A Tale of Two Fantasies

He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you. -- Friedrich Nietzsche

Those who would compare President Bush to Osama Bin Laden do the former an injustice. Despite the fact that both men have brought enmity and hatred to the world, a president of the United States is chosen in free elections by millions of voters, in a democratic system that, despite its imperfections, far surpasses other, non-democratic methods of choosing leaders. Bin Laden is an unelected, self-appointed spiritual leader of a group of Islamic extremists and dissidents. And yet – surprisingly – the two men seem to have one thing in common: they are both fantasists.

In his recent NYT article, Without a Doubt, Ron Suskind touched a nerve of what's at stake in the coming election:

It is "a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion."

Suskind was not just talking about Al Qaeda and extremist Islam; he was also talking about George W. Bush and current American foreign and domestic policy. The article goes into considerable detail, touching on the personal experiences of people who know Bush well or have been close to the seat of power in this or previous administrations. It is a disturbing portrait of a man driven by an implicit belief in magic, mysticism and messages from God.

Referring to Suskind's article, another Internet contributor put it this way:

Throughout history, pretty much any time a group ends up with complete political power without any group to challenge them intellectually, people go nuts. They get drunk with their own power, believing the delusions that it's a "new world," that they create "new reality" out of sheer will, and that the rest of the world will be bystanders to their manifest destiny.


Blah blah blah. Heard it before.

Who else went down this road?

Commodus of Rome; more than a couple Popes; heads of the Holy Roman Empire; Charles IX of France; Shaka Zulu; the Nazi party; Mao; Pol Pot, the list unfortunately goes on. (Source)

Another revealing piece in the Bush fantasy puzzle, for example, comes from an article entitled Bush's Messiah Complex in The Progressive:

A picture emerges from the President's public statements--and even from such adulatory accounts as Bob Woodward's Bush at War and David Frum's The Right Man--of a President on a divine mission. Call it messianic militarism.

An even more disturbing view of Bush can be found in Culture, Religion, Apocalypse, and Middle East Foreign Policy by Chip Berlet & Nikhil Aziz:

It’s hard to believe, but the Bush administration’s foreign policy and the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq are influenced by the writings of a cave-dwelling hermit who had apocalyptic visions some 2000 years ago.

These snapshots portray an American president who seems to believe he is on a messianic mission, who elevates faith to the status of a magic panacea and dismisses reason and empiricism as obstacles to action, obstacles in the path of divine will. Faced with a world of complexities in which black and white are not realistic guides to analysis and policy, George W. Bush seems to see "the evil that men do" but fails to grasp the fact that he has created his own fantasy world of foreign policy to deal with the problem – a world that may be a greater threat to friends than to foes.

In a dramatic turn of election events, television viewers yesterday witnessed another fantasist, Osama Bin Laden, the outcast Saudi merchant who has taken it upon himself to lead an extremist Islamic crusade against the West in general and America, in particular. While Bush is busy recreating his own fantasy world, Bin Laden and his not-so-merry band of Al Qaeda extremists draw on a fantasy tradition that goes back thousands of years.

In Al Qaeda’s Fantasy Ideology by Lee Harris (writing at Tech Central), the author described the nature of what he calls "fantasy ideology":

To an outside observer, the fantasist is clearly attempting to compensate by means of his fantasy for the shortcomings of his own present reality — and thus it is tempting to think of the fantasist as a kind of Don Quixote impotently tilting at windmills. But this is an illusion. Make no mistake about it: The fantasist often exercises great and terrible power precisely by virtue of his fantasy.

Harris goes on to show that the real danger of a fantasist is when there is "an entire group – a sect, a people or even a nation" caught up in such a fantasy world. It is precisely the lack of political realism on the part of such groups that feeds the fantasy – and the chief fantasist.

In reviewing these fantasy ideologies, especially those associated with Nazism and Italian fascism, there is always the temptation for an outside observer to regard their promulgation as the cynical manipulation by a power-hungry leader of his gullible followers. This is a serious error, for the leader himself must be as much steeped in the fantasy as his followers: He can only make others believe because he believes so intensely himself.

Now we have the spectacle of Bin Laden apparently rising from the dead, cautioning the American public that it does not matter who they choose for president, unless America changes its foreign policy in the Middle East. His words and ideas comprise yet another fantasy: his futile belief that Americans will give in to the blackmail of terror and violence. The fantasist does not seem to comprehend that such rhetoric only inspires people to fight for what they perceive to be right – just as the Bin Ladens of the world seem to be inspired to fight for what they perceive to be right.

The problem for the American presidential election is not that Bin Laden is offering unsolicited advice to the electorate. Rational people do not debate democracy with people who want to overthrow democracy by force. The problem is that the electorate may not fully appreciate the inherent dangers of people who build fantasy worlds and then try to act them out in the real one. Bin Laden acted out his ultimate fantasy by attacking America successfully on 9/11. Although Bush at first responded realistically and, in so doing, garnered the solidarity of virtually the entire world, his fantasy vision soon got the best of him. He began to talk incoherently of an "axis of evil", identifying countries that had nothing to do with 9/11, a fantasy ideology that culminated in the invasion of Iraq – the ultimate Bush fantasy.

Fantasy worlds proceed from a rejection of scientific thinking, from a belief in mystical "feelings", from "gut feelings" and religious "certainty". As Kerry rightly pointed out during one of the debates, "you can be certain but you can also be wrong."

Let there be no doubt that America is the attacked, not the attacker in this issue. For all his lack of understanding of world complexities, Bush is not the moral equivalent of Bin Laden. But, in trying to construct a fantasy world of his own, as a fantasist himself, Bush fails to understand the basic threat posed by other fantasists. He refuses to see the struggle against terrorism as an international, criminal issue, driven by poverty, injustice and despair on the part of millions of people on earth. Instead, he sees it as a crusade, a battle of good and evil, a showdown between "them" and "us".

Unfortunately, that is also how Bin Laden sees it.

As we near election eve, we are left with the images of two fantasists, each with his own vision of what the world should be like, each with his own belief in 14th century values, each with his own potential to ignite the world and destroy civilization, each with his own inerrant brand of mysticism – a sad, sombre tale of two fantasies.