Once in a great while does a new idea present itself that triggers a re-evaluation of my fundamental beliefs. did it once. Zell Miller did it and now Lee Harris has done it with his article on Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology

The basic premise of this idea is that most of our efforts to understand 9-11 are flawed. From our more rational point of view we try and see 9-11 as an act of Clausewitzian War (Clausewitz defined war as “politics by other means”). So while we look for the causes and strategy behind the 9-11 attacks, we do so thinking Al Qaeda is like the Imperial Japanese trying to bomb Perl Harbor and force us to submit to their hegemony of the Pacific.

According to Lee Harris, Al Qaeda is not trying to conduct politics by other means. They are acting out a fantasy ideology for themselves. The United States and the West are just the antagonists in their pageant. A fantasy ideology is a set of “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 why Mussolini invaded Ethiopia, why Tim McVeigh detonated a truck bomb in front of a federal office building in Oklahoma and why Hitler diverted much needed rail traffic away from the war effort to exterminate the enemy in his fantasy ideology. These were not means to an end, but ends in and of themselves.

The author describes a friend in college who was going to protest the Vietnam War:

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.

I’ve seen this type of thing before. It is the Modus Operandi of the Libertarian Party. My experience is that a majority of LP activists are not interested in conducting politics. They want to act out their fantasy. Their tactics aren’t designed to bring popular opinion into conformance with their views. Their goal is be the revolutionary.

Take for example the 2004 Libertarian Presidential Nominee. Here was an unemployed computer programmer. He didn’t have a driver’s license and hadn’t filed his tax returns in several years. These are not attributes that would endear him to the general public. But that didn’t matter to the convention delegates. They voted for him, not in a rational Clausewitzian fashion, but in acting out their own fantasy ideology of standing up to the Government.

Another example was his “arrest” at the Presidential Debates. This was a pure example of acting out a fantasy. To have had a Clausewitzian effect he would never have issues a press release before hand. It defeated any tactical purpose the arrest would have had, namely to generate press coverage for the campaign.

Now to be fair to the LP, not everyone in that organization is trying to live out their fantasy of being the noble resistance. And both the right and left sides of the political spectrum have their own groups acting out their fantasies. Operation Rescue and the Animal Liberation Front are good examples.

Those who disengage from reality to act out their fantasy ideologies are dangerous to themselves and their cause. Al Qaeda’s actions on 9-11 toppled two Islamic governments and caused a third (Libya) to rennounce its war with the West. Rational people looking to affect change try to distance themselves from the likes of McVeigh, Operation Rescue and the ALF movement. While the opposition uses those groups as a basis for an ad hominem attack. With friends like that you don’t need enemies.