Masturbation and Alternate History
Alternate history as a blow-up doll
One thing that has been common in many social circles, especially the hyperpolitical, is the obsession with disguising what’s essentially an alt-history workshop as true political discourse. The malaise of Liberal Capitalism has caused many to stop looking toward possible futures and instead fetishistically worship the past. George Orwell’s Notes of Nationalism gets somewhat into this:
”Every nationalist is haunted by the belief that the past can be altered. He spends part of his time in a fantasy world in which things happen as they should – in which, for example, the Spanish Armada was a success or the Russian Revolution was crushed in 1918 – and he will transfer fragments of this world to the history books whenever possible.”
But instead of this being specific to just the petty nationalists, this has been expanded to the entire fringe. Constantly reliving a false history because it provides some sense of ideological comfort. This becomes the most overt when looking at how alternate history has played into the discourse. The revival and reappraisal of syndicalism result from the Hearts of Iron 4 mod Kaiserreich, the whole wave of fascists, monarchists, and anarchists being coined from a simple video game. It could be viewed as a great coup d’etat of propaganda. Still, the mod for the game never really existed to sell the ideologies, more place them into a new context where they could, in fiction, fully actualize to become their near ideal states. This allows the politico to insert themselves into making whatever ideology they view as their fix to breathe artificially.
These artificial breaths from the ideology allow the person to view it as a living and breathing entity. Something to be lusted after, this isn’t specific to Hearts of Iron 4, but all alternate history. The lust is like fetishistic pornography, specifically, any fetish that cannot be reasonably created in reality, something that is just out of the grasp of the individual to make it that much more erotic. It becomes a fetish in and of itself, something they need to buy idols of to make this Golem of an ideology feel real. Wanting it to provide the stimulation they think it should give them, but just as the fetishist can never actualize their sexual inclinations, the person so invested in this ideological specter is stuck.
The vast chasm between material and ideal keeps them from their love, so they must work their darling into other parts of the world. Awkwardly bringing up alternate realities where they get to be the light bringer of this great idea to the world, caught up in either literature or the chore of constant world-building. Maintenance for their love builds into bringing it into discourse, the idea others must recognize this fiction as the ideal, as the thing to strive for. They want others to suck on the teat of the golem, filling their mouths with clay, and to smile and pat them on the back, to thank the politico for whoring out their hand-made love.
It becomes a way for these ideologies to proliferate, some of them being complete fictions that start to turn from clay to flesh. Man has become God, breathing life into dust, not for the sake of creation but out of his yearning and lust for belief. Fictions must be made real because reality denies them the hedonism of the flesh, so they must create their own flesh to fuck. Often this flesh, this thin dermis, is used to mask some deeper belief with an already attached ideology, something more milquetoast than what they crave. Akin to the fetishistic furry requiring the fursuit to cover the human form to embrace their eroticism or the inflation fetishist using balloons to create the illusion of what they desire. The balloon is a flag, a uniform, and a personal manifesto meant to perfectly align with the alternate history of the world they wished to have seen. This world exists only in their mind, how they imagine the day-to-day in this alternate history, this work of fiction, but the validation and orgasm from it is very much real and reifies the attraction.
Often, when that desire culminates, and one tries to make it real, it falls flat. The balloons, fursuit, and flag never match that deep desire; they’re just a simulacrum of what could be if only. But there is no way to make it match that ideal. The material base denies them that actualization, leaving them frustrated, edged by the idea of what could’ve been, no, what should’ve been.
Something worth saying, though, is this fetishism exists inside all ideological structures, not specific to alternate history by any means; all ideologies create these golems, something to act as their ideal, something to bring them closer to actualization. However, alternate history is the most overt version of this. There’s a way to whitewash the belief systems and make them look more closely to what the individual wants than whatever the ideology stood for or would naturally result in. This is where the new wave of politicos fit in, inoculated by online alternate histories that turn murder factories into utopias. It’s how the insane contradictions of identities can form; things that should inherently conflict are forced to fit together because they complete the blow-up doll of the ideology.
The only reason this is an issue is that the person never innovates on the ideology; they revise it and try to make it seem like it was never against what they believe to be true. For example, the idea that the fascists were never homophobic, so it’s okay to be a gay nazi, to absorb all other parts of nazi ideology completely and only excrete out the homophobia. The excrement is never acknowledged, this pile of shit festering in the corner of the person’s eye. They refuse to clean it up because that means they’ll have to change the fantasy that the past wasn’t perfect and the false future of their victory isn’t a utopia. The evolution beyond romanticism into pure doublethink, the doublethink that makes it seem like the objects they use for their fetishism are enough, that base level of delusion that slowly erodes away as the orgasm gets weaker, less intense, and less rewarding. As it fades away, they find their new story, their new ism, their new golem to start the process all over again.