‘Buddhism teaches the concept of “manifesting one’s true nature.” This means to reveal your genuine self, your true inherent potential and bring it to shine, illuminating all around you. It refers to your most refined individuality and uniqueness.’
—Ikeda Sensei.1
‘New Age wisdom, too, relies on the superego imperative: “It is your duty to achieve full self-realisation and self-fulfilment, because you can.” Isn’t this why we often feel that we are being terrorised by the New Age language of liberation?’
—Slavoj Žižek.2
In 1938 world-renowned Zen Buddhist D. T. Suzuki claimed that ‘Zen could be wedded to almost any political ideology, fascism included.’3 Immediately afterwards Karlfried Graf Dürckheim began to prove the truth of his future teacher’s statement. Dürckheim’s work before and after 1945 showed that Zen was compatible with at least two ideologies – Nazism and liberal individualism. He showed Zen could buttress two distinctive belief systems that both emphasise human potential and rely on narcissism. Ego-ideals, both in the form of the ‘race soul’ and the individual soul, could coexist with Zen ideas. And in Dürckheim’s capable hands they thrived when combined with Zen. Commanding us to ‘manifest our true nature,’ our ‘potential,’ Zen helped to justify the vaulting ambition central to each ideology.
When his Nazi days were over Dürckheim presented himself as a thoroughly apolitical character. His political abstention is an illusion. As Slavoj Žižek has argued, the ‘Western Buddhism’ of people like Dürckheim has an ideological function. It enables our complicity with otherwise intolerable systems and situations. For Žižek, Western Buddhism is not a remedy but a ‘perfect ideological supplement’ for the ‘stressful tension of capitalist dynamics.’ It tells us to ‘renounce the very endeavour to retain control’ over our lives, societies and technologies. It says we should let ourselves go and ‘drift along, while retaining an inner distance and indifference toward the mad dance of accelerated process.’ It also makes this distance possible through its schizoid assertion that no world process really concerns ‘the innermost kernel of our being.’ Western Buddhism, a belief system that has become the hegemonic ideology of global capitalism, thereby enables full participation in ‘the frantic pace of the capitalist game’ because it sustains ‘the perception that you are not really in it; that you are well aware of how worthless this spectacle is; and that what really matters to you is the peace of the inner Self to which you know you can always withdraw.’4
Žižek’s argument is simple. If we believe an unimpeachable, peaceful centre lies within our depths we can abandon ourselves to the play of political and economic forces, for we know that the most important part of ourselves will always be preserved. The Western Buddhist can always remain calm even among the terror, violence and confusion of contemporary capitalism. He can fully participate in global consumer culture without hesitation or fear. Or, to borrow one of David Bowie’s self-descriptions, he can comfortably become a ‘populist and postmodernist Buddhist surfing5 his way through the chaos of the late 20th century.’6
Western Buddhism’s attitude of detachment and passivity is not beyond politics. Rather it is innately political – and it doesn’t only help us ‘drift along’ passively. As Dürckheim noted, Zen Buddhism helps create the ‘typical Japanese synthesis’ of a ‘passive experience of God’ with ‘willpower and determined action.’7 Zen allows people to give themselves to forces outside the self, and so enables our surrender to committed action and movement. Western Buddhism does not only help us withdraw from capitalist reality, then. It also supports the distinctly narcissistic/schizoid combination of savage ambition, detached cynicism and affectless efficiency common to those who achieve great success in a world of human capitalism – the 21st century schizoid man’s cold-blooded ruthlessness. There is a reason meditation became standard practice for Silicon Valley CEOs in the 2010s.8 Zen supported the valour and self-sacrifice of Japanese soldiers in WWII; it did the same for those who must endure the brutal world of entrepreneurial ambition. Dürckheim’s philosophy of detachment is a prophylactic for the ravages of total-work; it helps to solve the psychological crises of human capitalism while preserving the narcissism it requires. Like Peterson’s work, Dürckheim’s philosophy enables the culture of potential. First, submit yourself to the punishing regime of total-work, it says. The terror and stress you feel will deliver you to Divine Being. Then, let its maternal oneness manifest in all your actions and embrace a state of constant meditation. Animated by its motherly power, you will be able to work at peak efficiency at all hours of the day and maximise your economic and psychic income. Regress, it says, and you shall ascend.
Since WWII people have called Dürckheim a ‘spiritual leader,’ a ‘therapist’ and a ‘philosopher.’ In truth the sole constant of his life was his complicity with whatever authority he happened to be submit himself to. Whatever spiritual rebirth he may have had we cannot forget this fact – above all he was a handmaiden to hegemony. As a member of the Third Reich, Dürckheim’s work naturalised and defended the violent, ethnic narcissism of the völkisch movement. And in the post-war world, with his superficially apolitical ideas of human universalism, he promoted the individualistic narcissism of the post-war neoliberal movement which began but a few years after he published The Way of Transformation. Before anything else Dürckheim was a propagandist, an ideologist, a talented advocate for his society.
Dürckheim fluently combined dogmatism with ideological flexibility. Doing so, he illuminates some vital facts about the ante-fascist phenomenon. Like David Bowie, he shows the porousness of these ideologies; his intellectual evolution inverts the ante-fascist trajectory observed in Kanye West and Jordan Peterson. His work and life also show the uncomfortable closeness of liberalism and fascism, ideologies that are united in their reliance on narcissism. Narcissism is both the psychic architecture of each ideology and the lexical cognate within their ‘explicit ideological texts.’ Though they differ in many ways, Dürckheim shows that, in some ways, these ideologies are the same.
Narcissism is the bridge that links the fascist and the liberal.
← 20th Century Schizoid Man (Part V)
Footnote
https://www.daisakuikeda.org/sub/quotations/theme/life-potential.html
Žižek, S (1999) ‘You May!’: The Post-modern Superego. London Review of Books, 21(6).
Baier, K. (2013) The Formation and Principles of Count Dürckheim’s Nazi Worldview and his interpretation of Japanese Spirit and Zen. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 11(48), pp.1-33.
Žižek, S. (2001) Western Marxism to Western Buddhism. Cabinet Magazine, 2.
An interesting choice of words, especially as Deleuze, whom Žižek described as ‘the ideologist of late capitalism’ believed that surfing ‘the sport’ of our era. See Organs Without Bodies, pp.163-164.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/david-bowies-buddhist-david-rang-me-up-and-said-i-have-a-very-bi/
Baier, K. (2013) The Formation and Principles of Count Dürckheim’s Nazi Worldview and his Interpretation of Japanese Spirit and Zen. The Asia-Pacific Journal, 11(48), pp.1-33