. That intelligence is “being smart.” And that if we are successful then we must be intelligent.
This is another form of fascination. It’s the mechanism by which wealth makes us stupid.
Political activity has been trapped within the view that cause & effect and agenda-building around binary choices is the only way to be effective in the “real world.”
Ask what that might mean and its defender’s rush into explanations of economics and every manner of reductive arguments into what constitutes reality to them.
Stupidity is not a lack of intelligence. Being “smart” is not “having intelligence or being” intelligent.
Intelligence is not a faculty or a knack or a talent. It’s something “out there” that we can either “entertain,” in the non-entertainment based meaning of the word, or refuse to attend to. Stupidity is a refusal to entertain intelligence.
In Russell’s statement he is distinguishing between two forms of stupidity. The kind he calls foolish and the kind he rightfully points out has been created by those who use fascination to muzzle intelligence. Not just for their victims, the “foolish,” but for themselves.
This quote exists as a meme because while its face-value seems to provide another wedge to drive between different flavors of intelligence-deprived-people. It can be used as a back-door into maintaining the power of fascination while playing at being sophisticated.
This points at why it is so problematic to be writing on-line. Even when attempting to be truthful we end up feeding the machines of fascination.
A “fascinating” essay, Antonio
Food for thought
I’ll admit to being guilty of fascination myself—
but at my age, I see it as the spark that keeps me alive to the world
To rein it in would be to silence the child still breathing within me