The Most Fundamental Force

9. VIII 2020

Is it progress if a cannibal uses a fork? (Jerzy Lec)

In a competitive environment, violence against the other is the most effective survival strategy. Murder as a (predominantly male) strategy of attaining the status position of dominant power has been adaptive. It is installed in the human brain because it worked. Violent humans are descendants of those who succeeded in evolution. They are wired in the same way as their ancestors as the dominant factors of success propagated.

From the perspective of evolution, it appears as if the secret fate of every individual is to destroy the other, not necessarily through deliberate intent to do harm, but because of the fact of their own existence, driven by some cosmic necessity for the general demise of life. This destructive impulse extends across all living organisms and binds them together. Baudrillard saw this as a true ontological principle: Existence as such is already violence.

Bacteria, viruses, parasites of all kinds, and bacilli in general, invade a living organism and exploit its hospitality until they kill it and in this way destroy the source that feeds them. With the death of their host, bacilli die as well. Their destructive drive is not intentional — they just don’t “know” better. The destruction process takes place because their existence and survival degenerates into blind excessive growth. Bacilli are blind to the higher entity to which they owe their life and nourishment. Despite superior survival abilities, adaptability, and mutation, the immanence of the fatal end simply transcends their capability to incorporate that crucial aspect of their existence into their behavior. From the first moment of its creation, every invasive microbe is on a suicide mission and the entire purpose of its existence is to execute that task. This is the ultimate irony of existence in general.

The striking parallelism between behavior of humans and microbes led to Arthur Schnitzler’s brilliant meditation[1] in which he imagined the human race as an illness of some higher organism, completely inconceivable to us, within which humanity was to be found a purpose, necessity and meaning of its existence but which it also sought to destroy, and indeed would ultimately have to destroy, the more highly developed it became, in the same way bacilli strive to annihilate the ailing human organism. Even if this were right, this configuration would be ungraspable to us. It resides in the hyperplane that is out of our cognitive reach.

Stripped of higher purposes and social context, and reduced to bare survival, violent self-destructive drive is the essence of human existence: Violence is the most fundamental force. Because of this, human life and interactions need to be heavily regulated on every level. The true (unconditional) human nature should never be allowed to take its course, not even approximately or temporarily. It should be intercepted and redirected at all costs! The 20^th century alone offers plenty of examples of what happens when human nature is let loose: Two world wars, Hiroshima, countless regional conflicts, Gulags, cultural revolutions, extermination camps, ethnic cleansing, genocide, and more than 120 million killed.

Topology of violence

The irony is that violence is unavoidable: Violence must be fought with violence. Subjective violence, inherent in human nature, should be controlled by the systematic violence of the collective. This is the regulatory and regulating force of the state. When human nature becomes unconstrained, we have death, wars, and extermination; there is blood everywhere. However, when we attempt to regulate our nature, when the state takes over, violence does not disappear, it merely changes the mode of its manifestation.

Human history is chronicle of the technology of violence. According to B. C. Han, social transformation across modernity represents its most dramatic structural transformation[2]. In premodernity, violence was ubiquitous and, above all, both mundane and visible. The staging of violence was an integral, even central component of societal communication. Rulers exhibited their power through deadly violence, through blood. The theatre of brutality that was staged in public spaces also demonstrated the ruler’s power and magnificence[3].

Emancipation and enlightenment announced a major departure in the use of violence. Modernity marks the onset of its internalization. Violence continues to be wielded but not publicly staged. The theater of bloody violence, which characterized the societies of sovereignty, yields to bloodless gas chambers withdrawn from public view. Rather than staging the magnificence of power, violence in modernity conceals itself in shame[4].

Without expressly drawing attention to itself, violence has withdrawn from the city center to its outskirts. Public executions were replaced with silent annihilations or by the hidden apparatus of institutional repression.

Han sees this as the essential and most sinister aspect of modernity: Violence in modernity takes place as a mute annihilation. It shifts from visible to invisible, from direct to discreet, from the physical to the psychic, from the frontal to the viral. Its mode of operation is no longer confrontation but contamination, not open assault, but concealed infection[5].

21^st Century: The return of the magnificence of power

By elevating competition and individualism to the level of ultimate universal criterion, politics, in its regressive (neoliberal) spiral of the last 50 years, ultimately became the tool of the systematic removal of inhibitory mechanisms, which allowed us to come out as we are. As a consequence, the modalities of resulting social structures developed a deep resonance with our real nature. Leading inevitably to the rise of systematic violence. This has become the core problem of capitalism, the main reason why it has emerged as an anti-social project and why ultimately it either has to self-destruct or society as such has to disintegrate.

