This was orginally written in a discussion of Islamism and the WOT. A different general topic, but this particular excerpt is quite germane in this site. This is an excerpt from an original article posted at.
http://www.policyreview.org/AUG02/harris.html
The nature of fantasy ideology
Yet clearly there are individuals for whom this control is, at best, intermittent, resulting in behavior that ranges from the merely obnoxious to the clinically psychotic. The man who insists on being taken more seriously than his advantages warrant falls into the former category; the maniac who murders an utter stranger because God ? or his neighbor?s dog ? commanded him to do so belongs to the latter.
What is common in such interactions is that the fantasist inevitably treats other people merely as props ? there is no interest in, or even awareness of, others as having wills or minds of their own. The man who bores us with stories designed to impress us with his importance, or his intellect, or his bank account, cares nothing for us as individuals ? for he has already cast us in the role that he wishes us to play: We are there to be impressed by him. Indeed, it is an error even to suggest that he is trying to impress us, for this would assume that he is willing to learn enough about us to discover how best we might be impressed. But nothing of the kind occurs. And why should it? After all, the fantasist has already projected onto us the role that we are to play in his fantasy; no matter what we may be thinking of his recital, it never crosses his mind that we may be utterly failing to play the part expected of us ? indeed, it is sometimes astonishing to see how much exertion is required of us in order to bring our profound lack of interest to the fantasist?s attention.
To an outside observer, the fantasist is clearly attempting to compensate by means of his fantasy for the shortcomings of his own present reality ? and thus it is tempting to think of the fantasist as a kind of Don Quixote impotently tilting at windmills. But this is an illusion. Make no mistake about it: The fantasist often exercises great and terrible power precisely by virtue of his fantasy. The father who demands his son grow up and become a professional football player will clearly exercise much more control over his son?s life than a father who is content to permit his child to pursue his own goals in life.
This power of the fantasist is entirely traceable to the fact that, for him, the other is always an object and never a subject. A subject, after all, has a will of his own, his own desires and his own agenda; he might rather play the flute instead of football. And anyone who is aware of this fact is automatically put at a disadvantage in comparison with the fantasist ? the disadvantage of knowing that other people have minds of their own and are not merely props to be pushed around.
For the moment I stop thinking about you as a prop in my fantasy, you become problematic. If you aren?t what I have cast you to be, then who are you, and what do you want? And, in order to answer these questions, I find that I must step out of the fantasy realm and enter the real world. If I am your father, I may still wish you to play football, but I can no longer blithely assume that this is obviously what you have always wanted; hence, I will need to start paying attention to you as a genuine other, and no longer merely as a ready-made prop. Your role will change from ?born football player? to ? x , the unknown. The very immensity of the required mental adjustment goes a long way toward explaining why it is so seldom made and why it is so often tragically impossible to wean a fantasist even from the most destructive fantasy.
Fortunately, the fantasizing individual is normally surrounded by other individuals who are not fantasizing or, at the very least, who are not fantasizing in the same way, and this fact puts some limit on how far most of us allow our fantasy world to intrude on the precinct of reality.
But what happens when it is not an individual who is caught up in his fantasy world, but an entire group ? a sect, or a people, or even a nation? That such a thing can happen is obvious from a glance at history. The various chiliastic movements, such as those studied in Norman Cohn?s The Pursuit of the Millennium (Harper & Row, 1961 ), are splendid examples of collective fantasy; and there is no doubt that for most of history such large-scale collective fantasies appear on the world stage under the guise of religion.
But this changed with the French Revolution. From this event onward, there would be eruptions of a new kind of collective fantasy, one in which political ideology replaced religious mythology as the source of fantasy?s symbols and rituals. In this way it provided a new, and quite dangerous, outlet for the fantasy needs of large groups of men and women ? a full-fledged fantasy ideology. For such a fantasy makes no sense outside of the ideological corpus in terms of which the fantasy has been constructed. It is from the ideology that the roles, the setting, the props are drawn, just as for the earlier pursuers of millennium, the relevant roles, setting, and props arose out of the biblical corpus of symbolism.
But the symbols by themselves do not create the fantasy. There must first be a preexisting collective need for this fantasy; this need comes from a conflict between a set of collective aspirations and desires, on one hand, and the stern dictates of brutal reality, on the other ? a conflict in which a lack of realism is gradually transformed into a penchant for fantasy. History is replete with groups that seem to lack the capability of seeing themselves as others see them, differing in this respect much as individuals do.
A fantasy ideology is one that seizes the opportunity offered by such a lack of realism in a political group and makes the most of it. This it is able to do through symbols and rituals, all of which are designed to permit the members of the political group to indulge in a kind of fantasy role-playing. Classic examples of this are easy to find: the Jacobin fantasy of reviving the Roman Republic, Mussolini?s fantasy of reviving the Roman Empire, Hitler?s fantasy of reviving German paganism in the thousand-year Reich.
This theme of reviving ancient glory is an important key to understanding fantasy ideologies, for it suggests that fantasy ideologies tend to be the domain of those groups that history has passed by or rejected ? groups that feel that they are under attack from forces which, while more powerful perhaps than they are, are nonetheless inferior in terms of true virtue. Such a fantasy ideology was current in the South before the Civil War and explained much of the conduct of the Confederacy. Instead of seeing themselves as an anachronism attempting to prolong the existence of a doomed institution, Southerners chose to see themselves as the bearer of true civilization. Imperial Germany had similar fantasies before and during the Great War. They are well expressed in Thomas Mann?s Notes of an Unpolitical Man: Germans possess true inwardness and culture, unlike the French and English ? let alone those barbarous Americans. Indeed, Hitler?s even more extravagant fantasy ideology is incomprehensible unless one puts it in the context of this preexisting fantasy ideology.
In reviewing these fantasy ideologies, especially those associated with Nazism and Italian fascism, there is always the temptation for an outside observer to regard their promulgation as the cynical manipulation by a power-hungry leader of his gullible followers. This is a serious error, for the leader himself must be as much steeped in the fantasy as his followers: He can only make others believe because he believes so intensely himself.
But the concept of belief, as it is used in this context, must be carefully understood in order to avoid ambiguity. For us, belief is a purely passive response to evidence presented to us ? I form my beliefs about the world for the purpose of understanding the world as it is. But this is radically different from what might be called transformative belief ? the secret of fantasy ideology. For here the belief is not passive, but intensely active, and its purpose is not to describe the world, but to change it. It is, in a sense, a deliberate form of make-believe, but one in which the make-believe is not an end in itself, but rather the means of making the make-believe become real. In this sense it is akin to such innocently jejune phenomena as ?The Power of Positive Thinking,? or even the little engine that thought it could. To say that Mussolini, for example, believed that fascist Italy would revive the Roman Empire does not mean that he made a careful examination of the evidence and then arrived at this conclusion. Rather, what is meant by this is that Mussolini had the will to believe that fascist Italy would revive the Roman Empire.