Solipsism to Nihilism:
A “Ceaușescu Moment”?

Nicolae Ceaușescu and his wife shortly before their televised execution on December 25, 1989.

2,188 words

“A regime built on lies always ends in collapse.” — Z-Man, “An Empire of Lies”

Solipsism: a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing.

I’ve been wondering lately: Will there be a “Ceaușescu Moment,” American style, sometime soon for the patriots to celebrate — clearing the rubble out of the ruins and starting over? By “Ceaușescu Moment” I refer to the sudden, unexpected collapse of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Romanian Communist regime in 1989, a regime built on lies. The only Communist tyrant during the Soviet empire’s collapse in 1989-1991 to get what he deserved was Ceaușescu who, for lots of interesting reasons, got considerable attention from Richard Nixon.

This “Communist theoretician of genius,” along with his wife Elena — portrayed as “Mother of the Nation” and, despite having only had an elementary education, a master chemist — were put before a firing squad of eager volunteers from their own country, one they had thoroughly plundered and whose people they had tyrannized for decades. Elena’s parting riposte to one of the soldiers leading her to face the firing squad was “Go fuck your mother,”[1] a graceful flourish in the final strains of the Ceauşescu-Danube waltz of Romanian socialism and a fitting trope for the conscientious stewardship of the decades of Communist vision and leadership.

Reflecting upon Nicolae and Elena’s final days, and more broadly on the fall of the Soviet Union and its vassal states, leads one to ponder the similarities of those elites in their sunset days with those of our own ruling class, also well into their dotage. The Soviet empire had their caboodle of mummified, political antiques: Leonid Brezhnev, Erich Honecker (East Germany), Todor Zhivkov (Bulgaria), Wojciech Jaruzelski (Poland), and, of course, Ceaușescu. Compare them to our own motley crew of long-in-the-tooth party hacks with decades-long careers of self-enrichment, their snouts thrust deep in the public trough: Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch O’Connell, Dianne Feinstein, Maxine Waters, the Clintons, and many others. They have been in power for so long. so immersed in nepotism, graft, and self-aggrandizement, that they no longer have the remotest contact with a world in which people actually play by the rules and struggle to make do with what they earn by their own honest efforts.

Think of the Ceaușescu Moment as the unraveling of the solipsistic cocoon woven by the ruling class elites who have detached themselves from the people they rule over and stubbornly resist the intrusion of reality. The solipsist believes that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existent thing. In power, that “Self” under its own constant modifications remains invincibly blind to the conspicuously brutal reality of its own failures, recognizing nothing but the illusory glorious movement of its own journey to perfection.

The 2008 presidential campaign season was an orgy of unabashed political solipsism. The deservingly unpopular Bush was served up as the benighted antipode to an unblemished Obama, a uniquely singular individual (The One), morally and cognitively complete, a phantasm proclaiming that “We are the change we seek.” Obama thus became a totality, both the question and the answer, that Self outside of which nothing else could be important or relevant. There was no “We” in that chant that caused maidens to faint at the stops of his traveling carnival show — fake Greek pillars and all — that was the centerpiece of his presidential campaign. There was only Obama himself mirroring the “Genius of Obama” to be held in contemplation, admiration, and . . . anticipation.

In an astonishing spasm of adolescent-like infatuation, Evan Thomas, Newsweek’s chief editor, captured the spell: “Obama’s standing above the country, above the world, he’s sort of God.” What sort of God he happened to be was never made clear, but the Gods exist to be worshipped and admired, not analyzed or criticized — not this one, anyway.

Once elected, however, The One could not avoid revealing that his potent elixir of Hope and Change was smoke and mirrors. Hope and Change could be nothing other than nothing because nothing, after the fumes of his soaring oratory dissipated, was what Obama was offering in the way of a better America. Like all of the other solipsistic princes, his modifications of Self produced nothing that made his subjects, other than his friends and political cronies, any better off.

The disappointment that inevitably follows in the wake of a solipsistic Self in power’s shortcomings \ turns into a rather ugly spectacle of blame and resentment fueled by lies. The Self is perfect. Thus, the gross disparity between imaginary perfection and grim reality that inevitably occurs cannot be the doing or fault of the Self. With the arrival of the dashed, high expectations and the unfulfilled promises, someone must be blamed — those who have failed to recognize his genius and conform to his perfect understanding; those “bitter clingers,” for example, disparaged by Obama, preening before his adoring Hollywood admirers.

The great solipsists have always been prodigious blamers. There is nothing else practically for them to do, and when the time for it comes . . . be careful. For the misery of his realm, Stalin blamed the “wreckers” and “Trotsky”; Mao, the “capitalist roaders” and “running dog imperialists”; and for Castro, it was “Uncle Sam.” Obama blamed George Bush, the Republicans, the European financial crisis, and in the twilight days of his reign, the “racism in our [white people’s] DNA.” Obama’s legacy hangs over us like a poisoned cloud, an unremitting source of turmoil and discontent. An abstraction of defamation — “systemic racism” — infects, we are constantly reminded, every crevice of American society, now and forever more. Just this week, with the hot summer months looming, the ex-President, no doubt hoping to rally the troops for more “mostly peaceful protests,” dropped such a reminder:

In the aftermath of his [George Floyd’s] murder [sic], a new generation of activists rose up to channel their anguish into organized action, launching a movement to raise awareness of systemic racism and the need for criminal justice and police reform.

Obama’s words of wisdom usually require translation. “A new generation of activists rose up to channel their anguish into organized action” should be rendered: “The usual crowd from ‘the hood’ headed for the malls to channel their hopes for free stuff into organized theft.”

You can buy Stephen Paul Foster’s novel Toward the Bad I Kept on Turning here.

