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Conclusion To Series On Individuality

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Index to posts in this series

 

A stupid despot may constrain his slaves with iron chains; but a true politician binds them even more strongly by the chain of their own ideas; it is at the stable point of reason that he secures the end of the chain; this link is all the stronger in that we do not know of what it is made and we believe it to be our own work; despair and time eat away the bonds of iron and steel, but they are powerless against the habitual union of ideas, they can only tighten it still more; and on the soft fibres of the brain is founded the unshakable base of the soundest of Empires’. M. Servan, Le Soldat Citoyen, 1780, quoted in Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Pp. 102-103 Kindle Edition.

 

 

[The attitudes of Trump voters and non-voters] are created by their experiences in their environment. The people shaping those environment are the truly contemptible shitheads. Me.

The series was motivated by the idea that the books I’ve read over the years and the writing and thinking I’ve done here might give me some insight into Trump voters. Not the racists, the Christian Nationalists, the misogynysts, the homophobes, the Nazis, the nihilists and the other freaks, their motivation is obvious. It’s the regular folk who think they’re decent people I want to understand.

I had a tentative idea, an image of Trump voters trooping to the polls like so many soldiers. That led me to think about the nature of individuality, because soldiers surrender large parts of their nature to achieve what they think is a higher good.

I suppose others might see Harris voters the same way. That’s what the Repub operatives say. But it’s stupid. There is no information bubble telling regular Democrats what to think. The Democratic Party isn’t capable of telling anyone how to think about the world around us and the problems we face.

Democratic voters have to work out a view of reality based on a range of sources, from Billionaire Media to blogs to social media, teachers, friends, family, books etc. There are strategies for that, but very few, if any, just take the word of a tiny group of professionals, especially Democratic politicians, for anything.

Trump voters are immersed in the world view created and maintained by creepy billionaire right-wing donors, ratfuckers, enablers in the business and legal communities, grifters and loons. We see it all the time. We listen to our parents who have crossed the line into Foxworld. We hear it from cousins convinced the MMR vaccine is dangerous. We see it in stories like that of Ryleigh Cooper.

All of these filthy rich actors and their enablers are trying to kill our political community. They use words to veil intentions and their deeds are brutal. See The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, p. 200, Kindle Edition. They’re succeeding at destroying, but they have no replacement and people are suffering. Ask Ryleigh Cooper and her family.

I don’t think there’s a single explanation for why people voted for Trump. That was a foolish idea. No matter the “reason” they give, it’s incomprehensible to me that anyone would vote for this deeply repulsive creep.

Conclusion to series

Immanuel Kant wrote a four-page essay titled Answer To The Question: What Is Enlightenment? In 1784. Here’s a readable free translation by Ted Humphrey, made available by the New York City Public Library. Here are the opening paragraphs.

1. Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed immaturity.Immaturity is the inability to use one’s understanding without guidance from another. This immaturity is self-imposed when its cause lies not in lack of understanding, but in lack of resolve and courage to use it without guidance from another. Sapere Aude! “Have courage to use your own understanding!”–that is the motto of enlightenment.

2. Laziness and cowardice are the reasons why so great a proportion of men, long after nature has released them from alien guidance …nonetheless gladly remain in lifelong immaturity, and why it is so easy for others to establish themselves as their guardians.

It is so easy to be immature. If I have a book to serve as my understanding, a pastor to serve as my conscience, a physician to determine my diet for me, and so on, I need not exert myself at all. I need not think, if only I can pay: others will readily undertake the irksome work for me.

The guardians who have so benevolently taken over the supervision of men have carefully seen to it that the far greatest part of them (including the entire fair sex) regard taking the step to maturity as very dangerous, not to mention difficult.

Having first made their domestic livestock dumb, and having carefully made sure that these docile creatures will not take a single step without the go-cart to which they are harnessed, these guardians then show them the danger that threatens them, should they attempt to walk alone. Now this danger is not actually so great, for after falling a few times they would in the end certainly learn to walk; but an example of this kind makes men timid and usually frightens them out of all further attempts. Fn omitted; my formatting.

Side notes: Guidance probably means something more like instruction or direction. The word go-cart is probably better translated as something like pony-cart. I left the misogyny in, but should I have deleted it?

Kant’s guardians are a big part of the problem, just as Servan, Kant, Arendt, Bourdieu, Foucault, and many others have said. But there’s nothing to prevent any of the ridden from thinking for themselves. Nothing, says Kant, nothing but laziness and cowardice. It’s too much trouble. I might get it wrong. I don’t want to get cross-ways with my neighbor.

I’m not saying everyone has to spend hours and weeks and years studying things. But. Billions of people have taken the Covid vaccines. The incidence of death is nearly zero. The incidence of serious complications isn’t much greater. But lots of people listen to loons on social media. They don’t perform a single-step thought process to see that it’s safer to take the vaccine than risk illness and death from the disease. I think that’s what Kant means when he tells us to use our own understanding.

The billionaires and their cronies who created this bubble of non-thought, are the guardians Kant is talking about. They are riding their herd just as he said. and it’s tough to tell one individual in a herd from another.

