21. VI 2023
The Pataphysics of Capitalist Experience
Underneath all reason lies delirium. Reason is a region cut out of the irrational. The rational is always the rationality of an irrational. (Felix Guattari)
Alfred Jarry was a nineteenth century French symbolist, poet, playwright and connoisseur of the grotesque in the turn of the century Paris. After his short and turbulent anarchic existence (he died at the age of 34 in 1907), marked with self-conscious buffoonery, substance abuse, and illness, he left a legacy which, according to many, has paved the way for the emergence of the Theatre of the Absurd half a century after his death. Celebrated (posthumously) for his Ubu Roi, Jarry also published stories, novels, and poems, but the brilliant imagery and wit of his works usually lapse into incoherence and meaningless and often scatological symbolism[1]. Out of that apparent incoherence emerged pataphysics as the idea that envelops his opus. It was originally conceived as the “science” of imaginary phenomena governed by the laws of exception intended to liberate concepts from the confines of their strict meaning. Concerned with the world which is superimposed onto our reality, pataphysics relates to metaphysics the way metaphysics relates to physics.
From a pataphysical angle, a concept is determined by the boundaries of its absurdity and exists within those boundaries without necessarily being uniquely defined. Instead of the epistemological inaccessibility of their unique semiotic assignment, concepts exhibit ontological fuzziness. The consensus meaning is just one of many points on the manifold of possible interpretations inside the space inscribed by the boundaries of absurdity, determined by the context, zeitgeist, or political utility of the moment, and can vary as these factors change.
Impossible exchange
Capitalism is a phenomenon that demands a pataphysical framework. Its pathologies are the symptom of its normal functioning, an indication of what is wrong with its underlying premises. Capitalism cannot be both complete and self-consistent at the same time. It is absurd if it is either too successful or if it fails. Its most prominent feature is the unusually flexible and efficient adaptability. If it encounters obstacles to its survival, capitalism will mutate and find a way to overcome them (irrespective of costs). If the impediments resist the change, it will destroy everything along the way, even its own blood supply, only to preserve its technical consistency in the short run. These aspects outline the contours of its boundaries of absurdity. Everything inside these boundaries can be capitalism at one time or another.
Capitalism is a self-cannibalizing, antisocial project. It systematically generates excess population – people who fall through the cracks and cannot be reintegrated into the normal functioning of society. In capitalism, everything – economics, politics, law, religion, language, aesthetics – gradually converges towards this self-cannibalizing mode of functioning. Capitalist economy does not describe the real world but, instead, creates its own reality where society is treated as a diseased body and people are threatened with recession, depression, unemployment, or inflation if their behavior does not align with capitalism’s diktat.
Capitalism breathes inherent non-equivalence and, with time, it loses track of any external points of reference and becomes fully self-referential. It will aspire to account for all of reality, ultimately extinguishing our ability to imagine capitalism’s end, the world without capitalism, or any possible alternatives.
Capitalist uprising (Extending the boundaries of absurdity)
So, what happens when a capitalist system has come to an end, when self-cannibalization had been completed and there is nothing left to cannibalize anymore? When all possibilities inside the existing boundaries of absurdity have been exhausted and all defensive strategies used up and no longer working, the system will desire to liberate itself from the tyranny of facts and truth. The rules of the game will have to change and the boundaries of absurdity extend in order to make room for novel self-serving narratives.
In critical times, which demand social changes, any prospective alternative system is supposed to offer a way of imagining the crisis. There will be a public contest for the most plausible narrative that explains it. However, at that point, our imagination will have been reduced to possibilities defined by the existing system and we will no longer have a language to express alternatives.
The recent global shift to the Right has been a response to the crisis of capitalism consisting largely of the well-known tried-and-failed narratives and stillborn ideas already rejected by history. This mission was designed to rescue capitalism from itself and as an experiment intended to test the validity of alternative forms of social organization. As much as they like to pretend otherwise, the political center has effectively remained committed to preserving the basic tenets of capitalism at any cost. They have remained remarkably consistent with their past modes of functioning and continue to do what they had been doing all along, i.e. making their constituents governable.
In the times of rapid disappearance of the middle class and its precarization, the two centrist wings were forced to reprioritize. The Left Center has embraced the rapidly growing minority groups, people who have been systematically marginalized through the entire American history, never fully accepted to the mainstream of society, but have now grown to become an important factor in the ballot box. Conservatives, on the other hand, have taken under their wing the more recent capitalism’s rejects, the unintended victims of neoliberalism and collateral damage of capitalism’s global triumph, the white underclass, which represents the core of the excess population whose growth has been remarkable in the last decades. Their discontent and ressentiment due to loss of their historically enjoyed privilege and subsequent downgrade on the class hierarchy was seized by the Conservative Right, their rage capital invested and converted into the main currency of Right-wing politics.
What the Left Center saw as a civil rights battle, Conservatives transposed into a culture war. In this regressive maneuver, the symbiotic union of enterprisers and moralizers reignited the nostalgia of the premodern Zeitgeist, their predatory politics reflecting capitalism’s return to the scene of its original crime.
Over course of its evolution, capitalism has systematically produced a growing stock of excess population – people who fall through the cracks and can no longer be reintegrated into normal rhythms of society. Their size currently exceeds the managerial capabilities of the planet[2]. Capitalism now sees them as a lever arm in a struggle to prolong its existence — its only chance for survival is to recycle the people it had already disposed of. This is an act of both desperation and atonement, at the same time. The project, which started some 50 years ago, is based on the absurd idea that the values and interests of the American underclass could (and should) be aligned with those of the billionaires and that the effects of capitalism’s self-cannibalization can be overcome by articulating the class struggle in displaced mode as the culture war. What can be more absurd than that? In many ways, capitalism has followed the evolutionary pattern of all other bad ideas. Unlike bad products which go away spontaneously, driven by their market inferiority, bad ideas don’t necessarily go away by themselves if people believe in them. They create circumstances that make them true by constructing institutions and ways of living that are consistent with these ideas[3].
Cross-dressing the status quo: The United States of Absurdistan
And so, here we are. Capitalism, now in its late stage, is functioning in a recycling mode, a social equivalent of coprophage in the animal world: They can survive (and prosper) by feeding on their own “excrement”. However, unlike primitive organisms like virus, which is intrinsically self-destructive because it ultimately kills the body on which it feeds — in cytology, such organisms/cells are referred to as infantile — capitalism possesses mature/adult malignancy. It can adjust to and even benefit from its own adversity. It can generate renewed support for itself even as it slowly extinguishes the life of its host. When taken to its final consequences, through all its adaptations and adjustments, capitalism inevitably converges towards its fixed point of excrement-management system.
For more than half a century, the boundaries of absurdity have been extending, capturing an ever-growing terrain, with social division and fragmentation crystallizing as the most promising and, ultimately, the only remaining strategy for maintaining the governability and cohesion of the Union (yet another superbly absurd idea). Things must change so that everything remains the same – the culture war must go on in order to preserve the status quo and provide a lifeline for capitalism. This has remained the mantra of American conservative politics since the last decades of the 20th century. Persistent tensions are the key factor and the main part of the political design in this project of split governmentality. Every dispute and confrontation have to be squeezed to the last drop until the next divisive issue appears. For this to go on, neither side should be allowed to win or become too weak if the fragile balance is to continue to hold. The two sides of the political spectrum are locked in a cooperating mode and the government effectively functions as a single party system where the two versions of reality, served by the two wings of that party, reinforce the need for their coexistence.
Each subsequent stage of politics, thus defined, consists of doubling down on the previous strategy. Through this approach, society becomes the battleground where division is the tool of cohesion and where the culture war remains the dominant political engagement. Unsurprisingly, in the last fifty years, the cold cultural war has been gradually heating up. Through its machinery, the main victims of social vulnerability of thus divided constituents remained permanently confronted with each other, their precarity transposed into irreversible antagonism, while the essential status quo remains in place.
Phenomenology of the end
The inevitable death spiral of adherence to division and culture war is an example of the Tainter’s law[4], a general pattern whereby unconditional investment in a single strategy (complexity, in Tainter’s terminology) sooner or later generates decreasing marginal returns for the systems that use it. Insisting on that same strategy, even when it no longer make sense or has ceased to work, sets a civilization on track to collapse.
In general, a culture/civilization/movement forms when, as a consequence of cooperation, some benefit accrues from greater complexity. In the case of American conservatism and the emergence of its Right-wing extremism, we must return to its inflexion point. In the aftermath of the Waco episode in 1993, inspired largely by the negative publicity of its FBI’s handling, previously fractionalized cells of aspiring self-proclaimed sovereign citizens, fueled by the fairytales of second coming, fantasy of government resistance, and fusion paranoia, became mutually connected and developed complex networks of cooperation and synchronized action. This marked the rise and subsequent shaping of the community of like-minded men whose cohesion was reinforced by the common social vulnerability. This was a de facto declaration of cold civil war.
Tainter’s Law: The cycle of culture wars and the future of the Right-wing uprising
In the initial stage, the benefits of increasing complexity, brought about by the reinforcement of their common resistance to the government and the underlying fusion paranoia, rose. However, during their subsequent evolution, the system spontaneously began to generate endogenous mechanisms of self-sabotage in the way complex systems generally do. The primary source of self-obstruction were the new protagonists that emerges on the scene. They came in different shapes and forms:
Culture war entrepreneurs (paramilitary advisers, talk-show hosts, think tanks, freelance debaters, televangelists…); mercenaries (various local militias and resistance groups like Proud Boys, Oath keepers and the like); foot soldiers (armies of hopeless and gullible precariat, self-declared sovereign citizens, anti-vaxers and deniers of all flavors, conspiracy theorists and various cult members). Increasing resources have gone into the machinery that maintains their functioning and efficiency as such, e.g. political rallies and events, merchandise selling, air time purchase in media, paid advisers, building of the Wall and various other embezzlement schemes, unnecessary tax cuts, and outright sabotage of the political process ultimately forcing suboptimal compromises and allocation of funds towards unproductive goals, while depleting the budget for common social projects, leading to further atrophy of productivity growth and government institutions, and general pillage of the social landscape.
These actors, the self-proclaimed guardians of the new paradigm, championed their vision and method as the main and, ultimately, only strategy. As they extorted their cut through persistent obstruction and sabotage, they created additional burden on the budget which, together with other aspects, gradually depleted reserves intended to deal with stress, causing the system’s erosion of resilience to shocks and increasing its fragility. Generally, the marginal benefits of thus developed complexity eventually begin to decline. Beyond a certain point, their intensification produces less additional benefit, putting its beneficiaries to more and more stress. All this reinforced the already existing problems and deepened the precarity of its constituents – people who started it are now worse off than they were before, largely as a consequence of their own doings.
As the community/organization/political system now only knows how to use a single strategy, a superstructure is in place that cannot be gracefully abandoned. As the benefits of additional complexity taper off, vast resources need to be invested in entirely unproductive ways, such as desperate attempts at regime legitimization[5]: The competitive monument building, or the lavish “parades”, furtherreduction of taxes for the richest segment of society while abandoning the infrastructure programs and obliterating the welfare of the majority in mind, obstructing constructive political actions for the sake of political posturing, or further reinforcement of self-sabotage by creating crises where they do not exist and paying high costs for their resolutions.
In the environment of proliferation of increasingly divisive and absurd political narratives, aimed at mobilizing deeper commitment of the political base, the expense of maintenance can only increase – as narratives become more detached from shared reality, political costs must rise. Stakes become higher with each election as they threaten to tip the scales. Consequently, the costs of election, which generally tend to be inversely proportional to the plausibility of the underlying political narratives, skyrocket.
The cost of the US elections has skyrocketed in 2020
Compared to 2016, when self-destruction was not yet so manifest and eluded consensus, the costs of the 2020 election more than doubled. This is a clear sign of panic in the face of the inevitable realization that divisiveness cannot be a unifying principle and that the absurd is just absurd and not a political program. Eventually, the burden of culture thus defined will exceed any benefit it provides and the existing system, in its present form, will have to collapse.
The vanishing point
Capitalism is logically absurd and yet it can work very well sometime. It is a pure short-termism addicted to its own self-destructiveness, ready to conform to any particular irrationality as long as conditions for its technical short-term logic are preserved. While, on the one hand, it possesses remarkable adaptability allowing it to adjust to and even benefit from the most adverse environments, it, on the other hand, remains always a prisoner of its own logic, paradoxically inflexible and incapable of helping itself.
The anti-social self-sabotage of capitalism has been eloquently summarized by the developments in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic, by exposing the chronic problems of its underlying premises condensed in the decades-long programmatic dismantling of welfare, education, and knowledge in general as a consequence of its unconditional profit maximization and short-termism. The negative shock to labor supply, which started already in 2018, was made worse by the pandemic as travel and visa extensions for foreign workers have been made more difficult. The problem is that the US service economy depends on imported skilled labor in an essential way because nobody in America goes to study sciences and engineering anymore (another gift of globalization and labor arbitrage). This also applies to low-wage labor as a consequence of skill set and preference biases. Because of the labor deficit, businesses now have to pay American workers higher wages to fill in the empty positions and wage inflation has to rise.
This is where conservative strategies have already encountered their own self-sabotage. With corona tapering, the flow of labor should have improved, but it hadn’t because the Right-wingers, the self-proclaimed capitalism whisperers and its biggest protectors, would never agree to an easing of immigration or tightening of the fiscal policy through higher taxes, extinguishing, therefore, any hopes that the issue will encounter a meaningful resolution. This creates political and social stalemate and reinforces the status quo in which the system becomes consumed by its own greed, unwilling to give up even a fraction of the surplus value to those who produce it in order to survive in a long run, just because it would violate the short-term technical requirements of market rationality.
The residual imbalance highlights the fundamental absurdity of capitalism in its late stage: When you start paying people fair wages, the system gets a seizure – the economy can’t take it because inflation spirals out of control. It is addicted to easy access to cheap labor and chronically underpaid workers and will resist any correction in that respect. This exposes the dark core of the entire ideology: In a system which is based on a systematic devastation of everything that refuses to submit to the profit of the strongest, poverty automatically becomes an essential part of politics and policy and not an unfortunate outcome of meritocracy and competition. The absurdity of commitment to this policy is that if the engine of growth (and progress) is based on picking the pockets of the poor, this plan cannot be sustainable in the long run. And neither can be the political response to it – by denying reality to the facts, reality will not change, no matter how far boundaries of absurdity are stretched.
There is an unmistakable feeling that the final stage of market capitalism as we know it has already arrived, and that this idea is rapidly penetrating consensus. What we are experiencing in real time is a triumph of capitalism’s self-cannibalization taking place in an accelerated mode.
This is the final phase of a long process, which originated at, what Elias Cannetti calls, the vanishing point when mankind suddenly left reality; everything happening since then was supposedly not true; but we supposedly didn’t notice[6]. We managed to leave reality by achieving the escape velocity through persistent acceleration fueled by technology and media-driven modernity as well as the speed of economic and political exchanges that have set loose a tempo of liberation, whereby we have become removed from the spere of reference to [reality][7]. We have left the horizon where the Real was possible because the gravitational pull of self-reflection was no longer strong enough for things to remain in its orbit.
Our task would now be to find that point, and as long as we don’t have it, we would be forced to abide in our present destruction. The question is: Are we prepared to emancipate ourselves from the toxicity of acceleration and fallacies of free market dogmas, and confront our addiction to the absurd?
[1] Manuel L. Grossman, Alfred Jarry and the Theatre of the Absurd, Educational Theatre Journal Vol. 19, No. 4 (Dec, 1967), pp. 473
[2] Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, Polity (2003)
[3] This observation, I believe, is due to David Graber
[4] Richard Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies, Cambridge University Press (1990)
[5] Ibid.
[6] Elias Cannetti, The Human Province, Seabury Press (1978)
[7] Jean Baudrillard, L’illusion de la fin: ou, La greve des evenements, Galilee (1992)
1.VII 2022
Asynchronous Wars & the Technology of Killing
If enemy’s body can no longer be liquidated with direct hits, then the attacker is forced to make his continued existence impossible by his direct immersion in an unlivable milieu for a sufficiently long time. (Peter Sloterdijk)
Our bodies consist of organs and technology acts as a prosthetic, allowing us to go where we otherwise could not have imagined. Shoes, autos, planes, telescopes, microscopes, hammers, axes, guns, Viagra, and other tools and weapons are all extensions of our organs that allow for new experiences and more efficient management of time for the purpose of travel, vision, work or killing. Technology changes the flow of time, shortens distances, makes the unimaginable doable, impossible efficient. It defines the way reality reveals itself to us.
However, despite the enormous advantages technology brings, it does not come free of charge. Invention of a ship is invention of a shipwreck. Invention of a plane is invention of a plane crash; nuclear power plant of nuclear meltdown[1]. One cannot innovate without creating some damage. The 20th century has been celebrated as a period with the highest concentration of innovations in history with the most far-reaching consequences. It was also the time of the greatest expressions of large-scale violence and killing, most of them with a direct link to those innovations.
When seen from an angle of technology of killing and techniques of death, the 20th century will be remembered as the age whose essential thought consisted in targeting no longer the body, but the enemy’s environment[2]. This shift completely changed the concept of war; it altered its logic and gave it new grammar. Wars could now be waged between opponents of vastly different strength, which in turn means that wars could be triggered at any point of time, or on any terrain, without significant armed forces or war machinery and with modest financing. In the last hundred years, the implementation of this new strategy of targeting enemy’s environment went through three phases. These three phases capture a gradual buildup of layers of abstraction in the evolution of the warfare, which, contrary to their appearance, reveal a regressive pattern of relapse to its barbaric mode of pre-thymotic pillage.
PHASE ONE: From destruction of bodies to destruction of the environment
The 20th century’s dawn falls on 22-April-1915 at the battle of Ypres, when a special German gas regiment launched their first operation against the allied troops using chlorine gas as a weapon. This was the first time poisonous gas had been used on a large scale. It was at this moment that war shifted from destruction of soldiers’ bodies to destruction of their landscape. When compared to the advancement from cold weapons to firearms, from swords to guns, which was a transition from blood on one’s hands to blood on the battlefield, the use of poisonous gas was a transition from bloody to bloodless warfare. As a consequence, acts of destruction became more efficient but, at the same time, appeared less barbaric, detached, and remote.
This mode of taking life quickly and silently found its place in times of peace. Executions by electric chair, in which a sentenced prisoner’s brain was fried by high voltage, was replaced by what was perceived as a more humane way of life extinction by internal asphyxiation triggered by inhalation of cyanide which blocked oxygen transport through blood.
The idea of efficient and “humane” killing underwent a perverse mutation during WWII when it was systematized for the purpose of the large-scale annihilation of ideologically dehumanized subjects. The mass killings in gas chambers evolved from the projects conducted by pest control units where efficiency was the primary goal. German chemist Fritz Haber, who served as the National Commissioner for Pest Control between the two world wars, the same person behind the invention of the gas used at Ypres, was responsible for developing Zyklon for the purpose of vermin extermination, which was later used (in its modified form as Zyklon B) in extermination camps. However, one of the most important objectives of extermination camps extended beyond mere efficiency; it was intended to protect soldiers of the firing squad from the trauma of killing other human beings.
PHASE TWO: Latency and destruction at the subatomic level
The search for an ever more efficient and potent means of destruction did not stop with gas warfare and extermination camps. It reached its apex towards the end of the WWII. The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not only a demonstration of the potency of the new weapon[l4] , but also an introduction of another layer of distancing between attackers and physical destruction. It highlighted a new dimension of landscape destruction beyond mere pulverization through effects of latency at higher resolution, making the landscape uninhabitable for years to come. The released radiation, which lingered on for years, was not just polluting the air, but also contaminating the microscopic level of the landscape, the waves and particles (much smaller than the air molecules) and continued to kill people slowly long after those who dropped the bomb could connect those deaths to their actions or were even alive.
Banalization of guilt
We are wired to kill, but we are also wired to feel bad about it. And as the killing and devastation become more massive, the associated guilt grows deeper with it. How to increase efficiency of killing while desensitizing the killers became a complicated optimization problem of utmost urgency. Technology provided simultaneously a solution to both sides of this issue and has continued to play a dual role in that context. Technology displaces things from what they originally are. Each thing that presents itself technologically loses its distinctive independence and form. A soldier is seen as an instrument of war (and a worker as an instrument of production), a human resource to be arranged, rearranged, and disposed of.
Truth and consequences of the new technological revolution: A digressive foreplay in three acts
1: Rule without a ruler
Towards the end of the 20th century, the second chapter of globalization began its final metamorphosis, which outlined the contours of the new era. Information technology revolutionized our perception of space and time, the most radical in its scope and magnitude since Galileo. Time now flows differently and space is compactified, no longer a space of trajectories, but a global Network. Different geographies are transformed into its nodes, all points equidistant to each other and, in terms of informational transfer and communication, instantaneously accessible from any part of the Network. Through technology, the world became smaller, but within that world, things no longer had a fixed place; they were displaced and delocalized. Permanently and irreversibly.
By its construction, The Network has remained extraterritorial & ex-judicial — not only unregulated, but with no one having capacity to regulate it. Without a global system of law and regulation, outmaneuvering legal obstacles defined the new paradigm of profit making. Crime became an essential part of every business leading gradually to the criminalization of the globe and the globalization of the crime where all states gradually began to gravitate towards failed states.
The disappearance of borders resulted in the systematic deterritorialization of local geographies afflicted with identity erasure and eruptions of regressive politics. A socio-economic transformation of uprootedness and a reformation of the attitude towards habitat preservation was the most fundamental change in the early 21st century. Habitat became exchangeable and portable. Technology as prosthesis gave way to transplantation.
2: The new elite
The late 20th century marks a hasty coming out of a new class of ultra-rich. Rather than serving collective interests of society, like investing in economic progress, education, welfare or environment, the oligarchic activities of this new class have focused on the extraction of resources and the impoverishment of their own habitats. This has gone into overdrive in the Wild East, the emerging post-socialist Europe and Asia. As the old state structures of the region were falling apart, they were replaced by criminal surrogates designed to operate under new conditions, which the state apparatus itself created for their own advantages. In that process, the new emerging state became both referee and player in the game of oligarchic repositioning, a practice, which became a standard modus operandi of the third world but has gradually taken root in developed economies as well, with the United States leading the way in that direction.
The conversion of public trust into private wealth and money became a routine. Greed was no longer (magically) converted into a public virtue – the old capitalism’s fairytale was dead and gone. The Keynesian bond that ties the profit of the rich to the wellbeing of the poor was severed during this process of oligarchic redistribution. It has cut the fate of the economic elites from that of the masses. Porous borders, created by globalization, allowed the undisturbed circulation and permanent displacement of, generally, illegitimately acquired wealth and money across different jurisdictions.
This became an environment especially favorable for the large scale and state-sponsored kleptocracies of the Wild East and third world, who drew substantial wealth from pillaging their own habitats, which they then invested and consumed abroad, where it remained sheltered from scrutiny.
Russia has gone the furthest in that direction. Given its territorial size (an area roughly equal to that of the United States and China combined), it is a relatively small economy ($1.7tr), smaller than Texas ($1.9tr). It is a very resource-rich territory with enormous, but unrealized, potential, a condition that has been maintained for more than a century. As a result of its post-communist transformation into a criminalized oligarchy, 1/3 of Russian GDP (about $500 billions) has ended in the hands of about 100 oligarchs. A significant fraction of that capital is largely exported outside of Russia and integrated into global finance and investments. To benchmark the magnitude of the $500-billion GDP loss that was taken from the Russian state, one should recall that during the 2008 global financial crisis, the US economy lost 4.3% of its GDP while during the great depression, 1929-1933, that loss was about 30%.
3: Global provision
Confident that they would outlive the social system that was making them rich, these actors of plutonomic capitalism no longer had to worry about national economic growth because their transnational fortunes grew without it. This was further catalyzed by the symbiotic forces creating strong tailwinds for further capital outflows from developed economies to the West, where they found increasingly favorable conditions for their wealth to prosper. The exit of the super-rich from their respective countries became possible and easy – they could take their money (most of it already outside) and move to another location, like Switzerland, the UK, or any country that gives them domicile and favorable tax treatment.
This is the logic of cash in, burn bridges, and leave nothing behind – the global provision[3] of rescuing oneself and family by exiting with their wealth untouched – a unique option provided by globalization, which incentivizes the rich to move into endgame mode. While this has been mostly a game played in the third world, the West is catching up rapidly.
PHASE THREE: The legitimization of pillage
You take my life/ When you take the means whereby I live (Shylock in Merchant of Venice)
The basic kinetic pattern of the age of globalization is capital departing from its location on a voyage around the Earth and returning with a surplus on its ledgers[4]. This pattern gets a new treatment with the late century technology. In contrast with the first phase of globalization, in the new era of global kleptocracy, capital no longer needs to circumvent the globe to multiply. Thanks to embedded global provision, it can be removed from the country of its origin to a zone where scrutiny of its acquisition can be avoided and where, through elaborate money laundering schemes, it can be integrated into the global financial system and its multiplication optimized through private wealth investments, foreign financial advisors, and money managers, or by sitting in warehouses of international duty-free zones as untaxed collateral.
However, this has not been a riskless maneuver, but merely a tradeoff between convenience and exposure. Despite all the riches new technology has created, it has exposed the global griftopian capital to predation by political adversaries. By its very nature, globalization has created the Achilles heel of thus acquired and displaced capital, which, as its size grows, becomes both more vulnerable and more attractive as a bounty.
This vulnerability defines a new phase of warfare: the freezing and seizing of assets by political adversaries, which, when combined with sanctions, becomes effectively a destruction of one’s economic habitat. So, the question is: How to create conditions for and declare an open season on foreign assets?
The absence of global law allows enormous arbitrariness in creating situations that are condemnable, and considerable flexibility around shaping a global consensus of condemnation. This presents a blueprint for the legitimization of the large-scale global pillage.
Creating conditions for war and asset freezes requires manufacturing an appropriate narrative that shapes subsequent actions. Those narrative presents a virtual layer, which ultimately legitimizes asset seizure by engineering political and/or humanitarian crises or augmenting and exploiting the existing ones. Places of massive oligarchic capital outflows present easy prey in that context. They function essentially as electoral dictatorships and have always had shaky records of humanitarian conditions, but during the initial phase of their capital’s transplantation and its multiplication abroad, these problems had always been temporarily overlooked.
Provoked and fueled from the outside, the adversary is initially placed in a position where they cannot avoid making a series of suboptimal decisions, generally creating a downward spiral from which they cannot escape. In its initial phase, that usually starts with a crackdown on opposition and follows by seizing control of the media — an explosion in a chemical weapons factory is always convincing — and usually the bombing of hospitals, nurseries and innocent civilians, the rape of women, dead children, refugees etc. All these factors, which present massive red flags for the Western global conglomerate, are used to shape international consensus around the de-legitimation of the regime in the target country.
The first act of this play usually ends with a cathartic moment of either ritual execution of the strongman leader by domestic opposition his apprehension and a trial by international tribunals from whose jurisdiction the West has been excluded by design. This part signals that the stage has been set and that the plunder can begin.
We all remember Hussein, Gadhafi, or Noriega, who were taken out in this way because of (nonexistent) WMD, human rights violations, meddling into political affairs of the West or just for not paying the racket.
Russia is only the most recent example, which synthesizes all aspects of the underlying mechanism. A criminal utopia of with significant aspirations for global influence, it has become an unprecedented rogue player in the eyes of the developed West and a potentially dangerous competitor in energy production who interferes in domestic affairs, with a huge bounty already exported outside of its borders, ready to be taken away. The size and extent of their looted capital enabled Russian oligarchs to buy considerable political influence abroad. And as their capital grew, so did the appetite and ability to defend it by purchasing further political favors and influence. It was only a matter of time until the harvest would be declared. By freezing and seizing their assets and their partial excommunication from the international financial network, the West has practically forced Russia into a virtual default, impairing its ability to raise debt and wage war effectively, causing a gradual change in sentiment, the withdrawal of investments, and the loss of market share. It was a carefully crafted plan to get them stuck in a long war that they could not win and simultaneously destroying them economically and eliminating them as a global player for decades to come.
This was yet another example where conflict could have been avoided were it not for the different preferences between the main decision-maker(s) and the rest of their country, a classic principal-agent problem whereby low-level criminal minds of the Russia’s leadership (former KGB operatives and communist apparatchiks) could not see beyond their own self-interests, defined through the obsession with benefits of savage capitalism and unconstrained capacity for looting, and align with the long-term wellbeing of the country.
The triangulation of a conflict
The new technology of death is no longer the physical and immediate destruction of the landscape of the adversary but turning off the life-supply faucet and its gradual and erosive decay due to economic deprivation, marginalization, and exodus of human capital. The war no longer involves just two adversaries, but requires a third party, the Victim, which completes the scene. The Victim, which can be either an internal opposition or external actor (e.g. another state),absorbs physical and human devastation. They are used as a human sacrifice at the altar of global capital, and the war, in its initial stage, is conducted as a precisely staged pagan ritual according to the strict rules that never change.
Reduced to a minimum between the two adversaries, violence and suffering is outsourced to the Victim. It is used only to trigger the initial step of the conflict aimed at shaping the global consensus of condemnation – because the civilized world detests violence – and define the position of the Network against the perpetrator.
As war gets transformed from an art of unbearable sensations to economy of suspended rights, it becomes even less barbaric and more detached and remote, but at the same time, more to the point. The act of pillage is implemented without direct military confrontation — physical destruction of the Victim during the initial stage is merely its overture.
The seizing of assets is followed by sending them to the opposition or the victim state, who in turn use those funds to either buy arms from the West or hire their contractors and military consultants to train their troops and rebuild the infrastructure. Conflicts are no longer about people or about territory, but (like ancient wars of our barbaric past) about the benefits of pillage and its legitimation on the landscape of the global network. At the end, wars end up serving to boost demand in developed world.
When it comes to war, rational decision makers weigh potential gains and losses from it in the context of their objectives, beliefs, environmental considerations and existing constraints. For war to occur, at least one of the two parties involved must see a net potential gain from war in given circumstances[5]. With current distribution of risk and return in international conflicts, for the developed West gains easily outweigh other considerations and war for them becomes a rational, and sometimes even an attractive, option.
In this game, the United States and the West become the Bermudan triangle on the global capital’s journey.
Barbarism as a universal reference frame
All the Western nations have been caught in a lie, the lie of their pretended humanism; this means that their history has no moral justification, and that the West has no moral authority. (James Baldwin)
The term “barbarism” is the password that opens up the archives of the twentieth century[6]. Postmodernity has set a cultural aesthetic ideal in which barbarism is denied and everyone acts as if it did not exist. This ideal excludes everything from its purview that is essentially unacceptable by the enlightened mind. However, a persistent obsessive effort at the exclusion of barbarism reinforces the awareness of its omnipresence and leads ultimately to its acceptance and surrender to barbarism, which defines a universal reference frame.
Despite all progress, cultural developments, education, enlightenment, and general efforts of distancing from its barbaric past, the world remains violent, but through technology, violence has become less direct, less visible, and more abstract. Contemporary public attention is short and fades in a matter of weeks after which the conflict, no matter how large its scale is, disappears into the netherworld of obscurity where people continue to suffer and die, but their suffering remains hidden away from the public eye. And the civilized world enjoys the delusion of itself as a less barbaric place. However, this is the world where local aggressors pay tribute to the global ones, where small rackets are taxed by big rackets and where the most barbaric rules prevail.
[1] Paul Virilio
[2] Peter Sloterdijk, Terror from the air, Semiotext(e) (2009)
[3] Wolfgang Streeck, How will capitalism end?: Essays on a failing system, Verso (2017)
[4] Peter Sloterdijk, What happened in the 20th Century, Polity (2018)
[5] Matthew O. Jackson and Massimo Morelli, The Reasons for Wars, in the Handbook on the Political Economy of War, edited by Chris Coyne, Elgar Publishing (2011)
[6] Peter Sloterdijk, You must change your life, Polity Press (2013)
13. III 2022
The Few Body Problem & the Metaphysics of Stupidity
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. (Max Planck)
A vibrating string represents the collective motion of a system of (practically) an infinite number of atoms. Its properties and behavior are very different from those of its constituents. When the collective sets in, the system loses knowledge of its building blocks and obeys an altogether different set of rules: A string made of nickel atoms behaves (acoustically) the same way as a plastic string composed of complicated organic molecules. In terms of complexity, the collective is a nonlinear function of the size. A one-body problem is easy to handle. A two-body is more complicated, but in most cases tractable. Three-body is very difficult, while the few-body problem is impossible. However, an infinite-body problem is easy. Loss of granularity washes away as the number of degrees of freedom increases. The wave equation describing a vibrating string is significantly simpler than the Schrödinger equation for a single atom; their discoveries are separated by two centuries.
Collective IQ < Average IQ
When it comes to intelligence, a similar pattern unfolds — size is its enemy. As the group grows, at some point, it inevitably begins to get stupider. It is not difficult to fool a single person. All you need is some persuasive skills and a little intelligence. Fooling two people can be complicated – they can compare their thoughts and come up with non-overlapping objections and increase resistance to persuasion by filtering out the nonsense more effectively. Fooling a few, say five, people is practically impossible, even if they are of average intelligence. They retain their individuality (and independent thinking) while their cooperation still remains strong. Manipulating large masses, however, can be very easy (as witnessed by numerous historical examples and confirmed by the experience of the last five years). Large groups would believe what even its stupidest members would reject on their own.
As the group grows beyond a certain size, the task of deceiving them becomes progressively easier. Individual wisdom and constructive cooperation changes and gives way to collective thinking where individuality is lost. In large groups, the collective IQ resides significantly below the average IQ – no matter how intelligent individuals are, their collective intelligence will be low. Although this inequality is an empirical observation, it is never violated in practice.
Size inspires special behavior: When a group become large, it has no resemblance to and no logic of individual behavior. Masses can always be manipulated with stories that would never work on individuals. It becomes increasingly more difficult to rebel against the consensus – the loss of individuality that results after such capitulation of the mind leads to loss of resistance to persuasion. You can disagree with collective stupidity, but your resistance is inconsequential.
Subjectlessness of humanity
Only individuals can be wise; institutions are well designed, at best. (Peter Sloterdijk)
Financial markets are often miscast as an example of an intelligent collective. Although they are treated as such, markets are not an entity in the true sense of that word, but a self-optimizing medium. All market participants have the same well-defined objectives, which streamline and unify their actions and push them to act in the same direction by doing everything possible in order to maximize profit. This leads to the propagation of ideas by the smartest players to everyone else and orients everyone towards the “smart consensus”, what is considered ex-ante as an optimal action.
Corporations are collectives. However, in their (misguided) attempts to emulate some of the market’s behavior, like meritocracy, transparency, and accountability, and transpose them to the context where they don’t belong, they create obstacles and impediments to their efficient functioning and permanent sources of corporate dysfunctionality. There is a long history of their continuous struggle against underlying the trappings which come with that predicament.
Casting businessmen (successful or unsuccessful) as political leaders is a bad idea, a very bad one, actually. Seeing society as a corporation and running it as such, cannot lead to good outcomes.
Humanity is even further removed from a market-like medium than corporations. It consists of people with heterogeneous (most often conflicting) objectives. Their goals cannot be quantified and are far from unifiable. When applied to humanity, the classic model of learning from harm collapses before this fact. In the words of Peter Sloterdijk: Humanity is a priori learning impaired because it is not a subject. It has no self, no intellectual coherence, no reliable organ of wakefulness, no self-reflection capable of learning, no identity — building common memory. Humanity cannot be wiser than a single human being. It has no body of its own with which to learn the hard way – no hand to learn first-hand – but rather a foreign body, its place of residence, the earth, which does not become wise, but transforms into a desert[1].
Humanity is to humans what a vibrating string is to atoms — its intelligence is inferior to even the sub-average intelligence of all humans.
The intelligence problem and the power of 16-percenters
Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that. (George Carlin)
Things don’t look encouraging when observed at higher resolution. This is a graph of the IQ distribution. The average IQ is around 100 with 68% of population residing inside the two standard deviations range, between 85 and 115, which means that about 16% are of deep sub-average intelligence. These numbers are fairly robust across different countries in the developed world.
This distribution becomes particularly alarming when applied to a large relatively non-oppressive country. In the context of modern liberal societies, the synergy of stupidity, size, and democracy reinforces the malignant potential of the stupidity of the collective.
Transcription of these numbers to America implies that about 53 million (16%) people (entire population of France) are of sub-average intelligence, out of which 7 million (entire Bulgaria) is seriously impaired. These people are empowered to express their opinion and impose their will in the ballot box.
