The Cult of the Lesser Evil
A Dispatch to the Department of Experimental Theology
Those of us residing in the American Empire have recently observed the most significant public festival of our quadrennial civic religion: our Election Day. Over the course of several weeks, more than a hundred millions took part in a vast and multifaceted national ritual. Those lucky enough to participate in this curious and (as I will show shortly) most paradoxical sacrament of paper and ink have thereby implicated themselves, however infinitesimally, in what has frequently been described as the empire’s most important political decision in a lifetime (at least, that is, until the next four-year cycle is completed). For once the deposits have been totaled (making allowances for certain eighteenth-century formulae to dis-count the voices of slaves and people of color), we shall see manifest in that sacred mirror of power the Will of that most Disparate and Contradictory of Deities, the God with a Hundred Million Bodies and More, the American Public Itself. The object of this election? Nothing more nor less then the National Warpriest, an office vested with tremendous physical and metaphysical duties and powers, yet whom we (in our typical Yankee humility) call simply “the President of the United States.”
As my fellow schollars will surely agree, the entire phenomena of the Electoralist religion is fascinating and requires vast and thoughtful analysis. But it is my modest proposal here to submit to you, a rough account of of the Transcendental and hermetic of the Inexplicable as operates in a certain, curiously fanatic subset of the faithful. Even compared to the totalizing scope of the Electionday, for this one sect The Vote bears a unique and altogether weird significance and meaning. And so, it seems fitting to submit this report for the consideration of my fellow khaosonaughts, transcendentologists, and psychomytholigiests; meta-heremeuticists and haigia-cartographers; metaphysicists & metaphysicians; and any other critical mystic who might take interest in studying this most fascinating sect, which for lack of a self-ascribed moniker I have taken to calling The Cult of the Lesser Evil.
In his foundational work Fear and Trembling, Danish philosopher and theologian Søren Kierkegaard writes of an incident recorded in Genesis Chapter 22, that of Abrahamn’s (non)Sacrifice of Isaac. Four times Kierkegaard re-tells the story, and four times he offers a benadictive interpretation of it, alternately horrific, depressing, disturbing, deadening.
Kierkegaard takes the remainder of the text to offer his own interpretation, or perhaps it is better to say anti-interpretation. Abraham, at least in certain versions, is a “Knight of Faith,” one who trusts in the miraculous transformation of his most deplorable mandate without being able to conceptualize them as possible, as opposed to the “Knight of Infinite Resignation”, who reconciles himself to his task not out of true faith, but duty alone. Unlike either the naïve believer or the Knight of Infinite Resignation, the Knight of Faith accomplishes the very thing he himself avows as inconceivable.
The merely-ethical subject sacrifices his own pleasure in order to fulfill his duty, which may be illuminated or informed by his teachers or masters, but which he himself ultimately gives unto himself. In contrast, the Knight of Faith sacrifices not only pleasure but the ethical itself and thereby he makes space (if only in his own mind, his own process of self-reflection) for Something greater. According to our most fearful theologian, the Knight of Faith thereby accomplishes a “teleological suspension of the ethical,” transcending the drives of desire and the systems of ethics which regulate them, in order to make an encounter with the “Absolute”—an encounter which in turn will found a new, deeper, but more traumatic engagement with the Ethical.
The Cult of the Lesser Evil is orientated principally around the ritual to which I alluded earlier, the Sacrament of the Vote. It is worth pausing to consider this rite in greater detail. For one, there is the curious paradox of participating in a democratic ritual in order to “have one’s voice heard” all while remaining entirely mute within the cloistered anonymity of the voting booth’s curtain. Step past that bridal-veil of democracy, and one discovers a the most Holy of Holies, the the Alter of the Republic itself, the Ballot Box. Here the framework of the Catholic Eucharist is worth drawing upon. True, in that case the priest deposits a small white wafer in the devotee’s hand which is then taken into her body, where here she deposits a white paper into a box, by the symbolism is much the same. The Box itself, like the Body of Christ, is a hyper-object; it exists here and there throughout time and space, instantiated again and again in each polling place, only ever achieving the full significance of its being once its contents have been emptied out and tallied in favor of one outcome or another.