By now, we are about to close the circle of violence. Our initial conditions were clear: We are violent creatures whose civilization starts only when an exogenous entity (sovereign or state) begins to regulate our natural impulses. However, emancipation and enlightenment, for all the intended good doings, ultimately resulted in the grand sabotage of the entire civilization project by allowing individuality and freedom to create the seeds of ideology that gradually aligned itself with true human nature and ultimately created the path for the return of violence in its primordial form.

Designing a system of social organization, which is in harmony with human nature, is not something we should aspire to. It is generally a bad idea. A very bad one, in fact. Without a considerable amount of inhibition, human nature is socially toxic. In order to become social, we have to abandon our true nature. The entire process of growing up, of becoming socially integrated – what is referred to as civility – is all about inhibiting our true impulses (e.g. toilette training, selfishness, lack of empathy, aggression, ability to engage in a dialogue,…). These inhibitory skills define us as social beings. We are born without those skills and we spend a considerable portion of our lives learning how to acquire and use them. Without them there is no society.

So, we are the real problem. Violence is inscribed in our genetic code and, sooner or later, becomes the essential component of social organization. The question is then, how close or how far are we from the grand convergence with our real selves when all barriers are removed and ideology becomes a true representation of human nature.

This dilemma has finally caught up with us in the 21^st century and we are beginning to get the first installments of the full answer. There is a clear trend of resurgence of violence in postmodernity. In this process, 2020 has played a singular role, not so much because it represents an eruption of violence per se, but because it is bringing it back to civic centers and confirming the sad, but unavoidable, truth that, no matter what we do and how much progress we make as a civilization, we can never fully emancipate ourselves from violence.

Rather than concealing itself in shame, violence is staging a return of magnificence of power through the regressive unwind of modernity. The new wave of fascination with power, with the emerging breed of populist autocrats seeing themselves as sovereigns of pre-modern times, are creating conditions for the recreation of the magnificence of sovereign power through a medieval fantasy of “law & order” by reviving the spectacle of violence and feeding the lower echelons of society, the modern day plebs, the regressive nostalgia by choreographing another reality show as a reenactment of the bloody violence of yesteryear in the contemporary centers of civility.

[1] Arthur Schnitzler, Aphorismen und Betrachtungen, S. Fischer Verlag (1967)

[2] B. C. Han, Topologie der Gewalt, Matthes & Seitz Berlin; Auflage: 1. (2011)

[3] ibid.

[4] ibid.

[5] ibid.

Portland

1. VIII 2020

There is a distinct feeling of déjà vu behind the government response to civil unrests across the country in the last month. Political demagoguery, heated emotions, faux patriotism, us & them, “law & order” BS, enemies of the people, antagonism of the press, gratuitous violence, racial supremacy, misogyny, secret police, and the entire spectacle of identitarian package, all of this comes from the same tired and worn out playbook — same type of theatre, same scriptwriter, and the same mindset seen so many times before.

The spurious similarity between the populism of segregated and fractured post-2016 America and single-voice Germany of the 1930s — the two countries a century apart with no socioeconomic overlap — can be traced to the fact that their respective leaders have been engaged in the same ritual practices. Their respective ideologies – unconditional subordination to either national or oligarchic interests — and representative parties, National Socialist German Workers’ Party and National Capitalist MAGA, run in parallel.

In both cases, social marginalization triggered and shaped the rituals that followed. The 1930s was an uprising against the marginalization of Germany as a cultural, industrial and military power of the time. The rise of Nazism was a result of discontent due to the loss of a privileged position in the global context and the rising precarity at home. As a consequence, the entire country spoke in a single voice.

In 21st century prosperous America, which has not had a war on its territory for more than 150 years, it was marginalization of an entire social class and a reaction to the loss of white male privilege of the old days. The consequence was an unprecedented polyvocality as an expression of the social divide along cultural, racial and ethnic lines — a class war in a displaced mode, with the entire marginalized class speaking in a single voice only they could understand.

Camouflaging ritual as an escape route from marginality in today’s America has the sole purpose of forcing the alignment of interests of billionaires with those of the marginalized sector of its population. It is an effort to compactify an otherwise fractured political landscape and, by ignoring facts, laws of physics, economic, logic and common sense, connect the two opposite, and logically opposing, ends of the social spectrum and forge political alliances along artificial cultural divides between victims and their executioners.

As systematic violence, which for decades enabled the smooth functioning of the system and its repressive apparatus, has been on the rise, so has subjective and random violence. Throughout those times, sales of weapons were breaking new highs. The number of mass shootings and the score of victims recorded an unprecedented rise that transcends any historical extrapolations.