By mobilizing the left side of the distribution behind a single political movement – a maneuver that represents a collectivization of mediocrity — makes them even stupider by lowering their collective IQ further, and persuading them to believe in pretty much anything. When their discontent is streamlined and wrapped into a single narrative, in an electoral democratic system, these 16-percenters can become a decisive factor[2]. Empowered by their malignant stupidity, such people are capable of committing the most extreme atrocities as they have been throughout human history.
Humanity cannot outgrow its own death drive
Intelligence is not a theoretical quantity, but represents a behavioral quality of creatures in an open environment. (Peter Sloterdijk)
Humans are generally intelligent, but this individual intelligence fails to get collectivized. This has only become worse with progress and the general trend of increasing acceleration and addiction to speed. The long term has become so long that it now exceeds our capacity for statistical prediction, but the short-term has accelerated so much that snap decisions are the only decisions ever made. The stakes have become higher – short-term survival is no longer guaranteed, which leads to a shift of focus.
In the face of the urgency of short-term survival, long-term foresight collapses. This defines the tradeoff — the lower the odds of survival, the weaker the desires and capacities for grasping the long-term. As the group size increases and individuality fades away, collectivization inevitably leads to abdication of responsibilities. This leads to collective myopia, which attracts its membership and supports the group’s desire to grow. As a consequence, we no longer engage in intergenerational projects — passing the baton to the next generation is the best we can do (as a collective).
This removal of the long-term perspective, its subversion, leaves power dominated by short-term forces, which under the capricious conditions of the market forces requires adaptive, liquid or transient strategies as a basic skill set. At a systemic level, change is taking the form of positive feedback. In conditions of general info acceleration and hypercomplexity, as conscious and rational will become unable to adjust to the trends, the trends themselves become self-reinforcing (up to the point of collapse)[3].
For years now, the Right-wing populism of the capitalist West has been tapping into the left side of the IQ distribution. This has proven to be a very successful strategy for their project. Unsurprisingly, in the most spectacular staging of abdication of collective responsibility, thus cultivated populist movement became the epicenter of insane resistance to simple measures of containment of the COVID pandemic.
At the core of the incoherent response to the pandemic – the spectacular failure of adjusting to the most straightforward problem of self-defense of the collective body – resides collective abdication of responsibility. This was a simple test of common sense, accepting the most basic measures any single human would normally have no problems accepting, but which collectively encountered resistance on a large scale (bordering on hysterical) causing, at the end, massive casualties, financial and economic damages, and unnecessary complications and extension of the pandemic. The resistance to alignment with simple and logical adjustment to an existential threat is just another illustration of the erosion of basic survival instincts caused by decades of deliberate and programmatic anti-science project and glorification of mediocrity.
In the world of infinite acceleration, humanity is spontaneously converging towards a state of maximum cognitive incompetence, a collective Dunning-Kruger effect. According to the latest statistics, there are about 41 million Q-anon believers in the United States.
However, this does not mean that capitalist democracies carry exclusive blame for the degradation of intellect and the rising rate of malignant stupidity. Rather, it is a combination of human nature and the law of large numbers. As much as Soviet-style communism pretended to have sought to divert the inevitable self-destructiveness of capitalism, it merely reinvented different and more efficient ways of self-destruction. A similar story goes with fascism. Communism’s record of ecological misconduct, which has penetrated deep into the territory of criminal, is just one of many examples of its self-destructive overdrive. Its pretended ideological attempts to be something else from what it really was were just failed diversions that merely accelerated the inevitable.
Welcome to Asbest
Russia is the largest country in the world by size. Nazis dreamed of conquering it as the Lebensraum for the new super-race. They failed, but so did the Russians. Instead of converting their resource-rich land into a prosperous superpower, despite Russia’s considerable cultural heritage, they have been struggling for centuries and still resemble in many ways a third-world country with staggering levels of large-scale corruption, chronic scarcity, high levels of poverty, and rampant inequality. After the failure of the Soviet experiment, Russia became a different type of Lebensraum for malignant stupidity of griftopian turbocapitalism and a laboratory of myopic ecological experimentation.
On the east side of the Ural mountain range, about 1000 miles east of Moscow and 2000 miles north of Kabul, resides the town of Asbest, the three forming a nearly perfect rectangled triangle. Asbest (the Russian word for asbestos) is one of hundreds of mono towns of the post-revolutionary Soviet Union, established according to the tenets of planned economy. As its name suggests, Asbest is the center of asbestos mining, with the largest open pit asbestos mine in the world, 1000 ft deep and the size of half of Manhattan.
As 59 countries have outlawed usage of asbestos and phased out any production due to its carcinogenic effects on humans, Asbest has become the world’s largest producer of the substance, which, by global ecological standards, is considered a criminal enterprise. About 70% of Asbest’s budget comes from the asbestos industry.
At the town’s entrance, drivers are greeted by what looks like a béton-brut installation in place of a welcoming billboard – a concrete structure, suggestive of a stylized arrow pointing downwards, with a coat of arms, representing asbestos fibers through a ring of fire at the top, and the text, below, broken in two lines: Asbest, my town and my fate! It is not clear if this was supposed to be ironic or not, but it certainly has an ominous vibe and strong overtones of dark humor. There are numerous motivational billboards in the town itself with text emphasizing the compulsory optimism of yesteryear, the most striking one stating: Asbestos is our future!
Breaking rocks and extracting the chrysotile from the mining pit is usually done with dynamite. This creates enormous clouds of asbestos dust, which covers everything in the town, from cars, rooftops, window, and parks, to fruits and vegetables people grow in their gardens.
Compared to the rest of the Sverdlovsk Oblast, Asbest has 30-40% higher incidence of cancer, a fact that remains carefully hidden from the public. Most of workers in asbestos processing plant have persistent coughs, a symptom of exposure to what they call the white needles, and strange skin ailments. Its population is slowly depleting with high mortality — the town has been losing about 1% of its population every year since the 1990s. And as if afraid to miss inserting yet another piece of irony here, local authorities have erected a monument to residents who have died (presumably from asbestos exposure) made of an asbestos block with the inscribed text: Live and Remember.
After the collapse of communism, without skipping a beat, the town of Asbest transitioned seamlessly from the clutches of ideological incompetence of the Soviet era to the unconditional greed of post-communist kleptocracy. Unlike other mono towns (where about 25 million people, 16% of the Russian population, still live), which became dying cities, Asbest did not die instantaneously. Rather, it repositioned for a slow death.
Instead of regulating human nature, capitalism as well as both communism and fascism only continue to reaffirm, time and again, what humans are truly capable of and enabled the full realization of that potential. And we haven’t seen the last of it, not yet. Free or oppressed, unable to avoid the degradation of collective intellect and preserve the wisdom of the few, humanity will always find ways to hurt itself.
Like post-communist Russia, Western democracy has been caught in a hypnotic ritualistic trance of the spectacle of its own cultural creation and self-consumption, the two fatal modes of modernity Jean Baudrillard identified as: Carnival & Cannibal. The self-imposed ignorance and collective myopia have reached the point where the West has elevated its own annihilation to a supreme aesthetic act. Against that backdrop Asbest is our future has acquired a universal metaphoric ring as a mantra of the directionless escape of mankind where the endgame appears unavoidable — a slow death in a hyperoptimized dystopian trap. This is the realization of Arthur Schnitzler’s vision of the human race as an illness of some higher organism, within which it has found a purpose and meaning, but which it also sought to destroy, in the same way virus strives to annihilate the ailing human organism and in that process destroys itself.
[1] Peter Sloterdijk, Infinite Mobilization, Polity (2020)
[2] These numbers, although larger or comparable to the USA, are less alarming when it comes to Russia, China or India. In the former two, high coercive powers of the state prevent large-scale stupidity to metastasize, while in India, where more than 50% of the country is under no one’s control, it is the fragmentation and absence of coherence along the lines of language, religion, culture, education, and social hierarchies, that prevent the collective to set in.
[3] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Polity (2006)
31.XII 2021
The Year of the Abject: Making Sense of Nonsense
Within the boundaries of what one defines as subject (a part of oneself) and object (something that exists independently of oneself), there reside pieces that were once categorized as a part of oneself or one’s identity that have since been rejected – the abject. (Julia Kristeva)
Unless we are consciously drawn to it, we, for the most part, are not fully aware of our saliva. It is part of our body, an utterly neutral liquid, which we produce and swallow continuously as long as we are awake. However, this is true only as long as it remains in our bodies. Imagine periodically spiting into a glass and attempting to drink it once it fills up. The very thought of this causes utter disgust. As soon as our bodily fluids have become alienated from us, they become abject.
Abject represents the taboo element of the self; it rejects and disturbs social reason and the communal consensus that underpins social order. The Indian caste of eunuchs represent a castrated remainder of a fully functional biological body, cast out, distanced, but not completely. In modern capitalism, the excluded segment of the population — those who fell through the cracks and can no longer be reintegrated into normal functioning of society – is the neoliberal equivalent of Indian eunuchs. Their proximity reinforces an anxiety that their destiny could become everyone’s prospect; their presence is a reminder how narrow the gap is between a comfortable middle class life and precarity.
We have an ambivalent relationship with the abject — we are both drawn to and repelled by it. The ambivalence and inherent dialectics of the concept is encapsulated in the very word, which can function both as an adjective/noun as well as a verb.
The verb to abject comes from the Latin abicere, which means to throw away or to cast out. The action of abjection refers to an impulse or operation to reject that which disturbs or threatens the stability of the self and is inassimilable. As an adjective, abject has two meanings: 1) Extremely unpleasant and degrading (living in abject poverty), and 2) Completely without pride or dignity (an abject apology). [1]
The abject functions both as a repulsive and as an attractive fixed point of subjectivity. The concept is at the same time constructive (in the formation of identity and one’s relationship to the world) and destructive (in what it does to the subject): Abjection, the operation to abject, is fundamental to the maintenance of subjectivity and society, while the condition to be abject is subversive of both formations. The key to this duality is that the abject is not fully exogenous.
The body of the excluded
The volume of humans that are made redundant by the global triumph of capitalism has grown so much that it exceeds the managerial capacity of the planet. They cannot be re-assimilated into the “normal” life pattern and reprocessed back into the category of “useful” members of society. (Zygmunt Bauman)
By its very nature, capitalism generates abject social bodies as a part of an excess population. Unlike criminals, social outcasts, homeless, illegal immigrants or general categories of aliens, who are transported beyond the boundaries of the enclosure of prosperity, the redundant white underclass has escaped the transportation and remains on the inside where economic balance and social equilibrium are sought. However, the longer the redundant population stays inside and rubs shoulders with the useful rest, the less the lines separating normality and abnormality appear reassuringly unambiguous. Assignment to waste becomes everyone’s potential prospect[2].
The white underclass represents the abject social body which cannot be completely objectivized but whose presence threatens the existing symbolic order. They cannot be fully reassimilated into normal life patterns and reprocessed back into the category of useful members of society — they lack the skills required for reintegration — but they cannot be discarded either; they carry a sense of entitlement as a constitutive element of the cultural and historical heritage that defines today’s America.
The abject lean on subject’s stability — their presence threatens the implicit culturally established boundaries of what is considered normal, causing the subject to feel vulnerable because its boundaries are under threat. The white underclass cannot be ingested or incorporated into the system — they are like bodily fluids that have departed the (social) body — appalling, but, at the same time, a part of the (social) body-image that carries a prospect of everyone’s destiny. The very thought of their reintegration, has becomes revolting, while, at the same time, they cannot be fully objectivized either.
The abject gambit
The abject hovers at the boundary of what is assimilable, thinkable, but is itself unassimilable which means that we have to contemplate its otherness in its proximity to us but without it being able to be incorporated. It is the other that comes from within (so it is part of ourselves) that we have to reject and expel in order to protect our boundaries[3].
The abject is a great mobilizing mechanism. While the state of being abject is threatening to the self and others, the operation of abjecting involves rituals of purity that bring about social stability. Abjection seeks to stabilize, while the abject inherently disrupts[4].
When the mass of the excluded increases to a size impossible to ignore, they trigger rituals of abjection, which work themselves into identity politics.The repulsion and efforts to distance from the excluded — the abjection – which reinforces the self-awareness of the social standing of regular folks, are in conflict with the attraction by the powers the abject population enjoys and exudes. They are the power bottoms in this relationship as they define the location, robustness and porousness of the boundaries of the enclosure. Fascination with the abject’s power pulls the viewers in, while they remain at arm’s length because of the threats the abject exert.
This makes the excluded a tool that drives the wedge between different social groups and prepares the population for political usage of the abject as leverage.
Objectifying minorities has been institutionalized in America since its inception — from slavery and Jim Crow to ghetto and hyperghetto, prisons, wars, opioids, and other tools of soft and hard marginalization. However, with the rise of the white underclass in the second half of the 20th century, American ideology has become highly nuanced around the questions of exclusion.
To a large extent, the Right wing has stuck to its white supremacists roots of yesteryear (either in a closeted form or explicitly) while centrists, both Left and Right, have shown greater initiative in modernizing the process. However, when it came to exclusion of the white underclass, the problem proved to be more difficult. Complicated by globalization, technology, the decline of American manufacturing, weaning off conventional energy sources and the general decay of demand for labor, low-skill jobs have been disappearing irreversibly, and the ranks of white underclass grew unstoppably together with their discontent.
Social outcasts and minorities are relatively easy to objectivize. Permanently excluded – criminals, drug addicts, homeless – they have already been cast out. The residual, white precariat, which has always been perceived as a building block of this country’s social fiber, remains still on the inside, but unable to get reintegrated within the context of modern developments.
In a white dominated/ruled society the marginalization of the excluded white subproletariat has been a political hard sell. They grew in size and have acquired a sense of entitlement minorities never could. Their sudden political awareness, no matter how fragile, has become an expression of pleasurable transgressive desires. As a new center of social subjectivity, theydraw their power from this position, which serves as an inspiration for their own identity politics.
The emergence of 21st century Right-wing populism represents the biggest innovation on that terrain. Right-wingers now recognize the abject as a source of political leverage and, instead of exclusion, their program revolves around subjectivizing them. Voluntarily casting oneself as abject — identification with the white subproletariat – has become a quest for authenticity, aimed at acquiring a stigma in order to become a credible voice of the marginalized. This is the core of the modern populist abject gambit.
Poetic catharsis: Politics in the kingdom of unreason
Poetic catharsis is an impure process that protects from the abject only by dint of being immersed in it. (Julia Kristeva)
In past autocratic systems, leaders had their own eccentricities and aberrations (e.g. Stalin’s paranoia, Kim Jong-Il’s sadistic personality disorder or vindictive narcissism of countless number of dictators and autocrats), but societies, collectively, didn’t suffer from them — there was a variety of afflictions that coexisted without any coordination with their leader –people were depressed, anxious, indifferent, etc. while their leaders remained an idiosyncratic singularity. In contrast, in contemporary populism the leader is styled as an embodiment of collective afflictions – he becomes a performance artist who functions as a concentrated version of collective social traumas, grievances, and anxieties. He appropriates the collective paranoia towards the deep state, the sovereign citizens fetish, the second amendment fixation, tax evasion obsession… Self-abjection of the Western political Right is pseudo-authenticity at all cost: Racism, misogyny, denialism, antivaxerism, conspiracy fantasies, and other flat-earth derivatives channel widespread collective anxieties through their leader.
Perceived as a medium of grievance and spokesmen for collective traumas, politicians of the populist Right have been absolved of any accountability. Their biggest strength and their superpower is the absolute absence of any shame and embarrassment, even when faced with undeniable proof of their incompetence, lies, criminality and lack of an ethical backbone, no matter how obvious and damaging their culpability might be. They have been set free to establish new benchmarks of shamelessness, a unique political skill that always keeps them one step ahead of their political opponents, which has opened an entirely new political terrain never accessible before.
The Populist politics now function as poetic catharsis: Through mimicry with their constituents political leaders no longer lead but surrender, resulting in a fragile and shifty consensus that is reinforced with their each action. Their activity consists of looking for themes that create resonance points capable of producing the loudest reverberations. Politics becomes hyper-optimized — there is not a single spec of life that is not used as leverage – but, in that process, it loses its robustness, becomes thinly spread and fractures under tinniest of shocks.
The emergence of the rapidly growing white underclass and its irreversible marginalization in the last decades is beginning to get recognized as the fatal flaw of the American experiment, an outcome that is in conflict with its founding axioms and an evolving national trauma threatening to void it. Things have gone terribly wrong in the last 50 years — the accidental wounding of the American white malehood by the inner workings of neoliberalism has been the unintended consequence of capitalist progress[5] with which the system has not been prepared to deal with in any form.
The Right wing populism of the last decade has become the last desperate attempt to save this failing experiment regardless of costs. Defeated in the ballot box, the battle to save wounded white malehood has assumed a less conventional form. In its desperation it has escalated to a suicide mission whose contours were unambiguously underlined in the first week of the past year.
As much as the political center may want to distance itself from the white underclass and its populist political representation, the significance of that moment forces them to pause and rethink one more time whether they are really prepared to win this battle and write the obituary for the American experiment.
CODA
If 2017 was the year when unreason was set free, then 2021 is the year of its proliferation – it is everywhere and nowhere. There are no more individual GOP members or voices anymore, only the opaque background of unreason against which they perform a choreographed dance of non-overlapping sequential appearances on the center stage of political spectacle hoping for a moment of public attention to make the absurd palatable and promote abnormal as the facts of life.
The Right-wing political kabuki functions like a medieval mechanism of an astronomical clock on a church of unreason. The puppet-apostles of that church have a fixed position on a slow rotating carousel, parading through the window of shared reality in a mechanized procession, always one at a time, like luggage pieces on the conveyer belt of baggage claim from a flight which arrived without passengers, occasionally voicing their presence through monologues of nonsense, hoping that someone would notice them.
[1] Rina Ayra, Abjection and Representation: An Exploration of Abjection in the Visual Arts, Film and Literature, Palgrave Macmillan; 2014th edition (2014)
[2] Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, Polity (2003)
[3] Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Columbia University Press; Reprint edition (1982).
[4] Rina Ayra ibid.
[5] Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West, Columbia University Press (2019)
21. XI 2021
Disaster Calculus
It is only the occasional experience of the extreme that exposes the temperate human region where we can cultivate what we are competent to do. (Peter Sloterdijk)
There is a considerable body of dystopian art and literature that captures our imagination of counterfactual reality corresponding to the history of the world in which dark forces had triumphed in WWII. These visions are generally an extrapolated superposition of various gloomy patches of history adjusted for modern times.
However, the flip side of our imagination, one which deals with a fictional reality where WWII had been completely absent, or the devastation significantly smaller, is practically nonexistent. Nothing in human history could be used to convincingly (re)construct this alternative world. Even if we were to mobilize all our creative forces and transcend the baggage of history and prejudice, we would still inevitably encounter strange mental barriers, psychological resistance, and dead ends.
At the bottom of this defect of symmetry resides the legacy of our historical experience. Good deeds are unpredictable because they are not natural; they don’t arise spontaneously, people commit them impulsively. Evil, on the other hand, acts naturally – we never wonder about evil; we are only surprised if it is not realized. This belief forces us to incorporate appropriate expectations into our thinking process and, with time, these expectations become our second nature and we no longer reflect about them; they constitute the knowledge that doesn’t know itself.
Disaster didactics
In his book Infinite Mobilization Peter Sloterdijk argues that one of the most powerful and robust lessons of modernity is that people need catastrophe because they must be educated and can only be educated by the school of worst possible scenarios. Human functioning and survival are intricately linked to disaster-didactic calculations – only a visual instruction of the worst can usher in a turn for the better[1].
Sloterdijk uses the Three Mile Island nuclear accident as a template around which he develops his argument.
The Three Mile Island Unit 2 reactor, near Middletown, Pa., partially melted down on March 28, 1979. This was the most serious accident in U.S. commercial nuclear power plant operating history. The accident began about 4 a.m. on that day when the plant experienced a failure in the secondary, non-nuclear section of the plant. Either a mechanical or electrical failure prevented the main feedwater pumps from sending water to the steam generators that remove heat from the reactor core. This caused the plant’s turbine-generator and then the reactor itself to automatically shut down. Immediately, the pressure in the primary system began to increase. In order to control that pressure, the pilot-operated relief valve opened. The valve should have closed when the pressure fell to proper levels, but it became stuck open. Instruments in the control room, however, indicated to the plant staff that the valve was closed. As a result, the plant staff was unaware that cooling water in the form of steam was pouring out of the stuck-open valve. As alarms rang and warning lights flashed, the operators did not realize that the plant was experiencing a loss-of-coolant accident.[2]
There is one particular moment in the Three-Mile Island episode, which captures the essence of disaster didactics: As disaster was brewing, there was a palpable sense in the air of the public developing sly sympathy with the explosive substances in the defective reactor, as if those were not representing a physical quantity, but also contained a culturally critical message that deserved to be released[3]. The silent rooting for the explosion was nothing more than an educational hypothesis about the didactic and mind-changing energies that radiate from actually occurring disasters.
Because the big explosion failed to materialize, the Three Mile Island disaster could not reach the level where disaster didactics develops its grim calculation between misfortune and insight can be formed[4]. (That role was fulfilled by Chernobyl about a decade later.) For that reason, this remained only the warning disaster.
When seen from that angle, both 2008 GFC and 2016 US Presidential elections were also just warning disasters – the financial and political Three Mile Island accidents when another faulty “nuclear reactor” threatend, but eventually failed, to melt down. A Chernobyl-type event was averted in both cases, in 2008 by the comprehensive bailout program (augmented with unprecedented monetary policy stimulus) and in 2020 by the Republican debacle in (and out of) the ballot box. And judging by how things have been developing both in the post-2008 times as well as during the last year, we haven’t learned much, if anything at all – the message hasn’t sunk in. By interrupting the course of history and by averting the full-scale catastrophe, we remained deprived of valuable lessons. This hadn’t happened in the 1940s, WWII was “allowed” to develop into a full-blown catastrophe. However, had Adolf Hitler been killed, had the natural course of history been upset and halted in July 1944, we would have had yet another national socialism soon after that, or we’d at least have to defend ourselves from it. Hitler wouldn’t have been defeated; rather his certain victory would have been thwarted. By experiencing the full-scale impact of the war, humanity has learned a valuable lesson, but this knowledge is conflicted with the price tag that came with it and has become a dilemma that never ceases to trouble us.
The addiction to the unbearable
According to Sloterdijk, the key question of disaster-didactics is: How big would a catastrophe need to get before it radiates the universal flash of insight that we are waiting for?[5] This disaster–calculus resides at the core of our stifled imagination. The difference between our reality and that without WWII extends beyond better or worse — the entire configuration of the world without WWII would have been unrecognizable by today’s man, as if we would have missed the most important lesson in our education.
Unraveling the causality chain that defines what we call our cultural and historical heritage today could take place along multiple alternative paths. Here is a short menu of things, one of its many possible accounts, of what we would be missing in this counterfactual reality.
Certain concepts like cold war, arms race or nuclear deterrent, simply wouldn’t exist. No Hiroshima, no Yalta and no political East and West. Geopolitical maps would look different. There would be no United Nations, no NATO and no European Union either.
Without another war, the nazification of Germany (which was really a consequence of WWI) and its infantile aggression would turn inwards onto their own people. High inflation and chronic indebtedness would have led to Germany’s imminent financial default and would handicap their economy in the long run. They would be the subject to multidimensional economic and cultural blockades, which, together with desires for excessive military spending, would exhaust their economic potential. Fueled by politically catalyzed incompetence and growing paranoia, Germany would spiral into something akin to the third world country and would be forced to close their borders finding themselves, with time, straddled somewhere between what East Germany was in the 1970s and contemporary North Korea. Adolf Hitler would have probably died of an aneurism at an old age remaining a marginal historical figure of local significance.
It is not unlikely that the Soviets – now a lot more numerous without WWII – would go on minding their own business, but still burdened by Stalin’s shenanigans, remain on a slower, but inevitable, path of self-destruction and eventual dissolution.
In contrast, the rest of the developed European countries which would never have to be liberated by the Soviets would remain on the course of prosperity; they would have an uninterrupted period of growth and resembling, probably, today’s Luxembourg or Switzerland.
Distribution of power would differ significantly. America would have nothing resembling its global presence and influence it has today. Its military budget would be considerably lower. There would be no Berlin Wall, no Bay of Pigs and no Castro; no Korean or Vietnam War either, no arms race, no Manhattan project, and no Sputnik moment. Landing on the Moon would have been dismissed as a frivolous and expensive idea and never attempted.
Kennedy would serve two presidential terms and his family would produce the longest reigning American dynasty, probably occupying top offices to this day. Onasis would remain anonymous outside of Greece. Nixon would have never been a President. There would be no Watergate and the Republican Party would not have to reinvent itself; they would remain a party of the elites and not a populist conglomerate. The right to life would never resurface as a polarizing issue. FOX would be an entertainment network without a political agenda. Twin Towers would still be the most prominent landmarks of the New York City’s skyline. The Civil rights movement would look very different. There would be no 60s as we know them, no hippies and no Charles Manson; 1968 would not happen. There would be no Summer of Love, no Woodstock, and lots of rock anthems from that period would never be written. The world would never see Casablanca, The Deer Hunter, Schindler’s List, Downfall or The Tin Drum.
Without WWII, philosophy, history, social and political sciences, physics and engineering, and our entire culture would have been hopelessly incomplete; they would be like physics without differential calculus, music without Mozart or literature without Dostoyevsky. We don’t even know how to begin to think about that reality. It would be an utterly different cognitive configuration, an anotherhood that eclipses our capacity for imagination – no extrapolation of our previous experiences would be capable of approximating it.
However, as much as we think we would be ready to transcend these obstacles, we remain nevertheless protective of the knowledge instilled by the catastrophe of WWII, unprepared and unwilling to give it up.
Adding disaster to the curriculum of humanity as the last pedagogical tool is a testimony to the fact that the only way that something can be learned is through catastrophe and the force of event. This is a de facto capitulation of Modernity’s method of unforced guidance and listening in favor of learning the hard way[6]. In the pedagogization of disaster – the interplay between misfortune and insight – there is always the lingering question about what didactically sufficient size of the disaster is: How bad the catastrophe has to be for the lesson to have long-lasting value? Well, WWII delivered in that respect.
The aesthetics of disappearance
When it comes to imagining the world without WWII – one that, at a minimum, shouldn’t be nominally worse than the existing one — the dead end of our imagination emerges as a consequence of the centuries old cultural baggage. Our world system and its history have developed mechanisms that inhibit modes of imagination which exclude catastrophes. This is a result of cultural struggles, which spontaneously create conditions that foster this asymmetry and resistance to alternatives as a cognitively more stable configuration. It stands as a reminder that disaster is essential for our existence, that bearable is an island in the ocean of unbearable and the island residents exist at discretion of the ocean[7]. Humanity’s addiction to disaster is a verdict on the failure of the struggle to extend the boundaries of that island of bearable.
This leads naturally to extrapolation of Walter Benjamin’s reflections on humanity. As a result of the blend of historical addiction to catastrophe and its growing self-alienation Western civilization may have reached a point where it can experience its own annihilation as a supreme aesthetic pleasure and, at the same time, internalize it through an ultimate didactic high as the most valuable lesson to be learned.
[1] Another outstanding book by Peter Sloterdijk that had been written way before its time. First released in Germany in 1989 as Eurotaoismus; Zur Kritik der politische Kinetik and in English translation as Infinite Mobilization in 2020 by Polity Press, the book has a keen contemporary relevance with unparalleled freshness of perspective and depth of insight.
[2] United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission Report: https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle.html
[3] ibid.
[4] ibid.
[5] ibid.
[6] Ibid.
[7] ibid.
25 IV 2021
Le Théâtre du Grand Guignol
The way out of a room is not through the door. Just don’t want out. And you’re free. (Charles Manson)
Under the influence of their main writer, Andre de Lorde, who collaborated on several plays with his therapist and experimental psychologist, insanity became the main theme of the Grand Guignol. This was happening at a time when insanity was just beginning to be scientifically studied and individual cases catalogued.
While fear of ‘the other’ appeared in countless variations, what carried the Grand-Guignol to its highest level were the boundaries and thresholds it crossed: Loss of consciousness, loss of control, panic — themes with which the theater’s audience could easily identify[2]. They reacted with terrified faces, but never once choosing to leave.
Revenge as entertainment
The theatre produced plays about a class of people who were not considered appropriate subjects in other venues: prostitutes, criminals, street urchins and others at the lower end of Paris‘s social echelon. This was also the original target audience. Horror plays often alternated with comedies, a lineup referred to as hot and cold showers. The actors often broke the fourth wall and directly addressed the audience in order to make them an accomplice to an act of violence, to highlight moments of realization, and to remind them that this act is happening very close to them, thus heightening the horror of being a witness[3].
The repertoire consisted of many different unrelated stories, but the common theme of revenge appeared in almost all of them. These are some examples of Grand Guignol horror shows[4]:
Un Crime dans une Maison de Fous: Two hags in an insane asylum use scissors to blind a pretty, young fellow inmate out of jealousy.
Le Laboratoire des Hallucinations: When a doctor finds his wife’s lover in his operating room, he performs a graphic brain surgery, rendering the adulterer a hallucinating semi-zombie. Now insane, the lover/patient hammers a chisel into the doctor’s brain.
Le Baiser dans la Nuit: A young woman visits the man whose face she horribly disfigured with acid, and he obtains his revenge.
Revenge was an emotion generally frowned upon by the proper bourgeoisie of the time, considered unseemly and unworthy of their status. Although it was associated with lower social strata, the initial target audience, revenge gradually became the guilty pleasure of selected members of the elite who frequented the Grand Guignol plays.
Unlike other forms of aggression hat require no provocation, revenge is an action provoked by a wrong. While punishment looks to improve the transgressor’s behavior or to deter future bad behavior, revenge seeks to have the transgressor suffer.
Revenge has deep social roots. The threat of revenge could have actually helped our ancestors to build stable social bonds by promising swift retribution if rules or boundaries were transgressed. Those who are vengeful were much less likely to be victimized or attacked.
Revenge carries strong hierarchical overtones. Not everyone is entitled to exact revenge. Right to revenge is a privilege that comes with status. Elaborate medieval spectacles of punishment and execution always contained a certain portion of retribution, which was not correctional and was incommensurate with the gravity of the offense. Even if there are no individual victims, breaking the law demands retribution because it is an attack on sovereign personally, since the law represents his will. This is the zero-point penalty. The ritual made the body of the condemned man the place where the vengeance of the sovereign was applied, the anchoring point for manifestation of power, an opportunity of offering the dissymmetry of forces. In punishment there must always be a portion that belongs to the prince – it constitutes the most important penal liquidation of the crime[5].
When put in a proper social context, revenge can find a strong resonance with certain segments of society, especially those who believe to have been wronged or excluded in one way or another. Revenge is the other side of victimhood. It defines the early contours of dialogues with the past and conquests of traumas, and reflects a quest for stability by folks who have been victims of various injustices. Since the past is fundamentally unjust, the call for revenge alludes to some form of dispensation of justice and implies entitlement and privilege with a promise of a chance of healing. This quest for justice and its collective resonance is often perceived as an aura of enlightenment by any political movement based on revenge.
Something is rotten in the state of status quo
These children that come at you with knives, they are your children. You taught them. I didn’t teach them. I just tried to help them stand up. (Charles Manson)
In the years following World War II Grand Guignol audiences gradually waned as the actual reality of the two wars and their aftermath eclipsed the theater’s fictional horrors[6]. By the time the Theater closed its doors in 1962, Charles Manson was 28, serving time in the McNeal Island US Penitentiary in Washington State. After a short release from there, he found his way back to the Terminal Island Correctional Institute in San Pedro, CA where he had already done time in the 1950s. As his release from Terminal Island was approaching in early 1967, Manson had already spent more than half of the 32 years of his life in prisons and other correctional institutions. Telling the authorities that prison had become his home, he requested permission to stay.
After being discharged in 1967, Manson began attracting a group of followers, mostly young women, from around California, later known as the Manson Family. The Family developed into a doomsday cult when he became fixated on the idea of an imminent apocalyptic race war between America’s Blacks and the larger white population. A white supremacist at heart, Manson’s acid fantasy revolved around Helter Skelter, a quasi-apocalyptic scenario whereby Black people would rise up and kill all whites, except, of course, Manson and his “Family”. And, to add to that another layer of the ridiculous, not being intelligent enough to survive on their own, the Blacks would need a white man to lead them, and would, of all people, chose Manson as their “master”.
In early August 1969, Manson encouraged his followers to trigger Helter Skelter by committing murders in Los Angeles and making it appear to be racially motivated. Their rampage ended the 60s, which marked not only their calendar ending, but also the end of an era of rebellion against conformism and the status quo. It closed a chapter in American history and wrapped up a decade of social uprising.
It is not so much what Manson did, although he did it in a way that couldn’t be ignored, but how he did it, the resonance he struck and reverberations his acts triggered. As if wondering what everyone was surprised about, Manson’s parting message, I am what you made me, was the unsettlingreminder of circular causality between the complacency of middle-class America and the inherent violence necessary for maintaining that lifestyle, its long echo refuses to go away even after five decades.
Manson was an outcast denied the comfort of American middle class complacency. He created his own surrogate reality through speech acts and pushed it to his followers. He exploited the Stepford wife model to repurpose the helpless, dissatisfied, and disillusioned young middle-class women bored with the status quo, into his willing robot killers. It was a civilizational relapse, a slap in the face to both the conformism of the 50s as well as all the liberation movements of the 60s that opposed it. Despite the backdrop of hippy rhetoric, free love, independence and emancipation, “his women” had been willingly downgraded back to obedient, docile subjects of suburban housewives of the 50s, only this time, with a mission. He had found the keys to the portal that unlocked the toxic social ferment whose existence had to be denied at all costs by the system.
The emergence of Manson and his cult was an autoimmune reaction of the system, the blowback that couldn’t be processed or digested. It appeared at the peak of ideological obsession with the status quo. Manson was a social malady that couldn’t be fought. He did not want anything from the rest of the society; he didn’t need anything that society could deny him. Yet, he exposed the Achilles’s heel of the system. His only agenda and the driving force, was revenge against the system, against women, pop culture, Blacks, Hollywood, and the entertainment industry, spiked with a dash of white supremacy and the entitlement that fills the void created by the absence of other values.
All of the cult’s participants in the murders received death sentences. This included Manson himself, although he personally did not do the killing and was not present at the site when they occurred. The sentence was subsequently commuted to life as California abolished the death penalty.
Wendy Brown
My father is the jailhouse. My father is your system. … I am only what you made me. I am only a reflection of you. … You want to kill me? Ha! I am already dead – have been all my life. I’ve spent twenty-three years in tombs that you have built. (Charles Manson, 1978)
Manson was one of the first superstars of the nascent society of spectacle. Fascination with him and his cult started shortly after their arrest, and hasn’t really stopped even during his time in prison. Manson had numerous marriage proposals and was, at the age of 79 (two years before his death), engaged to marry a 26-year-old Illinois woman. Tex Watson, the only male member of the killer squad, who, like the rest of the surviving members, remains incarcerated to this day, got married and had four kids. Susan Atkins was married twice (her second husband was a Harvard-graduate lawyer, 15 years here junior). Manson and his followers have all been repeatedly denied parole, anywhere between 17 and 23 times and those who have survived, will most definitely never leave the confines of a prison.
50 years later, doomsday cults are back in vogue again and we learned that the same modes of collective mobilization, on a much larger scale, could be achieved without the persuasive powers of psychedelics. In 2016, Grand Guignol has been shut for over 50 years and Manson, behind bars for 45 years, has become an almost forgotten chapter of America history. However, his paradigmatic significance as a vindictive narcissist cult leader was anything but dead. The spirit of Manson’s Grandguinelesque version of macabre horror was very much alive, only hibernating, ready to be deployed again.
Ressentiment and the modes of rebellion
At the center of all forms of uprising and public revolt resides Ressentiment /rə,säntə’män/, a psychological state arising from suppressed feelings of envy and hatred that cannot be acted upon, frequently resulting in some form of self-abasement[7]. There are three shades of revolt that govern different modes of response to Ressentiment. They differ by the intensity of revenge involved.
Absence of revenge: Judeo-Christian morality was born as a response of the weak, those who suffered in a value system affirming strength, power, and action. The weak were resentful not of their own weakness, but of the strong, whom they blamed for their suffering. As a result, they invented a new value system in which strength would be reproached as evil and weakness forted as good[8].
