A-Infos (en) Bulgaria, FA: The lesser evil (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

We translated this article by author Dominique Misein, and its message 
can be applied to the recent mass protests. ---- A few years ago, during 
an election, a prominent Italian journalist urged his readers to refrain 
from criticism and to do their civic duty by voting for the party that 
was in power at the time. The journalist was fully aware that to the 
people, this party reeked of decades of institutional rot - abuse of 
power, corruption, dirty deals - but the only political alternative on 
the market - the left - seemed even more sinister. There was no choice 
but to take off one's blinders and vote for the rulers who were already 
in power.

At the time, although it was the subject of much debate, this invitation 
had some success and in a sense it could be said to have won. This is 
not surprising. In essence, the journalist's argument was based on one 
of the most easily testable social reflexes - the politics of the lesser 
evil, which guides the daily choices of the majority of people. When we 
are faced with life's problems, common sense is always quick to remind 
us that between two equally abhorrent alternatives, the best we can do 
is choose the one that seems to us less likely to lead to unpleasant 
consequences.

How can we deny that our whole life has been reduced to a long and 
exhausting search for the lesser evil? How can we deny that the concept 
of choosing the good - understood not in an absolute sense, but simply 
as that which is valued as such - is usually rejected a priori? All our 
experience and that of past generations teaches us that the art of 
living is the most difficult and that the most ardent dreams can only 
have a tragic end: they go away with the alarm clock, with the final 
credits of a film, with the last page of a book. "It has always been 
like this," they tell us with a sigh, and from this we conclude that it 
will always be like this.

It is clear that all this does not prevent us from understanding how 
harmful everything we encounter is. But we know how to choose evil. What 
we lack - and we lack it because it has been taken from us - is not the 
ability to judge the world around us, the horror of which is imposed 
with the immediacy of a punch in the face, but the ability to go beyond 
the given possibilities - or even to simply try to do so. Thus, 
accepting the eternal excuse that a person risks losing everything if he 
is not satisfied with what he already has, he ends his life under the 
banner of renunciation. Our own daily life, with its indiscretions, 
offers us numerous examples of this. Honestly, how many of us can boast 
of enjoying life, of being content with it? And how many can say that 
they are satisfied with their work, with those hours without purpose, 
without pleasure and without end? Yet, faced with the specter of 
unemployment, we quickly accept paid misery to avoid unpaid misery. How 
can we explain the tendency of so many people to prolong their years of 
education as long as possible - a characteristic that is quite 
widespread - if not by the refusal to enter the adult world, in which 
the end of an already precarious freedom is seen? And what can we say 
then about love, about that spasmodic search for someone to love and to 
be loved by, which usually ends up as its own parody, since, just to 
dispel the specter of loneliness, we prefer to prolong emotional ties 
that are already exhausted? Scarce in wonder and fascination, our days 
on earth are capable of giving us only the boredom of serial repetition.

So, despite the numerous attempts to hide or minimize the harm caused by 
the current social system, we see it all. We know everything about life 
in a world that harms us. But to make it bearable, that is, acceptable, 
it is enough to objectify it, to give it a historical justification, to 
endow it with an inexorable logic to which our accountant's mind can 
only capitulate. To make the lack of life and its undignified trade in 
survival more bearable - the boredom of years spent in duties, the 
forced renunciation of love and passion, the premature aging of the 
senses, the extortion of work, the devastation of the environment and 
various forms of self-degradation - what better than to contrast this 
situation with others, more painful and oppressive; what more effective 
than to compare it with the worst?

Of course, it would be a mistake to think that the logic of the lesser 
evil is limited only to the regulation of our household chores. Above 
all, it regulates and governs all of public life, as this journalist 
well knew. In fact, every society known to humanity is considered 
imperfect. Regardless of their ideas, everyone has dreamed of living in 
a world different from the present one: a more representative democracy, 
an economy freer from state intervention, a "federalist" rather than 
centralized government, a nation without foreigners, and so on, even to 
the most extreme aspirations.

