R&D: The Librarian of Celaeno's "My Hegelian Moment"
"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." 1 Corinthians 13:12
Reading and Delving Dept.
Welcome to the R&D department, where we stop and THINK about an essay in detail. I choose the essay at random, otherwise I'd only be thinking deeply about essays I love, and I love what I understand, so I'd only understand more what I already understand. Instead - random. I roll a D10 after each essay I read, and if it comes up 0, it gets a deep read.
My goal here is to resist the modern inclination to glide over the surface of thought. Here on Substack I see more people resisting that than any other gathering, and for that, I'm proud. But even so, I see these incredible essays dropped, read somewhat closely, commented on briefly, then almost forgotten. Then we demand another. We can't really expect to build a body of knowledge, really, an alternative to the University system, without deeply considering the work of others.
R&D sessions will be from current material, but also from the archives of Stack's of which I'm a paid subscriber.
This is a commentary, not a review, so the quality of the essay isn’t in question. As Hegel said, “Whether we see an oak or an acorn doesn’t much matter as long as we remember Weltanshauung has two ‘U’s’”
My essay presupposes you’ve read the original essay. I quote at times for locational reference, but also simply mention sections of the essay without a quote.
So without further ado…
Reading and Delving into: The Librarian of Celaeno’s “My Hegelian Moment”
"I saw the Emperor – this soul of the world – go out from the city to survey his reign; it is a truly wonderful sensation to see such an individual, who, concentrating on one point while seated on a horse, stretches over the world and dominates it.”
-G. W. F. Hegel on Napoleon
The Librarian’s opening quote is from one of Hegel's letters which can be perused in full here. Fair warning: The link is to marxists.org, so spray down your PC with Freebreeze when you're done.
One must remember that Hegel was German, and that he saw Napoleon *in Germany* because the Germans were, at that given moment, having their asses handed to them by the French Army. Napoleon was the enemy, but that didn’t stop Hegel from admiring him.
And really, who can blame Hegel? France after the Revolution was in crisis, and in its moment of crisis came Napoleon, who by all accounts was a genius, and not just a military genius. His "Code Napoleon" formalization of civil law was, and is, the basis for much of European law. His memory was excellent, perhaps even legendary. He truly deserved the adulation given him by Hegel.
Napoleon has unfortunately been cast as the villain for so long by British propagandists that the common Western perception of him is perhaps permanently twisted. The Librarian’s comparison of Napoleon with Trump, in that sense, is apt - Napoleon, like Trump, terrified the power holders of his day. He wrecked them in ways they never thought he could. And then, when they thought they'd finished him off, he popped up again for a seemingly impossible comeback.
This made a big impression on the Brits at the time and still does to this day. All depictions of Napoleon, even in popular media like "The Time Bandits" or "Bill and Ted" is of a short, snobby, and petty man. Mostly without merit. The recent Scott movie also totally debases Napoleon into little more than a helpless dependent on his whore wife.
(For a much-needed antidote I highly recommend "Napoleon: A Life" by Andrew Roberts.)
So he was permanently vilified. Anyone living through our current moment should just resign themselves to Trump suffering the same fate. Who is praised and who is cursed throughout history is perhaps a fickle thing. For example, FDR was a borderline totalitarian dictator, who crushed the beautiful federal and free United States and replaced it with the functionally Fascist nation-state we live in today. In short, he was an asshole. The judgment of history? One of our greatest presidents. Because "history" isn't a disembodied embodiment of truth, "history" is people writing history, and most people who wrote about FDR, and still write about FDR, were paid to write about him positively. Court historians will be enthusiastic about the court, after all.
Trump though, is hated, and will be hated forever unless the USA is fundamentally changed. The election that was, probably, stolen will be "fortified" for all time, J6 will be a heinous insurrection, and Trump's presidency portrayed as a mere sock puppet for Putin. Despite the valiant efforts of Taibbi and others to right the record books, the overwhelming weight of material about Trump for the last eight years has been: Collusion, traitor, wannabe dictator, scumbag.
Like Napoleon said, "Quantity has a quality all its own" and quantity wins over time because of attrition. For example, for most parts of Roman history only one or two sources have survived. Is what we have extant the most true? How can we know? Will it be Taibbi's version of events that survives, or one piece of the multitudinous pile of excrement produced by popular media?