Moderate revenge: The French revolution and Communist uprising in Russia were bloody, but revenge was nominally blended with an emancipatory program and agenda. However, with time, revenge took over and prevented the evolution of the rebellion into anything other than self-destruction. These examples suggest that revenge is ultimately lethal even in small doses.
Excessive revenge: When ressentiment is born of dethronement, from lost entitlement, rather than from weakness, there is no new value system. Suffering and humiliation, ressentiment unsublimated, become permanent politics of revenge. In the present version of right-wing uprising, this is manifested through concentrated attacking those blamed for dethroned white maleness – feminists, multiculturalists, globalists, who both unseat and disdain them. There are high levels of affect instead of a developed moral system[9].
Unlike Black rage, which has been articulated through the Judeo-Christian mode, 21st century white rage represents collective vindictive narcissism. It is a reaction of the historically dominant as they feel that dominance ebbing.
Vindictive Narcissism
Exclusion leads to resentment and accumulations of grievances, which brews into revenge. Outsourcing those grievances to the cult and its leader defines the collective and the sense of identity and belonging. Cults are predicated on convincing their members that everyone has been lying to them. Followers are enticed by the illusion of new truths and territories. With the help of psychedelics or flattering rhetoric and identity politics, and with some persuasive power, cult leaders create their own reality through speech acts and push those visions to their followers.
At the core of each cult resides revenge as the common link. It is through revenge that cult leaders resonate with their members. The people most hell-bent on revenge are both low in forgiveness and high in narcissistic traits. Both the narcissist’s inflated social confidence and the narcissist’s sense of entitlement could produce a desire to retaliate against wrong-doers and could reduce constraints on acting on this desire[10].
In his book The Narcissist You Know, Joseph Burgo actually identifies The Vindictive Narcissist as a distinct psychological type/category. Narcissist’s vengefulness stems from his unconscious shame and his need to defend himself against that shame being revealed, leaving him thin-skinned and vulnerable to anything that looks vaguely like an attack. When he feels attacked, he reacts without restraint and limits[11].
Success is a relative category. A businessman whose career starts with a $400mn handout from his father and follows up with seven bankruptcies is not really an example of success. While being objectively rich, someone with such initial conditions and that roster of failures is a colossal loser, pretty much by any metric[12]. Getting into the White House only to finish his one-term presidency as, what is unanimously considered, the worst president in the American history (by a wide margin) is also not something one could be proud of. That knowledge and awareness must hurt.
For Trump, everything has always been about revenge – he is the epitome of a vindictive narcissist. That is his curse, but, at this political moment, also his magic, his secret sauce, and the point of resonance with his base. Exacting revenge has become the sole purpose and philosophy of both the leader and his following. It is the backbone of their shared social identity.
Having a leader who harbors feelings of revenge, not necessarily rooted in the same way as his followers, creates a special emotional bond and resonance between the two[13].
Trump’s transgressions and acts of revenge, no matter how petty or pointless, have had an orgasmic effect on his base. They became an articulation of their revenge against the wound of nothingness and a symbolic act of destruction of the imagined agent of that wound. The policies he proposed were irrelevant as long as he opposed those that were in place, which they hold responsible for their precarity. His abuses of power are vital to this desire. He has the power they lack – they live their revenge through him.
Politics as a suicide cult
No sense makes sense (Charles Manson)
Revenge as a way of creating change is socially toxic. It carries the seeds of self-sabotage. It is non-convertible and sterile, unable to transform itself into a creative force. The vindictive cult followers are trapped in the quicksand of fermented rage and resentment. They are asphyxiated by their leader, but, at the same time, as a group, they cannot survive without the virtual supplement that he provides. The residual of the Republican Party, “Trump’s Family”, is a bunch of bewildered and desperate shipwreck survivors, Manson’s girls without Manson in search of their raison d’être.
Fascination with chaos and ex-nihilo creation reveals a common pattern across different cases of vindictive narcissist cults. Through a concerted creation of chaos, doomsday cult leaders effectively voice their plea for a second chance, albeit without any alternative plans. Their entire lives were spent on the edge of precipice, narrowly escaping catastrophe. They believe that, due to their higher tolerance to chaos, they would fair better than the others after the great reset.
Manson’s ridiculous acid fantasy of revenge, Helter Skelter — the racial war in which the Blacks would win, but unable to rule themselves, would elect none other than him — is just the other side of his impotence in finding his place in the social universe. As an outcast, he saw himself in the same position as African Americans, the other systemically excluded social group. However, the little white racist in him couldn’t avoid seeing himself as their superior and “natural” leader. When put together with his choreography of the gruesome spectacle of the 1969 Hollywood murders, this dimwitted fantasy underscores the Grandguinolesque dialectics of comedy and horror.
These modes of collective self-hypnosis are the site where all revenge-based cults converge — Fascism, Bolshevism, Jacobin revolution, terrorism, Trump’s and Manson’s included. Their logic and dynamics translate seamlessly to contemporary Right-Wing populism, just on a larger scale. The spectacle of the last presidency, as a form where the comedy of ridiculous narratives, clownish self-sabotage, and outright stupidity are blended with irresponsible criminal incompetence and the gruesome horror of their consequences, is the Grand Guignol Theater of the new century.
According to Wendy Brown, the current predicament is a result of the unintended consequences of the neoliberal project. The accidental wounding of the white male supremacy has yielded an apocalyptic politics, whichin its final mutation has evolved into a suicide cult. If white men cannot own the planet, there won’t be any planet. This, at the end is the apocalyptic mode of white revolt and its politics that is willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future without white male rule[14].
This degeneration of the Right-Wing political movement (into a suicide cult) has an unmistakable Helter Skelter vibe. The crescendo of deliberately open and grotesquely excessive violence against the American Blacks could serve no other purpose except to act as a trigger of a racially intonated civil conflict, out of which the white supremacist cult hopes to emerge on top as a representative of the outnumbered, but ultimately, in their eyes, superior race in what they are experiencing as a reenactment of the Manson’s acid fantasy.
[2] ibid.
[3] ibid.
[4] ibid.
[5] Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Vintage (1979)
[6] Charles Nonon, theater’s final director, summarized it best: “We could never equal Buchenwald. Before the war, everyone felt that what was happening onstage was impossible. Now we know that these things, and worse, are possible in reality.”
[7] Wendy Brown, In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West, Columbia University Press (2019)
[8] ibid.
[9] ibid.
[10] Joseph Burgo, The Narcissist You Know: Defending Yourself Against Extreme Narcissists in an All-About-Me Age, Touchstone (2015)
[11] ibid.
[12] To put things in perspective, at the time of this handout, the S&P was around $100, and now it is at $4000, and if one had done nothing but left those $400mn as a passive stock market investment, that would have amounted to around $16bn today. Instead, the recipient of that handout today is struggling to remain solvent for the eight time.
[13] Wendy Brown, ibid.
[14] ibid.
24. II 2021
Idiocy and the Art of Getting Lost
Sanity is a small box; insanity is everything. (Charles Manson)
Two erotic modes of modernity
The real genius of Kafka was to eroticize bureaucracy, a non-erotic entity which in the early 20th century had already acquired a divine dimension representative of another order beyond earthly reality[1]. A century after Kafka, Sarah Palin rose from virtual anonymity to become an unlikely icon of eroticized stupidity, another force of the new order. She impassioned America and brought a new Eros to politics. In a series of carefully coordinated public appearances she struck resonance with a large body of the American population (mostly white middle aged men) and emerged as the Franz Kafka of right-wing populism. Embraced by the conservative elites who quickly recognized the political value of the ridiculous, she became, practically overnight, the new face of the Republican Party.
Sarah entered the scene as an emblematic representative of de-complexified post-femininity and a self-declared champion of the American underclass. She stood as a reminder that you can be ignorant, stupid, and, at the same time, aggressive and still occupy a high public office. She embodied “post-feminist” femininity without a complex, uniting the features of mother, primary-school teacher (with her glasses and hair in a bun), public person, and, implicitly, sex object, proudly displaying the “first dude” as a phallic toy (and don’t forget the “drill, baby, drill!”). The message was that she “has it all” — and that, to add insult to injury, it was a Republican woman who had realized this Left-liberal dream[2].
Sarah Palin’s figure resides on the end point of continuum of eroticization of the non-erotic that spans one century from Kafka’s castrating power of bureaucracy to Palin’s castrating power of stupidity. But she didn’t come out of nowhere. For decades, stupidity had been cultivated as a precious commodity, its value well recognized and used in politics, business and media. After considerable efforts have been invested in its rise and widespread acceptance, the harvest time came in 2016. And what a harvest it’s been. In the last four years, the circle has finally closed: Kafka’s world of eroticized bureaucracy gradually gave way to the eroticized stupidity of Sarah Palin, and finished with a fully bureaucratized stupidity of Trump’s GOP.
Creative potential of stupidity
You can’t get lost in one dimension — you go either left or right. On a plane, that is easier, but it comes with no penalty. Penalty comes with gravity and the third dimension.
Until recently, ignorance and stupidity were allowed only transient intrusions into public life. There was always a certain stigma attached to stupidity — people used to be embarrassed to display it. Sarah Palin changed that forever. Stupidity is here to stay; it is now being promoted as a virtue and has acquired an elaborate cultural cross-dressing aimed at anesthetizing the public to its omnipresence and, at the same time, encouraging stupidity to come out in its full glory.
The last four years ushered in a new age when stupidity infiltrated every pore of public life. Stupidity has become ubiquitous and unavoidable, assumed many forms and developed a level of granularity it hadn’t had before. Every segment of society has been touched by it. From those unemployed and socially dislocated, to political lobbyists, conservative think tanks, Congressmen, Senators, ministers, lawyers, media personalities, epidemiologists, cabinet members, economic advisors, and the First Family, stupidity always managed to have its voice heard. In its everyday acceptance, stupidity now demands a new framework — it requires to be properly identified, stratified, nuanced, and contextualized. Not everything is equally “stupid” – there are shades, depths and texture to it.
The space of intelligence is not a one-dimensional spectrum consisting of intelligent, stupid and everything in between. Intelligence, wisdom, ignorance, stupidity, or idiocy are not just points on a line, but destinations, paths, and directions on a multi-dimensional landscape.
The word intelligence comes from inter-legere, which means choosing-between. It is not entirely free as it is caught in a between. Intelligence has no access to outside because it makes a choice between options in a system. Therefore, intelligence does not really exercise free choice: it can only select among the offerings the system affords[3].
Intelligence follows the logic of the system; it inhabits the “horizontal plane”. It is conditional: A given system defines its own intelligence. (Having a PhD degree in abstract algebra has little value for survival in a prison.)
In contrast, idiosyncratic takes leave of the prevailing system — it abandons the plane of intelligence and operates along the “vertical” dimension perpendicular to it. The reign of intelligence is slavery to the existing order of things. The idiosyncratic means overcoming the intelligence; it is a rebellious act of removing the shackles of intelligence and emancipation from its confines.
Idiots reside on the idiosyncratic axis. Theirs is a missionary role: They traverse between different intelligence planes of the systems of knowledge.
In his Treatise on idiocy, Clément Rosset[4] points out that unlike intelligence, which is thought to be attentive, nimble and alert, stupidity is understood as sluggish, anesthetic, and mummified. However, there is nothing as attentive, nimble, and alert as stupidity. Boundless openness and receptiveness is its main distinctive feature.
Ignorance means not understanding the rules and options of the plane of intelligence. Ignorance is a poverty of experience: It closes doors and refuses to recognize the existing paths to knowledge.
Stupidity, in contrast, is opened to anything; everything is an object of notice[5]. It confuses different contexts and assumes knowledge and extrapolations of previous experiences to contexts where those do not belong and often cannot hold.
Ignorance is static — it means being stuck. Stupidity is dynamic — it implies being ill equipped, fearless, and lost.
When ignorance is set in motion, it morphs into stupidity. Stupidity is ignorance on the move. It is revealed by getting out of the cocoon and exploring unknown territory, applying knowledge and experience to the context where it doesn’t apply. Stupidity is open to conspiracy – it represents an assault on probability: It doesn’t recognize the impossibility of the improbable, but takes the unlikely as probable. This susceptibility to the improbable is not a sign of open-mindedness or critical thinking, but a trademark of stupidity.
Wisdom, on the other hand, means understanding the domain and boundaries of your knowledge and experience and avoiding terrain where those do not hold. It is the ability of not losing your way.
I followed the road less travelled and now I don’t know where I am
Illegal immigrants caught voting should be stripped of their citizenship (Ben Carson)
Stupids and idiots are fellow travellers. Idiots have perfected a way of looking clever to stupid people. They seduce and confuse; stupids are their victims. By creating bridges between different layers of knowledge idiots open gateways to new territories, new rules, and new experiences. But, in that process, they create entropy and increase the possibility of getting lost. With idiots’ help, stupidity finds the shortest path to self-destruction.
The encouragement of idiocy never ends well. Kafka’s bureaucracy, at its peak when it used to decide who existed and what the truths were, gave birth to another order and, with it, created fertile ground for the rise of idiot leaders, which, by the mid-century, produced totalitarian regimes of various kind and wars which shaped the entire century.
The post-Reagan war on bureaucracy, under the banner starve-the-beast/drain-the-swamp, was nothing else but a political maneuver of replacing the old bureaucratic machine of self-indulgent inefficiency with a new one – stupidity. Its core followers were, at the same time, its main victims.
Like the early 20th century bureaucracy, stupidity of the 21st century has become inefficient institutional machinery caught in its own circular self-pleasure and delight. The true aim of the technology of stupidity, its commodification and proliferation, is no longer to pursue an ideological goal, to solve problems of governing increasingly fragmented society, but to repeatedly re-create or even magnify the underlying problems and reproduce the reasons for its own existence and growth. Stupidity confronts us now with a new form of addiction in terms of paralyzing surplus-enjoyment[6]: The enjoyment generated not by fulfilling its official goal (e.g. mobilizing populist votes), but by self-reproducing cycle of its own movement.
Idiot: The man of the future
The old idiot wanted truth, but the new idiot wants to turn the absurd into the highest power of thought (Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari)
In Lars von Trier’s movie, The Idiots, a group of perfectly intelligent young people decides to express their reaction to society’s cult of aimless, non-creative and irresponsible conformism by living together in a commune of “idiots”. Their main activity consists of going out into the world of “normal” people and pretending to be mentally disabled. They create chaos and anarchy with a ritualized practice of enacting spastic tantrums of agitated mental derangement in public spaces, fast food restaurants, coffee houses, or movie theaters. These actions generally stop normal flow of things and generate discomfort by drawing attention to the perpetrators. They disrupt, shock, and anger the spectators caught in these situations. The turning point in the movie takes place on the occasion when the commune members, during their public display of voluntary idiocy, encounters a group of mentally disabled adults on a daily field trip from their nursing homes.
Following that encounter, one of the members goes involuntarily into a spastic tantrums and her act is noticed by the rest of the commune members as more genuine and is recognized as the letting of her inner idiot out, a novelty the others haven’t had the ability to do.
And as if reality has caught up with the movie more than twenty years after its release, there is an undeniable vibe of déjà vu in the current ritualistic practice of the American right-wing politics that strikes resonance with von Trier’s Idiot commune. Republican senators no longer engage in politics in terms of serving the needs of their constituents. Their main preoccupation has become the self-indulgent surrender to stupidity. Like von Trier’s Idiots, they function through enacted episodes of spastic tantrums and idiosyncratic stupidity in public, Congress or in Senate. And there seems to be a real competition among them to outdo each other – whose outburst would be more both more shocking and, at the same time, more convincing and genuine.
What does it mean to be stupid and what does it mean to pretend to be stupid? Who are these politicians who have had elite education and credential, but act like ignorant folks and can the two meet? While enacted political stupidity is about role-playing, at some point, it raises the question: Is the individual a persona, a mask or his stupidity is real? These are questions about identity, authenticity, and character as well as about politics as a medium and as tool.
In addition to being an act of protest, the practice of deliberate and ceremonial display of political idiocy has become a ritual, which highlights the inner idiot in a man. This is the situation when role-playing becomes indistinguishable from the real thing and when going overboard with idiocy is a way of getting rid of one’s false self and becoming a different person, one who can, by stepping out of the confines of intelligence, foster change.
Stupidity as a political tool is a new chapter in the history of civilization. The stupidity project is production of human bodies without human reason and the idiot as the man of the future. The release of idiocy is a way of displaying the hollowness of conventional behavior and a method of provoking consensus and status quo. It stands as an ideological critique of the existing social condition and frames stupidity as a rebellion against the tyranny of intelligence and a tool that is used to prevent reality’s intrusion on the entire stupidity project.
This brings us closer to answering the nagging question that just won’t go away: Why are madness and stupidity embraced as a tool of political alchemy? The answer is surprisingly simple: Because stupidity is efficient.
There is something cathartic about absolute surrender to the singularity of bottomless spastic tantrum of mentally unstable rage, with total disregard for consequences, whether it is in a fast food restaurant or on the floor of the US Senate. It is a true idiosyncratic event, the missionary task of idiots, which creates a situation of unconditional attention and maximum unpredictability, like stepping into a black hole and exiting on the “other side” to a new universe with no possibility of return.
Black holes are objects of absolute coherence. Information that is absorbed by the black hole does not disappear, but its apparent loss and increase in entropy is converted into an expansion of the black hole’s event horizon. As the event horizon extends after each spastic event, a larger fraction of the universe becomes captured inside the region from which return is impossible, and the growth of stupidity, like that of entropy, never stops.
[1] Slavoj Zizek, The Courage of Hopelessness: A Year of Acting Dangerously, Melville House (2018)
[2] Jacques-Alain Miller, Sarah Palin: Operation “Castration”, lacan.com (2010)
[3] B. C. Han, Psychopolitics, Verso (2017)
[4] Clément Rosset, Le Réel. Traité de l’idiotie, Paris: Minuit (1977)
[5] ibid.
[6] We encounter this surplus enjoyment in everyday life: We often engage in shopping, not only because we enjoy the object we would acquire, but because we enjoy the act of shopping itself.
29. XII 2020
Adventures in Rage Kapitalism
Between 1996 and 1997, during the de-Sovietization of Eastern Europe, Albania was convulsed by the dramatic rise and collapse of several huge financial pyramid schemes. At the peak, the nominal value of the pyramid schemes’ liabilities amounted to almost half of the country’s GDP. About two thirds of the Albanian population invested in them.
Last summer, ten years after my first reading, I took a second shot at Peter Sloterdijk’s, Rage and Time[1]. While the first take was illuminating, the second round was nothing short of transformational — a pure bliss and an altogether new experience. The framework, which it laid down a decade ago, when put in the current context, has acquired visionary relevance. The book has aged marvelously. Like the best wine, it developed complexity and nuance, which I failed to detect originally.
Rage and Time was published in its original version in Germany in 2006 and appeared in the English translation four years later, in 2010. It was written while the economy in the developed world was booming and neoliberal hegemony remained uncontested, before any hint of the global financial crisis was on the horizon. As such, the book had been deprived of the new landscape of rage and the most interesting decade of its evolution. Nevertheless, it became a true testimony of the future. Solterdijk’s work laid a precise fundamental groundwork for what was to come soon after its publication. Post-2008 developments flow seamlessly as a natural extrapolation of the ideas expressed in the book, making it practically effortless to imagine what would have been the content of additional chapters had the book been written in 2020. This period is possibly the most explicit celebration of the book’s framework and a stunning “out of sample” confirmation of its main theses.
Sloterdijk’s argument begins with the observation that political parties and movements define a non-monetary banking system where they function like rage banks and operate as collection points of affects; they facilitate transactions with the rage of others in the same way monetary banks operate with the money of their customers. They provide a liaison between rage capacities and a desire for dignity. Their contract is based on a promise to their clients to disburse a return in the form of increased self-respect and a more powerful grasp of the future, provided the clients refrain from independent utilization of their rage. By doing this, they relieve their clients of the difficulty of having to take their own initiative, while nevertheless promising thymotic gains[2].
With these transmission mechanisms of rage in place, political developments in America and Europe nowadays can be interpreted as conceptually the same phenomenon that took place in financial systems of emerging post-socialist Europe some 25 years ago.
At the core of these developments reside continuous attempts to manage the crisis of legitimation of a system that has run its course with pyramid schemes of rage: Populist movements, which have emerged as a consequence of this crisis, have enticed people to deposit every last molecule of their grievances in rage banks run by the current Right Wing political parties. Their game plan is to appropriate those deposits and declare bankruptcy, in pretty much the same ways as regular banks did in 1990s Albania. And who’s better suited for this job than a certified conman with an uncontested record of fraud and serial bankruptcies?
Surrogate capitalism
The main characteristic of pyramid schemes, what distinguishes them from traditional capitalism, is that they have a finite duration and irreversible collapse. Capitalism, which has booms and busts, crashes, and recessions, recovers because it has an elastic modus of fleeing ahead that includes creative behavior; it is capable of controlling tendencies that signal collapse[3]. A pyramid scheme, on the other hand has no inner mechanisms and patterns of behavior; it is a hollow project financed only by a continuous inflow of (gullible) newcomers who are willing to pay for an opportunity to take risk against empty promises. While those at the top could pocket sizable profits, the bottom echelons lose with certainty. It is the absence of transparency and information about individuals’ places in the hierarchy of the pyramid scheme that determines its extent and duration.
The underlying mechanism and logic of cash flows of a general pyramid scheme can be understood using a simple three-level example with Captain, Crew, and Passengers. Everyone has to recruit two new members, and each member chips in with $100, which is then distributed upwards. At the end, the Captain goes with $400, the Crew breaks even, and the Passengers lose their investment, a total of $400[4].
For a pyramid scheme to continue to work, it’s expansion must not stop – once it stops, it is over, all the funds have already been distributed and no new are coming in. Because of that, the scheme is a catastrophic process of finite duration — its collapse must occur because the number of new recruits, which are essential for its financing, is required to grow exponentially and very quickly the number of newly recruitable players is exhausted — all newcomers who can be recruited are already on board.
The inevitable collapse occurs either suddenly or it needs to be brought about consciously because the number of momentarily recruitable players necessarily becomes zero after only a few rounds, which is why even with good camouflage it is hardly possible to extend a game longer than a few years.
Albanian capitalist apprenticeship as a template of American right-wing politics
There is an unmistakable similarity between the Albanian transient apprenticeship in capitalism during the 1990s and the Right Wing populist attempts to crash the American political market in the 21st century. Sloterdijk’s detailed account of conditions that led to the Albanian crash transcribes almost verbatim to present-day America once conventional money is replaced with rage as political currency.
Albania has always held a singular position in Europe. Its history is an undeserved tragedy of Albanian people who had been innocent victims of circumstances created by geopolitical forces over which they had no influence. The country epitomizes physical, political, and cultural exclusion, with a heavy stigma of isolation and backwardness, similar to today’s North Korea.
Decades of systematic and absolute isolation have caused a gradual atrophy of general exchange mechanisms necessary for normal functioning of society[5]. And the more these mechanisms became necessary and urgently needed to keep up with the rest of the world, the more intense oppression had become, leading ultimately to their total disappearance and Albanian disconnect from the rest of the world. Albania was a failed state long before that concept existed. While the only thing at their disposal was time and patience, the world moved on leaving them light years behind and practically impossible to catch up. As Albania gradually learned to live without the world and the world without Albania, after more than half a century of total disconnect, reintegration became unachievable.
The excess population in America, the growing body of excluded white underclass, shares a similar destiny as Albanian folks — both have been the victims of systematic and irreversible exclusions and both have had their own Hillbilly Elegies:Like Albanians, who remained largely prisoners of their own past, the American white underclass felt equally cut off from luck, wealth, and privilege and its distribution for too long.
Their uprisings share a similar pattern as well. Like the newly minted Albanian capitalists of the 1990s, who were fed by grandiose phrases about their past, their American counterparts felt it was their turn to take part in the satisfying injustices of the affluent world. Both fell, naturally and expectedly, into the trap of their precarity and impatience. In the same way Albanians fell for the massive pyramid scheme in the 1990s, 20 years later, the American white underclass had fallen victim to the rage pyramid scheme of Right Wing populism following the same logic of the old-fashioned misconceptions and empty promises of capitalist alchemy.
Pyramid schemes have a strange effect on our minds: When easy money is readily available, we don’t ask for rationale, we take it; everyone sees themselves as perpetrators and not the victims.
Bundling rage deposits of the American excluded underclass into old and new (stillborn) right-wing narratives did it’s magic by saturating the public discourse with low-brow paranoia of deep state, assault on the 2nd amendment, right to life, and the fear of government control, while delivering the inflated thymotic premium in the form of worthless pseudo-nationalist pride as a surrogate for the old-fashioned white (male) supremacy. Although this was not a new development, it’s tempo, set by the last four years, was.
By normalizing corruption, Trump, with a lifetime of experience in fraud and embezzlement, demonstrated how to cash in more efficiently on the rage investments of impatient, gullible, and vulnerable constituents, by pretending to rais the stakes and by deepening the commitment of the Republican base, he drained the last atom of their rage, and after harvesting and monetizing it, declared bankruptcy. In that respect, he achieved in four years more than the GOP did in the prior 40 years.
And things went predictably wrong for all depositors, as they did for Albanian “investors” 25 years ago. Rage deposits were used to deliver lower taxes for the rich, while defaulting on all other promises to bring back manufacturing, healthcare, coal industry, immigration reform, the wall, healthcare debacle… Trump emerged as Bernie Madoff of rage capitalism and the movement became the rage version of the Albanian capitalist experiment.
By now, it is clear that the scheme is over; the pyramid has collapsed. COVID was Trump’s (and the GOP’s) Stalingrad. It outlined the contours of the bursting of the rage asset bubble and the crumbling of the Right Wing pyramid scheme. The result has been a replay of the Balkan opera buffa, which, if it hadn’t had tragic consequences, involving real people and human misery, would have been extraordinarily funny: Caged children irreversibly separated from their parents, massive economic devastation together with the rise of precarity, and the criminally incompetent mishandling of the pandemic with hundreds of thousands of unnecessary victims.
When reality becomes a parody of itself
Unlike Albanian “capitalists” who, after getting financially wiped out, got over it and figured out the obvious that a pyramid scheme is just a pyramid scheme, American comrades (self-proclaimed entrepreneurs, risk takers and believers in the “free-market” supremacy) seem to be immune to the same learning process. Their social metabolism works differently. The myth that there’s a first prize for everyone is still the basic axiom of American cultural ideology. The deep-rooted belief of the underprivileged that they are not victims, just temporarily embarrassed millionaires, is still the fundamental determinant of the American social identity.
After being robbed by one pyramid scheme, they rush straight into another, as if nothing happened — same type of scam, organized often by the same person who robbed them the first time (or by his cousin); it doesn’t matter, there are always rubes to be recruited. There seems to be a culturally conditioned chronic delusion about the wealth alchemy that pushes the entire nation to aspire to become instant millionaires, which prevents them from resisting a scam, even when it is transparent and clearly defined as such[6].
The last decade stands as the final stage of the transformation of the American psyche, from Protestant ethics of hard work to compulsive risk takers and lottery winners, a residual of the gold rush mentality that has mysteriously survived centuries of reality checks. This is the something for nothing mindset that has been going since the discovery of the New Continent. It received strong reinforcement and entered an accelerated phase by the Silicon Valley paradigm. The attempts to contain the psychological fallout of that episode have defined the social tensions of the new century.
Like the biological immune system of Native Americans, who early settlers decimated with diseases, which for the newcomers were not lethal, but proved so for the natives, the contemporary American social immune system remains permanently compromised.
The holy grail of this ideological affliction is the belief in the sovereignty of luck: 1) There is a first prize for everyone and 2) Who wins is right and who loses should not complain[7]. If a person commits a crime and gets away with it, instead of condemnation, society responds with: “Good for him”. This transposes ex-ante any transgression as another failed attempt to realize what is rightfully yours, and thus blurs the boundary between right and wrong. There is no room for ethical judgment – hurting people or doing social damage, is not assessed in a broader context of ethics and general system of values, but is, at most, taken as an error in calculation.
The unwavering emotional investments in the ideology of meritocracy and, at the same time, inability to understand subtle differences between capitalism and pyramid scheme prevents them from being able to resist and defend themselves against fraud. Capitalism is prepared to put up with every form of irrationality as long as conditions for its technical rationality are preserved. And because of that, American self-declared libertarians and defenders of the “free-market” capitalist value system, as much as they believe in the power of rationality, fail it repeatedly. There is a little Albanian capitalist with a learning disability under each MAGA hat, all 74 million of them.
[1] Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time, Columbia University Press (2010)
[2] ibid.
[3] ibid.
[4] In a four-period pyramid scheme passengers can be divided in to 1st class (4) and economy class (8). The latter lose all their money (total $800), while former break even, crew divides $200 and captains takes $600. With a more realistic branching number, where each participant has to recruit ten new members, we realize that pyramid schemes can have only a handful of levels. A twelve level pyramid scheme with this branching already exceeds the entire human population.
[5] For more than half a century, Albania was completely sealed – nothing could come in and nothing could get out. They had no political allies or sympathizers. There was no cultural exchange with the rest of the world and no flow of information. That was the vision of their political leadership, imposed on the entire population with considerable force. Albania was a poor country doomed to endure its isolation alone relying solely on its meager resources. The net result was an incredible poverty, both economic and cultural.
[6] The latest example of the post-election scam is just another data point. After realization that there are more than 70 million rubes ready to participate and invest in an already bankrupt project, the number that stunned even its creators, the new scheme started while the ballots were still being counted. Trump already raised several hundred millions after his defeat in terms of donations for “legal” costs, “Patriot League” and “Elite Club” memberships from the people who just didn’t want to see the small print informing them of a true trajectory of their donations.
[7] Ibid.
12. XII 2020
Rage Kapital
Thymos is that area of the soul where feelings of pride, indignation, and shame are located. It is the middle realm between reason and desire, the unreflective striving towards what is noble — the courage to be. (Paul Lee)
How do individual grievances become streamlined into a collective expression of dissidence, political opposition, and aggregate supply of discontent? This socio-affective landscape functions very much like a traditional banking system in which rage replaces money and becomes the main political currency. In Peter Sloterdijk’s highly original approach to the role of rage and thymos in political history, the starting point is the mapping between political systems of dissidence and financial markets. He adopts the framework of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory[1], which allows a straightforward generalization, and extension of banking to the social and political context:
Economics defines a bank as a collection point for capital. The deposits of customers, which are fruitless monetary treasures when deposited, are transformed immediately into capital. They are invested in profit-oriented forms of business, which allows clients to partake in successful investments while protecting them whenever possible against disappointments. The banking system transforms the temporal profile of money through the transition from treasury (a mode of storage as a static configuration of accumulated presence aimed at the preservation of value) to its capital form (a dynamic mode of being, subject to constant externalization, constantly occupied with using itself, but never in full possession of itself)[2].
How rage becomes transactional
Political parties and movements define a non-monetary banking system where rage banks operate as collection points of affects; they facilitate transactions with the rage of others in the same way monetary banks operate with the money of their customers. They provide liaison between rage capacities and a desire for dignity. Their contract is based on a promise to their clients to disburse a return in the form of increased self-respect and a more powerful grasp of the future, provided the clients refrain from independent utilization of their rage. By doing this, they relieve their clients of the difficulty of having to take their own initiative, while nevertheless promising thymotic gains[3].
Rage banks
In the 20th century, such rage banks/political movements were (with one notable exception) invariably on the left. In the 21st century, however, rage has moved completely to the right or, more precisely, to the far right, which has taken upon itself the main rage-banking role. This has come about as a consequence of two factors: The left’s abdication of its traditional role and its compromised position after the collapse of the Soviet experiment, and the reign and subsequent decline of neoliberalism and its current legitimation crisis. These two processes have not been completely independent — their evolution has had a strong causal interplay after the new initial conditions had been set in 1968.
Neoliberalism and the disappearance of the Left
The migration of sponsorship of rage from the Left to the Right is a consequence of the spontaneous self-destruction of the neoliberal social system. Paraphrasing Zizek’s summary of this transition, the causality chain begins with neoliberalism as an ideology which disseminates market values to every segment of life. However, once one allows the market to impose its values and criteria, society has to be managed as an auxiliary to the market. The welfare state has to be dismantled and the economy deregulated. Identified with social statism, the Left finds itself without either a program, project or perspective. It is gradually absorbed (and dominated) by the center and is tolerated only when it can persuade labor movements to accept the need for liberalizing reforms. As a consequence, the main task of the Left is to convince lower classes to articulate their fury without disturbing the status quo and voting themselves into economic ruin. Hijacked by the center, the Left becomes an Uncle Tom of the labor movement. It is only the Left in name – a name that it merely continues to discredit[4].
Rage assets and rage economics
The American white underclass never forgave the Center/Left coalition, which in combination with the general trend of emancipation, allowed/enabled black people to climb the class ladder and disrupt what they (the white underclass) perceived as the “natural” hierarchy. This sowed the racist seed for what would become the culture war, in reality a class war in a displaced mode, tipping the scales from the Left to the Right, and outlining the contours of that transition.
After decades of labor’s disappointment with the faux Left and the Center, the Tea Party emerged as a genuine right-wing rage bank in the days following the peak of the global financial crisis in 2008. Conservative opinion outlets like Fox defined the cognitive coordinates of the right-wing narrative and became the epicenter of the outrage industry with Roger Ailes as the James Pierpont Morgan of rage banking.
Bundling grievances of the white underclass into rage assets has been the core of contemporary right-wing political alchemy – an analogue to the financialization of the economy. The first draft of this project was outlined in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal. After the Republican party was pronounced clinically dead in the post-Nixon years, Lee Atwater drafted the blueprint of its comeback with the right-to-life issue, which mobilized emotions that united evangelicals, rural Christians and the general white underclass under the same umbrella with financial elites and the wealthy. The continued persistence and functionality of this counterintuitive ideological stunt, this unique American experience that goes against all odds of logic and economics, has never ceased to astonish.
American white underclass has deposited its grievances into rage banks which converted them into rage assets: Right-to-life and general misogyny (both representing an actual maneuver to reduce the social influence of women), 2nd amendment hysteria, small government fetish, tax affliction and the obsession with dismantling the welfare state, Deep State paranoia, Birtherism, and the production of a wide spectrum of deniers (from Flatearthers and anti-maskers to vaccine-, evolution-, holocaust-, climate change, and election-deniers).
The main suppliers of rage remained the white underclass, excess population, and those, generally, left behind, while Libertarian think thanks, the NRA, evangelicals, special interest groups and right-wing liminal players acted as purveyors of discontent, rage asset managers, and strategic investors in rage markets.
Disinformation and conspiracy theory centers like Rush Limbaugh, Talk Radio, Breitbart, Info Wars, OAN, NewsMax, and Qanon became the centers of treasure against which rage assets have been printed and used as capital. They became the main innovators of structured rage finance and suppliers of rage volatility, rising as the shadow rage banking system while social media became platforms for day trading in rage transactions and a way to whip up emotions and create additional rage volatility. Fox and (on the local level) Sinclair remained the main nodes of this action, acting like credit unions or the Fannie Mae of rage.
Nationalism as the white collar crime of rage banking
The depth of Sloterdijk’s insight and the power of his framework become manifest when it comes to discussions of the emergence and effects of nationalism on the eve of WWI. During the late 19th century and until the beginning of the war, capitalism as a source of economic misery and political repression was the primary origin of the supply of discontent and raw rage. In that configuration, political alliances and parties of the left became collection points of dissidence, which organized the thymos of the disadvantaged[5].
As capitalism spread through the developed world and internationalized, the anticapitalist impulse could maintain the level of its enemy only if it reached the same supranational level as the enemy in terms of organization and operation. This insight led to the internationalist pathos, which persisted for all authentic parties of the left uninterrupted until 1914[6].
All this came to a halt in August 1914 when it became clear that the collective grievances of the international proletariat had to be unwound and the underlying rage redirected toward national interests of individual warring countries. There were no longer any parties with any other mandate except for the national one. This sentiment and attitude was the obituary for transnational solidarity[7].
This was the major rage bank crisis. The rage deposits of the masses of internationally operating banking houses were now at the disposal of national political leaderships.
The emerging nationalism effectively represented a large-scale devaluation of rage assets and an embezzlement of rage banks. By withdrawing decades worth of accumulated quantities of rage and dissidence from the frontline against the capitalist order and making it available for the war between imperial nations, the leaders of the moderate workers movement committed a white-collar crime of unparalleled extent[8].