But the desire to realize your dreams drives you to action, because only 
action can change the world, turning it into something like a dream. 
Action sounds in the ears like the trumpets of Jericho. There is no 
stronger imperative than this, and for anyone who hears it, the need to 
proceed to action is imposed immediately and unconditionally. But anyone 
who calls for action in order to realize the aspirations that animate 
him quickly receives strange and unexpected answers. The recruit quickly 
learns that effective action is that which is limited to the realization 
of limited, gloomy and sad dreams. Not only are great utopias clearly 
unattainable, but even much more modest goals turn out to be barely 
realizable. Thus, anyone who has thought of transforming the world 
according to his dream finds himself unable to do anything other than 
transform the dream, adapting it to the more immediate reality of this 
world. In order to act productively, a person finds himself forced to 
suppress his dream. Thus the first renunciation that productive action 
demands of anyone who wants to act is to reduce his dream to the 
proportions recommended by the existing. In this way one comes to 
understand, in a few words, that our age is an age of compromise, of 
half-measures, of turning a blind eye. That's right, of the lesser evil.

If one thinks carefully, it makes sense that the concept of reformism, a 
cause to which everyone is now committed, is the consummate expression 
of the politics of the lesser evil: a cautious action, subject to the 
watchful eye of moderation, which never loses sight of the signs of 
acceptability, and which is carried out with a caution worthy of the 
most perfect diplomacy. The concern to avoid upheavals is such that when 
some unfavorable circumstances make them inevitable, one is quick to 
legitimize them by showing how a greater evil was averted. Didn't we 
experience a war last summer that was justified as the lesser evil 
compared to brutal "ethnic cleansing," just as fifty years ago the use 
of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was justified as the lesser 
evil compared to the continuation of a world war? And this despite the 
claims of every government on the planet that they reject the use of 
force to resolve conflicts.

And indeed. Even the ruling class recognizes the basis of the criticisms 
made of the present social order, for which it is in fact responsible. 
Sometimes one can even find a few of its spokesmen on the front line who 
officially condemn the discrimination of market laws, the 
totalitarianism of "single-mindedness," the abuses of liberalism. Even 
for this reality, all this is evil. But it is an unavoidable evil, and 
the most that can be done is to try to reduce its effects.

The evil from which we cannot free ourselves - as should be clear - is a 
social order based on profit, money, commodities, the reduction of man 
to an object, power, and which has in the person of the state an 
indispensable instrument of coercion. Only after having placed the 
existence of capitalism with all its consequences beyond all doubt can 
political attacks ask themselves which capitalist form constitutes the 
lesser evil to support. Today, preference is given to democracy, which 
presents itself - not by chance - as "the least evil of known political 
systems". Compared to fascism and Stalinism, it easily receives the 
support of Western common sense, all the more so since the democratic 
lie is based on the (illusory) participation of its subjects in the 
management of public affairs, which thus appears perfect. In this way, 
people easily convince themselves that "fairer" government activity, 
"better distribution of wealth," or rather, "more rational use of 
resources" are the only options they have to deal with the problems of 
modern civilization.

But in accepting this, we miss a fundamental detail. We miss the meaning 
of what actually unites the various alternatives proposed: the existence 
of money, of commodity exchange, of classes, of power. Here we can say 
that we forget that choosing an evil - even if it is a lesser evil - is 
the best way to prolong it. To use the examples above again - a "more 
just" state decides to bomb an entire country in order to convince a 
"more evil" state to stop ethnic cleansing within its own borders. There 
is no point in denying that the difference exists, but we perceive it 
only in the disgust that in this situation inspires a state logic 
capable of playing with the lives of thousands of people who are being 
killed and bombed. In the same way, a "better distribution of wealth" 
tries to avoid the concentration of the fruits of the labor of the 
ordinary majority in the hands of the ordinary minority. But what does 
this mean? In short, the knife with which the masters of the earth cut 
the pie of world wealth would change, and perhaps they would add another 
seat at the table of the merry guests. The rest of humanity would have 
to continue to be content with crumbs. Finally, who would dare to deny 
that the exploitation of the rest of humanity would have to continue to 
be content with crumbs. Finally, who would dare to deny that the 
exploitation of nature has caused countless ecological catastrophes. But 
we do not need to be experts on the subject to understand that making 
this exploitation "more sensible" will not serve to prevent further 
catastrophes, but only to make them "more sensible". But is there such a 
thing as a "reasonable" ecological catastrophe? And in what parameters 
can it be measured?

