Error Incarnate

Part 4 sets the stage for the final analysis of conspiracy thinking and paranoid cast integral to fascism and fascisizing tendencies. It does this through a philosophical inquiry into error, in a form that is built into the workings of perception, as theorized by Spinoza, Susanne Langer, and Whitehead. This existential rootedness makes error an “objective illusion”–an embodied perspective–not a subjective delusion. The error consists in a misattribution of linear causality that relays into the logic of the general idea. The misattribution of cause leads to a focus on blame, and the logic of the general idea projects the blame onto social identity categories. The identity categories are superimposed on individuals, reducing them to their resemblance to the category, factoring out singularity and variation. This dynamic underpins racism and other prejudiced thinking. The antidote is a thinking of complex, relational causality supported by the new logic of the collective singular.