Arousing thymos of the abject: 21st century populism
Nationalism is the worship of the smell of our collective shit (Charles Simic)
In the 20th century, WWI was the catalyst of the large-scale devaluation of rage investments of the oppressed and excluded. Similarly, modern 21st century nationalism is, more than anything, an insurrection against the consolidation and internationalization of global aggregate rage. It is an ill-conceived, discoordinated struggle for the appropriation and misuse of the global underclass’s rage.
The core of the conflict of the Right Wing populism resides in the debasement and degeneration of American conservatism. The main idea behind the alignment of the two opposite ends of the social spectrum (the privileged and the excluded) with fundamentally incompatible interests under one umbrella consists of redirecting rage into cultural instead of class struggle.
As the world (and capitalism as the center of discontent production) has been getting increasingly more global, in an effort to cash in on the accumulation of global grievances and latent dissidence, populism, with largely nationalist platforms and pseudo-protectionist agenda, has felt the need to internationalize its movement.
However, while Right Wing populism was pacifying the growing white underclass and keeping the movement of the excluded small, it, at the same time, was laying the groundwork for the formation of the conditions that would unite and reaffirm the interests of the oligarchs of the world. This was its primary task. The Right Wing was simultaneously running both a revolution and a counterrevolution.
The ridiculous idea of internationalizing nationalism, which screams of self-contradiction, was meant to result in the incorporation of a world rage bank, like the International of the labor movement some 100 years ago.
Subordinated to national interests, and as a partial compromise to their global oligarchies as ideological sponsors, anti-global grievances have been converted into nationalist rage directed against immigrants, porous borders, and disrupted class hierarchies.
Given their inherent priorities, Right-Wing populist movements, in reality, have always harbored preparations for a betrayal of rage investments without a world war – they represent the beginning of a political pyramid scheme. The inner conflict of this dual mandate reached intolerable levels in the last decade creating a sociopolitical configuration, which demanded its resolution.
The internationalization of nationalism came out naturally as an inherently racist proposal. Considering simultaneously the heterogeneity and essential exclusivity of each individual nationalism that was awakened in developed (and some developing) economies, the only axis along which the project could take place is white racism. Ultimately, globalization has forced the resolution of the irreconcilable inner contradiction of bundling the underprivileged with the ultra-wealthy in a singular way – racism.
On a purely transactional level, the idea behind the meaningless (21st century) populist project has been the appropriation of rage capital betrayed by the left, which abandoned the real grievances of the white (male) precariat created by capitalist self-destruction and further reinforced by globalization, leading to structural job destruction due to the outsourcing and scaling down of manufacturing, the transition to more efficient energy sources, etc. This betrayed discontent was transposed into racist and misogynist rage assets leading to an establishment of new organs of collective grievance.
From the outset, the Right Wing platform of the capitalization of the rage of the oppressed, excluded, and forgotten has been loaded with self-sabotage. Bankrupt at inception, it could only be conceived as a part in a pyramid scheme of rage, not sustainable, able to last only as long as new members could be recruited.
Communism abhorred nationalism as the kryptonite of its cause, the toxic substance that paralyzed their defense abilities against capitalism. However, when the tables turned and communism imploded under its own weight and the baggage of its internal malfunctioning, the very same actors, those who remained in power and in leadership positions after the system’s rebranding from a pseudo-egalitarian dystopia to a state sponsored organized crime syndicate, became rabid nationalists. They quickly realized the mobilizing potential of identity politics and its essential role in the get-rich-quickly scheme.
This was yet another realization of the general rule: When the system exhausts itself, it turns to identity politics.
Some thirty years later, capitalism in the developed world is facing the same problems and challenges. Paraphrasing Sloterdijk’s account of the post-revolution era of Bolshevik’s reign and extrapolating it to the 21st century America, the paradox of freedom and equality for all had never been exaggerated more convincingly than during the accelerated phase of the attempted takeover by Right Wing populism: The alpha dogs of that deception achieved their plan to accumulate (almost) all of the power in their hands.
In the same way Soviet Communists had done so during the early post-revolution years a century ago, current turbo-capitalism continues to argue that in order to “save” the system of values and lifestyle of millions of Americans, one had to accept that a few thousand people would have to be sacrificed. Throughout 2020, we were continuously reminded how hundreds of thousands have been sacrificed so that a few hundreds, and ultimately a few dozen, could stay in power and enjoy or even extend their privilege.
[1] Dirk Baecker, Womit handeln Banken?: Eine Untersuchung zur Risikoverarbeitung in der Wirtschaft, Suhrkamp (1991)
[2] Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time, Columbia University Press (2010). Although the book was published in its original, German, edition in 2006, it was difficult to shake of the feeling that the author didn’t really know what was about to happen in the subsequent decade.
[3] ibid.
[4] Slavoj Zizek, A Permanent Economic Emergency, New Left Review, 64, July/Aug 2010
[5] P. Sloterdijk, ibid..
[6] ibid.
[7] ibid.
[8] ibid.
30. VIII 2020
The Uprising Decomplexified & the Madness of William Barr
Do not ask him to be content, ask him only to be calm, to believe that he has found his place. But only the madman is really calm. (Antonin Artaud).
St. George Killing the Dragon
On a superficial level the Jul-28 Congressional testimony of Bill Barr was all it hadn’t promised to be. There were no scandalous new discoveries, no big confessions, no legal ambushes or breakthroughs, just routine obfuscations, deflections, pivots, denials and falsehoods – it was really a revelation about the new mode of functioning and condition of the American justice system and bewilderment with what had happened to it. However, when placed in a proper context, this event is an important chapter of a fascinating story and a peak into the darkest side of American politics, the sinister regressive forces of its Dark Star. But, more than anything, the event is a testimony of a mad man who has come out in full light of his lunacy and delusions. To set the terrain, consider this exchange between Swalwell and Barr during the Jul-28 hearing.
Swalwell: At your confirmation hearing you were asked: “Do you believe a president would lawfully issue a pardon in exchange for the recipient’s promise to not incriminate him?” And you responded with: “No that would be a crime”.
Barr: Yes, I said that.
Swalwell: … And you promised to the American people that if you saw that, you would do something about it. Is that right?
Barr: Yes, that’s right.
Swalwell: Now, Mr. Barr, are you investigating Donald Trump for commuting the prison sentence of his long-term friend and political advisor?
Barr: No.
Swalwell: Why not?
Barr: Why should I?
Here it is, right there, the logic of a madman, absence of metaphoric thinking, use of language solely in its literal meaning without its symbolic layers, the whole thinking process; the madness that distorts the space of logic and reason in full display: Parallel lines intersect multiple times, angles in a triangle do not add up to 180 degrees, circles never close, but become infinite spirals…
During the four hours of the hearing, despite being frequently interrupted, cut off or cornered into a blind alley of inconsistencies and outright lies, Barr kept his composure and remained strangely calm, never raising his voice or visibly contesting the interrogators’ aggressive questioning. For him, this looked like just another day in the office. This, one could argue, is probably the most disturbing aspect of the entire event. No one is as calm as the mad man. Throughout the hearings, his face and body language exuded peace and calm that can be found only in a truly mad man who is at peace with his visions — a man for whom any reality outside of his madness either does not exist or does not matter.
The display of the insane, warped logic is not a new element in Barr’s life. It has been with him for a long time as an essential part of his entire life. His 2019 commencement speech at Notre Dame[1] provides the necessary connective tissue between the recent Congressional testimony and his entire career. It has been transcribed into an 8-page document. It is a treasure trove of information both historical and legal, and is well worth a read. However, more than anything, the composite picture is a monument to Barr’s conflicting personality and career.
The first, coherent, part of the speech is an expose of American history with deconstruction of the constitution and the axioms used as its base. To be fair, this part is actually well presented and informative. Outside of a plain summary of facts, it has pockets of lucidity which, although initially there, begin to drift away as the speech progresses. The second, less coherent part is the “synthesis of a mad man”. There, the Constitution, and the ideas behind it, are placed in a contemporary context. Barr’s arguments during this part of the speech reveal a disturbed and delusional mind, at best, or a corrupt (and potentially criminally insane) fanatic, at worst. However, regardless of the intent, the speech retroactively sheds some light on Barr’s recent testimony and defines the context, which, despite twisted topology of his mental landscape does close the circle, and enables one to understand not only his Congressional testimony, but the entirety of his actions in the current and previous administrations as well.
America’s failed experiment
Law is a linguistic construction that changes as the common sense changes.
The central theme of Barr’s speech was the Framers’ belief that religion is indispensable to sustaining our system of free government. After all, he is talking to the graduates of Notre Dame. However, that aspect alone doesn’t explain what he is about to unload, not even approximately. So, let’s go back in time to November of last year, to the beginning of Barr’s speech[2]:
It has been over 230 years since that small group of colonial lawyers crafted a magnificent charter of freedom – the United States Constitution – which provides for limited government, while leaving “the People” broadly at liberty to pursue our lives both as individuals and through free associations.
According to Barr’s self-congratulatory appraisal, this quantum leap in liberty has been the mainspring of unprecedented human progress, not only for Americans, but for people around the world. This is the legacy of the 20th century when the ideas of the founding fathers paid off in spades.
But, Barr continues, in the 21st century, and in the long run, the question is whether the citizens in such a free society could maintain the moral discipline and virtue necessary for the survival of free institutions.
Unsurprisingly, in his view, this dilemma is real and acute due to the increasing rate of secularization and general departure from core Christian values, which Barr sees as sine qua non of the American society and social organization.
By and large, Barr continues, the Founding generation’s view of human nature was drawn from the classical Christian tradition. These practical statesmen understood that individuals, while having the potential for great good, also had the capacity for great evil.
The dilemma of the founding fathers is the realization that no society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity. Ironically, this is exactly the opposite of how America has behaved since the end of WWII (or even longer) – all tenets of social cohesion have been thoroughly dismantled in a programmatic and astonishingly systematic way. Abandoning the mechanisms of individual restraint, any moral boundaries, and submitting them to the most vulgar-materialistic ideal of unconditional profit of the most powerful is the core of the American ideology and its modern culture. It is here where Barr begins to drift and lose touch with reality. With every attempt to make contact with contemporary America, the sparse islands of lucidity begin to drift apart and seeds of madness inhabit the space between them. But he was not yet done with the past:
If you rely on the coercive power of government to impose restraints, Barr goes on, this will inevitably lead to a government that is too controlling, and you will end up with no liberty, just tyranny. So, unless there is some effective restraint, you end up with something equally dangerous – the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good. This is just another form of tyranny – where the individual is enslaved by his appetites, and the possibility of any healthy community life crumbles.
This is exactly where we are now (especially in the last four years) for precisely those reasons. This realization somehow is completely missed or ignored by Barr. And, as if that was not happening here and now or in the country where he sits at the helm of the Justice Department, but in anther galaxy, Barr goes on by quoting Edmund Burke: “Men are qualified for civil liberty, in exact proportion to their disposition to put chains upon their appetites….”
Sensing that this perhaps might be to close to home and too much hypocrisy even for devout Catholics, he quickly teleports himself back to the safety of the 18th century and concludes with:
The Founders decided to take a gamble. They called it a great experiment. They would leave “the People” broad liberty, limit the coercive power of the government, and place their trust in self-discipline and the virtue of the American people. This is really what was meant by “self-government.” It did not mean primarily the mechanics by which we select a representative legislative body. It referred to the capacity of each individual to restrain and govern themselves.
All this is pretty good and non-controversial when one talks about 18th century America, but is irrelevant and grossly inadequate for its 21st century.
Barr finally comes out and drives it home with the punch line: In Framers’ view, free government is only suitable and sustainable for a religious people – a people who recognized that there was a transcendent moral order antecedent to both the state and man-made law and who had the discipline to control themselves according to those enduring principles.
In the grand conclusion, Barr engages in a little flattery to the audience, makes them feel a little special, in order to neutralize the aftertaste of all the BS with some more 18th century wisdom from John Adams (just in case some of them took a nap and missed his key point) which, despite being more than two centuries old, Barr sees as a foundation of the contemporary state and legal system: Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate for the government of any other.
And for those who have missed the main point of his expose so far and where he is going with it, he flexes the argument further with yet another phrasing from Adams.
The American tenet was not that: Free government is inevitable, only that it is possible, and that its possibility can be realized only when the people as a whole are inwardly governed by the recognized imperatives of the universal moral order.
The Founding generation was Christians. In their 18th century, they believed that the Judeo-Christian moral system corresponds to the true nature of man, which is not that odd for that time. However, for Barr, as if nothing had happened since then – in his head, it is still 1787. He believes in the same thing as his ancestors did 250 years ago. Literally! It goes without saying that “man” for him means a white male Catholic bigot of that epoch.
This is the same warped logic as the one revealed in Barr’s exchange with Eric Swallwel displayed in full swing. By now, the islands of lucidity have moved so far apart, that they can no longer be seen in the sea of madness. And this is when the really insane second part of his commencement speech goes in overdrive. In that part, roughly half of the text, Barr argues that all the misfortunes and social decay are a result of the secularization of society. Violence, poverty, moral degradation, drug use, all this Barr sees not as a consequence of poverty, exclusion, disenfranchisement and neoliberal policies, but the lack of moral backbone. In his view, it is a correlate of the fact that the people of this country stopped praying and no longer believe in Immaculate Conception or creationism, but in facts and science (this is probably where his affinity for Trump comes from).
Ironically, the reality of these developments is exactly the opposite of Barr’s account. Family decay, homelessness, divorce rate are not consequences of secularism, but exactly of removing any ethic barriers to turbo capitalism. These stylized facts and the statistics that support them are singular for America, its politics and its functioning.
At the same time as he was talking about moral personal conduct and its importance of social stability and the functioning of the Constitution, Barr was acting as the consigliere of the most unethical and criminally incompetent president in the entire American history, whose behavior and conduct he has been supporting and defending unconditionally, the president who exercises no restraint and emphatically denies accountability and responsibility for anything and everything that a president by definition is responsible for – the most radical departure from the self-governing individual stipulated by the founding fathers.
This comes hardly as a surprise to anyone who knows Barr’s history. In his book, The Imperial Presidency, which appeared in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, Arthur Schlesinger enumerated the (bad) habits of potential autocrats: The all purpose invocation of national security, the insistence on executive secrecy, the withholding of information from Congress, the refusal to spend funds appropriated by Congress, the attempted intimidation of the press, the use of the White House as a base for espionage and sabotage directed against political opposition. While Schlesinger’s points were, in the context of that time, highlighted as pathologies, they in fact became defining axioms of both the current administration as well as Barr’s vision of how unlimited executive power should be implemented in the 21st century.
Matthew Miller, a former director of the justice department’s public affairs, said: Bill Barr has gone off the deep end like the entire Republican Party. Also he’s had his brain pickled by years of Fox News. He has all Trump’s bad intentions but with little of Trump’s incompetence.
The uprising decomplexified
All of man’s problems derive from the fact that we do not know what we are, and cannot agree on what to become. (E. O. Wilson)
The central theme in William Barr’s story, however, is not the reality of today’s America, but the historical moment of Barr’s introspection of his new awakening and how he envisions his place and role in the grand scheme of things. He sees himself as a medieval knight straddling the millennium with America at the crossroads of history, not so much as a US Attorney General or Trump’s enabler, but a Christian martyr, a timeless defender of the Christian value system, something like a modern-day Joan of Arc. He believes in the grand victory of his cause, if not physical, then at least “moral” (whichever way that concept is distorted in his head). In his mind, Barr is a tenure-track saint who will inevitably be canonized by the Church and his name permanently engraved in the Pantheon of Christianity.
In Barr’s view, the American Experiment has been failing. And, it is not the capitalist inner contradictions, wealth disparity, widespread poverty and disenfranchisement of an ever-growing segment of the population, but moral erosion inflicted by spreading of secularization as the main source of all contemporary evils.
When stripped of all the veneer of old-time verbiage and symbolism, here is where the core of the problem resides according to Barr’s vision of America. White American males have always been in charge. They made the rules and they called the shots in the workplace, in the home and at the ballot box. They’ve owned the world for so long and have been getting increasingly uncomfortable as their grip on power had been eroding. Now the unthinkable is happening: They are faced with becoming the minority. For the first time more minority babies were born than white babies; a black president had served two terms, his Secretary of State was a woman; the most educated segment of society are black women, and every other daytime talk show or news anchor is gay.
And all these folks now believe they are entitled to and moreover, demand, the same rights and opportunities as the white men. Suddenly this country is way off the main path; the whole system needs to be restored and some reset buttons need to be pushed. Restoring order means the resolute masculinization of society starting by arming men with weapons – the more lethal, the more masculine they are – establishing male supremacy values (this has worked since the Stone Age, and it should continue to work in the 21st century as well), and establishing a fear of god — this helps the male cause because god is a dude (white, of course). This is where he meets Trump and his base – where the parallel trajectories of the insanities of conservative privilege and white underclass intersect.
Pushing those reset buttons is the task Barr sees himself entrusted to accomplish. Sure, he will have to break some eggs along the way, make some concessions, commit series of illegal acts, perjuries, possibly get disbarred, impeached and almost certainly ostracized by the entire legal community, and permanently stain his entire career. But what is all that in comparison with enormity of the task he has endowed himself with? After all, his father, Donald Barr, small-time self-styled autocrat as the headmaster of Dalton School some forty years ago, who among other things, gave Jeffrey Epstein his first job, disgraced himself, in an almost identical way as his son is doing it now, by committing a series of petty, unethical, and professionally unacceptable acts in the name of a higher order only he envisioned at the time. William Barr today is just paying homage to his father, closing the gap between the two of them, by repeating, in a higher-stakes version of that game, the same mistakes in order to justify them.
Here is the major cognitive parallax and dichotomy of Barr’s worldview in the context of American political history. If we follow his line of thought, which is basically the same dogmatic and unconditional interpretation of the Constitution as is the fundamentalist Christian reading of the bible, we see the madness of his universe where circles never close and parallel lines inevitably intersect. First, in the 18th century, you draft the Constitution whereby oppression is internalized by giving people constrained freedom so you can reduce the power of the state. The constraint (religion, moral tropes,…) becomes the regulator and an instrument of self-governing. Then, in the 20th century, you design ideology, which obliterates all of these constraints, so you have a government of the people that are not held accountable to anything else but their personal interests. And things go predictably wrong. And when the toxicity of that maneuver, together with resulting social configuration, is in an advanced stage and, after decades of ideological program of systematic symbolic annihilation, you drag the idea of religion through the mud making mockery of its basic premises with TV evangelism, you decide to go back to the 18th century in order to restore its already outdated and bankrupt role. What can be a more ridiculous and ill-conceived project than this? Only a true lunatic could think that this could be a meaningful proposition.
Barr is not a principled constitutionalist, or a principled Catholic or, for that matter, anything else that adheres to principles. With his blatant hypocrisy and ethical bankruptcy, he never let consistency and principles stay in the way of conservative ideas of segmented social organization and elevation of their privilege. Use of warped logic at any time to betray the oath of office if the opportunity arises or whenever reality doesn’t fit his reduced vision of the world has been the signature of his modus operandi. This position of extreme “flexibility” has earned him millions in terms of consulting fees, position on the board of directors for Opus Dei operated Catholic Information Center in DC, and other lucrative corporate and political engagements. His support for unchecked executive power, which has been wavering depending on the party that controlled the White House, reflects something far more troubling: An opportunistic and unprincipled bigotry full of personal and ethical conflicts.
The apprentice of sainthood meets The Apprentice
Much like Catholic Church, Trump in its long career as a “businessman” (with seven bankruptcies under his belt) and later as politician has never been on the right side of any argument. The two are the leading competitors when it comes to the worst historical record in that respect. Church has been around longer and their negative track record is overwhelming, but they have had also some, albeit not many, good moments unlike Trump who has had none. This parallel had to be one of the strongest points of subliminal attraction for Barr as a Catholic. Trump, in this context, is seen by Barr as a pilot who will take him and us to that promised land of coherence, the place that does not exist outside of Barr’s head.
Barr volunteered for the AG job after recognizing in Trump a potential catalyst that would open the gate to his sainthood, something that was not there during his first mandate with Bush, the father. His current project of reinstalling the regressive medieval dystopia is such that no one in their right mind would ever, even half-jokingly, consider it. Barr recognized in Trump an epic fool (he got that part right), compromised so thoroughly that he would agree to any game, including Barr’s insane dream, in exchange for shallow flattery and his consigliere services — legal (or pseudo-legal) protection that would cover his misdeeds and keep him out of jail or international tribunal courts. Barr seized on that opportunity as his last chance to accomplish his otherworldly mission of putting this country back on its “right” course, according to the designs of 18th century minds, and earn himself sainthood.
When he talks about victory, the one where winners get to write the history, the history that will ex-post exonerate his actions, he is not thinking about Trump’s reelection, but of a moral victory of which he is certain of. And that certainty is what justifies all present action and instills his current calm.
The Lafayette Park photo-op, and the surge of violence that preceded it, was purely Barr’s creation and choreography; the whole thing has his fingerprints all over the place. In 1992, when rioting erupted following the acquittal of four policemen who were videotaped beating Rodney King, it was Barr, then the AG for Bush, the father, who deployed two thousand federal agents on military planes to stop the unrest. The “walk in the park” charade was a rehearsal for – a proxy reenactment of — the triumphant march of the righteous Christian martyr coming to the wreckage of a church, picking up the holy book from the rubble and raising it in a menacing way. Trump was only a puppet, Barr was the puppet master, observing from the outside, but feeling from the inside. As Trump raised the bible, Barr was already savoring the image of himself on large oil canvases hanging in the atriums of future government buildings on a white horse with a spear as St. George killing the Dragon.
What a tacky symbolism of a juvenile mind, and a sick wet dream of a disturbed and repressed former altar boy! Is this the best the American white privilege and elite education system could produce?
The figure of William Barr is a monument to the cultural debasement of America that will remain as a permanent stain in its history. Other societies have outgrown their medieval constraints and baggage. Why is America stubbornly clinging to outdated dogmas and bigotry that have been colliding daily with its contemporary realities? After all, as Slavoj ZIzek pointed out, Europe’s most precious legacy is atheism. This is what makes modern Europe unique. It is the first and only civilization in which atheism is a fully legitimate option, not an obstacle to any public post. This is the most emphatically a European legacy worth fighting for. For America, however, that option has expired, which could very well be the last developed country to modernize itself. At this historical point, America remains trapped in the vortex of its own unresolved past which continues to suffocate it, without offering any venue of escape.
The story of William Barr is a reminder of the irreconcilable contradiction between what America has always been and what it wants to be. This is a uniquely American problem that shows time and again how complicated and toxic the baggage of its own unresolved past has been and how difficult and painful it will be to deal with it in any constructive way.
Postscript: The younger brother
But we shouldn’t leave important things out. Bill’s younger brother, Stephen Barr, who looks and speaks like him, is a scientist. He has had a career in theoretical elementary particle physics with a long list of respectable papers in refereed journals that meet the highest standards of quality and rigor of research that would bring you a tenured academic position. And although his research has not produced earth-shattering results, and University of Delaware is not a Princeton or an MIT, by the standards of accuracy and intellectual integrity of the environment where his older brother operates, Stephen Barr has always been light years ahead.
Stephen’s focus has been in the field of grand unified theories and cosmology, which tackles the foundations of the structure of our universe. However, recently he has taken the emeritus status and has been devoting his time to lecturing about the interplay between science and religion, the old theme about the long-standing conflict between the two.
In his post-physics role, he has emerged as a propagandist and apologist for Catholicism, his arguments relying on dubious interpretations and obscure “documents”. He has interpreted this well-understood and non-controversial topic not so much as historical tension between religion and science per se, but as a historical misunderstanding and, in his opinion, deliberate and malicious, misinterpretation by militant secularists and atheists.
Interestingly, and not coincidentally, Stephen is also on a mission — his deliberate falsification of history and reality runs in parallel with his older brother’s political actions.
According to Stephen’s narrative, science and the Catholic Church had never had material disagreements and were always on the same side. Rather, he sees what has been a well-documented and well-established record of destructive antagonism, and the war in which the Church had been dealt an unrecoverable defeat, as a kind of second-hand-smoking effect driven by predominantly radical Protestantism and scientific materialism, two rabid fringes of both sides, a distinction that probably alludes to the materialistic approach to physics as an aberrant approach to reality (with clear allusion to Marxism, intended to give it an ideological dimension and make it even more abhorrent to typical American conservatives). Stephen’s post-academic coming out demonstrates the same obsessive logic of messianic delusion his older brother reveals in his exchange with Swalwell.
The important distinction between the two Barr brothers, or their two professional careers, is that, unlike Bill, Stephen comes from the academic world where money is never an objective – there is simply no money to be made in theoretical physics and so it never becomes a metric of status and success. People strive for prestige, respect and influence using the currency of their intellectual integrity, rigor and consistency of thinking. Nothing else. In Bill’s universe, on the other hand, one balances between integrity and profit – higher payoffs justify ex-post intellectual and/or ethical compromises and provide the metric for making these concessions. Bill’s opportunistic maneuvering has earned him tens of millions of dollars as well as the nickname “cover-up general Barr”. With that metric in the background, Stephen’s activity presents a far more radical transgression and intellectual perjury than any violation of rules and legal precedent his older brother has committed or is about to commit.
However, when all is said and done and when politics are pushed aside, the whole saga of the Barr family, their male part, underscores one more time the importance of family as an irreducible social unit whose event horizon is so strong that it is capable of crushing any other force of nurture, no matter how superficially dominant they might appear. No matter where you go, which schools you attend, what your political affiliations are or what social status you acquire, the stuff you absorb in your formative age remains always with you. The family remains the most nurturing and the most violent, and potentially toxic, social unit. No one can fuck you up as thoroughly and as deeply as your own parents (what better example of this than the current First Family). The success of the fundamental objective of social emancipation of an individual is conditioned on one’s capacity to resist the crushing force of family influences — an ability to liberate oneself from its pastoral confines — and to carry those influences not as shackles, but merely as initial conditions and stand on his/her own as an autonomous social and political subject.
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-william-p-barr-delivers-remarks-law-school-and-de-nicola-center-ethics
[2] All italicized segments are quotes from the commencement speech
19. VII 2020
Violence & Power
The cat uses force to catch the mouse, to seize it, hold it in its claws and ultimately kill it. But while it is playing with it another factor is present. It lets the mouse go, allows it to run about a little and even turns its back; and, during this time, the mouse is no longer subjected to force. But it is still within the power of the cat and can be caught again. The space which the cat dominates, the moments of hope it allows the mouse, while continuing however to watch it closely all the time and never relaxing its interest and intention to destroy it – all this together, space, hope, watchfulness and destructive intent, can be called the actual body of power, or, more simply, power itself. (Elias Canetti)
Violence and power stand in opposition to each other. Power is revealed when violence is withdrawn (the destructive clock stops when the cat releases the mouse). Inherent in power is certain extension in space and time (releasing the mouse, giving it space and time to develop illusion of freedom and hope). In contrast, violence takes place at a particular point.
American history resides in the interstices between violence and power. That has always been its preferred habitat. From inception, its history has been marked by an unprecedented reliance on violence, from the systematic genocide and practical eradication of Native Americans to Slavery — a prime foundation of the country’s industry, finance, commerce and general prosperity — and its successive mutations, Jim Crow, cities of destruction, hyperghetto, resulting in explosion of the networks of incarceration with the most extensive carceral system on the planet.
The persistent coexistence of violence and power, and the longevity of that configuration, is difficult to understand in a broader context of the dialectics of power. When taken in a political context, violence represents stupid power. It is an extremely inefficient way of rule, unsustainable when applied alone. Violence automatically causes an opposing will, which weakens its effect and demands escalation in order to offset that will. This causes violence to exhaust itself in the long run, and as its power erodes, its rule results either in capitulation or in the tragic end of annihilation. Between the beginning and the end of its rule, there is a tipping point beyond which violence, as it collapses under its own weight, either disappears or crushes everyone else.
How did American violence survive for so long without self-destructing? The systematic resort to violence as a way of maintaining a grip on power for four centuries remains one of the major paradoxes of modernity primarily due to its longevity and continued escalation.
The anatomy of violence and the masquerade of power
In domestic affairs, violence functions as the last resort of power against criminals and rebels – against individuals who refuse to be overpowered by the consensus of the majority. Even in actual warfare, like during the Vietnam war, we have seen how superiority in the means of violence can become helpless if confronted with an ill-equipped but well-organized opponent who is much more powerful. The accumulation of means of annihilation does not make superpowers mightier – military might is often the counterpart of internal weakness. (Hannah Arendt)
Violence is a transient phenomenon; it may contribute to the creation of power, but power is not based on it. One can use violence to seize power, but cannot maintain it with violence. In order to survive, violence must continuously reinvent itself. Following the process of mutation of violence through American history brings some clarity to the paradox of its longevity. There are three main ingredients, which define the landscape: The use of culture as a lever arm, economic forces, and particular patterns of mutation of state as the main source of lawlessness and violence.
1) Culture as a lever arm
Benedict Anderson’s observation that nations are imagined communities[1] (the emphasis is on “imagined”) frames the problem and alludes at its non-linearity. This notion indicates that the idea that complete strangers might share identity with us as a group or nation is not obvious from our direct experience. The fact that multiethnic and multicultural communities are trans-experiential, requires an abstract layer, like ideology, for example, that provides justification for their existence. A wide acceptance of these ideologies, thus, allows the mobilization of social movements and mass media, which may acquire power over people because they are ready to accept ideas that make some plausible sense of their world.
According to B. C. Han’s account of the power-violence dynamics, as opposed to violence, which does not allow for either ‘yes’ or ‘no’, power relation contains the possibility of resistance. Freedom, no matter how illusory it might be, is the essential precondition for the exercise of power (cat has to release the mouse in order for power to begin to configure itself). The illusion of freedom must never stop in order for the power relations to continue existing[2].
These considerations outline the importance of interplay between violence and the transient windows of illusory freedom, which creates pockets of power underlined by the cat & mouse dynamics: The space which the cat dominates, the moments of hope it allows the mouse, while continuing however to watch it closely all the time and never relaxing its interest and intention to destroy it, all these elements have been in play at each new node of violence in American history.
Since the abolition of slavery, every new concession to the freedom of Black Americans has created a new temporary space of power by implying a new mode of violence in place of the old one as a reminder. Every subsequent institutional change of repression just made violence more systematic and less transparent. As apparent superficial freedom was changing, from slavery to Jim Crow, to ghetto & hyperghetto, to the expansion of the prison system, and police brutality, violence did not taper; it only reinforced the grip on power.
Every shift in the underlying systematic violence has had its ritual part aimed at creating a temporary space of power: lynching, manhunts, and other manifestations of (white) male bonding, institutionalized and reinforced later through the carceral state. The entire white supremacy act, both in its original incarnation and its subsequent mutations, has been just ritualized violence with an unambiguous aim to reiterate and cast into peoples’ subconscious a symbolic message associated with each black face: “Your nature is to be a slave”(cat & mouse play, again!), for the sole purpose of transforming that violence into power, while the vulgar-materialistic evangelical narrative was structured around interpreting this order of things as a heavenly dictum aimed at mobilizing forces that provide its legitimacy.
2) Economic factors
All this has been playing against powerful economic factors. The backbone of the system’s attachment to Slavery and its modernized versions resides in capital’s insatiable need for free labor. This highlights the second dimension of violence.
According to Michael Mann’s model of ethnic conflicts[3], all cases of oppression against certain segments of society involve material interests. Usually, members of one segment/class/ethnicity come to believe they have a collective economic interest against an out-group. Often, ethnicity trumps class. Class sentiments are displaced onto ethnic group relations. The oppressed group identifies the other as an imperial exploiting class, considering itself an exploited proletariat. Exploiter on the other hand sees its imperial rule as bringing civilization and progress to inferior ethnic group/class. The defense of this imperium against revolutionary threats from below is what is called imperial revisionism.
3) State as the center of dissemination of lawlessness
In the past, culture had a dual role, to shape consensus and act as an agent of change. In the last 50 years, gradually, but perceptibly, culture has abandoned its missionary course; it has become the mechanism for creation of a parcelized space of power and a tool of division and maintenance of the status quo.
The modern state has redefined itself inside the gap between cultural and economic powers, where the two became inextricably intertwined providing the background for the imperial revisionism as the framework for expanding the space of power. The main trend of technocratic governments in developed democracies, and in America in particular, has been gradually giving up ideological consensus and replacing it with cultural division as the main lever arm. Without big ideological causes, the only way to actively mobilize people (and their passions) is through fear. In this way, culture wars became class wars in displaced mode. Neoliberalism and populism are just two different modes of implementation of this agenda.
According to Charles Tilly, the state in many ways functions like organized crime and uses its monopoly position as a racket. The very activity of producing and controlling violence favors monopoly, because competition within that realm generally raises costs, instead of lowering them. The production of violence enjoys large economies of scale. Governments are generally in the business of selling protection with state having a monopoly on violence. They legitimize its use in order to maintain and reinforce consensus and, thus, maintain their power. Subordinated government tends to maximize monopoly profits as well as turning protection rents to the economic interests of the dominant class[4].
Based on an extrapolation of Tilly’s argument, in response to each installment of innovation in violence during the last 400 years, time and again, the state had adapted to the new context accordingly, giving rise to new institutions of oppression.
By criminalizing the Other, power could be deployed as a way of protecting or maintaining the fractured consensus, which, in effect, refers to selling protection to the privileged segment of society, while drawing the revenues to maintain and/or expand its repressive apparatus. In that process, state tends to invent new problems, which it proposes to resolve, and in time becomes itself a source of lawlessness and violence[5]. This is the logic behind institutional racism, the criminalization of poverty, the war on drugs, the exploding carceral network, and other institutions of programmatic repression in America, all this against the background of a systematic, ideologically driven, elimination of empathy and pathological individualization as the main cultural dimension.
Production of political subjects or Banality of Evil
To be human remains a decision (Carl Schmitt)
As the state manufactures excuses to escalate violence and extend its life support, it enables violence to masquerade as power and sustain itself longer. Implementation of this approach to power requires the production and cultivation of a special kind of mindset: Philistine, self-righteous, ignorant, aggressive male, devoid of ethical constraints and accountability, which conforms unconditionally to ideological tasks, whatever they may be. These are mediocrities, not fanatics or sociopaths, who, rather than thinking for themselves, rely on clichés; they are driven primarily by their petty interests (promotion, careers, money,…) and believe in success as the chief standard of a “good society” to which everything else is subordinated. Such people, especially them, are capable of committing the most extreme acts of evil. Their actions are motivated by extraordinary complacency. These extraordinarily unexceptional men become champions of extraordinary evil, the condition identified by Hannah Arendt as Banality of Evil.
Creating conditions for this mode of social interaction has been the main ideological tool of American politics. Social atomization eliminates cohesion and unified expression, except in terms of violence or hostility towards the Other who have been identified as such through one of the modes of exclusion, like racism or social Darwinism, as not worthy of the same rights. The same mechanism — absence of organizational power — that allowed a relatively small number of slave-owners to handle a large number of slaves, or labor camp guards vs. inmates, is now in full display. When such a weakened social community is attacked and people are unable to organize themselves around their interests and political rights, they cannot find a common voice or underpinning, except in aggressiveness towards other groups.
Foundations of this order began to shake in the last decade with the escalation of systematic violence. The cumulative result of rampant inequality, systemic exclusion, and endemic precarity was ultimately the devastation of the political space inherent in the existence of the medium of power and, as access to power became more exclusive, consensus began to form independently of the state, which grew more isolated and without real power to rule. The context that provided power for decades continued to shrink and began to collapse onto itself as contours of superior non-coercive, smart, power emerged. This is when things started to unravel.
The system of violence, which masqueraded as power for four centuries, revealed its cracks in the last decade and, in 2020, reached the tipping point when the space of traditional power began to implode. Political/social matter and antimatter began to collide triggering the annihilation process. Centuries of the masquerade of power were exposed for what they always have been: violence, i.e. stupid power.
Hannah Arendt
If one of us is chained, none of us are free (Solomon Burke)
In a sociopolitical context, power is predicated on commonality and cohesion, but without necessarily having one central actor. Power creates a medium against which collective action can arise. This medium is the ground state of power. Violence, on the other hand, is a lonely act. It is not supported by the affirmation of the others – it is One against All[6].
However, power has another dimension besides shared space and commonality. During the accelerated transformation of the American political body in the last four years, the 45th president’s abject figure has emerged as the origin of the new political subjectivity. His only consistency, to be always, without exception, on the wrong side of any and every argument and decision, has inadvertently galvanized the process of political reconfiguration. He has made the present so appalling that unconditional change, wherever it takes us (as long as it is without him), has become a preferred direction embraced by traditionally opposing ends of the political spectrum, leading to the formation and buildup of massive like-minded crowds, unified in their common desire. He has become the center of mass of political anti-matter, which repels the rest and defines the direction of “against” and, thus, emerges as a reference point of political action.
