Hitler Masturbating
Consider Dalí’s 1973 painting, Hitler Masturbating. Horse-like phantasms uphold a chair while Hitler, turned away from the viewer, makes a tell-tale motion with his right hand. The scene around him is a desolate winter. A single raven looks on.
Dalí, fascist-flirtatious in the most charitable of readings, outright pro-fascist in others, pointed out something worth understanding. This will be of little consolation to those who will die, to those who have died each time the grand seizure of power grips the world.
If you look at the models Hitler took, the heroes he upheld as great, they all lost. Every time they were bound to some great purpose, they failed. The great man of history always forgets that the hero’s narrative includes hubris. A rise must include a fall.
Hitler loved art he didn't understand and would have been a fine painter at any given American art walk, the appetite there for knock-off Kuromi dolls and R2-D2s and Mickey Mouses painted like Kinkaids.
Consider the love for Wagnerian opera:
Tannhäuser cannot escape the world he has seen. Tristan cannot escape death; he longs for it, wills it. Meistersinger is often misunderstood, its spectacle overtaking its message of artistic evolution. Wagner, frequently labeled as reactionary, here argues instead for continuity—his response to those who accused him of abandoning tradition. He saw the pomp and spectacle but forgot as so many people do the message behind the piece: love for the tradition but desire to move forwards and innovate with love.
In a real way then, Hitler is the predecessor of the Star Wars fan who decries its “wokeness”, the comic fan mad that Captain America hates Nazis. If this seems slight and reductionist, you aren't paying attention.
What Dali pointed out is that this is masturbation. And that this masturbation has one purpose: which is indeed, to fail, and to die.
Therefore, in answer to why Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and other people in power cannot simply retire to their gold-hoards like the dragons of old content in their money and power, and must use their influence, their power and control in the same way, I suggest the concept of the psychotic necroaddiction to power and privilege. A chronic kind of masturbation desperate to escape death.
Terms must be defined, clearly. In this case we mean that psychosis is a break from reality: being so locked into a belief system that nothing can change it. The reversal here is that psychosis is not the term for those that cannot fit into the greater societal order (a la Foucault's reckoning), but the revelation that those who try to uphold the order do so beyond sanity. By Necroaddiction we mean a death-drive, a refusal to give up the fix even as it is destroying everything around one. And what is it that these privilege and powerful people are so addicted to? What is their fix?
It is to the power and the privilege.
We can again appeal metaphorically to the stories of dragons of old. What needs a dragon with gold? And yet, should you take enough, even just enough to feed a community, the dragon will burn everything down unto its very death.
(Aside: Do not mistake this for the kind of pop culture nonsense of the fascists' daddy was absent, didn't love him, rejected him.Warren Buffet is not giving up so much of his wealth that he stops being Warren Buffet. A nice fascist is still a fascist, regardless of stating the “right opinions”. The necroaddiction is a corruption of the wealth, as sure as Lord Acton would never give up being a lord.)
I detest that here we must make a Kierkegaardian leap into faith, but there is nothing to be done to justify it. Faith itself requires that justifications ignore logic.
But there is a precedent here. Antonio Gramsci described it as “Pessimism of the Intellect. Optimism of the Will.”
Things are bad. The dragons are rising. Hitler is gripping his cock again, eyes glazed over, junky shivering in the bodies of Trump, Musk, their followers...
But the story they tell always ends the same way. They cannot imagine anything else. They cannot escape the necroaddiction.
Too many will die, yet again, for that is what they are addicted to, the power that the death of others brings them.
This has already happened; it is true that we are in the midst of multiple genocides conducted by those in power.
But an addict who will not rehab dies—never quickly enough, but always. Every single time. This is the one thing that cannot be escaped no matter how fanciful your pyramid.
So we can understand the pessimism. But we must take that faith-leap into optimism—not by waiting for change, but by insisting it can happen. Not just speaking out, never just that—though from each we ask what they are good at (writers to write, painters to paint, organizers to organize)—but in choosing to resist and believe something. Choosing to believe that this world will not always belong to the dragons. That their necroaddiction will burn itself out before it burns out everything else. That there is something after them.
And choosing that what we can offer, our craft, is the best contribution to the town defense.
A far smarter comrade in the struggle, one who faced far more than this writer ever has explained it so well in one of the most loved poems of all time.
So I will ask in the voice of il miglior fabrio:
Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete?