The Totalitarian mindset

The Skoptsys are a religious sect who believe that the genitals were implanted by the devil in the Garden of Eden after God had created man and woman, and they represent sin, and genital nullification – castration – is the path to divine grace (and of course there are other less extreme forms of symbolic castration, think celibate religious folk). They appear to think they have eradicated or at least conquered desire but… they may fail to see that desire is psychic, and unconscious, and not biological or something to be conquered.

And to be fully human is to desire, to desire implies your humanity, for good and bad.

Desire, at base, is a quest for meaning through identity. It is associated with uncertainty and anxiety. It can result in a selfish will to have power to subjugate, or a (still ultimately selfish), will to be the power that liberates.

But, if one has lost desire one has become a monstrous and insatiable obsessive robot embodying a Law.

One can lose desire seemingly only too easily, through a psychic castration rather than a physical one

It doesn’t take much. Think of: the jobs-worth bureaucrats, the killing soldiers, the white collared administrators of genocide. They can all be such robots. Banal, in a way, but also relentlessly, if dispassionately, obsessed with the Law they embody – always a fascist law in kind. A law that takes no account of the value of human life destroyed in the name of that law. Repressive pursuit of zero risk through Health and Safety edicts, progressive pursuit of zero disease through medical screening for asymptomatic disease , progressive pursuit of destruction of the enemy through ethnic cleansing through genocide. From the sublime to the ridiculous, these are all fascist activities performed by totalitarian mindsets. One interesting thing is that the psychic castration can be, in a sense, partial. It has its psychic impact, the loss of desire to be replaced with a monstrous demand to obey a law, in a particular social context or cultural environment, say, an office, or a political or professional role, where others or certain behaviours trigger a destructive response. The other may be, eg, behaviours in relation to health and safety (keeping fire doors shut), for medical screening enthusiasts (the behaviour might be deaths from a certain cancer), for the soldier and genocidaire (it’s simply the existence of the enemy). They must be eradicated, all of them: those open fire doors, those cancer deaths, those ‘others’.

This should raise some questions for us. If the Skoptsys castrate themselves – physically, yet remain psychically desirous (of an elusive identity at least, and when they’re not being unthinking or psychopathically totalitarian), this suggests they remain psychically castrated. Our psychic castration refers to our ongoing attempts, (ever since we first became aware of our reflection without an identity we can say we really ‘own’), to behave and feel in a way that meets with the approval of some phantasmic Big Other, one who knows how things should be, knows what we would love to know but can never know, sometimes embodied in an actual human being endowed with imaginary super powers, by us.

We can all think of such a person or many such persons, unless we’re in a temporary totalitarian unthinking state, (as described above) eg dropping 2000 lb bombs on refugee camps in Gaza, hounding people for trivial health and safety rule violations, or persuading healthy individuals to be screened for cancer.