Power is above all an affirmation of self[7]. This is Arendt’s most powerful insight. It is not an absolute consensus, but a mirror image of violence as expressed with “One against All”: Power is “All against One”, where “One” is the object to be opposed, the repulsive core of social antimatter, an anchor of subjectivity and the origin through which coordinates of subjectivity are drawn. The collective that is configured around this origin becomes the seed of spatialization of power.
Power is greatest where the holder of power encounters no resistance whatsoever. Power and violence, therefore, meet in the limit of their absolute: There is no resistance not only in the case of infinite violence, but also in the case of infinite power[8]. At some point, the distinction between the two becomes blurred and transition from one to another seamless.
[1] Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, Revised Edition, Verso (2006)
[2] B. C. Han, Was ist Macht?, Philip Reclam jun. GmbH & Co. KG, Stuttgart (2005)
[3] Michael Mann, Dark side of Democracy, Cambridge University Press (2005)
[4] Charles Tilly, War Making and State Making as Organized Crime, in Bringing the State Back, ed. By P. Evans, D. Rueschemeyer, and T. Skocpol, Cambridge University Press (1985)
[5] ibid.
[6] Hannah Arendt, On Violence, Harcourt Brace Javanovich; First edition (1970)
[7] ibid.
[8] B. C. Han, ibid.
31. V 2020
Deresponsibilization and the Politics of Escape
Making a decision under risk/uncertainty requires an understanding of possible outcomes (and having some idea about their probability assignment) in order to quantify the relative magnitude of cost/benefit, and assess its merits. The only decisions that make sense are those where the upside exceeds the downside (in a probabilistic sense), preferably by multiple times.
For example, jumping a turnstile in the NYC subway carries a $100 fine; the actual ticket price is $3.00. Opting to jump a turnstile instead of buying the ticket is clearly a stupid decision – the downside, $100 fine, is more than 30 times higher than the upside of saving $3.00 — you have to do it 34 times without getting caught in order to break even.
Imagine now that you are offered to participate in a game of coin toss with the following payout: Gain $10 if heads come up, and $0 in the case of tails. Clearly, a ticket to this gamble should be worth something, around $4 or $5, for example, so that net gains are just slightly higher than potential losses. However, for the sake of argument, assume that this gamble is grossly mispriced and is offered at a much lower cost, say $1 or less, so that its price is insignificant. For the buyer the exposure is: $10 upside and practically no downside.
This type of transaction/gamble/contract cannot exist, or if it for some reason shows up, it cannot persist, in a financial world or any other context where all participants are rational. Without a commensurate downside, the gamble violates basic axioms of (financial) decision-making. However, if this Impossible Game were to persist, it would inevitably end in the financial ruin of the underwriter.
Since the gamble is practically costless, the beneficiary could either flip the coin repeatedly as often as he wishes with impunity as the costs to enter are insignificant, or can raise the stakes and, instead of $10, change the upside to $10 million. This means that the costs to the underwriter could increase indefinitely and ultimately result in ruin. Knowing this, the buyer could use this as leverage – by dosing the frequency of his coin tosses, he could extort any kind of consent from the underwriter.
Severe mispricing and absence of meaningful downside is always harmful. It leads to far-reaching and catastrophic outcomes. Removal of the downside decouples decision making from its consequences and creates a dangerous world of irresponsible behavior with predictable long-term outcomes. Good judgment is based on experience and experience is based on past bad judgment — exposure to downside, i.e. suffering the consequences of our mistakes, is an essential part of learning. Denial of downside intercepts the corrective loop of knowledge acquisition and prevents the formation of experience as an essential part of our existence.
The existence of real and consequential downside is a friction that is necessary for the stability of any sociopolitical, financial, or biological system that involves risk, like social contacts, relationships, sexual encounters, family, economics, business, science, art, law, politics, crime or any other human activity.
You cannot innovate without creating some damage
So, why are we thinking of Impossible Games that have no right to exist? The 20th century was largely a century of innovations and new discoveries. However, every novelty introduces new risks and consequences. Invention of a ship is invention of a shipwreck; invention of a plane is invention of a plane crash, nuclear power plant of nuclear meltdown. Progress and disaster are two sides of the same coin, and the more revolutionary and impactful the innovation, the more spectacular the disaster it creates[1]. We have been harvesting the benefits of those discoveries for decades. This is what the last century was about. However, the 21st century is shaping up to be the century of disasters.
The accident reveals the substance of innovation. Only now are we beginning to get a full taste of this causality. 9/11, global financial crisis, inequality, climate change, economic stagnation, structural unemployment, populism… they are all consequences of the 20th century innovation streak (scientific, political or socioeconomic).
While the innovation paradigm has become an irresistible profit-making machine, embraced by the capital, there is a persistent parallel effort to externalize the downside that comes with it by distancing decision makers from the consequences of their decisions. This has been the unmistakable trend of the first two decades of this century so far. However, in the last four years, this effort has entered an accelerated phase. The paradigm of Impossible Transaction has intruded into every pore of our activity and has become the template of current American politics.
Intersecting crises and the anatomy of the impossible
Capital has always externalized the adverse effects of its prosperity — its desire for deresponsibilization is understandable and in some perverse way natural. However, when such denial of responsibility comes from a person, it is a sign of deeper problems and pathologies. The inability to behave responsibly – pathological refusal to face the downside in a risky situation – is inextricably linked to incompetence, insecurity, and habitual lying. When such people are entrusted with positions of high responsibility, the totality of their flaws are activated simultaneously and begin to reinforce each other leading to dire consequences.
The third decade started with a bang by creating the conditions for the most dangerous configuration of risks: The intersection of social and economic crises. At the epicenter of this deadly configuration resides a compulsive escape from responsibility. Externalization of responsibility and its rapidly growing deficit have entered an acute phase in the last two months as attempts to untie the deadly knot and decouple the two crises are beginning to crumble, threatening to intoxicate the public sphere and bring the whole system down.
Reopening the economy during a pandemic is a high-risk decision. It is desirable by businesses and, if successful, the monetary and political upside could be substantial. However, the downside is difficult to own — the price can be many human lives. Forcing one or the other side – ignoring the risks or erring on the side of caution — requires expending unknown amounts of political capital, which inevitably deepens the downside.
The main difficulty with that decision is the irreconcilable character of the data – the upside and downside are measured in different units. While the upside reflects economic gains, the downside, in addition to economic losses, includes human lives. Any attempt at cost/benefits analysis would necessarily reveal the price tag policy makers put on human life, which as a rule has always been low. And while that has been no secret, the issue is especially troubling for the current president, who has a pathological skew in that context and reminding the public of its magnitude and extent could be politically costly. As a result, the criteria for reopening cannot be clearly specified, forcing the deployment of alternative articulations of the approach to the problem. And we know how it all unfolded.
Pathological refusal to face downside
It’s been more than two months since, during the press conference on March 13th, the 45th President uttered the historic words: “I don’t take responsibility at all”. This ludicrous denial of responsibility by a person in a position of the highest responsibility stands on its own as one of the most singular PR attempts ever seen in American political history. However, the nonsense did not stop there; it was followed by a barrage of falsehoods and a series of real “constitutional gems”[2] in the subsequent weeks. If Dante Alighieri were a contemporary poet some statements that came from the current occupant of the Oval Office in the last two months would occupy prominent spots in the New Divine Comedy of the 21st century. The emerging composite message of Trump’s laughable attempt to redefine his position in the current crisis can be summarized with two claims: “I can fix it alone” & “I bear no responsibility”.
In financial lingo, this is the Impossible Gamble: All the upside without any downside. The underwriter of this transaction, the American public and the state, would be exposed to a pure downside with no upside and would be subject to blackmail by the president who can use that contract as leverage to extort any subsequent concession.
This maneuver reveals a systematic and unambiguous pattern: Trump has no ability to take risk. Instead of managing risk, he runs for cover preemptively and buys protection ahead of time. If he were a market maker or portfolio manager, he wouldn’t last a week. At the root of this handicap resides an implicit deep-seeded lack of confidence in the merit of his decisions, an implicit awareness that they are worthless — there is a cloud of inevitability of their failure from inception. However, when he is forced to take a risk, he does so in the most cowardly (and dishonest) way. All this while he and his surrogates are trying to strike an alpha-male chord with the frustrated angry citizenry, who go to antigovernment protests armed with AK-47s and rocket launchers. Underneath that faux machismo resides an essential cowardice and ultimate beta-dog mindset of both the leader and his followers fundamentally unsure of themselves.
Truth deficits and Ponzi-scheme artists
In the same way small sporadic indebtedness — occasional borrowing to have ends meet — is different from massive dependence on debt to cover the costs of a gambling habit, there is a qualitative difference between isolated lies and habitual or perpetual lying. Lies are a debt to the truth; persistent lying is accumulation of debt without collateral.
Trump is not an occasional liar; he is addicted to lies. The fundamental axiom/algorithm of his life, and the main pillar of his business, is condensed in the simple realization: If I owe you $100, it is my problem; but if I owe you $1 million, then it is your problem. Trump’s entire business “acumen”, the only thing he really knows, is contained in this one sentence.
He is a one-trick pony, an avid Ponzi-scheme practitioner socializing his risks and neutralizing himself against his bad decisions and actions. Doubling down on every lie is a strategic debt management maneuver, not in a good or intelligent way, but in a way that reflects incapacity for anything else. It is a survival skill acquired during a lifetime of bad business decisions out of which it was impossible to escape by any other means except with the help of other bad decisions. Such a context requires an ever-expanding line of credit, which draws his creditors into the position of his accomplices. Once they are fully in, they become partners and co-owners of that debt – it becomes their problem[3].
Incompetence and the art of escape
More than anything, Trump is an escape artist. His entire professional life he has been on the run, trying to escape the consequences of his ineptitude and incompetence. He’s been a fugitive from facts, truth, and evidence, always merely steps away from the fatal clinch of his collectors. This had created conditions of acute anxiety, short attention span, cognitive incapacity, persistent feel of persecution, and low-grade paranoia, where everyone is there to get him. Ironically, this is not incorrect because he owes to everyone in terms of money, truth, facts, favors, loyalty, and responsibility. He genuinely sees himself as a victim because of that.
Somewhere along the way in Trump’s troubled life his ignorance became robust and non-adaptive. He had gotten away with it so many times that he became incapable of understanding any other context than the one of his own mistakes and cover-ups. His corrective mechanisms atrophied, his bad decisions never converted into experience.
Disappearance by proliferation
Cancer implies an infinite proliferation of a basic cell in complete disregard of the laws governing the organism as a whole.
How could a person so flawed, inept and fundamentally incompetent like Trump continue to thrive for decades and rise in ranks in the nominally competitive meritocratic world of American business? And how did America get duped into signing a contract with this subliterate yawper? These are fundamental puzzles, which cannot be understood on their own, but require a broader context. His survival and rise are signs of deeper dynamics — a problem of contamination of the entire American value system — which have been brewing in the background for decades now.
Over the course of the last 50 years, contemporary Western political systems have become entirely self-referential. They have lost every external point of reference and, in that way, corrective mechanisms that align them with their social purpose. They could be either judged only on their own terms or not judged at all. Consequently, they have been allowed to continue to expand, increase in size and become more efficient, but in the direction that served no other purpose but their own. With time, they have become all encompassing – every sector of social activity gradually became like this and now all systems account for all of reality[4]. There is nothing that can be held against such a political system that is not revealed to be already part of it. The mode of ideological hegemonic functioning has become self-preserving: Nothing that comes from within the system can be resisted – no critique of it can be articulated and revolt and uprising are rendered meaningless.
To a large extent, Trump is a product of these conditions of socioeconomic functioning. His political position is supported not only by his base but also by a wide-ranging sector of capital. He was seen as a harbinger of the new paradigm, responding to both the need of capital for deresponsibilization and for the creation of simplified and self-serving narratives aimed at pacifying a growing number of excluded and managing their rage capital.
Capital loves him because he is doing their bidding by setting the stage for a general escape from consequences by opening the door for the legitimization and eventual normalization of widespread unaccountability. He is a catalyst whose task is to introduce it into the mainstream and make sure that the paradigm of the Impossible Game percolates into every pore of human activity and proliferates until it is everywhere and nowhere and, as such, becomes invisible.
With the consequences of risk-taking fully externalized, the accumulated downside becomes the dark matter of the social universe and its buildup the main uncertainty. However, it is just when all uncertainty disappears that it also reappears, because it is at the very moment when domination is total that, because there is nothing outside of it, that it cannot be realized, and has no objective effect. It is at this point that stakes re-enter the game and impossible exchange is shown to be necessary[5].
Beginning of the epilogue
Nazi plunder refers to art theft and organized looting of European countries during the Third Reich, between 1933 and 1945, carried out by military units known as the Kunstschutz on behalf of the ruling Nazi Party. In 1940, Der Einsatzstab Reichsleiter Rosenberg (The Reichs Leader Rosenberg Taskforce), or ERR, was formed, under Alfred Rosenberg’s and Herman Göring’s leadership. ERR was responsible for seizing more than 20 thousand art objects from German-occupied countries, out of which Göring alone selected about 600 pieces for his own collection. Items which Hitler and Göring did not want were made available to other Nazi leaders, while other, lesser valuable, objects were traded to fund Nazi activities.
While it started as a systematic and well organized project with great attention to detail and involvement of many top art experts and art dealers, guided by strictly defined aesthetic and market criteria, towards the end of the war, the effort became more hectic, non-discriminating and disorganized as the whiff of inevitable defeat began to sink in.
Trump has been doing his con job for over 40 years. But has it worked? Well, every project he undertook ended up in bankruptcy, a total six of them – roughly one every seven years. However, he got away without going to jail while at the same time raising the stakes, so he succeeded in that sense. The stakes are now as high as they can be, so there is no next level. Will he get away with it this time and who will be the rube that bails him out? Or has he come to an end from which there will be no escape? It looks like this time will be no different.
The Republican party and the ideological right, which several decades ago spearheaded the conservative agenda as fiscal hawks and mobilized an army of economists, historians, and legal experts to push implementation of the programmatic plunder of the public domain, entered the final phase of high entropy of the end days in 2016.
This year (2020) presents their attempt to breathe new life into the already bankrupt project of Trump’s presidency. All elements of their so-called “strategy” and doubling down have been on display. Nevertheless, despite all the efforts to find an escape route and stage another comeback, last week feels unmistakably different, as if we have passed through the point of no return and that from now on, things will start unwinding at an accelerated pace.
The four decades of plundering of the public domain in America by the GOP’s Kunstschutz and their oligarchic sponsors, a.k.a the project of reconfiguration of the state, has been interrupted in 2020 by the lethal mix created by the intersection of the social and economic crises. Trump’s pillage and cover-ups are the modern version of the Nazi Plunder. Its accelerated phase of the last three months, the disorganized looting akin to the last days of WWII, is an acknowledgment of the imminent end of the Trump era, its 1945.
[1] Paul Virilio, The Original Accident, Polity (2007)
[2] “It’s my decision, not governors’, to reopen country. I have the ultimate Authority to Override States’ Virus Measures. When somebody’s the president of the United States, the authority is total.” on 13-Apr, only few days apart from: “I like to allow governors to make decisions without overruling them, because from a constitutional standpoint, that’s the way it should be done. If I disagreed, I would overrule a governor, and I have that right to do it. But I’d rather have them make their decisions.”
[3] One does not have to go as far back as his real estate deals, casinos, products he tried to con people into buying, or his University and charity; not to mention the entire Birther Movement. We just need to remember what happened in the last 3½ years. His problems with Russia, impeachment, or corona pandemic… are now problems of Bill Bar, Michael Cohen, Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Lindsey Graham, Fox News, and the entire GOP – apparently everybody’s except his own.
[4] Jean Baudrillard, Impossible Exchange, Verso (2012)
[5] ibid.
30. XII 2019
America at 400: 1619-2019
Out of slavery — and the anti-black racism it required — grew nearly everything that has truly made America exceptional: its economic might, its industrial power, its electoral system, diet and popular music, the inequities of its public health and education, its astonishing penchant for violence, its income inequality, the example it sets for the world as a land of freedom and equality, its slang, its legal system and the endemic racial fears and hatreds that continue to plague it to this day. The seeds of all that were planted long before our official birth date, in 1776, when the men known as our founders formally declared independence from Britain[1].
America has always had a complicated relationship with its own history. The nation that was based on the ideas of enlightenment, and which gave us Declaration of Independence, The Emancipation Proclamation, May Day, International Women’s Day, Women’s Suffrage, Universal public K-12 education, The Marshall Plan, and Civil Rights Act, was also the birth place of some of the worst institutions of repression such as the genocide of Native Americans, slavery, Jim Crow, white supremacy, systemic segregation, McCarthyism, internment camps, and mass incarceration. But this is not what makes America special; after all, there is hardly any developed country that does not carry historical baggage of some sort. Rather, it is the deliberate effort to make sure that the underlying tensions remain unresolved, which makes its position unique. America has turned its back on some of its best achievements, and never showed the courage (or desire) to completely distance itself from some of the worst practices of its past. The very same rights and freedoms that it continues to champion abroad, the US has systematically denied to a large segment of its population at home[2].
The American political landscape has always reflected this ambivalence. To this day, the underlying ideology and its reality remain trapped in the multiverse of causal entanglement whereby ideology creates social adversity, which requires ideological adjustments, which in turn reinforces the very same social adversity it was meant to contain.
Race as strange attractor: The Centaur-state and the four peculiar institutions
No one has captured the inner contradictions of America’s parallel history better than Loïc Wacquant. He sees the current social and political developments as part of a particular continuum outlined by the Four Peculiar Institutions against the backdrop of a reshaping of the capitalist state[3]. The essence of the dialectics of neoliberalism is condensed in its obsession with a smaller state (always, except when it comes to the riot police). The consequence of that obsession, according to Wacquant, is the building of a Centaur-state, liberal at the top and paternalistic at the bottom[4]. The superficial maneuver of imposing the functioning of free markets to life as whole, with a hands-off approach to the corporate sector and the upper echelon of society, is complemented by a state that is fiercely interventionist and authoritarian when it comes to dealing with the destructive consequences of economic deregulation for those at the lower end of the class and status spectrum[5].
Wacquant’s deconstruction of the reconciliation of the inner contradictions of the Centaur-state puts the entire post-Reagan era of political carnivalization in perspective as the great neoliberal Aufhebung. The imposition of market discipline is not a smooth, self-propelling process: it meets with recalcitrance and triggers resistance; it translates into diffusing social instability and turbulence among the lower class; and it practically undermines the authority of the state. So it requires institutional contraptions that will anchor and support it, among them an enlarged and energetic penal institution[6]. Behind the clownish posturing of the new breed of political leaders resides a serious (and brutal) political reality and the more carnevalesque the politics becomes, the more repressive its penal system turns out to be.
This lays out the logic behind Americas intrinsic resistance to outgrowing its dark history and dealing with its legacy. This history begins in 1619, with the first slave ships docking the coast of Virginia. Its backbone is captured by the matrix of the Four Peculiar Institutions[7], which define the contours of the underlying carceral continuum. The most direct and intuitive perspective on the 400 years of America is offered by the second column of the Table: The root of it all is an insatiable demand for cheap labor; the history of America reflects this through the four transformational phases.
Four Peculiar Institutions
An unfree and fixed workforce was essential for the North American preindustrial economy. Slavery, as a relationship of domination, was used to fulfill a definite economic end: to appease the nearly insatiable appetite of the plantation for labor. The abolishment of slavery was more than anything a supply shock in labor. After slaves were formally free, a cheap and abundant workforce needed for the plantation economy had been eliminated. The true slaves deserted the South, attracted to looming opportunities in the North as the economy transitioned to its industrial phase, while the South experienced a decline (mechanization, urbanization …), which, when combined with cuts in immigration during WWI, resulted in an acute shortage of unskilled labor[8].
In response to these developments, capitalist industrialization and the plantation elite joined to demand political disenfranchisement and the systematic exclusion of former slaves from all major institutions. This was the period of Jim Crow rule. Backed by custom and elaborate legal structures, the economic opportunities were severely restricted (prohibited attendance of schools, churches, banished from the ballot box with a range of requirements, like residency, literacy tests, poll taxes or criminal offences).
The Ghetto was intended to have a prophylactic function. It was conceptualized as a separate Lebensraum for a group viewed as “physically and mentally unfit, unsanitary, entirely irresponsible, and undesirable neighbors”, while allowing, at the same time, to exploit their labor power (cheaply). In terms of its social functioning, the Ghetto was a logical sequel to slavery and Jim Crow.
The wedding of ghetto and prison: Hyperghetto
When the ghetto was rendered inoperative in the 1960s with economic restructuring and riots, which won blacks votes, the carceral institution offered itself as a substitute apparatus for the black community devoid of economic utility and political pull[9]. This was a way to prevent formation of a unified voice of discontent and convert the non-consuming segment of society into a profit center. According to Wacquant, African-Americans now live in the first prison society of history. The ghetto and the prison are now causally entangled — the two look the same and have the same function; they support and reinforce each other. The life in the ghetto almost necessarily leads to more criminal behavior. And in the prisons, which function effectively as graduate schools of crime, a “black culture” of outsiders is being reinforced by “professional” inmates, which eventually gets exported back to the street[10].
The ghetto and the prison are for all practical purposes indistinguishable, reinforcing each other to ensure the exclusion of African-Americans from general society, with governmental blessings. The prison should be viewed as a judicial ghetto and the ghetto as an extrajudicial prison. Taken together, these constitute part of a ‘carceral continuum’[11].
2019: Exit through the wormhole
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but mainly to ourselves. (Julian Barnes)
Capitalism creates crises, which it cannot wrest from. Recoveries from those crises are funded by social deficits, which grow bigger with each crisis. This became particularly severe during the neoliberal phase of capitalism. The Carceral state has been essential for the survival and sustainability of the neoliberal project and has had a triple role in that context: As a shock absorber and an insurance policy of capitalism against itself, as an engine of growth, and as a mechanism that reinforces its own toxicity. On one side, it offsets the unwanted side-effects of capitalism, while on the other, it creates new problems that reinforce the original ones.
The story of the Four Peculiar Institutions is not a chapter in American history; it is a book whose writing continues. It very much defines the present day (and future) of American politics, society and culture in general. It resides at the core of American culture and is the backbone of its history and economy.
Today more than ever before, America stands conflicted between two parallel histories and two atonal narratives, one starting in 1619 and the other in 1776. This ambivalence is deeply rooted in its constitution and it starts with the establishment of “progressive” America in 1776. Even before the US Declaration of Independence became an official document, the well-known statement from its second paragraph, we hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal, was at striking discord with the social and political realities of the time as it appeared while slavery was in full swing[12]. The dual desire to define a new beginning without resolving the residual baggage of 1619 outlines the intentions not only to have two parallel histories, but more than that, to afford additional flexibility of the new Union. It remains one of the most striking examples of historical irony that the desire to save slavery was in the background of the American push for a new beginning in 1776. While the rest of the world was beginning to phase it out, slavery was still going strong on the “new continent”. America may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue[13]. As a consequence, the issue of race and institutions that followed had become the foundation of the country, as two parallel flows of history unfolded.
The two orthogonal narratives have persisted largely as a result of the ideology America chose to embrace. Endemic exclusion, and the attempted modes of its management, which in the USA assumed a particular institutional systematization, has been a residuum of intrinsic incompleteness of these ideological choices. The two parallel histories have coexisted for centuries unphased by each other, pulling the country in two different directions resulting in an irreconcilable cultural rift, which rose to unsustainable levels in this century.
However, as capitalism ran its course and the 400 years of its reign are facing unwind, these two histories have suddenly become cognizant of each other. The ghost of America’s past resonates with the present-day neo-segregationism located at the intersection of the two parallel (historical) narratives. A Current snapshot of America reflects the peak of the tensions caused by this ambiguity — it is the moment when the two begin to collide and desire to either reconcile with or annihilate each other. As the two historical processes (1619 and 1776) are beginning to intersect, the underlying socio-economic configuration is opening a wormhole that short-circuits the distance between them. This is the coming out of Dark America and its encounter with its progressive twin. What had been the centuries-long illegible process is becoming instantaneously legible in light of the intensity of this encounter. It is the moment of enormous clarity – the reconciliation of the underlying contradictions, which has been suspended for centuries and is now being resolved during their synthesis into a single narrative.
The 2016 wormhole
The divided self or the anti-psychiatry of the American experience
The resurrection of the 1619 timeline and the collision of two histories come hardly as a surprise in the light of the socio-political developments of the last five decades. The whole republican strategy since the 1970s has been a white supremacist dog whistle. And, since the population has been growing less white, their anxiety has grown accordingly and, with it, their susceptibility to right wing narratives, no matter how ridiculous they became or how much they played against material interest of their constituents. Ian Hany López offers the best summary of the last 50 years of that politics: Government coddles nonwhites with welfare and slap-on-the-wrist policing; meanwhile, government victimized whites by taxing their paychecks and refusing to protect them from marauding minorities[14]. It is no coincidence that since 1972, no Democratic candidate has ever won majority of the white vote. In turn, 90% of GOP supporters are white and so are 98% of its elected officials.
What continues to reinforce the antagonism of African Americans is not so much the fact that political discourse continues to be centered on blaming them for their social dislocation, but the absence of the Four Peculiar Institutions and parallel American history from that discussion — their role has been deliberately and intentionally downplayed or outright omitted from it. By blaming the victims, the existing political narratives, both centrist and right wing alike, are confusing cause and effect. Whatever blacks are being blamed for is not the cause of their precarity, it is a result of centuries of systematic adherence to particular politics and policies. The “missing” history, from 1619 to 1776, without which the last two-and-half centuries are illegible, provides the background for the synthesis of the four centuries of America.
The impossibility of a meaningful consensual discourse stems from the fact that we cannot experience other people’s experience — we can only experience their behavior, which might reveal something altogether different from what they are experiencing[15]. When observed from the outside certain behavioral patterns might appear as irrational and self-destructive with their rhetorical articulation being a valid expression of the inner distress and, therefore, meaningful only from within their own situational context.
When seen through the perspective of the longer (American) history, 1776 had been an attempt at a new beginning. Subsequent years and centuries represent normative period, the birth of new standards of normalcy as something that has come to hold the highest cultural value, what we teach our kids to become and what they pass along to their kids. But, what is the value of normalcy? During the 20th century alone, normal men had killed more than 120 million people and if left unchecked, they will kill more. After almost two and half centuries, we have come to realize that normalcy is overrated.
The only way to forget the traumas of history is to do away with normalcy and embrace madness in order to be healed and find salvation. According to R. D. Laing, one of the founders of anti-psychiatry, madness could become a transformative process — travelers could return from the journey with important insights, and may become wiser and more grounded persons as a result[16].
If the human race survives, future men will look back on our enlightened epoch as a veritable age of Darkness. They will presumably be able to savor the irony of the situation with more amusement than we can extract from it. The laugh’s on us. They will see that what we call “schizophrenia” was one of the forms in which, often through quite ordinary people, the light began to break through the cracks in our all-too-closed minds[17].
[1] The 1619 Project, The New York Times Magazine, August 18 (2019), Ed. Jake Silverstein
[2] Loïc Wacquant, Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh, Punishment & Society 3, 95 (2001) & Punishing the Poor: The Neoliberal Government of Social Insecurity, Duke University Press Books (2009)
[3] ibid.
[4] ibid.
[5] ibid.
[6] ibid.
[7] The remainder of this section is, for the most part, the description of the functioning of the Four Peculiar Institutions entirely in Wacquant’s words and thoughts either as a direct quote (italicized text) or paraphrased (regular print).
[8] ibid.
[9] ibid.
[10] ibid.
[11] ibid.
[12] The phrase “all men are created equal” has received criticism from elitists and traditional conservatives. Before final approval, Congress, having made a few alterations to some of the wording, also deleted nearly a fourth of the draft, including a passage criticizing the slave trade. At that time many members of Congress, including Jefferson, owned slaves, which clearly factored into their decision to delete the controversial “anti-slavery” passage. In 1776, abolitionist Thomas Day wrote: “If there be an object truly ridiculous in nature, it is an American patriot, signing resolutions of independency with the one hand, and with the other brandishing a whip over his affrighted slaves.”
[13] By 1776, Britain had grown deeply conflicted over its role in the barbaric institution that had reshaped the Western Hemisphere. In London, there were growing calls to abolish the slave trade. This would have upended the economy of the colonies, in both the North and the South. The wealth and prominence that allowed Jefferson, at just 33, and the other founding fathers to believe they could successfully break off from one of the mightiest empires in the world came from the dizzying profits generated by chattel slavery. In other words, we may never have revolted against Britain if the founders had not understood that slavery empowered them to do so; nor if they had not believed that independence was required in order to ensure that slavery would continue. It is not incidental that 10 of this nation’s first 12 presidents were enslavers, and some might argue that this nation was founded not as a democracy but as a slavocracy. (Nikole Hannah-Jones in The 1619 Project)
[14] Ian Hany López, Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class, Oxford University Press (2015), and Race and Economic Jeopardy for All: A Framing Paper for Defeating Dog Whistle Politics,
http://www.ianhaneylopez.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/race_and_economic_jeopardy_framing_paper.pdf
[15] R. D. Laing, The Politics of Experience, Harmondsworth: Penguin (1967)
[16] ibid.
[17] ibid.
10.XI 2019
Degenerate Matter
When a star exhausts its nuclear fuel, the balance tips in favor of gravity, and the star starts to collapse. In its final stage, it expels most of its outer material leaving the core as its only remain. This core becomes a very hot white dwarf. Rules governing “life” on a white dwarf are quite different from those on a normal star[1]. Highly compressed mater exposes the quantum mechanical nature of its constituents, which, when stripped down to their irreducible selves, obey the exclusion principle: no two particles can occupy the same state. As the density of such matter increases, so does its energy, pressure and temperature. In the dense matter, particles cannot slow down completely all at the same time. Some of them can, but once they occupy the low energy levels, those levels become inaccessible to the rest, so they start populating the next lowest levels and when those are filled, there come the next higher etc. When all available energy levels are filled, this is referred to as degenerate matter – it is an overcrowded environment where everyone suffers from acute claustrophobia.
Economic progress is intrinsically coupled with exclusion and exclusion with the production of excess population – those who fall through the cracks and cannot be reintegrated into the normal functioning of society. They represent a surplus of humanity that is unwanted, inconvenient, and ultimately displaced and are earmarked for transport outside of the enclosure of prosperity. Their presence creates discomfort inside the enclosure and changes the underlying social dynamics. The longer the excess population rubs shoulders with “normal” folks, the more palpable precarity becomes everyone’s prospect and the less reassuringly safe anyone’s position seems[2].
The volume of excess population has come close to exceeding the managerial capacity of the planet. This is one of the biggest and most acute problems of the developed world today. Every political administration in the USA has had a different proposal for managing the latent anxiety associated with it. This issue has shaped the transformation of the neoliberal state in the last decades from the welfare to the penal modality of its functioning[3]. The neoliberal response to the problem of growing excess population has been centered on the proliferation of underclasses as a counterweight to the prolapse of the eroding middle class and reinforcement of their illusory comfort. As a consequence, poverty has become more granular. In the last 50 years three new classes have emerged at the bottom. In addition to the four existing classes, The elite plutocracy, The Salariat, Proficians, and Proletariat, there are the three new structures at the bottom[4]: The precariat, The unemployed, and The lumpen precariat.
While the standard of living of the working class remains underwritten by forms of income other than money wages (e.g. welfare, social security, unemployment insurance, Medicare…), for the precariat, those benefits have largely disappeared. The combination of employment instability and income vulnerability defines the economic precarity of the precariat.
Precariat position centers on the increasing marginalization of many people from the rights normally associated with citizenship (disenfranchised, homeless, former prisoners, illegal immigrants…). The intersection of economic precarity with political marginality is what distinguishes the precariat from the working class. The precariat lacks the seven forms of labor-related security: labor market security, employment security, job security, work security, skill reproduction security, income security, and representation security[5].
Mathematics of poverty
When it comes to wealth distribution, there is a general misconception about the role of randomness. Almost by default, randomness is misidentified as a sine qua non for fairness: If we let the chips fall where they may, randomness would guarantee equitable distributions — everyone will be happy. The false equivalence between randomness and fairness is incorrect and nowhere is it more forcefully invalidated than in the case of wealth accumulation and its distribution. In fact, the very opposite holds true: If it were up to the forces of randomness alone, unregulated and unattended, the outcome would be extreme wealth disparity – there would be very little in the middle of the distribution and most of it would be in the tails.
Extreme wealth goes hand in hand with extreme poverty and the depletion of the middle class. This is the mathematics of wealth accumulation alone, and holds true even if we do not account for the power, political influence, and intergenerational reinforcement it brings. The figure below shows the distribution of wealth determined by a repeated coin toss[6]: each participant gains or loses a unit of wealth if they get heads or tails respectively. This is repeated many times. The total wealth is displayed as a fraction of favorable tosses. For example, 0% means not a single heads outcome – the player is considered poor at the end; 50% reflects an equal number of favorable and unfavorable tosses – the wealth is unchanged; 100% is all favorable tosses – the wealth accumulation is maximal.
While new wealth (or its depletion) arrives in random installments, total individual wealth is mostly either steadily increasing or decreasing (with a relatively small fraction remaining stable). Most of the distribution is in the wings: 40% of the people are poor and 40% are rich, while only 20% are in the middle. Visually, this is a mirror image of the normal distribution where 2/3 of its mass resides in a two standard deviation band around the mean.
In reality, wealth is even more concentrated than this. The disparity due to randomness is amplified with each generation as initial conditions reinforce it further. This is exactly our current predicament. 20th century capitalism is a spectacular confirmation of this mathematical result. As much as this most amazing period of human history had been about enlightenment, emancipation, science, progress, and wealth, it had generated a staggering amount of poverty along the way.
Poverty used to be a safe place
Wealth is inherently empowering and motivating; poverty is neither [Jeffrey A. Winters].
The presence of wealth focuses the political attention of the rich on wealth defense; its absence has no parallel effect on the poor. Poverty by itself neither motivates nor provides a core set of common interests for the poor the way wealth does for the rich.
Capitalism never recognized poverty as its own, its endogeneity always denied and rationalized by deploying exogenous factors or attributed to imperfections of implementation. As it grew bigger and deeper, poverty became self-reproducing and multiplying.
No one has captured the essence of poverty better than the French poet Charles Péguy in his 1913 essay[7]: Poverty was an unspoken contract between man and destiny, and before the outset of post-modern times destiny had never reneged on this contract. We had known the times when a man condemned to poverty was at least secure in poverty. It was understood that those who wished to escape poverty, those who gambled, risked everything. Those who gambled could lose, but those who didn’t gamble could not lose. They could not have suspected that a time would come, that it was already here – and this, precisely is modern times – when those who do not gamble lose all the time, even more assuredly than those who do.
In postmodernity, this only became more extreme with the 21st century delivering the complete transformation. Paradoxically, the metamorphosis of poverty has been most striking across electoral democracies in developed economies where poverty became not only risky, but shameful and, with time, its criminalization became one of the main neoliberal projects[8] resulting in systematic social precarization and large-scale loss of citizens’ rights contributing to the rise of new underclasses. This particular mode of permanent exclusion short-circuited the feedback loop between their discontent and the political process. And nowhere has this transformation been more extreme and thorough than in post-modern America where the gambling mindset became a new paradigm, and gamblers new folk heroes, and where society gradually transformed from that of workers to risk takers and lottery winners.
The physics of social downgrade
There are always too many of them. ‘Them’ are the fellows whom there should be fewer – or better still none at all. And there are never enough ou us. ‘Us’ are the floks of whom there should be more. (Zygmunt Bauman)
At the bottom of the social scale, the stakes are lower and risks higher. Migrants, the new underclass of precariat, who flee their homes out of desperation represent the highest level of risk taking. They trade the certainty of poverty at home for the risk of precarity abroad, in the developed world and agree to populate the lowest social strata in exchange for an objectively infinitesimal chance of a better future.
Exhaustion of social libidinal energy, the equivalent of the nuclear fuel of a star, is the beginning of the creation of social degenerate matter. The more society is shaped as the winner-takes-all, the more extreme risk taking is set off and the more dire the consequences and deeper the downfalls, resulting in more crowding at the bottom layers of social underclasses.
Nothing frightens people as much as the prospect of their social degradation, of losing their social status or facing a class downgrade. This fear is managed by the creation of social underclasses. The rise of new modes of xenophobia is a result of the underlying class struggles at the bottom.