Nor is this transcendent status limited to the voting process itself; rather, it is imparted, for those who have the affective disposition to receive it, upon each voter. And so we have another paradox, because it is precisely at this moment of extreme atom-ization, of being sealed off with only his own thoughts, this lonely climax of the political calendar (one could be forgiven for glossing this moment as almost masturbatory) it is in this moment that you make yourself part of that most sacred Demos, a people who claim, in some sense, to govern themselves.
In any case, the competition has long been totally dominated between two colleges of civic priests. With some variation in procedure across different provinces, any person may join either of these colleges. However, for generations they have been dominated by certain magistrates, judges, law-speakers, merchants, . The colleges are quite alike in practically every way, in function if not in appearance, and I will not bore you with their names. It is sufficient to distinguish them by their totems, which for more than a century have been a Red Elephant and Blue Jackass.
The Cult itself is a curious byproduct of the competition and intercourse of the two colleges, with contradictory membership giving their loyalties to one or the other. This may lead some to ask, is the choice of the term “cult” for such a disparate and unorganized association not derisive? To which I reply: It is. Likewise, is the choice of term not unfair? To which I reply: It is not.
Within the academic study of religion, the term “cult” has been frequently debated and often jettisoned altogether. My definition of cult is framed by the article “Definitions of Cult: From Sociological-Technical to Popular-Negative” by James T. Richardson, who examines two historic trends in use—including a social/anthropological one, where the cult is seen as a self-contained community or social project with a counter-prevailing ideology or value-system to that of its larger social context, and a more recent, popular structural/critical usage, where the defining attribute of the cult is adherence to a hierarchical structure.
Not requiring the level of categorical discrimination Richardson has, I have elected to adopt both the historic and popular understandings. For the sake of this essay, than, “cult” refers to organized community where an rules and order are central, where these rules provide for and depend on the constant reifying and sharpening of an in-group/out-group distinction, where where a hierarchical leadership structure dominates within the in-group and stands-for it to (and against) the outside, and where obedience and relation to the hierarchical leadership promises Profound Experiences, Connections, Truths which cut against in some way the prevailing assumptions and tendencies of its host-culture. In the case of our specific object of analysis, the aspect which “cuts against-” is the explicit, ritualized avowal of “Evil” itself—albeit always relative to a still greater evil.
Joseph Robinette Biden (left), the leader of one of the empire’s two dominant priestly colleges and (according to his supporters) the most recent incarnation of the Lesser Evil; Donald John Trump, (right), Incumbent Warpriest and (according to his detractors) the greatest Greater Evil the empire has yet to produce.
The conceit of this essay, of course, is that the phenomena of openly voting for the “lesser evil” cannot simply be explained away as a purely rational tactic. Certainly tactics are part of this phenomena—perhaps the critical part, the base to its superstructure. But there is at least something else going on here, something wrapped up in the tendency not only to accept but to avow this Evil, a desire to associate oneself with this performative rejection of all litmus tests and inviolable principles, or at least a belief that doing so will help one’s candidate or otherwise advance the political project in some way.
An over-correction, perhaps, to the rhetorically weak move of saying that this candidate is slightly less bad then the other. But to say it is an over-correction is not even to begin to explain the phenomena itself. For there are a multitude of directions in which one could over-correct--an avowal of your candidate’s goodness, for example, through the denial of the truth or significance of critiques. Or an over-correction away from the significance of the candidate (its not about the candidate, its about the party), or away from electoral politics itself (elections don’t matter). Why the specific over-correction towards the Lesser Evil? What does one gain from a performative avowal of that which one performative hates? To answer questions like this, it seems obvious to me that one would do well to return to the first site of theorizing Evil, the very roots of the Tree of Knowledge, the study of religion.
[first part of liberal analysis]
The Knight of Faith is not a magician: he cannot settle for cheap tricks of cognitive slight-of-hand, avowing in turn, now the impossibility of his destiny, now the certainty of it. Instead, he must occupy a superposition between the two. For it is the conscious impossibility of his situation which drives his anxiety, which pushes him past the point “where thought stops” into the realm of true faith. Without such anxiety, his religion cannot have any substance, and though he may avow the great and terrible mysteries of his God, his words fall upon even him—especially on him—like so much noise and air.