A Political Horror: Horseshoe Theory to Facehugger Theory

Years ago in 2019, as the decisive Epstein news was coming out, I was also in the middle of reading about Chinese internal politics under Mao and Deng, especially the economic reform debates under Deng. I was also experiencing at one degree removed the first crisis of the Zizians with LessWrong, now escalated to murders that have made stories at major newspapers. All together, there were so many odd cross-cutting hybridizations of left and right in these events (Intelligence-sponsored libertine eugenicism? Market Communism? Nick-Land-accelerationist vegan anarchist trans supremacism?) that I felt I needed to go back to firmer concretes and ditch the left/right abstractions for a while. That "while" then turned into something just over five years, and I’m now reorienting myself to contemporary left/right divisions. Joining Substack is part of that, for me.

Many years before, I’d had confusions about left and right that had resonated with meme images of "horseshoe theory,” but I knew also that the left and right sides of the "horseshoe", the fringes, split into many fingers. The left was not just center left vs. far left; within the far-left just the Communists alone split into Trotskyists vs. Maoists vs. Frankfurt School vs. pure Leninists and on and on through seemingly innumerable small “tendencies.” Similarly the right was not just center right vs. far right; within the far right, just the Neoreactionaries alone split into Landian accelerationists vs. Yarvinite Machiavellians vs. Orthosphere neo-ultramontanists vs. BAPist vitalists and on and on through innumerable schismogenic group blogs.

The fringes of the horseshoe branched into fingers, and the fingers often met one another in surprising, paradoxical alliances at the far left/far right extremities that were always specific. In their specificity they could be much less surprising. They could arise due to essential similarity of premises, as when left accelerationism and right accelerationism agreed on acceleration. They could arise from complementary opposite interests, as in the “Baptists and bootleggers” alliances of the Prohibition era. They could arise due to constitutive similarity of social forms, as in the shared secrecies and sign-languages of early 20th century occultism from Besant’s Theosophists to Reuss’s O.T.O. to von List’s Ariosophists.

With the ends of the horseshoe branched into fingers and the fingers now meeting in unsurprising matches, in 2020 the image abruptly metamorphosed into a nightmare. When the matches hadn’t been obvious, I reasoned, it had been because the division of left and right was catching my attention too much for me to see the whole. The incumbent center’s first polarizations to the left and right, then, had been covering my eyes and face. The fingers met behind my head.

With ugly nausea, I saw the horseshoe as an alien facehugger already firmly smothering me and I felt the phantasm of an alien egg forced into my gut: a cynical, nihilist retching came over me and I imagined prying desperately at the slick carapace: rejecting all of this politics and all of these complex dialectics as meaningless. But there was no hope for it at first. It seemed too clear that reactive cynicism was a false escape that would just leave the egg to incubate. What could I do with blind disgust but contribute to reproducing a next new thin radical finger for a next new generation? The image persisted in my dreams as a brute symbol of political overwhelm and failure.

It was an image nasty enough to stay with me to this day, years later, though I no longer take it so direly or so personally. I think it is a genuine specter haunting the political imagination of the present, and one well worth facing, but it’s no more a fundamental reality than the nightmares of Oedipal castration as “racial memory” spawned from Sigmund Freud’s Haeckelian imaginative excesses. (Those are also well worth facing.)

Examining each finger from my nightmares, studying the history of political schismogenesis, I began to understand the metaphorical tendons. Studying affective psychology and the constitution of political subjects, I began to understand the pressure points of my metaphorical head under each finger’s pads and knuckles. I began to feel that the alien hand had its own soft spots and pressure points. I began to feel that it could be pierced, removed, and dissected, and that the egg could be crushed, dissolved, and digested.

It’s been a long, strange march that I won’t write further about here, since that’s more properly a story of another kind. The path took years and a syllabus that’s not easily summarized, so this is just one half-dream irrational side of the experience, a phantasmic representation of serious and sober problems. Something of that remainder of what it’s like to really be human that rarely fits well into the disenchantments of systematic rationalization.

Today, these standard rationalizations are failing to meet and speak to current political realities well. Political enormities derange us and cast awful shadows. The derangements spawn panics that further intensify political irrationality and thus further invalidate the commonplace rationalizations, further multiplying phantasms, and yet simply repressing the nightmares usually proves counterproductive.

Whether we like it or not, and as a former physical scientist who used to take great comfort in the security of rigorous reason I don’t, this seems to be the state of the world. Charisma, intuition, and instinctive aesthetics will only play greater roles in our politics for the near future.

I wish I could trust either the right or the left to have the answers to this challenge, but I don’t. Without thorough reform of contemporary parties and their political philosophies, focusing on that left/right division first still seems to be a derangement in itself to me. Even in the second Trump era.

Thanks to

Gnocchic Apocryphon

for encouraging me to write a start of this for an earlier comment, on his interesting post here: https://gnocchiccodices.substack.com/p/cries-out-in-literate-despair.