In post-war Western Europe, immigration issues were rarely (if ever) an important part of a political platform. An influx of immigrants was driven by demand for labor; their social position as precariat was controlled both administratively and culturally. Immigrants practically never had a shot at citizenship and neither did their offspring. There was no mixing with local folks due to impenetrable cultural barriers which were practically never challenged.
Celebrated by the capital for removal of economic rigidities and as a catalyst of free capital flow, globalization was, at the same time, a major disruption of the social equilibrium. By its very constitution, globalization guarantees porous boundaries for capital, and the basic condition for restoration of equilibrium requires that the same holds for labor. Social precarization, thus, became the process of formation of a new equilibrium, a consequence of a tradeoff between poverty and precarity. However, lumpy, intermittent surges in supply of precarity, sometimes as much as one million people at a time, put enormous stress, both fiscal and social, on domestic middle and lower-middle classes and threaten their social standing, especially in times when the crushing forces of the economic zero-sum game have become inescapable due to the depletion of growth and general libidinal forces. This has only become more acute in post-2008 years as policy response aimed at covering the costs of capitalist excesses began to exaggerate already preexisting social imbalances.
The lower middle class and domestic excess population don’t really mind minorities or immigrants as such, they just don’t want to see them climbing the existing social ladder – they want them and their offspring segregated and permanently prevented from getting a shot at it. The lower echelons of society need assurances and a buffer (political, institutional, and physical) that separates them from the true underclass. This is their new political demand, which they are being promised by the new populist leaders.
The images of detainment facilities and overall dehumanization of target groups (immigrants and minorities), tried and exploited so many times before, whose replay we have been seeing in the last years, are very powerful assurance tools in that context. Ritualistic denial of their humanity with gratuitous displays of cruelty, are essential parts of political strategy and communication tools between populist politicians and their base. Immigrants, in their view, need to be confined to the three lowest social groups and the walls – symbolic, administrative and (preferably) physical — between them and the rest of the population have to be permanent and impenetrable. As a cultural concept, these walls have an immeasurable symbolic value for the domestic underclass. This is the main reason why the issue of immigration has become a central part of every populist movement now (and not before), and why the idea of The Wall, as idiotic as it objectively is, cannot be abandoned by populist politicians if they want to have a chance of staying in power.
White dwarf capitalism
Ever since humanity bowed to the economy, all that is left is the freedom of hostility. The feeling of hate is the only thing that survived in people’s minds since the first days of the 20th century and the beginning of progress. It dominates today’s societies of abundance. (Paul Virilio)
Capitalism will not disappear, it will transform into managerial feudalism. In its final stages, capitalism functions very much like a collapsing star. When it exhausts its libidinal energy, it will turn into an economic and social white dwarf. The rules governing the behavior of such a social structure are very different from the laws describing traditional social organizations.
Degenerate matter, the fabric of white dwarfs, is not composed of atoms and molecules, but elementary particles. Stripped down to their irreducible selves and decontextualized, elementary particles no longer come together and form chemical bonds. There is no chemistry, no biology, and there is no life. Instead, there is a strict hierarchical order establish by particles’ intrinsic intolerance for each other. As basic social structures like family, clan, community, or congregation no longer function, when empathy is extinguished, and only individuals, stripped of their social context and governed exclusively by their own self-interests remain, society becomes a culture of elementary particles and turns into social degenerate matter.
White dwarfs are perfect undead objects. They are eternal[9] — it takes forever for them to cool and lose all their energy, longer than the life of the universe. Their constitution defines a perfect stasis: Everything is in its place inside a white dwarf; there is no room for anything to change. It is a perfect rigid order – a beautiful monstrosity without any attributes of life.
Civilizations rise and they collapse making way to new ones. White dwarfs do not have enough mass to collapse into neutron stars or black holes. They must endure a far harsher sentence than death: Eternity without the capacity to end their existence.
[1] As the density increases, so does the pressure, energy and the temperature (which is the average kinetic energy of the system). As a consequence, temperature of the white dwarfs exceeds 100,000 degrees. Density of white dwarfs is typically 200,000 times that of Earth and the gravity on their surface of is 350,000 times that of gravity on Earth. That means a 150-pound (68-kilogram) person on Earth would weigh 50 million pounds (22.7 million kg) on the surface of a white dwarf.
[2] Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, Polity; 1 edition (2003)
[3] ibid.
[4] Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class, Bloomsbury Academic; 1st edition (2011)
[5] Ibid.
[6] Jamil Baz and George Chacko, Financial Derivatives: Pricing, Applications, and Mathematics, Cambridge University Press (2004)
[7] Charles Péguy, d’Argent, Des Equateurs (2008)
[8] While neoliberalism produces social and economic vulnerability, criminalization produces ways to capitalize on that vulnerability. The criminalization of illicit drugs accomplishes three things at once. First, it reinforces socioeconomic vulnerability through a steady flow of pre-trial detainees, prisoners, parolees and families disrupted by harshly punitive sanctions. Second, it makes the economic viability of hard drugs dependent on a willingness to assume risk, especially as entry-level narco-labor. This willingness is a condition clearly associated with the socioeconomically marginalized – those who have little to lose but their “freedom”. Third, it guarantees accessibility of hard drugs to the disenfranchised segment of the population. In this way, the very victims of global capitalism are trapped in the spider web of the carceral state and the more they struggle to survive in it, the more precarious their position becomes.
[9] As the theory goes, white dwarfs should, in principle, gradually cool down and stop emitting light and eventually morph into black dwarfs. However, this is a very slow process – the period of the transformation would take in excess of 14 billion years – more than the age of the universe. Thus, the mortality of the white dwarfs is an entirely academic question. For all purposes, white dwarfs are universally eternal.
31. VIII 2019
Adventures in integral reality: Amusement parks for angry citizens
There is no longer anything on which there is nothing to say. (Jean Baudrillard)
Back in the day, long before flat screens, in the times of cathode tubes, watching news was a compulsory ritual, like a shower or shave, which took place once every day at 6:30 pm. The news was a basic reflection of reality — people watched them to get informed. From 6:30 to 7:00, a solemn cloud would descend on the households – during that time, activities would slow down and the kids had to get quiet while adults (mostly fathers) would tune in to hear what really happened on that day. The news were dry, boring, and unremarkable, delivered without embellishment; they had to be endured. Those 30 minutes felt different than any other 30 minutes of the day. As if the clocks slowed down, the flow of time changed, becaming thicker and slower. It felt like there was nothing that couldn’t fit inside that half hour.
The arrival of the 24/7 news cycle changed everything. By occupying the entire program, the news became both news and entertainment. Suddenly, there was always something going on somewhere, or so it seemed, something one was supposed to be afraid to miss. The news became less news and more opinions, and they provoked counter opinions and set the stage for the contest between different opinions. And the public started taking sides. There were winners and losers and everyone liked the winners, so the newscasters and political commentators became new inadvertent media stars. By then, people were watching news all the time, in the morning, during the day, before dinner, during dinner, and after dinner, between shows and during commercial breaks, before going to bed or if they couldn’t sleep at night. In order to fill the time, news channels had to expand beyond basic reflections of reality; they became a production of reality and the source of its excess. There was hardly anything left for us to imagine anymore. It spelled a slow death of the Real by suffocation of the imaginary.
Consider the following example of 1970s Italy from the perspective of modern media and 24/7 news. Those were the times when bombs were going off regularly in its cities as a result of the activity of the Brigade Rose and their likes.
Is any given bombing in Italy the work of leftist extremists; or of extreme right-wing provocation; or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power; or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to calls for public security? All this is equally true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity of the facts, does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a logic of simulation which no longer has anything to do with a logic of facts and an order of reason. Simulation is characterized by a precession of the model, of all models based on the merest fact — the models come first, and their orbital circulation constitutes the genuine “magnetic field” of events. The facts no longer have any trajectory of their own, they arise at the intersection of the models; a single fact may even be engendered by all the models at once. This anticipation, this precession, this short-circuit, this confusion of the fact with its model (no more divergence of meaning, no more dialectical polarity) is what allows each time for all the possible interpretations, even the most contradictory – all are true, in the sense that their truth is exchangeable, in the image of the models from which they proceed, in a generalized cycle[1].
The politics of Simulacra
The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth — it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true. (Ecclesiastes)
These developments opened the door for alternative modes of reproduction of reality to enter the mainstream. According to Baudrillard, besides basic reflection of reality employed in traditional news casting, there are three additional stages of reproduction[2]: perversion of reality (e.g. William Barr’s summary of Mueller’s report); pretense of reality (Larry Kudlow’s statemet: “President doesn’t make things up”); and simulacrum, which bears no relation to any reality whatsoever (e.g. Fox News).
Simulacrum is the map without a territory, a copy without an original, the avenue by which accepted ideals or privileged position could be challenged and overturned. Pinocchio is an example of simulacrum, and so is Frankenstein’s monster, and TV evangelists, hipsters, The Picture of Dorian Grey, Pygmalion, painting of a photograph, or Disney World.
Simulacrum contains a certain aspect of creation ex-nihilo. The intrinsic circularity between the real and imaginary is essential for its sustainability. For example, Disney World exists, it is permanent, undeniable; it constantly serves as a benchmark against which the Real is compared and measured. In contrast, Pretense and Perversion of reality are transient; they cannot take root and must be followed by another pretense or perversion in order to have any consequence.
However, the most important practical dimension of simulacrum, one which defines its appeal and longevity, is its intrusion into the value system. As Umberto Eco pointed out, when visiting Disney parks, we not only enjoy the perfect imitation, but the conviction that imitation has reached its apex, in comparison to which reality will always be inferior. This is the same motif found in Frankenstein (intention to produce a superior human from superior parts, Pygmalion, or Pinocchio. All these examples capture the desire to achieve perfection by design, improve reality by creating its copy, elevating it to the level of the real, and using it as a surrogate[3].
Very early on, the 24/7 news concept inevitably began to deviate from basic reflection of reality, although in varying degree, depending on the network. However, no one has gone further in that journey than the Fox News. Their accelerated departure from the rest of the news media coincides with the arrival of Roger Ailes who was the first to realize the endless financial potential of manufactured reality, long before anyone else, and adopted it as the network’s business model — We deceive, you believe — to create a simulacrum as a perfect surrogate, more appealing and in many ways superior and more desirable than actual reality itself.
Once reality gets passed through the cognitive sausage making processing plant of Fox News, it emerges transformed and utterly unrecognizable, immunized against facts. In that process, Fox has created a fictional world of arbitrariness that has no reality corrective, but one that resonates with a growing segment of the American society.
The real and the imaginary: From fusion to confusion
Integral reality has no imaginary. Everything becomes real, everything has a meaning, whereas it is in the nature of meaning that not everything has it. (Jean Baudrillard)
As much as the sociopolitical developments catalyzed the evolution of the media, changes in political climate and a general shift in sentiment were largely shaped by the media, so much so that in the last decade it has become impossible to see the beginning and the end of their causal connection.
At the core of this all reside the deep social changes of the post-industrial West. Technology, globalization, tighter environmental regulations, and decline in manufacturing have resulted in accelerated deplition in demand for unskilled white labor, a similar social configuration experienced by the black sub proletariat in the early postindustrial decades.
Such developments, whenever they take place, produce insecure, fear-driven masses that can be coopted by ethno-nationalist forces. While for a shrinking minority, money can buy security and act as a replacement for identity, for a growing majority without money, there is nothing left – neither identity nor security. They are forced into the imaginary. Fear for oneself unconsciously fosters a longing for the enemy. They invent an enemy for themselves. The enemy, even in imaginary form, is a fast supplier of identity[4].
For a significant (and rapidly growing) segment of the American population, reality has become a nightmare without an escape path. The surrogate offering of Fox presented itself as a far more attractive alternative than the one that governed their lives – a copy had becomes superior to the original. The underlying rage of the white underclass was abundant, it presented itself as the new political capital ready to be deployed and invested. Its emergence as a portal to power and influence defined the political inflection point, and was seized by Roger Ailes when he joined the Fox. His version of right wing populism became ventriloquism of the excluded, a well-tried and bankrupt political maneuver of the right, a regressive anti-globalist surrogate for the general identity loss.
This was a novel, ingenious shot at the old and probably the most acute problem faced by the developed world: the problem of excess population. The number of people that fall through the cracks and are unable to get reintegrated into the normal functioning of society has been growing unstoppably, their size exceeding the managerial capability of the planet. Their discontent has reached toxic levels and their presence inside the enclosure of prosperity has been making the “normal” segment of the population uncomfortable and nervous. So far, attempts at draining of the excess population have been centered on either their incarceration or outright physical elimination via opioids. The newest proposal, championed by the right-wing populist outlets, is to open amusement parks for angry citizens and keep the excess population sequestered inside those parks, not merely as spectators, but as interactive extras; create attractions and make them angrier so they never want to leave.
For the excess population, the reality created by Fox is the only thing to cling to. Rage is their political currency, an asset and investment, which Fox and the right-wing media promise to reinvest and manage. It is the source of dividends, their 401K, and bitcoin at the same time; their present and their future, and the last chance of reclaiming their social identity.
The arrival of Trump was an extension of Fox’s vision beyond media. His election was perceived as a rebellion against the Real. However, Trump was not a novelty here. The script had already been written well before he was even in the picture. Fox News is the theme park; Trump is just a character in it, the Fox’s Pinocchio, there merely to entertain the visitors.
And with the strange twist of fate, as one political idea gets recycled after a century of hibernation, and ideology undergoes a face lift from National Socialism to National Capitalism, the Nazi wet dream of harnessing the power of media for political gains comes to life again, only this time as a perversion of itself: It is not the media that are in the service of politics, but politics in the service of media.
Semiotic insolvency and the great flood of arbitrariness
Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth[5]. And as lies continue and become bigger, our deficit to the truth grows. And this debt will have to be paid one day – that day will inevitably come. By inventing new lies in order to diffuse the old ones, we finance the old (semiotic) debt by issuing a new one – we borrow more in order to pay old debts. This is a semiotic pyramid scheme.
Being allowed to lie without consequences is like having an unlimited credit line; it feels like free money. And when free money is readily available, we don’t need a rationale, we take it, although we know all too well how it will end. And despite all that wisdom of hindsight, we fall repeatedly into the trap of pyramid schemes because we always see ourselves not as victims but as perpetrators.
In the culture where money is elevated to a supreme metrics and profit to the highest principle, it is no wonder that non-financial liabilities, like deficit to the truth, have been perceived as secondary and allowed to grow without a bound as long as they continue to bring profits.
What we are facing, in the not so distant future, is the bursting of the semiotic subprime bubble, ignited and carried out by Fox News and accelerated and brought to unsustainable levels by the current administration. The conditionally insolvent are allowed to borrow until they become unconditionally illiquid: People with no credibility or qualifications are appointed to positions of high responsibility and are allowed to cover up the consequences of their incompetence with further lies and distractions until their lies are no longer transactable — when no one believes in them any longer. This is when the system will clear. However, when the criminal incompetence of the current administration can no longer be covered up, its toxic debris will have already affected a significant part of the planet. It will be the political equivalent of the 2008 crash, a global Chernobyl, a chain reaction of defaults with huge casualties and unforeseeable long-term effects. This will be a generalized meltdown of credibility of trust, a default of the magnitude never seen in human history, an analogue of the 2008 financial crisis extended beyond financial markets, a meltdown of all frames of reference. There won’t be a firm spot to put a foot on. This is the great flood of arbitrariness.
[1] Jean Baudrillard, Selected Writings, ed. Mark Poster (Stanford University Press, 1988), pp. 166-184
[2] Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, University of Michigan Press; 14th Printing edition (1994)
[3] Simulacrum comes to life in three stages. In the initial stage, a faithful copy of the original emerges as an object is replicated, but the image is recognized as a counterfeit of the original. In the second stage, the distinction between the original and its replica begin to break down as a mass production of copies emerge. In the final stage, the replica precedes the original; there is no longer distinction between the reality and representation. Simulacrum anesthetizes the imagination numbing it against reality. It is ultimately a replacement of substance with symbols.
[4] B. C. Han, Die Austreibung des Anderen, S. FISCHER; Auflage: 4. (2016)
[5] Valery Legasov in Chernobyl
22. X 2018
Male trouble and the rise of the disillusioned perspective
The disillusioned perspective distinguishes continually between life as we want it to be and life as it actually is. Conversion is a transparent attempt to lend meaning to the meaningless, possibly only through self-delusion, that is by allowing illusion to trump disillusion. (Karl Ove Knausgaard)
It is the eleventh hour for white American males. This, once dominant and privileged majority has become a collateral damage of capitalism’s global triumph, beaten in just about any game that matters, even the ones they invented, they are joining the ranks of excess population facing a threat of irreversible social displacement and marginalization. Tired of self-abuse, anesthetized by drugs and alcohol, angry and armed with guns, but feeling powerless, a growing number of American white men is taking permanent residence in the center of the disillusioned perspective, in desperate search for conversion, looking for a savior who will restore their lost dignity and self-respect, and reclaim, on their behalf, what they always considered rightfully theirs, the basic white male privilege.
In that quest they have fallen victims to predatory seduction of anarcho-capitalists and global kleptocrats. These merchants of regressive nostalgia and self-proclaimed guardians of traditional values, who celebrate the idea of privatized utopias of gated communities, do not really need white the male precariat as such, but are ready to offer them whatever leftovers they don’t need, in exchange for an exclusive right to manage their rage capital and for their voice in the ballot box. And white American males will take it and will fall under the spell of magical thinking of the Third-World-esque political pornographers just because, stripped of all other alternatives, the male precariat has found itself lost in the blind alley of the disillusioned perspective.
The stories we tell ourselves and the stories behind stores: The emergence of male precarity
American men have been the unintended victim of the policies and socio-economic changes of their own creation, which saw their culmination in the ultimate downfall ten years ago. Although the prophets of supply side economics continue to insist that we are deep into the recovery cycle, a minimal dose of common sense points in the opposite direction – the economy and, especially, society have never fully recover after 2008 — the crisis appears only to be deepening.
Here’s one way of slicing it. Conventional civilian unemployment rate represents a fraction of the labor force that is not employed. It is a superficial (and distorted) way of assessing the state of economic health, the official statistics reported and referenced in the media and public discourse. It is compared here with the fraction of the US male population of working-age without a job (not including the people that are currently in prisons, so that its rise does not get confused with the explosion of the incarceration rate).
Joblessness never stops for American men
The histories of these two measures of unemployment share the same cyclicals: Their rise in recessions and decline during recoveries always takes place in a coordinated way. However, their structural parts are different. Although during each recession conventional unemployment peaks, it always returns to its “normal”, pre-recession level, somewhere in the 4-5% range. Male unemployment, on the other hand, follows a steady upward trend. For over a half a century, since 1960s, every six years the unemployment rate of American men has increased by an additional 1%. For them, there is no “normal” unemployment – every recession creates a new, higher, normal unemployment rate they are required to tolerate.
In every recession, the social costs of recovery have been financed by the rise of male precarity. And those social costs have accumulated to the point where they no longer can be ignored. The current male unemployment rate is around 14%, about 10% higher than in the 1960s. This is the unemployment gap that captures the level of male precarity. Nearly 10 million American men[1] are currently without a job (in the 1960s they accounted for about 1.5mn), and with them probably another 10+ million of their immediate family members and/or dependents who are affected by that condition.
When compared to the unemployment of women, which shows exactly the opposite trend, these numbers highlight the problem associated with the male condition. Starting with the 1960s only a small fraction of women worked and their unemployment rate was in the 60% range. It has since declined down to 25%, with a noticeable inflection in the 1980s, a consequence of significant socio-economic changes, shift of focus from manufacturing to service economy, women’s liberation, and a general emancipation trend.
Two opposing trends: Unemployment of American men and women
As male unemployment tripled in size since the 1960s, female numbers declined to less than half of their initial value. All progressive forces, like general education, emancipation, or new technologies, which had been embraced initially as possibilities for improvements in the working conditions, leisure, and higher quality of life, eventually became new techniques of control and created the world of perpetual underemployment. These developments have inspired a massive wave of anti-progressive sentiment and emerged as the foundations of the disillusioned perspective, predominantly, of American white men.
Male precariat and the excess population
Over the course of six decades, American men have become the main constituents of what Zygmunt Bauman has identified as the excess population: The volume of humans that are made redundant by the global triumph of capitalism has grown so much that it exceeds the managerial capacity of the planet. They cannot be re-assimilated into the “normal” life pattern and reprocessed back into the category of “useful” members of society.[2] This has emerged as the most challenging test of the existing socioeconomic paradigm, with no hint of possible solution in sight.
There are several shades of excess population. At the extreme end of the spectrum reside criminals and chronic outsiders, for whom there is no place within the boundaries of the enclosure inside which an economic balance and social equilibrium are sought[3]. These people are transported outside of the enclosure, either sent to prisons, or confined to life in hyperghettos without access to traditional citizens’ rights.
The unemployed represent those who escaped transportation and remain inside enclosure; although temporarily redundant, they are earmarked for recycling and rehabilitation. However, all that changes once the drainage of the surplus of humans is blocked. The longer the redundant population stays inside and rubs shoulders with the useful and legitimate rest, the less the lines separating normality and abnormality appear reassuringly unambiguous. Assignment to waste becomes everybody’s potential prospect – one of the two poles between which everybody’s present and future social standing oscillates[4]. As unemployment becomes chronic, the ranks of those who permanently drop out of the labor force swell and they become a burden to the society. Their temporary status comes under review and they face potential permanent exclusion.
American males have been falling through the cracks for decades. Angry and growing in size, they epitomize the excess of population, a burden to the society for which there is no solution. And when under pressure of persistent hardship all the energy of young age wears down and body and soul capitulate, they become a part of the “dark statistics”. Mortality of white American males 45-54 — the age when the emotional and physical immune system gives up — is on the rise, while everyone else’s condition (including that of Hispanic Americans) is improving.
The three horsemen of the white male apocalypse
What accounts for this dispersion is hardly surprising. While the biggest killers, such as lung cancer have been on a steady decline, death due to poisoning (read: “drug OD”) has more than tripled, suicide rate (i.e. depression) doubled, and death due to chronic liver diseases (alcoholism) increased by 50% since the beginning of the century. Together with prisons, as graduate schools of crime, drugs, depression, and alcoholism are the three main ideological tools for drainage of the excess of population.
Dark America: Nonsense with a purpose and political pornografication
Populism has become the ideological response to the disillusioned perspective, an attempt to lend meaning to the meaningless, to trump disillusion through self-delusion. When process of growth and change becomes chaotic and overwhelming, individuals experiencing such episodes feel that their sense of identity is breaking down, that their old values no longer hold true and that the very ground beneath their personal realities is radically shifting. This is the point at which the new identity politics inserts itself.
Joblessness of men, predominantly whites, has been the cause of multiple side-effects and various forms of social vulnerability. With time, white men’s social dislocation created a fertile ground for a simmering resentment towards those superficially perceived to have been the causes of their job losses, and with it, their social status and, ultimately, self-respect. This made them receptive to the predatory politics of right wing populism. Instead of questioning capitalism’s responsibility for its crimes, their discontent was articulated in a displaced mode, as a cultural struggle.
The main culprits of their condition have been (mis)identified as women, minorities, immigrants, globalization and emancipation in general. Misogyny, resurgent racism, and xenophobia emerged as major mobilizing forces of the conservative right, championed by the NRA, right-to-lifers, and white supremacists, and fortified by the alliances with the vulgar materialism of Christian fundamentalism in the background. These became the voices of the disillusioned perspective that outline the contours of Dark America, which found its way to the ballot box in 2016. Such distribution of factors and their misidentified causes could struck resonance with the fundamentalist narratives and paved the way for a full blown relapse towards strict patriarchal order inspired by nostalgia for times when social coherence was firm and stable due to rigid family structure and racial segregation.
This is where Christian fundamentalism meets its lost Islamic twin and other monotheistic siblings. Nothing illustrates better this civilizational relapse than the words of Mark Harris, pastor turned Republican nominee for Congress in North Carolina’s 9th district. This otherwise marginal and utterly insignificant individual, has distinguished himself by repeatedly questioning the health of women’s pursuit to prioritize their careers and independence over their biblical “core calling”. His colorful sermons condense the core republican views in an unedited form:
Wives, please hear me this morning. You’re not to ever submit because your husband demands it, but you do it because the Lord ordained it. Now ladies, you can rebel against that command, but just please understand you’re not rebelling against your husband, but against the Lord … submission is not about inferiority in any way, any shape and any form. It simply reflects a God-ordained function of things.
When put in context, the message is clear: Emancipation is a sin, modern women are the offenders, getting ahead of men is a rebellion against God’s order of things. “So get over this inequality thing — because that’s not the point of submission,” he concludes.
By retreating to their households and assuming the subordinate role of housewives, women would exonerate themselves from sin and, at the same time, participate in an economic and social reform[5]. Youth crime would decline, as would unemployment when women, grateful for an opportunity to please God, begin to leave the workforce to care for their children. The problem of excess population and unemployment (together with budget deficit!) would be solved in one stroke – here is your conservative fiscal policy right there.
This is one of many techniques of submission of women, the main ideological pillar of right wing identity politics, populist and mainstream alike, which speaks directly to, and resonates strongly with, their sole constituency who are, at the same time, the main victims of its ideological predation – the white male precariat.
Unlike intellectuals, who experience the world with their brains, poor and uneducated arrive at their convictions through their empty stomachs. One cannot confuse them by opening new horizons or perspectives[6] (e.g. with the empty promises of centrists’ narratives). However, they remain blind to conversion. The disillusioned gaze sees through everything, sees all the lies and the pretenses, the only thing it doesn’t see is its own origin, its driving force[7]. White men are at the end of the rope; they have fallen victims of their own creations. And this is the biggest irony of this otherwise unhappy and depressing story.
[1] There are currently around 60 million men and about 70 million women age 25-54 in the US
[2] Zygmunt Bauman, Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts, Polity (2003)
[3] ibid.
[4] ibid.
[5] This reform would go along the same lines as described by Michel Houellebecq in Submission
[6] Reflections of the SS Standartenführer Heinrich Steinbrecher, in How to quiet a vampire, B. Pekic, Northwestern University Press (2003)
[7] Karl Ove Knausgaard, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, NYT (2-Nov-2015)
23. V 2018
Scandal and power: Pornographication of politics and social life
There is a species of man who is always one step ahead of his own excrement (René Char)
Scandal is emerging as possibly the most significant technological innovation of the new century so far. It makes social barriers porous, it uncovers human flaws behind the sheltered Public, humanizes the dehumanized, and contaminates the sterilized Symbolic. Current political reality reveals itself through scandal. Scandal gives an illusion of political engagement – it is political activism in consumer mode.
Perfection is sterile – we are attracted to people’s weaknesses and imperfections and not to their strengths. If personal flaws and idiosyncrasies harmonize with repressed collective traumas, desires and nostalgia for the ancestral terrain, they can have a great mobilizing power capable of defining new identity politics and shaping entire political movements. A leader who is able to strike the ancestral chord of his people will make those people dance to his grooves and fall in love with him. For several decades now, the new breed of post-Reagan politicians has been doubling down on their flaws in a bid for deeper access to wider political audiences and a chance to reinvest considerable rage capital that has accumulated over time. Their idiosyncrasies make them human, and the more they err, the more human and appealing they become. They diffuse one scandal with another (always) bigger one — spectacle is addictive, it has to grow to satiate the boundless appetite of the publics. Since Reagan days, scandal has morphed from a free form to a precise game theoretical strategy.
The main problem with scandal as a public communication tool is its integration into political life. After all, scandal in public life has always been synonymous with professional suicide, the end of political career (Nixon was the last tragic victim of that equation). It took almost two decades after Reagan to figure out how to bypass this obstacle. The breakthrough came with a realization that the troubling equation, Scandal = Suicide, is intimately linked with the second one, Suicide = Power.
It wasn’t very long after 9/11 that the West managed to grasp the idea that suicide is a statement of power. A man on a suicide mission is not to be messed with: Irrespective of how much stronger you are, he will manage to hurt you, or at best, his guts will splatter all over you leaving the stains (physical and mental) you will never be able to remove. The impactfullness of suicide as the ultimate symbolic gesture can only be understood and argued after reconciling it with the symbolism of afterlife. The duality of suicide — physical and symbolic (the collateral and the reward) – defines the first layer of its rationalization within the existing cultural paradigm.
Suicide is the most private act. Its intent and execution are done without the consent of anyone but the self. The suicide through martyrdom is an externalization of that personal pact; it is a radical privatization of the public space – a violent erasure of the gap between private and public.
Physical suicide as subordination to a higher goal that transcends the value of human life represents a symbolic act that has no counterpart in the Western culture. For Westerners, this is potentially the most frightening confrontation. But, the West has emancipated itself from this nonsense of higher goals a long time ago: We no longer give our lives for higher goals; we take risks in exchange for adequate compensation.
With real (fundamentalist) martyrs loss of life is real and afterlife is symbolic. For pragmatic Westerners rationalization of suicide consists in transposing its coordinates: suicide becomes symbolic and afterlife real. This is the key step.
Over the last two decades, the public spectacle of symbolic suicide has become a ticket to a lucrative material “afterlife” for numerous public figures. Through scandal, current populist politics, (the concluding chapter of neoliberalism) has been transformed into a perpetual ritual of watered down acts of reversible self-annihilation — political suicide followed by subsequent symbolic resurrection. The ongoing parody of self-destruction comes with an embedded option on resurrection (political and/or commercial) or an implicit promise of a lucrative “afterlife” with “70 virgins” in the form of book deals, high-commission speech opportunities, TV appearances, Fox News correspondent, or consultant positions.
These rituals are repeated over and over again as an essential part of an ever-growing public spectacle. The high-stakes game, the ultimate gamble, where one puts his life on the line for his beliefs (what if my belief is wrong and my life was lost for nothing?) is transposed into its parody, a tactical low-stakes gambit consisting of making minor short-term concessions in return for a potentially large future upside. There is an emancipatory ring to this parody: While “traditional” martyrdom has been strictly a male thing, symbolic suicide has been very much a gender-neutral thing, which has only helped its acceptance and integration.
As potential upside grew, the spectacle of symbolic self-annihilation became more competitive and more elaborate. At the top of this theatre of cruelty sits Donald Trump, always (and without a single exception) on the wrong side of every argument, political, social, ethical, ecological or rational, with consistency that can only be deliberate or programmatic, definitely not accidental. And this is just an appetizer; his distaste for truth, deep in the territory of pathological, is an amuse-bouche (it comes free of charge) before the main course, his passion for scandal of any kind, political, sexual, financial, or legal, none too small or too trivial not to be embraced, defines his habitat. He insults war heroes, war heroes’ widows and parents, handicapped, women, homosexuals, transgender, minorities, judges, FBI, CIA, media, religions, domestic and foreign dignitaries, chiefs of states, anyone that exists on this planet and beyond. And when it looks like he has sunk as low as one can sink, he manages to define new lows. His ability to survive the consequences defies laws of probability, gravity and logic; it can be only compared to surviving a plane crash (something his buddy Nigel Farage actually experienced).
Trump’s administration appointees and surrogates are all symbolic martyrs, selected volunteers on a suicide mission, trying to keep up with their boss. This commitment has become all but an explicit prerequisite for any political office appointment — we continue to be reminded of Comey’s (or Tillerson’s) ritualized dismissal as a consequence of their reluctance to commit to the parody of martyrdom.
The list of Trump’s symbolic suicide volunteers has been growing at an exploding rate. Various transient surrogates and talking heads are too insignificant and numerous to mention. But, who can forget the tragicomic figure of Sean Spicer, a bona fide moron, who went too far too soon and, in that process, blew his chances for afterlife; or premature ejaculator Scaramucci who kamikazeed on runway before his “plane” could take off; the undead duo, Conway & HakaSan; Jeffrey Lord who just couldn’t take the pressure anymore and (for no good reason and out of the blue) blasted a Sieg Heil on twitter, and subsequently lost his CNN (and any other) gig; Garry Cohn, a rational man who did and said irrational things and ruined his reputation in a futile mission, but as a government employee, managed to cash in his vested Goldman Sachs stocks without paying capital gains tax; the list goes on and on.
But, when it comes to the spectacle of public self-annihilation, no one comes close to Sean Hannity, the whirling dervish, performance artist, and Swiss army knife of populist tricks. People of all persuasions and political leanings tune in every night to watch the greatest show on TV, where this postmodern-day Lazarus of the far right sets himself on fire and incinerates his symbolic body every business day of the week at precisely 9 p.m. and within the subsequent 60 minutes violates every professional, journalistic, legal, ethical, and esthetical boundary there is to violate, only to magically resurrect the next day and repeat the same ritual during the exact same time slot.
However, away from the spectacle, one faces sobering reality: Porous boundaries, atonal politics, and populist plan for its rescue reveal the troubling truth about the human condition of the depressive-narcissistic neoliberal subject. It is at the edge of depression where neoliberalism meets its fundamentalist twin. The inability to arrive at a decision or finish anything constitutes a symptom of depression[1] — our spirit has become so compromised that even suicide cannot be accepted as a conclusive act, but just another chapter – what can be more narcissistic than that? This is the social Möbius strip where the real becomes symbolic and the symbolic turns into real. In this process of social pornografication, the paradigm of the reality show converts martyrdom into a precisely structured symbolic ritual, mythology of afterlife into business opportunities, and transforms America, and the West in general, into a culture of second acts. Everything is explicit and nothing is believable.
[1] B. C. Han
7. XI 2017
One hundred years of solitude (in hindsight): 1917 — 2017
In Andersen’s fairy-tale “The Red Shoes”, an orphan girl is given a pair of magical shoes by her rich adoptive mother. She wears them to church where she pays no attention to the service and, when her mother becomes ill, the girl deserts her, preferring to attend a party and dance in hear red shows. An angel appears to her and, to punish her vanity, condemns her to dance even after she dies. The shoes begin to move by themselves, but they can’t come off. The girl finds an executioner and asks him to chop off her feet. He does so and the girl receives a pair of wooden feet and crutches. However, the shoes continue to dance even with her amputated feet inside them. The red shoes are embodiment of an undead partial object, a pure libido which goes beyond persistence, not an interpolation between the living and the dead, but more vigorously alive than ordinary mortals — it insists on repetitive movement of dancing irrespective of the well being of the host to which it is attached[1].
Communism had to die twice. The first, symbolic, death occurred after the fall of the Berlin wall. Its second, material, death was announced after the first Iraq war when the Soviet military machine was outclassed and rendered obsolete by the far superior western war technology. But, communism could not die yet. Symbolically dead while “biologically” alive, communism still inhabits the world of undead. Although it was eventually buried in the countries where, after their initial breakup, states got reconstituted — in many places the red shoes continue to dance on.
What went wrong with the communist idea and how did liberté, egalité, fraternité become a totalitarian nightmare? Communism’s biggest sin was its vanity — an obsessive conviction that it could take uncertainty out of life as such. To accomplish and maintain that task requires an extraordinary amount of violence. Both excessive determinism and excessive force compromise system’s robustness and deprives it of valuable information, which prevents formation of adaptive mechanisms necessary for its survival.
Nomenclature of the early communist state saw their ideas as having strong scientific legitimation and maintained their conviction that loss of political power even temporarily would have been a betrayal of their historical mission. Thus, any opposition had to be inhibited and gradually eradicated. The suppression of unofficial organizing, and information that such process generally provides, left the leadership essentially blind to whatever was happening in their back yard. The red shoes began to dance. While sciences, engineering and technology had to remain competitive in order to keep up militarily with the West, communism completely neglected social sciences. A vocabulary for describing social and political conditions and adequate description of social reality never properly developed. In the face of perpetual conflict with reality communism fostered a continued state of cognitive dissonance. It erected its own boundaries to protect itself from contamination from the outside and in extreme cases morphed into a cult following. The accumulation of its shortcomings, which remained undiagnosed for a very long time, was allowed to self-reinforce. Like most other totalitarian ideologies communism remained non-adaptive, not allowing any feedback to penetrate its boundaries. It lacked a corrective and when the end came, it was unable to transform or defend itself.
Eradication of uncertainty breads ignorance which leads to paranoia and escalates oppression. These inhibit risk taking and creativity and negatively impacts economic growth with a loss of competitive edge in global marketplace. In the long-run, the system becomes fragile. As it tries to adjust to such environment, change takes the form of positive feedback. Oppression mobilizes enormous resources to keep control of its allies and political subjects and effectively turns them into its hostages. Attempts to express growing discontent require a heavy hand rule which in turn reinforces the hostage syndrome and brings about further escalation of discontent and additional loss of competitive edge. At that point, legitimation becomes the system’s biggest problem and requires mobilization of all resources, primarily aimed at glorification of the system. But, by then the oppression is the only thing the system knows how to deliver. It is the only strategy, and very expensive one — only extremely resources-rich countries can truly afford them. When existing resources are fully exhausted, the system collapses.
Because of its shortcomings, communism in its mutated form was indefensible. It required enormous resources and force to keep it alive and that was in no one’s interest. At the end, it did not work for anyone and in most places it was dissolved practically overnight. Although most communist states, one by one, declared themselves as capitalist, the transition period, after the formal breakdown of communism, appeared as building of capitalism without capitalists, at least on the surface. In an essay that could be considered as a sociological version of Orwell’s Animal Farm, Immanuel Wallerstein[2] compared the communist states to factories seized by a labor union during a strike. If the workers try to operate the factory themselves, they inevitably have to follow the rules of capitalist markets. The narrow circle of those making managerial decisions would cut themselves off from the larger group and evolve into new ruling elite and it was only a matter of time when they would no longer feel compelled to disguise the reality. This is “the iron law of oligarchy”. The factory would then revert to being a normal capitalist enterprise.
The communist supernova exploded in the center of the global geopolitical landscape. In countries where it took place, collapse of communism unfolded according to four scenarios, not two, contrary to the still dominant one-dimensional, cold-war view, which divides contemporary political systems into totalitarian and democratic. The evolution of the Soviet Union, socialist north (Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and DDR) and the Balkans went in four different directions. The four underlying trajectories that marked the transition period highlight the four attraction centers of the general political landscape and outline the corresponding oligarchic modes.
Comparative politics of social change and coordinates of wealth preservation
Traditional approach to problematic of geopolitical change relies on the assumptions that the dominant dimension of country’s political actions is geographically conditioned. However, recent contributions to this view are based on the observation that there is another, complementary determinant defined by different modes of wealth protection which has been the central force behind political changes throughout history. This is the orthogonal dimension of political change; it assumes the wealth concentration and its defense as the fundamental ingredients, often independent of geography. Thus, oligarchy as the politics of wealth defense emerges as a candidate for a unifying framework for describing different modes of political structures and geopolitical flows, especially during their formative stages. Different political systems and forms of social organization are efficiently summarizable in terms of simple oligarchic structures.
Two aspects define the building blocks of oligarchic landscape: Oligarchs & Oligarchies, wealth defense & their means. Oligarchs, in the generalized sense used here, are defined as individuals endowed by enormous wealth which both empowers and exposes them to threats. Because to that, wealth defense becomes their primary objective for which they can mobilize considerable resources. Oligarchy represents different modes of wealth defense. The interplay between oligarchic coercive power and their organization defines the four corners assigned to underlying political systems within which all political structures reside. In general, extreme concentration of power or material inequality result in political inequality and particular oligarchic structures describe different modes of wealth and power defense. Property claims and rights can never be separated from coercion and some kind of violence. Variations across oligarchies are two-dimensional with main axes defined by how oligarchs impose their will (e.g. are they armed or disarmed) and their mode of rule (e.g. individualitstic, collective or institutionalized). This results in four possible structures, the four oligarchic corners that represent cognitive coordinates of our framework (Figure). All historically known political structures reside within these four corners[3].
From: Jeffrey A Winters, Oligarchy
Starting with the origin (lower left corner), in warring oligarchies a connection between violence and property defense is most direct. The illustrative examples are African warlords or medieval Europe. Oligarchs are individually involved with unstable transient alliances. The mechanism between wealth and power is circular — coercive capacities exist for wealth defense and wealth is deployed to sustain coercive capacities.
In a ruling oligarchy (upper left corner), individual oligarchs surrender a major part of their power to a collectivity of oligarchs. Oligarchs as a group are more powerful than any single oligarchs (examples: mafia, ancient Rome, State cities).
In contrast, in a sultanic oligarchy (lower right corner), oligarchs surrender a major part of their power to a single individual. One oligarch is more powerful than the rest (e.g. Suhartos Indonesia or the Philippines under Marcos).
Civil oligarchies (upper right corner) represent the most significant political innovation, never seen in history before creation of the modern state. Here, oligarchs surrender a major part of their power to an impersonal and institutionalized government in which the rule of law is stronger than all individuals. While this protects property, wealth defense does not stop there; its focus merely shifts to income defense – the effort to deflect the potentially redistributive predations of an anonymous state – where all resources are now mobilized. Electoral democracies fall at the end of the oligarchic spectrum. While their activity remains heavily constrained by the law and by the democratic process — they do not control the law, but obey it — in most cases different sectors of income defense industry give access to various modes of oligarchic actions. There is, however, no necessity for a civil oligarchy to be electorally democratic (e.g. Singapore or Malaysia)[4].
Saying goodbye to all that: Anatomy of the perverse unwind
The partial downfall of communism has been both celebrated and mourned. The most puzzling aspect of this process was its largely peaceful character and swift resolution in the hardline centers and violent and protracted unwind in states where communism saw its most liberal and flexible implementations. In Europe alone its departure from the political scene caused tectonic changes that made all theoretically informed models crumble. Former Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia are now 28 different countries (24 legitimate; 4 with limited international recognition) and a fluctuating number of statelets constantly changing number of territories seeking the status of sovereign state or trying to be attached to another already legitimate entity. Ten poorest countries and failed states all emerged from the former communist block. In Poland, Hungary and DDR state was not dissolved. These countries were absorbed by Europe and transformed along the lines of civil oligarchies. In USSR, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia, dissolution of the state caused variable outcomes and defined radically different trajectories.
North: Civil oligarchies
To a large degree, each country of the north had something different going on, which made it interesting for the West and an easy candidate for integration into EU. Poland, with its large population, was a big labor force and consumer. Czechoslovakia, in its pre-communist days, was already a well developed country with considerable economic potential that could be relatively easily revived given their mentality and habits. The course of the last 50 years, a historical digression, could have been reversed. DDR was really never fully separated from the West Germany and in addition, it was ready to be absorbed and subsidized during the transition. Euro zone recognized strategic significance of the periphery and rushed to bring in Rumania and Bulgaria. In terms of nominal GDP per capita[5], north post-communist countries are ranked close to peripheral Europe together with Baltic States with Estonia, Czech Republic slightly below $19,000, and Poland near $13,500 defining the upper and lower bounds of the range. In the last ten years, north post communist and former Baltic states almost all have recorded a steady double digit annualized increase in GDP per capita, with Slovak Republic growing from $6,187 in 2003 to $17,706 in 2013 at an average annualized rate of 11%, Poland at 9%, Czech Republic at 7% and Hungary at 5%, while Baltics grew faster than 10%.
The main diagonal: Soviet Union between ruling & sultanic oligarchies
The rationale behind vastly different character of the breakup of different socialist regimes and the dissolution of the corresponding states can be understood by highlighting the difference between the underlying structures of those states. In empire different sectors of periphery do not interact with each other, only with the center. In a federation, they do. In confederation there is no center. The main characteristic of the dissolution of the Soviet Union was that the breakup was amicable. It was a consensual dissolution of the state, but relationship between the center and periphery was preserved. Prior to that, the state was preserved, but obsolete – couldn’t function under existing conditions but ethnically and historically was unambiguous. Gorbachev accelerated the process and to a large extend defined the direction of its change. Yeltsin settled for less state, but by shedding the periphery, gained more reform and more power. It was a compromise, the second best solution after the Soviet Union entering the capitalism as a big, unified player[6]. Yeltsin vs. Gorbachev clash was confined to the center, while periphery remained untouched. Unlike the Balkans where new states (with exception of Slovenia) didn’t have control of their territory – states fell apart while borders were unspecified. For a time Soviet internal borders swelled into sovereign state borders (structures of power) and it seemed they will remain untouched.
Officially never recognized structure of political power relations defined the rules of game when it came to the grabbing of reach resources (“privatization”). The net result was that an enormous state owned wealth had ended in the hands of a few who commended the decision making process. What happens with the secret police and ideological inquisition when the state falls apart? They have to become some form of organized crime force. The crime infiltrated in the vacuum. Army, whose primary mandate was external, defined through the Warsaw pact membership, remained on the sidelines. It was not a political force during the transition.
Majority of Asian Soviet states remained like satellite states with ties to Russia. While some still function like communist, pseudo-totalitarian systems or electoral dictatorships, resources rich states have shaped themselves along the lines of sultanic oligarchies with high number of Russians still there. The consensual breakup was orchestrated in such a way that formal sovereignty was respected in exchange for military and economic dependence on Russia and comfortable position of Russian minorities there. When after a while this dependence was questioned (Armenia, Ukraine) it automatically entailed revoking of recognition of sovereignty and Russian army more or less openly intervening in formally internal clashes.
At nominal GDP per capita of $14,591 and annualized growth rate of 17% in the last ten years, Russia sits above the rest of the southern European and post-Soviet states, but below the Baltics and post-communist north. Within the group of Asian former Soviet states, there has been a significant bifurcation between the resources rich states and the rest. Kazakhstan has been the best success story with GDP at $13,509 and the most aggressive growth of 21% in the last ten years, followed by Azerbaijan at $7,900 and 24%. Turkmenistan remains in the middle with $7,157 and 12%, while Uzbekistan at $1,878 and Tajikistan at $1,045 remain on the other side of the spectrum and below any of their European counterparts.
The Balkans: Warring oligarchies
Unlike the Soviet Union where the structure of the empire de facto remained preserved, in the Balkans there was no clear breakup scenario, especially in Yugolsavia which functioned as a confederation. Another dimension made the breakup problematic for it. For example, while in Czechoslovakia the primary target was socialism, in Yugoslavia it was the territory, which remained ambiguously defined. As a confederation of equal republics, without a clearly specified center, it lacked incentives to identify common ground. The state fell apart. Historical and demographic parameters were mixed and ambiguous except in the two westernmost republics. The breakaway states had only partial sovereignty with incomplete control of their territory and at the same time ambitions for territorial enlargement.
Conflicts over future borders escalated into the game of dismemberment followed by territorial disputes. Breakaway republics were more or less ethnically mixed and had not had full sovereignty of their territory after the breakup. As a counterweight to the army, whose main mandate was internal, basically around defending the constitution and, therefore, the integrity of the Federation, local militias were organized by the new republics. The stakes were high as state assets were offered on fire sale to a few privileged who had an access to power and information, which defined highly parcelized sovereignties and set terrain for formation of warring oligarchies with territorial claims as the main agenda together with all the side effects of that environment, instability, shifting alliances, extreme violence and ethnic purges. What followed was the mode of land-grabbing and property claims with multiple warlords and local militias going against each other, the landscape akin to warlords of medieval Europe.
Except for Slovenia with GDP per capita at $23,317, but slow growth of 4.6%, characteristic only for highly developed European countries, which has done slightly better than Czech Republic in this metric (and ahead of peripheral Europe), all other former Yugoslav republics are on the list of 10 poorest European countries with GDP per capita below $6,000. Their GDP ranges from $2,200 to $5,900 accompanied with persistently slow growth in the past ten years. In all of them the state still remains the “only business” – no new market venture is possible without consent and some form of the pay-off to the political elite.
What next?
Contemporary geopolitical discourse still views the world as us & them, free and totalitarian systems, a division largely a legacy of the cold war and everything that happens on that landscape is seen as a result of tensions between these two “extremes”. According to that narrative, dictatorship is the worst outcome of social evolution and all societies should strive towards democracy while progressive forces should be united in unconditionally supporting every effort to topple dictators. The post-communist experience, 25 years after its symbolic downfall, demonstrate that such a simplified framework is a poor approximation of reality. It shows rather unambiguously that there are far more extreme alternatives to dictatorships and that, in some cases, their dismantling could be a turn for worse or much worse.
Communism fell apart because it didn’t work for anyone and no one wanted to defend it. This is a qualitatively different situation from what late capitalism (and Western democracies) is currently facing. Extrapolation of the capitalist experience so far indicates that it is working for a progressively smaller segment of its population. At some point, its main problem will have to become its legitimation in the context of liberal democratic mode of social organization. The powerful minority, however, has the means to defend the system as long as it works for them and that will require a heavier hand as the discontent of the excluded rises. The only peaceful consensual transformation could happen if capitalism stops functioning for capitalists (e.g. inability to externalize the costs further).
The same way communism could have been a nominally well conceived idea that went wrong (in practice), democracy could be drifting away from its basic principles and gradually evolving into its antithesis. It has been largely recognized by the Western democracies that force is an inefficient form of rule. Power is an embarrassment – no one wants to claim it and it refuses to dominate. That is why advanced societies do not rely on force, but governmentality. Ideological innovations will be needed for their survival with a search for new forms of power.
In the meantime, as discontent of the excluded grows, capitalism could begin to move against democracy. This means that there could be a growing need for adjustment of either democracy or capitalism (or, most likely, both). What makes exact prediction regarding the new forms of social organizing especially difficult is that resilience towards redistribution of wealth remains firm in place with revolutions becoming obsolete as wealth is no longer only material.
There are several logical directions along which this transformation process can take place. The four corners define a rich set of possibilities; there is a vast territory that they inscribe. The four attraction centers are not necessarily the only stable configurations. In principle, civil oligarchies could begin to move looking for a new domicile in the field. It is reasonable to expect that some lessons from the breakdown of communism will be absorbed in that process. After all, capitalism owes its vitality to its adaptability. While the final destination is a long- or very-long-term project, the underlying direction and trajectory should have significant impact on the immediate future.
If there is one lesson to draw from a century of communist experience, it is that ignorance by design is the trap any hegemonic ideology faces. In its search for legitimacy, late-stage capitalism is committing the same mistakes that communism did in its early days. And every time history repeats itself, the price goes up. The spectacular display of systematic anti-scientific bias, war on facts and knowledge in general, together with eroticization of stupidity, which in the last decades has reached alarming proportions, have all created a Sachzwang – a factual constraint residing in the nature of things that leaves no choice but to perpetuate the existing conditions that are spreading throughout the neoliberal West. This desperate move to engineer legitimacy for an indefensible order of things, which consists of choosing to adjust reality to the underlying ideology, instead of the other way around, boils down to deliberately giving up adaptability of the system – its most valuable strength. That alone is bound to become the main source of positive feedback, which compromises the system’s robustness and undermine its long-term stability. This inherently suboptimal strategy is a one-way street, the same one that led to communism’s ultimate demise. After all, facts always matter, even if we don’t like them.
[1] S. Zizek, Less than Nothing, p.548, Verso (2013)
[2] Immanuel Wallerstein, (1973)“The Rise and Future Demise of the World Capitalist System” reprinted in the Essential Wallerstein (New York: New Press, 2000).
[3] Jeffrey A. Winters, Oligarchy, Cambridge (2011)
[4] Ibid, Ch. 1
[5] All numbers refer to the 2013 IMF WEO data measured in units of 2013 USD
[6] Instead of rationally bargaining on superpower advantages for a more honorable collective inclusion in the world capitalist hierarchy, the nomenklatura squandered and cannibalized Soviet assets in a panicked rush to protect the individual oligarchic positions against Gorbachev’s purging and the prospect of popular rebellions. It was an embarrassing political failure of Soviet elites to act together in the pursuit of their best historical opportunity. G. Deruluigan, (2013), p.123. in Does Capitalism Have a Future?, Oxford University Press ( 2013)
18. X 2017
Criminalization of the globe and globalization of crime
Four centuries after Galileo, our experience of space is undergoing the second revolution. With the help of information technology the space of trajectories has given way to the space of sites & networks. As time contracted and distances shrunk, different geographies became the nodes of the global Network. With delocalization and infinite connectivity the world has become smaller, but within that world things no longer have a fixed place; they are displaced and delocalized: Everything is now both everywhere and nowhere. All things are both equally important and irrelevant. Equivalence has become the source of both claustrophobia and agoraphobia.
Rule without a ruler
Through the erasure of borders and deterritorialization, The Network, the site of global flows, has become extraterritorial and, since laws are inherently local, by definition extrajudicial, and therefore, unregulated. There is no global law that governs the operation of the Network. It operates in politics-free space. This means removal of market frictions and optimal capital allocation which made the Network immediately irresistible for global capital. This changed everything.
As the Network carves its way into the system, it transforms all layers of the socio-economic landscape creating in the process (new sources of positive feedback and) additional instability of an already shaky system.
1st layer: Laws are local and so is politics — the Network is not governable and cannot be regulated
No one is watching the space in which global capital operates. No one even has capacity to do so or propose such an idea. Space of global capital flows, therefore, remains eminently extraterritorial and ex-judicial. The impossibility of Network regulation is a major novelty. It presents itself as an economic advantage and is embraced by the capital. This has created conditions for the removal of economic rigidities, erasure of borders, and delocalization of the labor force, guaranteeing optimal capital allocation, which has allowed for enhanced capital accumulation at a rate not seen before. However, the convenience introduced by deterritorialization creates new problems.
2nd layer (Problems): The Network is a politics-free space
Political Impotence: Economic interests are global while politics is local. Politics, the ability to decide, remains local and unable to operate effectively at the planetary level, while power to act is moving away to the politically uncontrollable global space[1]. There is no politics of the Network.
Rise of global capital: Global capital is gaining strength at the same time as political impotence becomes more acute. This defines the underlying power relations. Politics becomes the global oligarchy’s bitsch. Gradually, everything becomes subordinated to the interests of global oligarchy and their prosperity comes at social costs. The absence of Global law is transformed into A rule without a ruler and global oligarchy emerges as an anti-social class.
3rd layer (Consequences): Tyranny of the global
The global dominate the local: Local becomes either replication of the global (Glocal), or presents itself as Radical alterity which disrupts the system and becomes the object of an exercise of the right to interfere[2]. This means that the Network is all encompassing and cannot be avoided – everyone is on the grid.
4th layer (Mutation): State becomes eminently corruptible
As a result of creation of the Network, a new form of elite, global oligarchy, emerges which now makes all major economic decisions. The absence of global polity means that super-rich operate free.
Global oligarchies do what oligarchies normally do: They use their (substantial) wealth to protect their interests through whatever means are available, from lobbying activity, shaping of the public opinion, influence on the local legislative process and politics in general, to corruption, harassment, intimidation, or physical force. They are no longer interested only in profit but in every aspect of life. Their coercive power is transmitted through influence on legislation, art, media, culture, education etc. This is the rise to biopolitics and biopolitical economy.
The new global overclass is not governable: States are powerless to interfere and have to submit to the interests of global oligarchy and effectively become their extended arm. Politicians are vetted by oligarchies and only those who comply are admitted to the table. Institutional and social changes are aligned with interests of global capital. Society is treated as auxiliary. Welfare state is dismantled and its repressive apparatus strengthened.
Debt, fiscal policy, taxation and budget deficits are an important lever arm. They become the main instrument of biopolitics. For example, the US owes $16tr to global capital ($6tr to foreigners alone), about the entire GDP (other developed and undeveloped countries are not looking much better either). As a form of collateral/insurance creditors have been or will be granted access to domestic policy and guaranteed influence over decision making institutions in general. In this way, global oligarchy becomes a stake holder in the US government. This is where things become complicated further and problems deeper.
Rise of kakocracy
What most deeply holds a community together is not so much identification with the Rules that regulate its normal rhythms, but rather a specific form of transgression of the Rules. (S. Žižek)
“When the government becomes both referee and player, the game changes rather dramatically for every other participant. Rules that might be rigorously applied to private competitors will not necessarily be applied for the sovereign who makes the rules. Government should act as regulator but is increasingly an interested party”. [3]
If global oligarchy, or private sector in general, “owns” shares of the government – they have stakes in it and the ability to influence its decisions — then anyone who is not a “shareholder” in the government is at a huge disadvantage when it comes to competing with “insiders” — they are playing the game where referee is on the side of some players and, as such, is indirectly acting as interested party. In this setup, it is no longer competence, quality of products and services, but degree of influence one commends that plays a decisive role. Influence on public and government becomes the most valuable asset.
This is a source of a reinforcing (positive feedback) loop that destabilizes the system. Under the pressure of global capital and in the absence of political power to resist it, the functioning of the state reinforces both further removal of barriers to capital accumulation (economic rigidities) as well as political impotence through continued dismantling of the welfare state and general demand for smaller state, while at the same time conforming to demands of the Network to remain unregulated.
This reinforcing loop becomes the main driver of the rapid transformation of the state from the welfare to the penal modality of its functioning. Global capital demands a smaller state to ensure the status quo, i.e. that the state remains unable to interfere with the existing order of things and that the network stays unregulated. Its increasing wealth and influence accelerates the process. This is all happening between the 2nd and the 3rd layers. Politics and law adjust to accommodate global demands. Exclusions and surplus of population grow with more efficient production process and further access to cheap labor force. Because of that, demand for fiscally accommodative environment (primarily through lower taxes and shutdown of the state sponsored programs) exerts pressure on the state to transform further by shedding the vestiges of its welfare programs through relentless privatization, while at the same time strengthening its repressive apparatus in order to gain access to the play through its monopoly on violence. Carceral mode of the state is embraced and reinforced further by the global capital as a source of additional profit maximization, e.g. war on drugs, high incarceration rate, privatized prisons, and war on poverty in general. Rising inequality is but one of the consequences of this process. It correlates with (and exacerbates) other social maladies, but is not necessarily their only or even primary cause.
Corruption becomes an intrinsic part of how the system operates. The corrupt state becomes the source of dissemination of lawlessness. Through state’s repressive apparatus, violence propagates through all the pores of life. The end game? There is no global law to violate any more, no global law that could permit setting apart of criminal pursuits from “normal business activity”[4]. The gap between legal and criminal activities is closing rapidly as legal business converges to crime. This leads to gradual criminalization of the globe and globalization of crime. Crime is everywhere and nowhere.
Progressive criminalization of the globe and globalization of the crime is the most spectacular and potentially sinister consequence of the erratic globalization process. The mechanisms of democracy no longer function, they have been seized by corporate power. With time, corporations, which generally have no internal constraints, gradually lose external constraints as well. They exploit, because that is the only thing they know how to do, until exhaustion and collapse[5]. In Mao’s words. Everything under heaven is in utter chaos: the situation is excellent.
[1] Zygmund Bauman: Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Polity (2006)
[2] ibid.
[3] Cristopher Cox: Address to Joint Meeting of the Exchecquer Club and Women in Housing and Finance (Dec. 4, 2008)
[4] Franco Berardi, After the Future, AK Press (2011)
[5] ibid.
17. IX 2017
The divided subject of labor market
It’s a shame that the only thing a man can do for eight hours a day is work. He can’t eat for eight hours; he can’t drink for eight hours; he can’t make love for eight hours. The only thing a man can do for eight hours is work (William Faulkner)
For the first time since the advent of industrial age, new technology is destroying more jobs than it is able to remobilize. Productivity and employment have begun to diverge from each other since the last years of the 20th century – productivity accelerates while employment decelerates. This is the new reality. While good for profits, this is becoming a major setback for labor, a source of positive feedback in the system and a destabilizing force for the entire economy and society. The profit maximization equation can no longer be satisfied: The recipient of wages (and social benefits) is expected to perform an impossible task of supporting increasing consumption, which accounts for an ever growing fraction of GDP, while being paid less in an environment of rising living costs. Credit, which had been conceived as the magic bullet aimed at bridging this imbalance, has turned to be another source of positive feedback leading to unsustainable borrowing and balance sheet crisis from which it is difficult to engineer economic and social recovery.
Work is at a crossing point of history, going through a significant transformation, second since industrial age, with profound economic and social implications. Both new technology and credit, together with dismantling of the welfare state, have been the drivers of surplus labor and erosion of demand. It is becoming clear that we need less labor to produce the same output and that further rise in growth is conceivable without a rise in employment and wages. Work has become the biggest bubble which is about to burst. This is the limit where economic and social rationalities collide. Disappearance of work in work based societies is no longer only an economic issue, but a wider social and political problem and a crisis of the entire system of values.
Work alone
A priori, there is nothing appealing about wage work. It is all about the employers; they set the rules, workers comply[1]. Work is generally an unpleasant task, something we rather would not do. It goes against our nature and conflicts with our free will. Unlike work for subsistence, which we (most of the times reluctantly) do, wage work is an outcome of a voluntary optimization process. Workers effectively agree to surrender a portion of their free time in exchange for salaries.
When seen from the modern perspective, work defines our social identity. It is a gift to society and our contribution to the project “better future”, a sacrifice we are willing to make for collective wellbeing. Work is viewed as our moral duty, social obligation and the road to personal success. However, work as we know it today is a relatively recent phenomenon. For example, in Ancient Greece freedom was exclusively located in the political realm and necessity was a prepolitical phenomenon. Those who had to work were slaves to necessity considered incapable of making ethical decisions, and therefore, not part of political life[2].
The modern notion of labor appeared with the advent of manufacturing capitalism. From the modern perspective, production was not governed by economic rationality. The objective was to work as much as it takes to earn a wage necessary for subsistence rather than earn beyond that by working as much as possible. The economic rationalization of labor was a major novelty at the time. It presented a radical subversion of the way of life. In order to overcome workers’ unwillingness to work long hours, factory owners had to pay them meager wages, which forced the former to put in long hours every day of the week in order to earn enough to survive. Labor became part of reality distinct form everyday life. However, in the course of time, with development of industrial society, work became the Siamese twin of life.
Technology and labor in postindustrial age
While in pre-industrial societies innovation and competition were strictly prohibited, postindustrial age, in contrast, is characterized by its addiction to innovation.
Innovation has turned out as a major trigger of a reinforcing mechanism of economic exhaustion. The primary reason is that innovation is a source of rent — prices are no longer commensurate with production costs, but contain a scarcity premium. Profit centers always compete in terms of their capacity to innovate. Higher output leads to more investment in innovations which lead to new technologies, which means higher output and even more innovations. However, technology reduces need for labor and so the workers have to work for lower wages, which reduces labor costs of production and increases output, which means more investment into new technologies, which further reduces the need for labor and lowers wages further. This process continues until it exhausts itself and there is no more room for labor.
When labor is scarce, workers have some bargaining power – they could refuse to work and the producers are willing to make concessions to workers. As long as profit margins are high, there will be money for everyone. Problems begin when margins begin to compress. Cost cutting eliminates jobs either through automation or relocation to regions with cheap labor or forces the workers to accept lower wages. As a consequence of innovation, work ceases to be the main productive force and wages the main production cost. Output is produced more by capital than by labor, and labor gradually loses bargaining power as its choices become reducible to dilemma between poorer working conditions and unemployment.
As a consequence of these developments we have had tree major trends that emerged in the past decades: Decline of wages, reduction of government spending (a.k.a. dismantling of the welfare state), and continued rise of consumption as a fraction of GDP (currently near 70%). Over time they have created cumulative imbalances and dead-end conditions, which have resulted in the 2008 crisis and conditions where further recovery from the crisis is becoming increasingly more difficult to engineer. These trends define the current landscape. Any attempt at change becomes a source of positive feedback that only destabilizes things further.
Devalorization of labor and the new standard of subsistence
Credit is another source of positive feedback. Low wages force more reliance on credit which causes higher living costs (more liabilities and less money for subsistence), so more people have to work (e.g. not just the head of the household, but their partners, kids….), and they have to work longer hours which further increases labor surplus and forces lower wages and amplify reliance on credit which increases living costs further. Servicing debt becomes the main liability, which further undermines bargaining power of the workers. This continues until debt becomes a burden than can no longer be born.
In some sense, we are being pulled back towards early industrial age. In those days, the unwillingness to work beyond subsistence had caused employers to pay lower wages to force workers to work long hours in order to earn for their basic needs. Labor market was inefficient: Demand for labor was high, but workers were reluctant to work. Early industrial era worker had a limited capacity to desire and the opportunity of earning more was less attractive than that of working less. Salaries had to be low to force people to work hard in order to earn for subsistence.
Although, the end result (low wages) coincides with the current predicament, the causality chain is different. Late 20th century economies grow only if people consume beyond their needs. The ability to desire – the consumer libido — has to be maintained systematically and that mechanism has to be incorporated into ideology as work ethics and wage work to become closely associated with social status. With pressure to maximize profits, and therefore limit wages, this program could only be achieved if wage recipients continued to borrow more and more, especially if their liabilities continue to grow. For that, they need jobs, but jobs do not pay. So, they have to work harder, put in longer hours, to be able to survive. Unlike early industrial age when scarcity of labor was the dominant factor, in post-industrial economies, supply of labor continue to climb together with costs of living high.
Preindustrial concept of “enough”, which in the early days defied economic rationality, gained new life in the light of postindustrial developments. Its meaning is now being redefined by credit. The problem is no longer the individual attitude towards work, but the collective response to the cumulative effects of excess rationality. Credit redefines what subsistence means. It is a conversion factor from desires to needs. As seen from the workers’ side, the effect of increased efficiency of production, brought about by technology, is offset by credit. It naturally extends what our needs are and sets a new standard of subsistence and determines how much we have to earn for survival. Contrary to the economic dogma and cults of free market ideology, competition has led to suboptimal outcome for labor. Despite all technological advances, there has not been a commensurate decrease in working hours.
Work won’t be revolutionized, it will be auctioned
The objective of profit centers is to make money and, if they happen to create jobs, that is good, but not necessary if it negatively affects their profitability. Keeping this as priority for the future, changes of the labor force would have to be made accordingly. Some contours of the fragmented labor force are already beginning to show along these lines of adjustment. The assembly line has colonized a wide range of jobs. With the rise of cognitive economy and de-emphasis of material production, workers are divided into four main categories: Inventors of ideas and desires, educators (responsible for reproduction of labor), salesmen of products and producers of desires, and routine laborers[3]. We could refer to them metaphorically as over the counter or OTC (first three) and exchange jobs (the last one). OTC jobs can never be made generic; they always carry some unique component of personal skills that cannot be fully automated. Routine laborers, on the other hand, require no particular social skills. They are an extension of assembly line workers, but in a wider context that includes technical and intellectual skills. They are always replaceable and therefore treated as expandable.
Extrapolation of the current trends leads to a limit where workers become a shadow category. They no longer exist, only their time does, always ready to engage in exchange for a temporary salary. In that environment, the next step towards improving the efficiency of transaction between capital and labor are job auctions. A finite term, e.g. 2000-hour or zero-hour, job would be offered in an auction and given to the lowest bidder. Profit centers would face high flexibility at expense of labor force whose bargaining power could decrease further. The labor force would be self-trained and offer high-level skills on an increasingly precarious landscape. Those with superior skills could demand additional accommodation that could smooth their consumption across periods without jobs, which could create a need for intermediaries, job brokers who have stables of workers with standardized skills on whose behalf they bid for part time jobs.
Added flexibility of employers eliminates pressure to have a long-term view and strategy. Instead, there is a sequence of short-term tactical positions with an ability to quickly adjust labor costs to different market conditions. If this is indeed the case, it could create a reinforcing mechanism where their output trails the economy and never completely recovers or rebounds. Disappearance of permanent jobs would have a dramatic impact on credit market. It would increase urge to save more and would affect ability of long-term borrowing, with direct impact on housing market, education, consumption, etc. and, therefore, adverse effects on economic growth.
In the extreme, demand for labor completely disappears — everyone works for himself. This is the most radical social transformation from society of workers to society of employers. The ultimate irony is people employ themselves but end up working long hours and paying themselves poorly.
Coda
Work is gradually emerging as the biggest hoax in the history of humankind. We have come a long way from the early days of capitalism where its basic antagonism was defined by the dynamics of capital and labor. It is reduction of life to work, and not capitalist exploitation, what makes work alienating. This particular aspect is what has led to the rapid dead end. In taking work as a given, we have depoliticized it, or removed it from the realm of political critique. Wage work continues to be accepted as the primary mechanism for income distribution, as an ethical obligation, and as a means of defining others and ourselves as social and political subjects[4]. There is an urgency to emancipate ourselves form work. Crisis of work is signaling also a crisis of imagination. We cannot imagine postwork society. This is the biggest problem.
[1] “Work is a paid activity, performed on behalf of a third party, to achieve goals we have not set for ourselves, according to procedures and schedules laid by the persons paying our wages.” (Andre Görz, Critique of Economic Reason, Verso 1989)
[2] ibid.
[3] Richard Sennett, The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998 )
[4] Kathi Weeks, The Problem with Work, Duke University Press (2011)
20. III 2017
A hole in the head: The fetishism of a failed state
The society of the spectacle is turning into a soft version of the theater of cruelty, a burlesque of death with the globe as its stage (Jean Baudrillard)
Trepanation is an ancient procedure, second oldest after circumcision, in which a hole is drilled into the skull. People have been doing it for thousands of years in order to relieve headaches, seizures and various mental disorders, or as a ritualistic practice in which the shamans, the kings and the priests were trepanned in order to access new levels of consciousness. There is no scientific evidence that trepanning has any tangible benefits. Its proponents believe in a natural equilibrium between the brain and the rest of the universe that can be described poetically in pre-modern terms as “letting light in” or “letting devils out”. [1]One of the most highly publicized examples of trepanation in modern times dates back to the early 1970s. After years of experimentation with a range of hallucinogenics (and guided by deeply seeded cranial claustrophobia), in search of a new/permanent high, 27-year old Amanda Feilding performed self-trepanation by drilling a hole in her forehead with an electrical drill with a flat bottom and a foot pedal, while her partner filmed the entire event with an 8mm camera. She described the effect of trepanation at the time as a radical change in her consciousness comparing it to the tide coming in.
Almost half a century later, another quest for a new equilibrium is being staged. For several decades now, with the help of neoliberalism and globalization, Western oligarchs have enjoyed unprecedented positive externalities for their wealth accumulation. However, those positive externalities came at considerable social costs. As oligarchic wealth swelled, so did the social deficits they created; their compounding grew until their cumulative effect became so substantial that it began to undermine the normal functioning of the system. With time, the system’s legitimation became the main problem and with it the issue of the excess population — the growing volume of the population made redundant by neoliberalism’s global triumph whose size is now exceeding the managerial capacity of the planet. This has gained new urgency in the last decade as it became clear that democratic process has become incompatible with the oligarchic program, while force, tried many times before, is found to be a highly inefficient and expensive way of maintaining stability.
In the same way a hole in the head was an organic, non-chemically induced high for the 60s generation, the quest for a new social equilibrium is a permanent oligarchic high. State and ideology were no longer sufficient to satiate the appetite for wealth accumulation (or a need for its preservation). A new natural order was needed and, for that to happen, one had to remove the remaining barriers, break some bones and spill some blood. As the ideologically driven oligarchic high began to taper off, after reaching its peak during the last decades of globalized neoliberalism, a quest to find new levels of social consciousness gained new urgency. Ironically, the breakdown of communism – the ultimate triumph of neoliberal ideology – offered clues for how to proceed and how to define a search for a new equilibrium.
American oligarchs have had an eye on post-Soviet Russia ever since the collapse of communism. Their fascination with its post-communist transformation process continues to this date. In less than two decades, the country where chronic and severe scarcity, grossly mismanaged by the state, was its trademark, where everyone had to stand in line in order to maintain an elementary standard of living, where western middle-class lifestyle was just a pipe dream, and where getting rich was a crime, this very country became an oligarchic paradise producing practically overnight a stunning number of obscenely rich and disturbingly powerful individuals, who rose directly from the rubble of the dismembered Soviet state.
To a western mind, brought up on protestant ethics of hard work, such a transformation was difficult to grasp. Russian oligarchs represent a hybrid of communist apparatchiks, government bureaucrats, and strictly small-time criminals, sub-mediocrity in every aspect of their existence – nothing remarkable about them. Yet, they became an embodiment of an ultimate America dream. People who lived all their lives in isolation, had no knowledge or even exposure to business know-how, had no place or opportunities to learn about it, and lived close to what in America would be considered poverty level, emerged as super-rich. With time, it became clear that this puzzling transformation was not about the people, but about the actual conditions created by the collapse. This realization resonated hard with the aspiring American oligarchs, temporarily embarrassed billionaires, nouveau riche, and those who are always ready to operate on the margins of law, now struggling to ride Donald Trump’s coattails. Very early on, it became apparent that failed states create conditions of unimaginable business opportunities, a realization which became the primary driving force behind the fetish of the smaller government perpetuated by the American right.
