By his own statements, it’s safe to assume New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani spent a lot of his misspent education reading Trotsky and Guevara while skipping the likes of Le Carre, Jung, and Shakespeare.
The latter’s Iago, the greatest villain in the gathered history of drama, is well on his way to deceiving and painstakingly destroying his longtime friend of Othello, when he confides to the audience a most essential element of both his plan and his modus operandi:
“When devils will the blackest sins put on, they do suggest at first with heavenly shows.”
MAMDANI’S COLLECTIVIST VISION FOR AMERICA
Ignore the religious references, and The Bard’s master manipulator is simply explaining that evil hides behind smiles, kind words, and warm promises. Once the predetermined victims trust their false benefactor, the true nature of the predator emerges. Mamdani is known for a smile honed with strained dimples and lit with bleached teeth, but the sharp and sinister threat implicit in his most famous quote must not be ignored or misconstrued.
“We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.”
“Collectivism” is a glazed term for government owning the means of production. “Rugged individualism” values minimal government intervention in citizens’ lives. The wise observer should push the weary war between those concepts aside because the true horror of the statement is only fully revealed if one strips away partisan politics from its use and reception. Look past the Marxist implications. Disregard the attack on U.S. history. Read it again on a personal, human level.
Those words expressly call for the willful, even celebrated, destruction of the individual mind and spirit. The human ideal of self-fulfillment that gives birth to art, music, literature, aspiration, invention, and philanthropy will be disregarded and repressed in New York.
Consider the unchecked arrogance and malignant narcissism of the statement, and it becomes clear that Mamdani glossed over any study of Karl Jung and that giant intellect’s exploration of the shadow.
“Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.”
Mamdani and his drones are as far removed from their darker sides as they are from the working-class people they pretend to serve. The self-proclaimed prophets can do no wrong. They cannot be incorrect. They are the source of all that is good and just in New York and the world. If any of the endangered individuals out there dare to question their enlightened wisdom, the utter certainty of their pseudo-intellectual righteousness must devolve into attacks, repression, and fanaticism.
Enter the final quote Mamdani most assuredly avoided. In John Le Carre’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, his British protagonist, spy master George Smiley, predicts eventual victory over his opposite number in the KGB, the dedicated communist referred to as Karla.
“And that’s how I know he can be beaten. Because he’s a fanatic. And the fanatic is always concealing a secret doubt.”
One could argue that Le Carre did his Jungian homework as that giant of psychoanalysis himself wrote something very similar: “Behind every fanaticism lurks a secret doubt.” The guts of both statements warn that crusaders who seek to dominate the population and the policies controlling it — in this case, by attacking individualism — quietly fear that their policies are flawed and their plans will fail.
That fear leads to hostility and totalitarian force. When folks step forward and make it clear they claim their souls and wish to retain their identities — when they insist on remaining individuals simply for the sake of holding on to their self-esteem — Mamdani and his gathered cloud of smug elitists will turn on the people they claimed to welcome within their “warmth.”
Search for a moment in our species’ history when suppressing the individual will and the singular human spirit spoke well of a leader, a government, or a culture. Count the catastrophes committed against the innocent by dictators and regimes who decided they knew what was best for their misguided constituency with enough certainty to apply punishment until the citizenry got on board. Such punishment will come to New York should spines stiffen against the “collective.”
CHAMPAGNE SOCIALISM IS FORCED TO RAISE ITS GLASS TO ECONOMIC REALITY
As a cloud of groupthink and justified theft descends over the Chrysler Building, individuals face an age when they must defend their rights to remain individuals because there are clearly millions of voters in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and elsewhere with minds like empty rooms ready to be furnished with blind obedience and factory assembly-line conformity.
It’s for their own good.
John Scott Lewinski (@johnlewinski) is a writer based in Milwaukee.
