Avan oru type, I was also branded so. This expression connotes some sort of abnormality, craziness, or madness. It’s a bit hard to digest this sort of comment and bypass it. When it comes to the public sphere and becomes a talk among the people known to us, it becomes even harder. The situation is worse, when people come and sympathise with you. As it is always, the fire catches up within you and around you and you feel that the social aurora gets damaged, having repercussions on your personal and social life. It would be easier to overcome this if you are less concerned about the public image and powerful positions in the socio-political arena, and happy with the little things that bring a lot of cheers daily. But if you are a public figure and have a political ambition then it is really troublesome.
Image: pixabay.com
From my ordinary experience, I can tell you, that people are after you with their little aspirations to overpower you and have control over you. To achieve this end, they use several tactics and one among them is character attack. A comment shared both with your enemies as well as friends can create socially damaging images and the power aspirant will be happy to catch the fish in the troubled waters. With the arrival of micro/new media, where staying disconnected can make you non-existent, it has become easier to create such damaging images and the impact is quicker and wider. The pace, impact, and effects are higher when it is about women.The
patriarchal system provides society the right to make women objects and men the due right to be a subject. Thereby, power is a natural right to men, and
if at all women aspire to have it men are entitled to deny it and put them
down. And the means one employs to deny is justifiable in society. The
means, in other terms the tools or weapons they use are not, logically
speaking, based on the basic principles of logic. One is naturally entitled to construct
a socio-political image in the public, using his leadership qualities,
crowd-pulling powers, and sound rational-logical arguments. But if a person
tries to build his public image by tarnishing the image of the other or making an offensive
personal attack then it is a logical fallacy. That is, you have lost every
sound argument to confront your enemy, therefore you begin to attack her/him
personally. This sort of inauthentic image creation and ascension to power is
easy when your enemy is a woman. Men, fallaciously
ride on misogyny and ascend to power.
We
look at this issue through the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas connecting it
with the current political and social state of affairs.
Levinas’
view on authentic self
Suppose one tries to understand self in terms of Cartesian ego ergo sum, that is, a self that is worried about itself and tries to construct itself assimilating everything around oneself. In that case, she/he will be missing the
Levinas’ self. If it is the way one goes
ahead, then she/he will land up in inauthenticity. For Levinas, if one tries to
conquer the other and victimise the other for self-consolidation, then she/he
will end up in self-deceit and self-defeat thereby inauthentic life. For him,
it is by letting the other to be other that the self retains itself. He will
even go further and say, it is by holding responsible for the other that one
consolidates herself/himself. Little more details would shed more light on it.
Jean
Paul Sartre, whose philosophical thoughts expressed troubled relationship with
the other, had unconventionally written something about Mary and Jesus, and the
birth of Jesus. He depicts the birth of Jesus in existential terms, the inner
struggle of Mary to accept that Jesus is another person separated from her
bodily. He writes: “For all mothers are in this way attracted at moments before
this rebellious fragment of their flesh that is their child and they feel
outcast before this new life that has been made of their life and that they
populate with foreign thoughts.” More to it, what is even harder is that Jesus
is divine and he is totally snatched from her mercilessly (Jean-Paul Sartre, “Bariona,
or the Son of Thunder”, in The Writings of Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel
Contat and Michel Rybalka (trans.), Evanston, North Western University Press,
1974, 121). The separation, an external body, was part of Mary’s flesh. But
once he is born, he is a separate entity. It can be said in relational terms
that the son has created the mother or the motherhood of Mary. Levinas in one of his masterworks, Totality and Infinity writes about “I” alluding
it to paternity: “the I breaks free from itself in paternity without thereby
ceasing to be an I, for the I is its son.” For Levinas, I is born
by radical separation from the son, i.e., the son is out there, therefore the I
exists. A radical separation happens by letting the other to be the other.
Levinas
would draw philosophically sound implications out of it. For him, selfish-self
is inauthentic self. Riding on the vulnerability of the other, annihilation and
assimilation of the other for self-glorification and consolidation are, for
Levinas, not only acts of murder but also acts of self-pity, an illness of inauthentic
existence. Misogyny can be brought under this sphere. The people who crave power ride on the socially licensed vehicle of misogyny. It is a military
exercise of using irrational weapons to ascend to power, a fallacious
attempt.
This
phenomenon was intense in the last US election. Kamala Harris was targeted with misogyny. To endorse Trump, Elon Musk used the unwholesome tool.
Deepfake videos went viral, that propagated that Kamala Harris attacked the
manliness of the serving president. The video shared by Elon Musk contained as
if Kamala Harris is saying, “President Biden is senile”, and he does not “know
the first thing about running the country”. Further, she went through body-shaming
and was trolled repeatedly by Trump himself. The users knew that these were fake,
but as is the norm in social media, there was wider engagement and
circulation of this online content (see Manish Tiwari, “Big Tech’s fail –
unsafe online spaces for women”, The Hindu, November 5, 2024, 8). Indian
journalist, Swati Chaturvedi in her book I am a troll, brings to light
the flooding of online platforms with obscene comments about women journalists
whom the supporters of the current regime consider enemies. Man’s hunger for
power is socially endorsed by great giants and shared by the majority.
Consequently, basic logical and moral principles go off-screen.
Other
forms of struggle for power
The
editor of the Frontline magazine Vaishna Roy, brings out the “man’s right”
comments in her editorial: the victim of rape “deserved”, when she is out in the
night, she is “available” for man’s use. Again, it is the right of the men of
“honour” to do whatever they wish with these women who are “available.”
Consolidation of a patriarchally determined moral society is done by riding on
misogyny. These men of “honour” can navigate for the rape-videos of the women brutally
tortured and killed and they have the right to do it. She brings about the ugly
face of the misogyny that totally misses out all sorts of fraternal or sisterly
love (see Vaishna Roy, “Editor’s note”, Frontline, vol. 41.18). It is a sheer
heartless society created by the world that relies simplistically on empiricism
or scientism. This sort of unscientific temper provides the space for one to
navigate through porn sites and mechanise one’s neurons, providing
insensitivity and empty interiority. Sadly, the socially prevalent phenomenon
of male superiority takes for granted pornography and other forms of sexual
obsessions and acts of violence.
Pope
Francis’ recent encyclical Dilexit nos (2024), speaks about the dangers
of losing one’s heart in a world where digits determine everything. He brings
in the central character from Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel Demons, Nikolai
Stavrogin, to explain the contemporary era's heartlessness. He
takes the interpretation from philosopher Romano Guardini: “Stavrogin has no
heart, hence his mind is cold and empty and his body sunken in bestial sloth
and sensuality… Only the heart is able to welcome and offer hospitality… Stavrogin
is always infinitely distant, even from himself, because a man can enter into
himself only with the heart, not with the mind. It is not in a man’s power to
enter into his own interiority with the mind. Hence, if the heart is not alive,
man remains a stranger to himself” (n. 12). A man who is not with sentience will
not be able to get connected to the other, and will lose his interiority and
miss the very meaning of life. Male chauvinism and riding on misogyny to establish “manly” totalitarianism misses the heart from the root (see A.
Faizur Rahman, “A case of codifying totalitarianism”, The Hindu,
November 5, 2024, 8).
It
is time to reclaim one’s authenticity and have some time for the education of the heart and mind of our male children.
Appu Santhosh Kumar
ssanjoseph@gmail.com
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