Given that the colossal propaganda machinery is at full throttle, one has to wonder how “awareness of systemic racism” could be raised any higher than it already has been. A visitor from Mars after a week’s stay would have to conclude that white people are the most wicked, malevolent force on the planet. To convert the abstraction of “systemic racism” into something concrete and more suitable for the production of flesh-and-blood scapegoats, “systemic racism” now presents itself in the form of “white supremacists.” They threaten yet another abstraction –“our democracy” — manufactured and ballyhooed about to distract attention away from the cascading failures, incompetence, and corruption of the bosses. There is always a scapegoat du jour, and now it is white people. The eight years of his reign brought into clear focus those who were always the objects of solipsist-Obama’s acid resentment.

The solipsism stage of the cult-of-personality Obama era, however, has moved into the nihilism stage of the Biden era. Obama’s personality cult was non-transferable — especially not to the crooked, charmless harridan he tapped to succeed him, and most certainly not to a decrepit life-long grifter in the throes of dementia now wandering aimlessly in his slippers around the White House. The “We are the World” “idealism” that was attached to a youthful magic negro has degenerated into a depressing confection of the purest cynicism and shameless, shoulder-shrugging corruption. The rulers now treat the ruled-over as enemies with a fear and contempt they don’t even bother to hide. The 2021 Presidential Inauguration ceremony, with the masked-up stars of the show conducted behind concertina wire and surrounded by military troops, could not have been more emblematic of illegitimate, corrupted power.

The Clintons remain the archetype for corrupt cynics. Their long reign over the Democrat party served to complete its transmogrification into an association that most closely resembles those that engage in organized crime. A cynic is one who has given up on the truth. He sees everyone as a liar, a fraud, or a dupe. The cynic, unlike the skeptic, is a believer, but can only bring himself to believe the worst of others. He concedes the entire expanse of humanity to the liar and his dupes. There are no other categories to envision or employ. He resolves to be the one who does the duping, not the dupe; hence the resort to lying as standard operating procedure, committed so routinely, brazenly, and confidently that it becomes the norm.

It’s what we came to expect; it’s what we always got from the Clintons. Hillary Clinton’s infamous Benghazi Senate testimony riposte to Ron Johnson, “What difference does it make?”, is a succinct formulation with a raised, middle-finger exclamation point of the Clinton doctrine of ethical accountability. In the cynic’s world, everyone is on his own — one does whatever one has to do. The person of integrity is a dupe and a loser; deceit and corruption rule.

The late-nihilist stage of the Biden era points to the possibility of a Ceaușescu Moment, that moment when the mass of lies that gives a weak simulacrum of legitimacy to a clueless ruling class finally comes to be openly repudiated, and the regime is toppled.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, in his 1974 “Letter to Soviet Leaders,” poured out his revulsion with this lying, corrupt regime. “This universal, obligatory, force-feeding with lies is now the most agonizing aspect of existence in our country — worse than all our material miseries, worse than any lack of civil liberties.”

That regime staggered on another 15 years before the death throes set in. Now in 2022, the “obligatory, force-feeding with lies” is what we are subjected to daily as we experience the extinction of our civil liberties. “Our democracy” is what our geriatric oligarchs tell us they are “protecting.” It is what they call the current system, one in which the bosses make the rules they exempt themselves from, rules that they arbitrarily use to reward their clients and punish their critics.

The force-fed lies become more blatant, more defiant of the real world’s constraints: men can decide to be women, and resistance to it is bigotry; high rates of black underachievement and criminality are the exclusive fault of white people; “whiteness” is a moral defect; open-doors, Third World immigration will make America a better country; diversity is our strength; any criticism of Israel and Jews leads directly to another “Holocaust.” What we are now expected to believe is a web of lies constructed to uphold the superstition of human equality. It has not been realized only because white people refuse to surrender their “privilege.”

Joe Biden resembles Nicolae Ceaușescu not least in amassing a family fortune while pretending to be a public servant. Like Ceaușescu near the end, he is a spent husk, out of touch, unable to comprehend why everything around him is falling apart, much less having the wherewithal to do something about it. The economy is cratering with raging inflation and basic shortages. The invasion from the Third World continues unabated. The debacle of Afghanistan continues to loom, and worries abound that he will blunder the country into World War III.

Biden’s handlers appear to be increasingly nervous as the core of his supporters who do not consider him to be non compos mentis appears to be rapidly dwindling. What to do? Behind him in succession, the cackling simpleton, Kamala Harris; then the 82-year-old, botoxed Nancy Pelosi, who often appears to be drunk. She is Brezhnev with a vagina, minus the bulk and 40 pounds of fake medals on her chest. After Pelosi comes 82-year-old Senator Patrick Leahy, another party-serving mediocrity whose cognitive horsepower might rival Joe Robinette’s.

As we head into the summer months and toward the fall election, look for spiraling energy and gas prices, shortages of essentials, black rioting and looting, and another pandemic with the reemergence of Trofim Lysenko Fauci to order us about. How much credibility do the managers of “our democracy” have left? How many more lies on top of the lies?

Once again, Solzhenitsyn: a passage from his “Letter” that describes our current slide into the abyss:

Everything is steeped in lies and everybody knows it, and says so openly in private conversation, and jokes and moans about it, but in their official speeches they go on hypocritically parroting what they are “supposed to say,” and with equal hypocrisy and boredom read and listen to the speeches of the others: how much of society’s energy is squandered on this!

Perhaps a Ceaușescu Moment is in the cards. If so, the nihilist elites will be in disarray and running for cover. They will be done for; another class of elites will step in. It could be a good moment.

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Note

[1] Victor Sebestyen, Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire (New York: Vintage Books, 2009), p. 5.