Engineering failed states everywhere, and thus creating a global disequilibrium that would create chaos and force or accelerate a change became a signature strategy of American global politics in its late neoliberal phase. It reflected the interests of global oligarchies, a political trajectory that, using Immanuel Wallerstein’s terminology, could be described as democratic fascism — a 20% of the world keeps the remaining 80% in submission – an old wine in new bottles already tried out with different ratios and failing because of the flawed math. This project got new wind in the 1990s and continued to accelerate ever since capturing the post-communist Soviet block and spreading to the Balkans, Iraq, Afghanistan and North Africa, while in the West it showed up domestically in waves manifesting itself through various forms of identity politics and irrupting tensions between the global oligarchy and the right-wing populist implementations of the neo-feudal vision of the world.
This seemingly strange idea of forcing a change by destruction was first outlined in the works of the 19th century French thinkers (e.g. Alfred Jarry’s Ubu Roi), and developed further by the post-modernists and finally crystallized by Jean Baudrillard:
Total revolution is a strategy geared to escalate the system and push it to its breaking point. Then, giving up on every pretense of rationality, it starts revolving and achieves in the process a circularity of its own. The society of the spectacle is turning into a soft version of the theater of cruelty, a burlesque of death with the globe as its stage. Life is being exchanged for nothing, for a handful of glittering toys, work absorbs time like a sponge and leaves no traces. The system itself becomes the exterminator.
It is not difficult to recognize shades of this pattern in the political life of the developed world of the last year. The tide is coming in. For over two decades, the quest for a new order from chaos and dis-equilibrium – letting light in & devils out — has been operating full force away from home. Everybody has a hole in the head or is about to get one drilled, UK being the latest example, while France apparently eager to follow (Dutch got cold feet recently and decided not to rush with it). The time has come now for the next and possibly final step in an ongoing global transformation process for America to perform this bizarre experiment on itself. The unmistakable similarity between the mixture of the self-anesthetizing euphoria coupled with the cranial draft of the first two months of Trump’s presidency, and that experienced during a DIY trepanation seems to suggest that this process is well underway.
Even after all these years, Amanda Feilding, now Countess of Wemyss and March, wife of the landowning 13th Earl (he, too, has a hole in his head), and a friend of the Royal Family, has not abandoned her belief in the ancient practice of trepanning — drilling a hole in the skull — or her hope that it will one day gain the acceptance and legitimacy it deserves. She must be enjoying the spectacle.
[1] The higher state of mind sought by trepanation is that of childhood: When a baby is born, the top of the skull is soft and flexible. As a baby ages, the skull bones close which inhibits the full pulsation of the heartbeat, believed to be responsible for a wide range of problems and anxieties that come with the adult life.
29. X 2016
Heroin & non-consensual capitalism: As the rich get richer, the poor get higher
Heroin consolidates all your problems into one big one. No more worrying about aggression, repression, poverty, futility, and frustration – just heroin and how to get a hold of it.
The street price of heroin has dropped below $100 per gram. A disturbing development. For a novice, about 10-20 mg provides a decent high. Simply put, one can get high on heroin for the price of a chocolate bar. The most addictive drug is now also the cheapest, cheaper than cigarettes. Its 20-fold price decline, from $2000 in the 1980s, is unlike any other commodity or product. This is not a result of a more efficient production process or technological advances, but a curious cooperation between the forces of geopolitical and ideological makeup. Three decades of heroin price history parallel the transformation of the neoliberal state and society. It tells an interesting story of business, politics, economics, globalization, and governmentality.
Heroin price history as experienced by wholesale, small dealers, and drug users
- Pull back. The blood rushes in. Slowly push the plunger. I want this to last. Pull it back out again, the blood swirls back in. Now, squeeze! It rushes up my arm in tingles. Then it hits. It is like a mini explosion of pure pleasure. Everything is blissful and beautiful. It is pure joy to be alive, to have a body. Depending on the quantity and quality this is there for hours. It is sensual. All your nerves are on fire and just having someone run their fingers along your skin feels delicious. It isn’t really sexual. It is simply that the intensity of the experience lends itself to being described that way. This is when you are “high” on heroin.
In 1980 a wholesale dealer (if he had $1 million) could buy 1kg of heroin from the supplier at $1000/g (red line) and sold it to hoppers (street dealers) at $1700/g (blue line). In this transaction, he would have made $700/g profit ($700K for a kilo). In comparison, a hopper buys at $1700/g and sells to the users at $2000. His profit is $300/g, i.e. $3000 for a 10g package.
Since then, the price continues to decline at an annual rate of 9% — it drops to 1/3 of its value every 12 years. In the 1990s the wholesale price of heroin was $300/g. Dealers had to work harder (sell more heroin) to earn the same money as before. However, risks associated with drug dealing were lower and the money was still good, especially on a risk adjusted basis and when compared to the available alternatives. The business was booming.
Another decade and a half later and another threefold drop in prices: Heroin in the new century is selling for near $100. No longer is just the first hit free, but all subsequent hits are practically free as well. This changes the business model completely. Post-90s is the period of major consolidation and systematization of drug business. The dealers are no longer interested in quick profit from one-time sales to occasional users. They are now after lifetime subscribers. And the system continues to deliver them in numbers like never before. Drug businesses began to think and operate like any legal profit center, which sets in motion the true market forces.
Globalization has played a key role in these developments. It has achieved this effect in two ways. 1) Efficiency of the distribution of drugs: Lower transport costs, the use of the new IT and the enhanced worldwide competition have dramatically improved the efficiency of drug business. At the same time, the greater efficiency of the distribution process, made it easier to conceal the transport and the stock management of drugs. 2) Risk premium effect: Globalization has opened the borders of many countries with a surplus of poor and low-skilled workers. Millions of havenots who have little to lose have been attracted by the fantastic intermediation margins provided by the drug market[1].
Inelasticity of demand has defined the background as one of the main economic drivers. For heroin addicts, nothing is more frightening than being without heroin. No one who has gone through heroin withdrawal wants to repeat this experience. So, no matter how high the price, they will find the way to pay for it.
The Breakdown of communism has created new markets and sustained demand. Post-socialist countries, which have largely been sheltered from the influence of hard drugs in the past, suddenly opened up as a new untapped market. Erosion of local state institutions, and general hopelessness that ensued after its fall, were directly responsible for the surge in drug users.
The war on drugs became its own antithesis from inception. It supported high margins, which guaranteed that drug business remains more attractive, and therefore more competitive, than any other business[2]. Wholesale dealers held the racket. They effectively lowered their own risk by transferring their exposure to street dealers and were happy to accept lower margins as this increased their business longevity. What was lost on tighter margins was made up by the volume of the business. Bigger volumes and increasing profit gave access to the benefits of the legal system, attorneys and corrupt government officials, which provided an additional protective layer and reduced risks further, while elaborate money laundering schemes opened the doors to legitimate investment opportunities and further wealth accumulation. So, although margins were lower, on a risk adjusted basis, drug business never looked better.
Ideological mainlining: Biopolitical penetration of the American brain
One of the most extensive by-products of globalization is a surplus of humanity that is unwanted, inconvenient, and ultimately displaced. The volume of humans made redundant by capitalism’s global triumph grows unstoppably and comes close now to exceeding the managerial capacity of the planet; there is a plausible prospect of capitalist modernity choking on its own waste products which it can neither reassimilate or annihilate, nor detoxify. (Z. Bauman)
This is one of the biggest and the most acute problems today. The need to address this issue has shaped the transformation of the neoliberal state in the last decades from the welfare to the penal modality of its functioning. While neoliberalism produces social and economic vulnerability, criminalization produces ways to capitalize on that vulnerability. The criminalization of illicit drugs accomplishes three things at once. First, it reinforces socioeconomic vulnerability through a steady flow of pre-trial detainees, prisoners, parolees and families disrupted by harshly punitive sanctions. Second, it makes the economic viability of hard drugs dependent on a willingness to assume risk, especially as entry-level narco-labor. This willingness is a condition clearly associated with the socioeconomically marginalized – those who have little to lose but their “freedom” [3]. Third, it guarantees accessibility of hard drugs to the disenfranchised segment of the population. In this way, the very victims of global capitalism are trapped in the spider web of the carceral state and the more they struggle to survive in it, the more precarious their position becomes.
In the past, drug addiction existed as an expensive “luxury” for a small minority. Democratization of heavy drugs has been embraced by the ideological apparatus as a way of managing exclusion, poverty and discontent in general. Within the neoliberal project, the war on drugs has become synonymous to the war on poverty. And so, as poverty grew, so did the heroin usage.
As the rich get richer, the poor get higher: Decline in heroin prices vs. inequality
- Gini coefficients are often used as a measure of wealth inequality and, as such, they are an indirect measure of poverty. Developed/civilized societies, like the most advanced West European countries, have Gini’s typically in the mid 20s. Among developed countries, the United States has the highest levels of inequality, the only one in the western hemisphere with Gini above 40. In that metric, it is on par with China, the Dominican Republic, Nepal and Ecuador for income. The Figure shows the history of the (wholesale) heroin price against Gini coefficients (on inverted axis) since 1980. The two histories, both having exponential trend, show high degree of commonality. Declining price of heroin goes hand in hand with growth of poverty: As rich get richer, poor get higher.
State as enabler of self-destruction
I bought a gun and chose drugs instead (Kurt Cobain)
While global capitalism is the engine of production of socioeconomic vulnerability, the state is the main architect of subjects and spaces of exclusion, e.g. the black American male and the post-industrial ghetto, whose political and economic exclusion catalyzes participation in illicit economies as well as vulnerability to policing. The objective of criminal justice in the neoliberal state is no longer to correct behaviors that are socially harmful, but to identify the bodies that must be excluded from the population and justify this exclusion by labeling their behaviors as abnormal. In this context, heroin has been recognized (and embraced) as a powerful tool of self-destruction, capable of turning any resisting individual into a perfectly docile social subject, eminently manageable by its dependency.
The evolution of the heroin business reveals the inner logic of the massive consolidation of the state’s repressive apparatus in the post-1968 era. When viewed in this context, the war on drugs emerges as but one of many neoliberal strategies of governing, a technique for identifying populations that must be governed in other ways. The essence of these strategies is that they do not use force to destroy dissent, but push it to self-destruct. They stay as a constant reminder that power has been deemed as a highly ineffective tool of governing. Outside of its repressive apparatus, the state no longer represents the ability to engineer change, but has become an enabler. The war on drugs is an ideological answer to the problem of surplus population, and heroin an instrument of drainage of wasted lives.
[1] C. Costa Storti, P. De Grauwe, Int. J. Drug Policy, 20 (2009) 488
[2] In the 1990s, assuming a hopper sells 10g every day, he could make $2000 a day ($250 an hour or 50 times the minimum wage commensurate with qualifications of most of the drug dealers), which, translates into $500K a year (untaxed), equivalent to an $800K of taxable annual income. This is a full-blown Wall Street salary. In most cases, they pay “tax” to the wholesale distributors who “own” the territory hold the racket.
[3] D. Corva, Political Geography, 27 (2008) 176
25. IX 2016
Adventures in heterotopia: The things we left behind
Invention of a ship is invention of a shipwreck, invention of a plane is invention of a plane crash, and invention of nuclear energy is invention of a nuclear meltdown. (Paul Virilio)
Galileo’s real heresy was not so much his rediscovery that the Earth revolved around the sun, but his constitution of an infinitely open space. His findings dissolved the idea of the medieval concept of emplacement. The space suddenly opened and disrupted the existing order of things. Localization gave way to trajectory and emplacement to extension. A thing’s place was no longer anything but a point on its trajectory, the stability of a thing was only its movement indefinitely slowed down. There was no up & down anymore, no celestial hierarchy. Instead of the universe resting on the back of a giant turtle, suddenly, everything was moving and out of place. Nobody was in charge anymore, and that was OK. The heavens were in a state of celestial anarchy. This was the emancipatory core of Galileo’s revolution. To a medieval mind, this was a picture of utter chaos. The idea of creation and design was seriously undermined and with it what was believed to be the Big Guy’s mandate (and authority). The Church, as His shopkeeper and interpreter of His will, saw this as bad for business and a problem for the franchise. Understandably, they had an issue with it, pronounced Galileo an evildoer and threatened him with violence. Galileo recanted, but it didn’t matter – religion’s golden days were over.
Four centuries later our experience of space is undergoing the second revolution, this time far more disruptive. With information technology and infinite connectivity, time is contracting, distances are shrinking and space compactifying. The space of trajectories is giving way to networks & sites. Different geographies are becoming nodes on the global grid, equidistant from each other. The outside is gradually disappearing, absorbed by the expanding and elastic inside. The world has become smaller, but within that world, things no longer have a fixed place; they are displaced and delocalized. Permanently and irreversibly. The world is the Network.
The Network is a subversion of all terrestrial hierarchies. The concepts of center and periphery have lost their traditional meaning. All things are both equally important and irrelevant. Everything is now everywhere and nowhere — compactification and delocalization at the same time. An absolute rule of equivalence. The tyranny of transparency. The source of both claustrophobia and agoraphobia. The ultimate triumph of dialectics, simultaneously both oppressive and liberating.
Things are no longer constrained by physical separation, seasons of the year, time zone, weather, climate… Companies can relocate to countries with cheap labor and real estate, lower taxes and accommodative political climate. As long as the place is on the grid, and eventually all geographies will be, it doesn’t matter where one is. The Network is everywhere and so are the factories and companies and everything else. People are no longer bound to a particular locale; they don’t even have to leave their homes to perform work. Everyone is gradually losing their identity in the face of persistent deterritorialization and uprootedness.
Unprecedented wealth accumulation afforded by the Network gives rise to a new, ungovernable, global overclass which now makes all major political decisions. States are powerless to interfere and effectively become their extended arm. As a rising tide lifts all boats, crime becomes more prosperous, organized and powerful – increasing fraction of global wealth comes from and is destined to criminal sources. Gradually, everything becomes subordinated to the interests of global oligarchies and their prosperity comes at high social costs.
The pressure of equivalence is crushing everything in sight, histories, cultures, identities, futures, and symbolic meaning.
The same way Galileo wreaked havoc in outer space and disrupted celestial order, post-modern creation of the Network has been a disruption of terrestrial order with the dissolution of historically rigid social structures. New technology has revealed every segment of society as an instrument of production, a human resource to be arranged, rearranged and disposed of. It has created major economic advantages and unprecedented opportunities for profit making. But this embrace of convenience doesn’t come free of charge. Removal of market frictions, economic rigidities, and erasure of borders, resulted in physical and cultural displacement, loss of identity, corruption, omnipresence of crime, rise in violence, dismantling of the welfare state and a rise of carceral state, populism, regressive policies and political chaos.
The very same technology that has proven to create the main economic advantage has also reduced the system’s ability to change. The system has lost the ability to adapt and with it, its main advantage, its vitality. It has suffered an autoimmune failure and is no longer able to recover from crises. This is the shipwreck, the plain crash and the nuclear meltdown.
4. VI 2016
Remains of the future
But thought is the slave of life, And life times fool, And time, that takes survey of all the world, Must have a stop[1].
I remember when growing up used to be fun. Youth was claustrophobic. We were looking forward to getting older and becoming adults, moving out of our parents homes, living alone, making decisions about life, owning our mistakes, moving in with our girlfriends, finding jobs, becoming financially independent, paying bills with the money we earned, partying, having kids, and generally getting engaged with the world. The future was full of promises. There was nothing we couldn’t do, no dream was too grand. The whole world was ours. We lived without restraint. The future was our collateral and there was no limit to how much it could deliver. Life was wonderful.
All of this has changed rather abruptly in the second decade of this century. For millennials, life became complicated, heavy, full of problems without solutions; financial independence illusory, rents unaffordable, moving in with parents rational. Insurmountable obstacles were everywhere. The future holds no promises, only threats. It has become a compromised collateral and growing up one of the most highly overrated experiences. Entering adulthood is now like entering a latrine: The first reaction is a shock, and then you get used to it. Life became a bitch.
The front page of the May 30 issue of the Newyorker gives an eloquent summary of this state of affairs.
| Two consecutive generations of graduates from the same college |
Every year around this time, graduation ceremonies remind us of what the future has become. Every new generation is facing an increasingly more precarious road ahead. Every year we wonder if the best days are behind us. And every year we ask the same wrong question: Are the gains of the last 150 years real, when, instead, the actual question should be: Are these gains permanent.
Every year, young graduates have to revise down their expectations of life and adjust to new realities and accept whatever job they can get. And yet, everyone keeps going to college, although tuition has been skyrocketing and it has become increasingly clear that more education does not give one more prospects of getting a good job. However, education appears to be the ONLY chance of getting any job. But, what kinds of jobs are we talking about? Collecting leafs and mowing loans on campuses of the very same universities which granted students their degrees in the previous year? New York City is flooded with waiters and baristas with graduate degrees from elite private schools who work for a minimum wage and who owe over a quarter of a million through student loans on which they can never default.
Commencement speeches have become structured increasingly more along the lines of worn out clichés peppered with some forms of lightweight humor and anecdotes aimed at anesthetizing graduates against bleakness of reality rather than attempting to invigorate their expectations and create hope. Several years ago, Bard College invited Ben Bernanke as a commencement speaker. The man who had been at the helm of the Federal Reserve in the times of epochal crisis, and who had access to considerable insights, had essentially nothing to say about the future in his message to new graduates. Not good, not bad… Nothing! Instead of using his privileged position to enlighten the audience with new visions, raise their expectations and send them thus prepared into the world, his entire speech revolved about how difficult life was 100 years ago how then we were worse off than today. Really? Was he reluctant to tell them the truth because it was too depressing or was he just being cynical? Or he didn’t know better? Hard to believe.
Is there any evidence, which is not faith based, that suggests the next 20 or 50 years will lead to a better quality of life as recent history suggests? The answer to this question has become very much sample dependent. If we take the first 15 years of the 21st century as a base, the first seven have been in no way indicative of how the subsequent eight would feel. This is in sharp contrast with the pattern the developed world has experienced in the second half of the 20th century: 60s were better than 50s, 70s better than 60s (maybe not culturally, but economically), 80s better than 70s, etc. The very same system that had denied nobody anything in the past, now denies everyone everything.
Credentials inflation
The way education is functioning these days has changed dramatically. More and more universities operate like businesses. The aim is to attract as much money as possible. Students are treated as client and incentivized by grade inflation. Significant sums of money are spent on infrastructure aimed at attracting affluent foreign students, new buildings, studies abroad, networking… Many state schools have luxury condos built on campuses. Acceptance of foreign students has increased to the point that they are crowding out domestic applicants. An emphasis is shifted from academics to marketing and expansion in administration. Around 80% of new hires are in administration. This is financed by diluting the academic quality: About two thirds of academic stuff consists of adjuncts and only one third permanent professors. Universities operate like Cartels. There is very little price variation between colleges of different ranking. Nevertheless, college attendance has never been higher. In the last 30 years, umber of Bachelor’s degrees per capita increased by 25%, masters by 90%, PhD by 40%.
What do new graduates face? Two things dominate the post-graduate landscape: precarious job market and enormous student debt. Price of education has grown so much that it makes little or no sense. There is a countless number of tenured professors who are still paying their student debt. Moreover, admittance to a good college requires, almost as a rule, networking that is assured only by going to a “proper” (and inevitably expensive) private school, admittance to which is conditioned on attending a special pre-K etc. By the time one graduates from college, families and individuals have accumulated over half a million of debt per child (after tax), and for most of the college graduates realistic prospect is a $40K starting salary. So, student debt becomes perpetuity and life reduces to serfdom.
Education is facing credentials inflation: more education buys less opportunity. In the last three decades tuition in the US has risen about three times faster than living costs. The figure shows the history of college tuition in units of 1978 costs. In order to put it in the right economic context, the costs of living and healthcare, which have changed since then, are shown on the same graph.
Compared to 1978, costs of living have increased roughly 3.25-fold; medical costs inflated roughly 6-fold; but college tuition and fees inflation approached 10-fold. Thus, education costs have increased by about three times faster than the costs of living.
As much as this number looks extreme, it is a logical consequence of developments that took place in the last two decades[2].
Educational degrees are a currency of social respectability, traded for access to jobs. Like any currency, the prices inflate when increase in monetary supply (money printing) chases an ever more contested stock of goods. In our case, an increasing supply of talent/qualification/educational degrees is chasing an ever more contested pool of upper-middle-class jobs.
So, while there is an oversupply of degrees, people are willing to pay the high price because jobs are scarce. The availability of funding in terms of student loans, which has also gone in overdrive, is a mid-wife, but not a cause of this process.
At the root of this anomaly is, in fact, the ongoing process of dismantling of the welfare state. The idea of a welfare state in capitalism is to broker the meeting between capital and labor. Its role is to make sure that capital is funded and that labor is saleable, i.e. that it is healthy, trained and generally ready to endure rhythms of the factory floor. Without externalizing those costs, capital would be unable to operate profitably, thus, public healthcare, housing and education. The reason for dismantling the welfare state is that it is no longer needed: there is increasingly less need for labor, and in order to keep taxes low, welfare costs need to be severely reduced or completely eliminated. Instead of public housing, we have mortgages, instead of healthcare, private insurance, instead of public education, student loans.
The ongoing transformation of education is a consequence of this transition from public to private deficit spending, which has been both a direct cause of the current crisis and a core reason behind the inability to recover from it.
Future as an existential impossibility
We are born, we die. Everything in between is subject to interpretation[3]. Our time between birth and death is structured by desires — not their fulfillment, but rather desire to continue to desire. And, in order to sustain the capacity to desire, our lives need a virtual layer. A loss of that capacity results in an ultimate state of melancholia, libidinal disinvestment and spiritual coma. In modernity, the future has provided the interpretive grid responsible for maintenance of this virtual layer. For almost two centuries, future has been perceived as a better place. All political systems, from democracy to socialism, to dictatorship or anarchism, shared the belief that, irrespective of how dark the present might appear, the future is bright.
This has changed radically and abruptly in the last years. Future has become a crowded place. There is not enough future for everyone. No one believes in it any more. But, without belief in future, the present cannot take off, and without the present there will be no future.
[1] Shakespeare
[2] Randall Collins, in Does Capitalism Have a Chance, Oxford University Press (2013)
[3] Nora Ephron
15. IV 2016
The tropic of Chaos
Three years ago (in 2013), I came across an interesting book, 1913: Der Sommer des Jahrhunderts. The original (The Summer of the Century) and its English version title (The Year before the Storm) give a complementary summary of its importance for the rest of the century. There has never been a year like 1913, a true big-bang for arts and culture. Vienna was the cultural capital of the world and Berlin was just emerging on the scene. Everybody was there, Freud, Schönberg, Witgenstein, Arthur Schnitzler, Egon Schiele, and Alma Mahler, while young guns, Hitler, Stalin, Trotsky and Tito made a brief appearance on the scene. Elsewhere in Europe, things were happening as well, although somewhat less concentrated. The first and second Balkan wars were over, the Ottoman Empire had been driven out of nearly all of Europe, King George I of Greece was assassinated. On the New Continent things were developing fast. The Mexican revolution started in February, and the US made its voice heard in the art world with the Armory show, while, at the same time, undergoing significant institutional and political transformation with an Amendment to the US Constitution authorizing the government to impose and collect income taxes and the creation of the Federal reserve System. Louis Armstrong and Charlie Chaplin had their first public appearances. The first assembly line as well as the Camel cigarette brand were introduced , stainless steel invented, MDMA (aka ecstasy) synthesized for the first time, and the all-purpose zipper patented. The world was buzzing. Creative forces were building up together with (positive) political tensions. Things could hardly look better. The world appeared to be in balance, only to fall apart a year later. The rest was silence.
While reading the book, a short paragraph caught my attention commenting on the only two mass killings that took place in that year. This is the factual summary of the two events:
- The Bremen school shooting occurred on June 20, 1913 at St. Mary’s Catholic School. The gunman, 29-year-old unemployed teacher Heinz Schmidt, indiscriminately shot at students and teachers, causing the death of five girls and wounding more than 20 other people, before being subdued by school staff. He was never tried for the crime and sent directly to an asylum where he died in 1932.
- On September 4, 1913 Ernst August Wagner, killed his wife and four children in Degerloch and subsequently drove to Mühlhausen an der Enz where he set several fires and shot 20 people, of whom at least 9 died, before he was beaten unconscious by furious villagers and left for dead. After several psychiatric assessments diagnosed him to suffer from paranoia, and thus becoming the first person in Wüttemberg to be found not guilty by reason of insanity, he was brought to an asylum in Winnenthal, where he died there of tuberculosis in 1938.
Mass murder has become so commonplace that having only two such occurrences within a year strike us as odd. For comparison, in 2013 there were close to 80 mass murders (they had to be alphabetized by the place of occurrence — on the average about three for each letter of the alphabet).
Intrigued by this comparison, I collected the data on mass killings in the last 100+ years looking for some clues about the trend. The data reveal a rather disturbing pattern. Since WWII, the number of mass killings (defined as an idiosyncratic, not state-sanctioned, killing spree with multiple victims) has been growing exponentially at a rate of 5% every year. This means that every 20 years or so, the number of mass killings triples (1.0520 = 3). For example, between the 1970s and 1990s, the average number went from 10 to 30, and between the 1990s and 2010s it went from 30 to 90. In 2013, when I looked at the numbers for the last time, we had around 80-90 mass killings, or one for every third business day. Allowing this trend to continue would take another 20 years for this number to triple, which meant that by the mid 2030s there would be one mass killing every business day.
The arrival of 2015 has announced something new! We have achieved this rate in less than two years: from 90 in 2013 to over 350 in the last year. The number of mass killings in 2015 exceeded the number of calendar days – every day somewhere someone’s fuse went off! This was not supposed to happen before the 2030s. This is how crazy the world has become. The future came too soon – we have already reached the point of self-intoxication when inner contradictions of the system, which previously could have been ignored, are taking over. The destabilizing forces are becoming stronger than those responsible for restoring the equilibrium.
Mass murder has been growing exponentially at 5% annually
But, nothing surprises me any more after subjecting myself to the ordeal of watching the republican debate in the last weeks, something I had never attempted before (and am unlikely to repeat again). The obscene spectacle of this year’s presidential elections is a real game-changer, a true political big bang that will set the template for future public discourse everywhere. Its consequences will be studied for years to come. The political landscape will never be the same. Are these men really the best this country (of 350 million people) has to offer?
For several decades now, modernity has been operating between two fatal modes: Carnival and Cannibal – it has been transfixed by the spectacle of its own creation and self-annihilation [1]. The current republican campaign is a culmination of of this trend which has finally reached alarming proportions where the system can no longer bear it and which, by the force of its own absurdity, has made an illegible long-running process instantaneously legible by the sheer power of the event.
Current political discourse no longer has a solid empirical backbone. Nothing is binding. Politics exists mostly in the kingdom of words. It creates parallel narratives and fragmented reality. As a consequence, society has become disoriented and confused due to the gradual loss of all frames of reference and distorted cognitive coordinates. It suffers from loss of shared reality and a chronic inability to form consensus, which becomes its main cultural dimension. The political body is afflicted with split personality — collective mental disorder in need of shock therapy. This collective “mental instability” becomes its intrinsic cultural determinant and enters the center stage of public life.
Watching this bizarre orgy, this unabashed display of vulgarity I am beginning to converge towards the realization that the biggest collateral damage of this century has been empathy — not really a natural emotion but a cultural concept and a psychological condition that is cultivated and refined and which, in the absence of cultivation or under ideological pressure, can disappear or be completely extinguished [2]. Most certainly, there can be no room for it in the winner-takes-all environments.
Early attempts at creating conditions for social atomization started in the 80s with sustained camping to turn material poverty and absence of luck in general into something shameful and repellent. The anti-war movement, pacifism and public empathy together with conditions nurturing these currents had to be eliminated and replaced in all areas with culture of aggression and violence. Through the appropriation of public spaces and resources into the logic of the marketplace, individuals were dispossessed of many collective forms of mutual support of sharing. A simple and pervasive cooperative practice like hitchhiking, for example, had to be transformed into a filled act with fearful, even lethal consequences [3].
The result of this state of affairs, and its purpose, if one wants to attribute it to a particular ideological design, is to prevent us from hearing each other, sharing our pain and expressing our underlying discontent through a single voice that can be heard. The net effect is anger, frustration and withdrawal of libidinal energy. Depression becomes the only adequate emotional response to this state of affairs, a privileged position of anyone capable of reflective thinking.
Since the beginning of the crisis I struggled to understand why in the times of epochal crisis, when change appeared inevitable, trillions of dollars have been spent on preventing change. The escalation of violence, which gained new momentum in the last years, is not due to reaction of the oppressed (e.g. revolution), but is the flip side of the resistance to change. When change is as necessary as it is politically impossible, rage capital becomes the new political currency and the systemic rise of violence becomes the price to pay for forcing the acceptance of the unacceptable. Mass killing becomes a suicide in displaced mode, a somatic response, a reaction of the physical body, to increasing precarity, hopelessness and fragmentation of the social body. A depressed and desensitized subject, no longer burdened by empathy, transforms personal lack of courage required to pull the trigger of the gun pointing at his own head into a high stakes video-game type spectacle with the practical certainty of being killed in the end.
It is not easy to kill another human being. It is a deeply traumatizing experience, for a killer, of course, especially if it is his first kill. 100 years ago, mass murders were result of an idiosyncratic mental disorder — killers always ended in an insane asylum. In contrast, 21st century mass killings have acquired strong systemic overtones with high degree of commonality across different occurrences and individuals, and have become an integral part of the spectacle. Contemporary mass murderers, when seen in hindsight, show a strikingly similar pattern. Depending on the vantage point, they can be seen both as heroes and as antiheroes. They are all ticking time bombs whose trigger could have been anticipated and possibly prevented were it not for the lack of resources. Unlike their early 20th century peers, contemporary mass murderers are largely rational individuals or people on a planned mission (murder or suicide), perfectly aware of what they are doing at the time of killing. For the most part, their behavior can be argued, reasoned or explained by underlying social factors.
102 years later, we are undoing the cultural big bang of 1913 with a cultural collapse and symbolic annihilation – a continuation of the general debasement that has dominated the political landscape of the last four decades. This is a full blown explosion of Carnival & Cannibal, a cultural mass murder and eventual cultural suicide. It is depression externalized through aggressiveness, a typical male reaction (we are yet to see the emergence of female mass killers on the scene). Collateral damage? A split on the political right, fascisization of the political body and the barbarization of the social landscape.
If some 20 years ago I saw a sci-fi movie with these images of the future, I would have walked out of the theatre. Today, I want to do exactly that, to walk out of the spectacle, only I wouldn’t know how to find my way home.
[1] Jean Baudrillard, Carnival and Cannibal, Seagull Books 2010
[2] Franco Berrardi, Heroes, London, Verso 2015
[3] Jonathan Crary, 24/7 — Terminal Capitalism and the End of Sleep, London, Verso 2014
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13. II 2016
Modern times: The scandal of sleep
Man has always sought to find new ways of time saving. The most important technological discoveries (horse, ships, cars, trains, plains, assembly line), although addressing efficiency of transportation and production, were really about efficient usage of time. The most recent technological innovations were the key to the question of how to fuse different times, productivity, leisure, consumption and family — Television, TV dinners, microwave, fast food, Las Vegas wedding, smart phones, the internet, and virtual reality all enhance possibilities of multitasking and, as such, affect directly the way we manage our time, so that one can both work and consume away from the workplace or the shopping mall. These inventions blurred the boundaries between work and private life and outlined a new age of biopolitics and bioderegulation with novel narrative frameworks.
From rational perspective life is simple. Work is a paid activity performed on behalf of a third person, to achieve goals we have not chosen for ourselves, according to the procedures and schedules laid down by the persons paying our wages (Andre Görz). Labor time is unfree time, imposed upon the individual (originally even by force) to the benefit of alien (tautological) end. Since the first days of industrial age, the compromise according to which workers allocate some of their time to work in order to enjoy their free time, is perfectly rational. Seen by the capital, on the other hand, free time is empty and useless time. Economic rationality demands that any constraint which presents an obstacle to capital accumulation be removed. The end result is austerity of free time – free time should be minimized or austerely rationed. As a result of rationality of both sides, the employer and the employee (capital and labor) stand in direct opposition to each other when it comes to time and this defines their basic antagonism whose unfolding is seeing a new chapter in the tech era.
The most powerful technological forces have profoundly changed our experience of time and transformed the way we spend it. They have established a new normative model in the culture of the entrepreneurship of the self, which has become standard in the western world, where there is pressure to be constantly present and engaged. Not being switched on means falling behind, being out of step and thus losing a competitive edge. “In that paradigm, sleeping is for losers.”
Bioderegulation and the scandal of sleep: The Brave New World recomposed
Unlike other irreducible activities, which have been successfully commoditized, sleep has stood as the last frontier resisting the colonization by engine of profitability. “The troubling reality is that nothing of value can be extracted from it. Sleep sticks out as an irrational and intolerable affirmation that there might be limits to the compatibility of living beings with the allegedly irresistible forces of modernization, whose credo is that there are no unalterable givens of nature.’’ [1]
As Jonathan Crary points out, this discontent with sleep, and its resistance to colonization, is condensed in the concept of the sleep mode of electronic devices, which defines a state of low-power readiness implying really not sleep as an extended disengagement, but a deferred or diminished condition of operationality. It supersedes an off/on logic because nothing should ever be fundamentally off.
Sleep cannot be eliminated, but it can be wrecked, and efforts to accomplish this wreckage are fully in place. Scientific research on sleep is an unusually active playground, attracting considerable attention and funding. One example is the study of white crowned sparrows which during their migration along the West coast show unusual capacity for staying awake for as long as seven days[1]. This ability makes them a particularly interesting subject for the army — despite considerable technological progress, the need for human solders will never go away and a benefit of engineering a sleepless solder, who could engage in combat for unspecified duration of time while maintaining alertness, is obvious.
As with other inventions that spread from military to civilian life—for instance penicillin, microwaves, nylon—the next logical step would be to produce sleepless workers and sleepless consumers. And while this transformation from crown sparrow to sleepless soldiers to sleepless workers and consumers might not have immediate dystopian repercussions, it outlines a trend which enhances the idea of human disposability. After all upgrading someone to a more efficient version is an implicit recognition that their earlier version was less valuable. The images of a society where these trends are fully developed, however, are deeply unsettling.
We live surprise results of the old plans
This is just another illustration of general dialectics of progress — one cannot innovate without creating some damage – expressed most eloquently in the writings of Paul Virilio, theorist of accidents and the grand maître of cultural theory. In his own words: “Progress and disaster are the two sides of the same coin. Invention of a ship is invention of a shipwreck, invention of a plane is invention of a plane crash, invention of nuclear energy is invention of a nuclear meltdown. And, the more powerful the invention, the more dramatic are its consequences. So, it is inevitable to reach a point when progress and knowledge become unbearable. ”[2]
It is difficult to find a flaw in Virilio’s concise explanation of causality. Its power lies in the fact that it can be applied to almost any context. When it comes to the tyranny of work, it exposes the ultimate dialectics of rationality and its logical transformation path (from sublime to excremental). Rationality, when set free and unchecked, demands removal of any obstacle to profit maximization. Coupled with efficiency, which is raised to the level of exact science, and pushed to the extremes, it mutates into systematic devastation of everything that does not submit to the profit of the strongest. In the constellation of post-Fordist (attention) economy workers no longer behave rationally. Instead of working for living, they live for work – their work no longer serves to subsidize the enjoyment of their free time, but they use their free time to become more productive workers.
In other words — and this is the corollary Virilio draws — excess rationality (this permanent daylight of reason) leads to irrational outcomes and a culture that is based on rationality must experience a deep crisis when it becomes irrational.
Diachronic extension of the progress/disaster counterpoint places our present at an uncomfortable historical point: If the 20th century was the century of great inventions, then the 21st century has to be the century of disasters [2]. This is the predicament of the new century — we are living surprise results of the old plans.
This historical inflection point of the present reality is eloquently illustrated by the contrast between the futuristic dystopian fiction of the early 20th century and the current new wave of dystopian non-fiction. For 20th century futurists, dystopia was placed in a distant future (the shipwreck is the futurist invention of the ship). In contrast, the new wave of dystopian literature is not a fiction. The topic is no longer the visions of a distant future, but rather a dystopian present without a future: We are shipwrecked in the endless deteriorating present.
And inability to produce a convincing image of the future causes an implosion of the present. So, behind the current economic crisis lies a crisis of time. Time no longer flows freely. It has come to a stop.
If this trend continues, it is not difficult to imagine a future where sleep will have to be bought like bottled water.
[1] Jonathan Crary, 24/7 — Terminal Capitalism and the End of Sleep, London: Verso 2014, pp 10-11.
[2] Paul Virilio, The original accident, London: Polity 2007, pp 21-33.
notesfromdisgraceland 