LINGUISTICS AND SEMIOTICS AS MECHANISMS THAT GENERATE POLITICAL-IDEOLOGICAL SCHISMOGENESIS: THE USE OF THE WAR OF ALL AGAINST ALL FOR TOTALITARIAN DOMINATION - HOW THE PROGRAMMATIC STRUCTURE USED BY THE TOTALITARIAN MOVEMENTS OF THE 20TH CENTURY HAS INFLUENCED THE RADICAL IDENTITARIANISM OF THE EARLY 21ST CENTURY

Abstract

The use of rhetoric as an instrument of persuasion and domination is one of the most used practices throughout history. Its practice is portrayed and denounced by Socrates, Aristotle and Isocrates[1] against the Sophists[2]. Throughout this period, the tactics of getting listeners, readers and viewers to agree and follow certain ideas or even induce this audience to act in a certain way, changed according to the conditions of the environment without, however, losing their basic structural essences. Taking the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as an analytical approach, it is possible to affirm that several movements have emerged exploiting the struggle of all against all as a tactic to achieve maximum power over one or more social groups. From Soviet Bolshevism to radical identity movements, through Hitler's Nazism and Mussolini's fascism, tactics of distension of the social fabric, where "the other" is always seen from the perspective of irreconcilable difference,  symbolic apartheid, the ontological frontier, schismogenesis was used to accentuate – even if artificially – differences and, in this way,  destroy the balance between differences and any construction of possible social contracts. In this bet for conflict, social groups were criminalized or even decimated by the agents who promised the construction of a new world, a kind of golden age for "the chosen ones". Nevertheless, the final result of these events can be condensed into common characteristics: strengthening of the State as the sole social mediator; emergence of a corrupt and totalitarian bureaucratic caste; the kidnapping of individual autonomies, and; the shipwreck of the social concert.

[1] "Isocrates weaves his criticisms of the eristic sophists (§1-8), i.e., teachers of dialectical argumentation with a view solely to victory in a debate. The author claims that what they promise is a lie, hyperbolic and immoral, because they allegedly teach the disciples grandiose knowledge, such as the prediction of the future, happiness and justice, while not being ashamed to charge negligible amounts for such teachings. These sophists strangely distrust their students (isocratic irony), despite supposedly teaching such high moral virtues. According to Isocrates, therefore, they are nothing but impostors, for their words are nothing but 'gossip and idle talk' (ἀδολεσχία καὶ μικρολογία - §8)." (LACERDA, 2018, p. 69)

[2] "The Sophists are teachers who go from city to city in search of an audience, and who, for a convenient price, teach the well-to-do young Athenians to excel, by lessons in ostentation and by various courses and methods whose object is to make a certain thesis which they want to be accepted to win.

Truth, therefore, is replaced by the search for success and is based on the art of convincing, persuading and seducing.

Finally, the Sophists seek to achieve fame and wealth in the world and have become masters of eloquence and rhetoric, teaching men eager for political power how to achieve it, by way of persuasion." (VIDAL DE SOUZA, 2009, pp. 14 d 15)