There's a certain sense in which our perception of events isn't always entirely true, whether in the past or the present. This is especially true if something stands between us and what we see; if that something mediates the perception, as in it assists, or handles, or carries the perception, then the mediation being bad, or good, or tilted one way or the other, can decisively alter the perception.
Which is exactly the Librarian's point, or at least, one of them:
We see everything through screens, and detached from our communities and the world of immediate sense experience as we are through the Siren-pull of increasingly immersive digital spaces lay ourselves open to being shaped by them.
Power is the ability to control that mediation. We all seek that power, in big ways and small. Those who can seize that power seize not only the power to mediate our perception of the present, but also the past. He describes it as sorcery and it is. It's incredible power.
He goes on to the mass man, a concept introduced by Ortega in his book "The Revolt of the Masses":
More than anything, mass culture and the mass man who is its instantiation must be sustained with artificial approximations of reality that serve the interest of the those who rule him.
That's a similar thesis to Jacque Ellul's "Propaganda", which I highly recommend reading. Mass culture and the mass man is artificial in that he's created and sustained by propaganda. The mass man's desires, his passions, his furies, and his fears are all fomented by propaganda; without propaganda the mass man becomes confused and uncertain. We modern American's have a childish perception of propaganda - That it is Nazi's shouting into loudspeakers, or obviously subverted truths like Pravda (Pravda means "truth" in Russian). In reality propaganda is all around us and pervasive, generated by marketing companies, universities, schools, Hollywood, and so on.
It's so pervasive that our society (The links between people) has almost ceased to exist. Most of the links between people are networked links on media platforms (Facebook, Twitter, etc.), the entire existence of which is dedicated to propaganda (Marketing). As the Librarian so nicely puts it, "community, such as it is, is an abstraction conditioned by forces from above."
Great point, but that's not his main point. His main point is that Trump represents a threat to their/our mediated existence because he moves around and through it so deftly. In a world full of weaklings whispering into mics to be heard, he stands in the room and shouts. He's heard without the mediation. And even more dangerous? He reminds us of leaders from a not-so-distant time, not managers who were above us, but leaders who were among us.
In the not so distant past people’s experience of power was far more personal and transactional. Peasants could wander Versailles and buttonhole the kings of France. John Adams, stingy yankee that he was, scrimped on hiring a butler and answered the White House door himself. Lincoln and Douglas would stand on stumps debating before jeering and mostly drunken audiences with nothing but the power of rhetoric to compel people to listen. People expected leaders to be approachable and to do things for them, not to represent the equivalent of a call center in Bombay behind twenty minutes-worth of phone tree button pressing.
A wonderful quote and worthy to be remembered.
The Librarian with this piece does yeoman's service in walking us through just one of Trump's many campaign events. It was a relatively small event, but all the same, Trump's speech was excellent. I intended to only watch a few minutes but thirty minutes later I was still watching it. Trump was funny, I was laughing out loud. His points were often subtle and ironic. The Librarian's summary of Trump's visceral presence was quite good:
He is very radically present wherever he goes, which was perfectly illustrated in his speech that night, a free-wheeling, off-the-cuff stream-of-consciousness braggadocio-filled rant that somehow managed to be both compelling, funny, and informative at the same time. The contrast between him and the local pols who came before him was as stark as a murder mystery dinner theater lead and Daniel Day-Lewis. You understood hearing it that this speech would never be repeated, that it was the product not of focus groups or public relations teams but rhetoric with no existence apart from a single moment’s dynamic between the president and this particular audience.
Trump is intimate and with the audience like a master salesman is with his prospect. He's seductive. And it works - He can sell Trump Steaks. He can sell Trump casinos. He can sell Trump President. The ultimate politician, but as the Librarian points out, not the current iteration of "politician" - These vacuous, skeletal weaklings who really are nothing more than pimps *and* johns for the wealthy. There's a Hegelian dialectic for ya - Thesis - Pimp. Antithesis - John. Synthesis - Politician.1
Trump, however, is an old school politician, a stump-speech-making man of the people. "He's very radically *present*." He's compelling with his speech in ways we don't fully understand. We just know we can't pull our eyes away. He's the caliber of salesman that can sell you that timeshare even though you were only sitting down to hear the pitch so you could get the free stay at the hotel, and no WAY were you gonna buy the timeshare, you and the wife agreed, and only fools buy the timeshare, but dammit I just walked out of there with a timeshare.
