Savage Thought and Totalitarianism

The concept of “savage thought” in the sense of Claude Lévi-Strauss is being discussed and applied to the magical context within which the discourse of the new right-wing movements is embedded gaining the quality of what we call “populism” for short. The role of digital media is discussed then in terms of a massive concentration of ideological information flow in the public domain. It is shown in particular that recent developments as to an enhancement of magical world-views can be re-traced to the explicit denial of the complexity that is necessarily encountered in the progressing motion of social evolution. The rational discourse of facticity is replaced then by the irrational discourse of mythology in order to find means of relief, discharge, and exculpation at the same time.