Analyzing the Mind of the Left (pt. 3)

"One of the most insidious aspects of life under despotism is that it can create an existential ennui among the subject, a barely conscious layer of hopelessness and helplessness, which then becomes a tacit participation in allowing the despotism to continue."

First of all, Mr. Lewis, in his rush to dazzle you with his vernacular, misdefines "ennui." "Ennui" means boredom. What he meant to say was "malaise." That's the result of using a thesaurus in a vacuum without being sufficiently well-read to understand the contexts in which the word should be used. Ok, I'm nitpicking so let's move on...Let's crack these little nuts such as "existential ennui," ""barely conscious layer of hopelessness and helplessness," and "tacit participation allowing the depotism to continue." Again, "ennui" should be "malaise," but the use of the term "existential" is key to Lewis's point. The French existentialist, Albert Camus, is a hero of the Left. Camus joined the Algerian Communist Party in order to work politically towards expanding the rights of Algerians. Camus saw communism as a means to an end, but was never a devout Marxist-Leninist. Nevertheless, Camus' appeal to the Left arises from his commitment to revolting against one's state in life. Camus' philosophy, reduced to one sentence is: "Human beings are caught in a constant attempt to derive meaning from a meaningless world. This is the ‘paradox of the absurd’." Life is absurd because it has no meaning despite our heroic attempts to impose meaning on it without considering the possibility (and, in fact, dismissing out of hand the possibility) that life has no meaning at all. Without getting too far into the weeds, Camus believed that existential authenticity demands that we admit to ourselves that our plans and projects are for the most part hopeless and in vain – and struggle on regardless. This, for Camus, is existential revolt – to affirm the absurdity of life and continue. As Camus said:

"Revolt … is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity … [It] is certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation which ought to accompany it".

To sell his point, Camus used the attitude of revolt in the mythological figure of Sisyphus.

"The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain, whence the stone would fall back of its own weight. They had thought with some reason that there is no more dreadful punishment than futile and hopeless labor."

According to Camus, Sisyphus is heroic not because he suffers his fate, but because "he is superior to his fate." Sisyphus does not weep and lament his fate. Out of scorn for the gods who condemned him to this fate, he affirms his labor, and concludes that all is well. Fixing his eye on the stone at the bottom of the hill, he trudges down the slope to retrieve it. Camus says: "One must imagine that Sisyphus is happy."

To revolt is to affirm the absurdity of existence and continue. As Camus muses:

"It may be thought that suicide follows revolt – but wrongly. … [R]evolt gives value to life. … To a man devoid of blinders, there is no finer sight than that of the intelligence at grips with a reality that transcends it." (Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus).

(Note: Much of the above was plagiarized liberally from various websites on topic).

Lewis believes that the Egyptian people (pre-Jan. 25, 2011) were living in a state of abject existential malaise. They had very little meaning in their lives due to a natural reaction to 30 years of despotism (actually, the despotism predates Mubarak and his predecessor, Sadat. It goes all the way back to 1952 when the military deposed King Farouk-last scion of a 150 year dynasty, took over Egypt, and established a "republic" that was nothing more than a Soviet puppet-state. I assume that, since the original Egyptian revolution installed a communist-friendly regime that distanced itself from Russian influence only when President Sadat wisely decided to side with the US in the late '70s, Lewis doesn't want to tack on 28 more years to Egypt's history of oppression. In Lewis's mind, communism, by definition, can never be oppressive). In this barely conscious existence, the Egyptians knew they were oppressed, but had little motivation to throw off their chains. Then, according to Lewis, freedom surfaced ex nihilo in the malaise-stricken minds of the Egyptians and they knew a priori what path they needed to take towards democracy. Purely spontaneous, purely organic. Pure horse-hocky. Anyways, as the argument goes, the Egyptians have achieved existential authenticity by revolting and casting off the yoke of their oppressor. "I rebel; therefore, I exist" as Camus said.