Trump could sell anything...except a second Presidency. Why? Well, it's not because he lacked skill in rhetoric. Watching Trump again and reading the Librarian's impressions, the whole time I was thinking, "There's no way this guy lost. How did he lose?" But more on that later.
So why did the Librarian call this his "Hegelian Moment"?
It's a bit of an ironic statement. There's the obvious answer, that Trump was/is our Napoleon. I find that ironic, and I believe the Librarian does as well, because France had Napoleon, and we have... Trump. A salesman. He's a showboating bullshitter par excellence. All show, mostly no go. Trump is nothing like Napoleon. If we had Napoleon, we might have a chance of surviving the present crisis. Trump is no great hero, but at the same time, he's the embodiment of what we now consider "heroic". He's not history's Napoleon, he's our present Napoleon. Trump is so quintessentially our American Napoleon that it hurts.
Could I perhaps go so far as to say that our present Weltanschauung makes him our Napoleon?2
But the Librarian layers in more irony. He saw Trump, but his essay and the videos he provides are all mediated. We saw the positive side of Trump because we saw it through the Librarian's eyes.
The camera angles, the commentary, all of it, are alterations of the real experience. He saw Trump, Hegel saw Napoleon, but for most of us the mediated experience is all we'll have of either man. And for both of them, *who* the man was to the mediator, whether monster or hero, entirely changes the mediation.
In that sense then the meat of his essay, the description of the rally, is a metaphor as well.
The Librarian of course had another point, which he shares in his conclusion:
Retvrn is inevitable, and older forms of power, more natural than managerialism, will reassert themselves as the crises of that system increasingly manifest themselves. Trump is but a forerunner of what is to come, a hint of the sort of leader who will come to the fore as credentials and media sanction cease to indicate the mandate of heaven, as though they ever did.
I disagreed with the Librarian initially, then realized later I was still right, but for different reasons that maybe also made him right too.
Let me explain.
We live in a mediated existence. How will that cease? The Librarian here is either arguing: One, our reality will cease to be entirely mediated, therefore older forms of power will be reasserted, or two, old-school leaders will somehow break through the mediation, though mediation will still exist.
The technology and will to mediate the mass existence grows apace. Big players like Hollywood and major news networks have of course lost their monopoly on mediation, but the power itself hasn't gone away. It's growing. AI creation tools will put the ability to alter and shape public perception in even more hands. It's not that propaganda has gone away, it's that we're all propagandists now. Grandma's Facebook page is propaganda - A reality-bending mediation of existence that benefits Grandma, her family, and Facebook.
Of course, Grandma is merely fumbling about with the power. Professionals use these tools with utter grace, such that most don't perceive the mediation. It makes them money, lots of it. It gets them power, lots of it. The existing managers may have become incompetent, but that just makes them weak and ripe for usurpation by a new and more capable replacement.
So it's unlikely, barring total technological collapse, that our reality will cease to be mediated. The mass man desperately wants and needs it.
So we have option two, that somehow new leaders will pull a Kool-Aid man and just kick through the wall of mediation. I just don't see this. We didn't see it with Trump. Yes, his visceral presence was felt by those around him, but it took the collaboration of media to extend his presence beyond his immediate surroundings. It took Twitter allowing him on the platform. It took the media broadcasting his speeches. It took Youtube allowing videos about him to be posted. And all those systems can and *have* denied Trump access.
The Librarian helpfully included the speech on C-SPAN. What if C-SPAN pulled the video? Twitter dumped Trump's account, and future platforms could do the same. Youtube pretty much non-personed Trump after the election for questioning the sacred integrity of the vote. It could do it again.
Trump managed to break through the mediation screen, but only when it was a win-win-win. Trump brought ratings, excitement, and money for everybody. But as soon as it became a win for only Trump, Trump went away. At the most crucial moments he was not allowed to break through. After the election, when his denial of the results most desperately needed heard, especially his reasons for doubting the results, all communication from him was shut down, altered, or twisted.
That's power, my friend, and it was used. And it will continue to be used whenever Trump strays too far or ceases to make coin. It will be used on any future Trump-like figures as well.
The power to mediate reality isn't going away, so is our only choice is to suffer the farce of these fools?
I don't think so. In fact, I think we have a couple options. First, seize the power for ourselves. Second, learn to resist the power.
As far as seizing the power goes, it's already happening; for example with Musk taking over Twitter. I'm not sure where it will lead, if it's possible for multiple realities to exist, or if a total bifurcation of perception is possible in a single nation. But it's happening.
For now that power is still mostly held by legacy agents, but we will increasingly come in control of it. Why? Because we'll be one of the few peoples still able to think coherently. To use these propaganda platforms is easy, but to build them? To maintain them? To guide them? That takes the ability to think.
Isaac Simpson gives the call to arms so well in his recent essay. Read it after you finish this essay. It's publicity folks, and either we get good at it and win, or we don't and we lose. That simple.
But for some, the use of propaganda, even if we re-frame it as publicity, is distasteful. It's manipulation. In a way, as Ellul says, it's violence, because we're making a man do something he normally wouldn't. I'm not going to argue that one way or another here. Each of us must choose. But at the very least, if we choose not to use the power, and especially if we choose to use the power, we must know how to resist the power.
The education of those who will control the culture is most important in both cases - Their moral education as much as their knowledge. The rare geniuses of the earth will rise to power, and what they do with that power will be determined by the love and care of their mother, and the wisdom and attention of their father. They will be shaped by the difficulty of their schooling, and the severity of their discipline.
The more power a person wields, the more their perception of reality becomes reality itself. Napoleon bent reality to his will. Trump does the same. We need more of those men.
But all of us, power-holders or not (And we all hold a bit of power), must choose to be God's Man and not the Mass man. We must choose to be noble.
As Gasset says, " …nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set on excelling oneself, in passing beyond what one is to what one sets up as a duty and an obligation."
Our first duty in this modern world is to deny the temptation to mediation. The siren call of easy answers. The ease of thoughtless mass comforts. A worldview on a platter. The noble soul denies that most of all. And all of us, genius or not, can become noble.
Homeschool! If you can't homeschool, private school. If you can't private school, do almost literally anything other than send your kid to public school. Take him to work with you. Leave him in the woods with a hatchet and a compass. Have the whores on the corner take care of him. Anything.
But if you do public school, you might, and the chance is very small, you *might* get a teacher like the Librarian for your kid. He's an oasis in the desert of managed mediocrity that is public school. And the dryer the mouth, the sweeter the water. I have no doubt he's totally changed the life of some.
But he’s just one man. Don't take chances with your kids and public school. Most likely, they'll come out transformed in ways you don't like. If you send your kid to Dracula's castle, don't be shocked if he comes back a ghoul.
We must, and we will, form the Weltanschauung (Worldview) of our children. The true Weltanschauung, the one that persists after the glow of the screens fades, that comes from within, not from without.
In some ways the mediators deceive themselves, for their power isn't total. We look through the glass; the shape of the glass, it's color, and it's clarity can all be controlled by the glass-maker, the mediator, but the one looking through still stands apart; or at least, they can stand apart if they see the glass for what it is and not as who they are.
All of us are influenced by mediated reality. Anything beyond ourselves is mediated. We must know that. But we must also know that we can stand apart from that mediated reality and remain whole. Those most able to stand apart from that mediation will be the most capable of controlling that mediation, either for themselves, or for others.
So I guess ultimately I agreed with the Librarian, but perhaps for different reasons. Mediated reality will still be there. It will still control the fates of great men. But it will be OUR mediated reality. It will be OUR great men. The Elon Musks and Palmer Luckeys of the future are coming from the incredible gesalt of the homeschool tribe, or from other unconventional systems of schooling. It will be their hands on the levers of power, or if they be not powerful, they will know enough to resist those that are.
So I see hope for the future.
Many thanks to the Librarian for his excellent and thoughtful essay.
Sorry Kriss, that’s me doing Hegel.
I DID look it up, I promise.
Again, thank you for this thorough and insightful review of my work.