For years we have been bombarded with excuses and narratives arguing that all the innocent victims of mass shootings — this uniquely American phenomenon, a product of country’s obsession with guns, and militant opposition to any semblance of their regulation — had to die in order to preserve the 2^nd amendment in its most insane form. While 90% of the American population has been unequivocally in favor of more stringent gun control, the NRA has persisted in their cynical and sadistic non-consensus stance against it, insisting, against all evidence, that such high concentration of unregulated gun ownership will keep us all safe and protected in case a rogue government turns on their citizens. According to them, even more guns are needed to make the society even safer. Leaving alone shear idiocy of that argument for a moment, the time to test the validity of that narrative and intentions of gun lobby has finally arrived.

This year, the rise of violence gained a new dimension. The failing and increasingly desperate and lonely president, who has practically abdicated his position and duties, who is already functioning as a lame duck, cleaning up his shop and trying to deliver in the next three months what was originally planned for him to do in the subsequent four years of his presidency (which by now is practically certain that will not happen), is bringing the vestiges of medieval spectacle of violence and power to the city center.

While unidentified paramilitary troops — the actual government secret police, the present-day incarnation of Gestapo — are terrorizing the citizens of Portland, including unarmed women, veterans, and elderly, and are preparing to spread their activity to other big cities, the NRA and their members and supporters are nowhere to be found; their silence has been deafening. In fact, if one were to wager where their sympathy would be, there is an unmistakable feeling that it is most likely to be on the side of the aggressor, rather than the people.

The uncovering of the falsity of the ideological mindfuck behind the 2nd amendment is the terminal bankruptcy of the old and persistent narrative, a fairy-tale for angry citizens, which, against any reason, continues to permeate and contaminate the American culture. Disguised as a rationalization of the faux “cultural” alignment between executioners and their victims, it never really had any other meaning and value beyond laundering blood money from arms sales.

Violence & Power

19. VII 2020

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 45^th 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.

The Gods must be crazy: The rise of the primitive society of the future

10.XI 2018

Religion is an insult to human dignity. With or without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. (Steven Weinberg)

If God exists, then everything is allowed because every act committed by man is an expression of God’s will. This includes even the most extreme acts; especially them. For most people, hurting others is deeply traumatic. A sacred Cause serves to anesthetize their elementary sensitivity to another’s suffering. Without this Cause we would have to feel all the burden of what we did – the Cause transposes the burden of guilt[1]. So, if there is God, we do not have to reflect on the consequences of our actions. Whatever we do — and, we know, we are prepared to do terrible things if the situation requires — it is a priori legitimized.

If there is no God, however, everything is prohibited. Well, not exactly everything, but a lot of things. This is the Lacanian inversion of Dostoyevsky. In the absence of God, we are the judges of good and evil; we censor ourselves and restrict our actions. We become Kantian subjects: every man has a conscience and finds himself observed, threatened and, in general, kept at awe by an internal judge[2]. The moral subject is simultaneously defendant and judge, a doubled self or dual personality. A Kantian subject is answerable to a superego far more severe than that of the traditional morality.

Man’s discontent with God in general, and how he managed the affairs of the world in particular marks the beginning of Modernity. It is the moment in history when man puts himself in charge. This is the first point of transfer of power and responsibility in modern history. However, enlightenment, rationality, and above all, emancipation from God created their own problems. In the final stages of enlightenment, this process led naturally to the disenchantment of the world[3] as the ultimate triumph of rationality — a seminal break point in modern culture and a radical departure in the way we experience reality. It connotes the removal of a magic spell and reflects a belief that humanity can control everything by means of calculation. And so, through the advent of scientific methods and the use of enlightened reason the world was rendered transparent, demystified and, ultimately, hollowed and deprived of its richness. It became disenchanted and disenchanting, predictable and intellectualized.

God as a secular entity: Primitive society of the future makes its first appearance

Nothing vanishes; of everything that disappears there remain traces. God disappeared, but he left behind his judgment, like a Cheshire Cat’s smile. And God’s judgment is terrifying in itself, but the judgment of God without God is even more terrifying[4].

The disenchantment of the world proved to be the alienating and undesirable flip side of scientific progress. Life got more complicated and unmanageable, and became too much of a burden and responsibility. The more man tried to liberate himself, the more trapped and enslaved he felt. Unhappy again, he started plotting his escape from freedom, by looking for a worthy replacement for God. Despite centuries of enlightenment, emancipation, education, and overwhelming accumulation of empirical evidence and insight, dictators and autocrats, as God’s surrogates, never went out of vogue. In fact, their appeal only grew stronger with time. We just seem to be unable to resist their seductive powers. Modernity in its later phase reads like mankind’s love affair with authority. There has never been a comparable concentration of dictators, of the most extreme kind, in history as in the 20^th century, the times marked with the most intense scientific progress and emancipation on all fronts.