A small war is better than a big war; being a billionaire is better than 
being a millionaire; limited catastrophes are better than prolonged 
catastrophes. How can we not see that along this path the social, 
political and economic conditions that make possible the outbreak of 
war, the accumulation of privileges and the continued occurrence of 
catastrophes will continue to perpetuate themselves? How can we not see 
that such a policy offers no even minimal practical benefit, that when 
the bucket is full to the brim, a single drop is enough to fill it? From 
the moment we give up questioning capitalism as a whole, common to all 
varieties of political regulation, and instead give preference to the 
simple comparison between different techniques of exploitation, the 
continuation of "evil" is guaranteed... Instead of asking ourselves 
whether we want to have a master to obey, we prefer to choose the master 
who beats us the least. In this way, every outburst, every agitation, 
every desire for freedom is reduced to a more gentle solution; instead 
of attacking the evils that poison us, we blame them on the excesses of 
the system. In this context, the more sharply these excesses are 
condemned, the more the social system that produces them is 
strengthened. The plague once again approaches this ideological 
disguise, leaving no way out. And while the question to be solved is how 
to manage domination, instead of considering the possibility of getting 
rid of it and figuring out how to do it, the logic of those who govern 
and guide us will continue to dictate the measures to be taken in 
relation to everything.

After the damage has been done, there cannot be any lack of mockery. 
With each tightening of the screw, we are assured that the result 
obtained cannot be worse than the previous one, that the policy pursued 
- always aimed at progress - will block the path of a more conservative 
policy, that after having suffered so many difficulties in silence, we 
are finally on the right track. From lesser evil to lesser evil, the 
countless reformists who have taken over this society push us from war 
to war, from catastrophe to catastrophe, from victim to victim. And 
because one accepts this humiliating logic of petty accounting and 
submission to the state, making calculations to weigh evil and other 
evil, the day may come when one will put one's own life on the scales: 
it is better to die immediately than to continue writhing on this earth. 
Surely this thought is the one that puts the weapon in the hand of the 
suicide bomber. Because a person holds their nose while voting in favor 
of the government, and eventually stops breathing.

As we have seen, remaining in the context of the lesser evil does not 
pose any particular difficulties; the difficulty begins the moment one 
leaves that context, the moment one destroys it. It is enough to state 
that between two evils the worst that can be done is to choose one of 
them, and lo and behold: the police knock on the door. When one is the 
enemy of every party, every war, every capitalist, every exploitation of 
nature, one can only appear suspicious in the eyes of the authorities. 
In fact, this is where subversion begins. The rejection of the politics 
of the lesser evil, the rejection of this socially imposed habit that 
makes one preserve one's existence instead of living it, inevitably 
leads to one putting at stake everything that the real world and its 
"necessity" deprive of meaning. Not that utopia is immune to the logic 
of the lesser evil - that is not guaranteed. During revolutionary 
periods, it is precisely this logic that has stopped the attacks of the 
rebels: when the storm rages and the waves threaten to sweep everything 
away, there is always some more realistic revolutionary who rushes to 
divert the popular anger towards more "reasonable" demands. After all, 
even a person who wants to turn the world upside down is afraid of 
losing everything. Even when none of it actually belongs to him.

https://www.anarchy.bg/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S  N E W S  S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en