Adorno and Horkheimer, and other Weber’s followers of Frankfurt School understood early on the dialectics of rationality and enlightenment and perceived the disenchantment as an altogether negative force. Science’s attempts to disenchant the world resulted only in a kind of return of the repressed: the irrationality that had been squelched by enlightened reason returned in the form of violence and barbarism[5]. Re-enchantment emerges as a response to an overdose of rationality, an attempt to establish new symbolism, or recycle the old one, and resurrect the supernatural qualities that were exorcised during centuries of symbolic asphyxiation.

In the mid-20^th century, the market emerged as a surrogate, which temporarily filled the vacuum created by God’s disappearance. During the peak of the neoliberal post-industrial phase, it attained a status of a separate entity, worshiped like a pagan deity to which society sacrifices social prey in order to appease it. This defined the contours of a new social structure: Primitive society of the future.

However, unrestrained personal hedonism gradually intruded and ultimately invaded other peoples’ pleasure horizons. Its consequences were social fragmentation, eradication of empathy, and a general breakdown of social bonds. Fueled by the machine of competition, asymmetrical distribution of wealth and misery, together with unprecedented corruption, found widespread acceptance and endorsement as a consequence of “natural” free-market forces, and was eventually normalized. It didn’t take long for the free market orgy to take the course of a full-scale autoimmune reaction.

Nothing can be more oppressive than ethical hedonism (the right to achieve the greatest amount of pleasure) – we have been enslaved by it for centuries. Religion serves to legitimize the hedonistic trespassing; the absence of religion constrains it. We look at religious suspension of the ethical[6] as our salvation from enslavement. And this opens the doors for the return of God through the vulgar materialistic interpretation of his will and judgment by the born-again Evangelical fundamentalists.

This is the answer to disenchantment with disenchantment, a barbaric eruption of discontent with the oppression of rationality and growing desire for submission. If there is one aspect that post-modernity brings in this historical moment of introspection and self-reflection, it is the realization of bottomless human capacity for submission to institutions, ideologies, or to personalities, regardless of how grotesque and destructive they may be. These are the initial conditions of the 21^st century.

Deresponsibilization and the second transfer of authority: Ideology of collective contempt of reason

The same logical framework provided by the religious suspension of the ethical in fundamentalist religious interpretations is also deeply embedded in the ideological foundations of neoliberalism — so long as we follow economic rationality, this ultimate metric of value, we are exonerated of any and all the consequences of (and free of responsibility for) what any of our actions may cause. The same mechanism sits at the core of both the fundamentalist call for crusade, religious exclusivity, and its propensity to annihilate infidels as in the economic Darwinism and hyper-libidinal capitalism of libertarian neoliberalism. This is where the religious and the free-market dogmas meet each other. Economic rationality and existence of God both maximize our freedom from responsibility. They are logical twins.

This is the second point of transfer of authority and responsibility in modern history. The need for authority comes from the same center of our mind and soul as the needs for freedom, order, and coherence. Reaching that destination goes hand in hand with unwind of responsibility; this is the gift of the authoritarian project. The singular attraction of the right-wing populism, the ideology of unreason, lies precisely in the fact that it represents a movement of deresponsibilization of epochal magnitude never seen in history, the main reason the world is making a sharp right turn at this point of history. This is the face of the new primitive society of the future.

The infantile refusal to accept responsibility together with the ontological need for (unconditional) absolution legitimizes all the regressive measures that come with the ideology of unreason, and defines the core of its malignancy. We no longer need to admit our mistakes or apologize for them; we disrespect the truth and refuse to step back in the face of facts and, in a collective display of contempt of reason, interpret our delusional ramblings as the voice of God’s will. After all, if God exists, everything is allowed.

[1] Slavoj Zizek, “God is Dead, but He Doesn’t Know It” (Lacan plays with Bobok), Lacanian Ink (04.04.2009)

[2] Immanuel Kant, Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, Suhrkamp (1982)

[3] In its original usage, the term Entzauberung is attributed to Friedrich Schiller, crystallized through his poem The Gods of Greece, first published in 1788. The German word literally means de-magic-ation, but is meant to imply the breaking of a magic spell. Around 1913, Max Weber used it to describe the character of modernized, bureaucratic, secularized Western society.

[4] Jean Baudrillard, Why hasn’t everything already disappeared?, Seagull Books (2016)

[5]Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Dialektik der Aufklärung, Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag GmbH (1989)

[6]Seren Kierkegard, Fear and Trembling, Cambridge Text in the History of Philosophy (2011)

One hundred years of solitude (in hindsight): 1917 — 2017

7. XI 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 her red shoes. 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 undermines 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)