Enough. I am a child of the Enlightenment. I’ll leave this series with this aphorism from David Hume, an Enlightenment philosopher. Here’s a link for context.

A wise man, therefore, proportions his belief to the evidence.

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Power And Rationality

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Index And Introduction To The Subject And Power By Michel Foucault

Foucault begins his essay The Subject and Power by telling us that his project is understanding how human beings are made subjects. By this he means both a) objects for others to study, and b) objects for domination and exploitation. We generally study things, including human beings, through methods which “try to give themselves the status of science”; or by dividing things into groups and studying the groups; or by dividing ourselves into parts and studying those parts in ourselves or others.

Foucault describes three of the ways in which people are enmeshed in relations with each other: relations of production, relations of signification (communication), and power relations. He says that economics gives us tools to consider the first, and linguistics and semiotics give us tools to understand the second, but he couldn’t find any similar academic-type disciplines useful in considering power relations. Legal models point us to the proper uses of power, and other considerations point to the role of the state, but these are only small parts of power relations. That awareness pointed him to study of power relations in a broader context.

So, Foucault’s overall project is to create a theory, a systematic way of thinking about power relations. To create a theory, we have to objectify the thing to be studied. That requires conceptualization, through critical thinking. He says he has to check his thinking constantly.

1. He says the conceptualization should not be founded on a theory of the object. That is, we don’t start with a theory of the object. Instead we start with a description of the object in the context in which it exists, and the history of how it came to be. We have to recognize that that history influences our thinking in a deep way. It can make it very hard to see the thing objectively. This ties back to the point I made in the first post in this series: the importance of Foucault’s methods.

2. We must examine the kind of reality we are considering. Power is a matter of lived experience, not of abstract theory. Its manifestations are a central problem of our time. Our recent history includes two “pathological forms” of power relations: fascism and Stalinism. Neither was new. They both used existing techniques of power, existing mechanisms and devices. Despite their internal madness there was a kind of rationality.

We have to limit our rationality to the boundaries given by experience. One possibility is the use of reason. This was the goal of the Enlightenment, to use reason to solve problems, material problems, social problems, and even psychiatric problems. It might make sense to consider the rationality of various subparts of society, as Foucault has done, with sexuality, crime, madness and more.

But Foucault has a very specific idea for studying power:

//It consists of taking the forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point.//

This is a smart move, because we do not directly consider an unknown object called power, which we haven’t even defined yet. To do this Foucault will look at ways of identifying resistance, the history of that resistance, its motivations and its goals. The hope is that in the process of considering resistance, we can get a clearer picture of the thing resisted, as if we were defining it by its boundaries.

For example, to find out what our society means by sanity, perhaps we should investigate what is happening in the field of insanity.

And what we mean by legality in the field of illegality.

And, in order to understand what power relations are about, perhaps we should investigate the forms of resistance and attempts made to dissociate these relations.

Here’s my example. We have an enormous code of laws, regulations and procedures. We say we are a government of laws, not men, and that the rules and procedures define legality. But in the real world, we can understand legality better by looking at the parts of that legal structure that we actually enforce, the people we hold accountable and the way we enforce it against different people.

Discussion

1. We generally think of the Enlightenment as leading us to the scientific method, the foundation of all our sciences today. A key element of the scientific method is that we understand things in the context of a paradigm, as we saw in Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, for example here. The paradigm predicts an outcome so we check to see if that’s what happens. If not it’s possible we have reached the limits of validity of the paradigm.

Foucault is forced to start from the beginning with the theory of power because in his view there are no acceptable existing theoretical frameworks. He needs a method for studying things without a paradigm.

2. But his argument has a broader implication. He writes:

… [S]ince Kant, the role of philosophy is to prevent reason from going beyond the limits of what is given in experience; but from the same moment-that is, since the development of the modern state and the political management of society-the role of philosophy is also to keep watch over the excessive powers of political rationality ….

We saw this idea in Hannah Arendt’s The Origins Of Totalitarianism. Both the Nazis and the Communists carried their theories from their more or less empirical beginnings in Darwin and Marx to murderous extremes, but in an inexorably logical way. Here’s my discussion:

The last chapter of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism is devoted to discussion of the totalitarian regime, which comes when the totalitarian movement has taken power. Arendt says that totalitarian movements don’t offer a specific program for government. Instead, they propose to operate under a “scientific” program. For the Nazis, this was the law of nature with its eternal progress towards perfection, which Arendt thinks arises from a corrupted form of Darwinism. For the Communists it was the laws of history as supposedly discovered by Marx. Once in power, the totalitarian regime becomes an instrument for the will of the leader, who in turn is an instrument for imposing and acting out those laws.

Earlier in the book, Arendt discusses one of the reasons people found this irresistible. She points to their loneliness, their alienation, their rootlessness, their irrelevance, their impotence:

That thought processes characterized by strict self-evident logicality, from which apparently there is no escape, have some connection with loneliness was once noticed by [Martin] Luther …. A lonely man, says Luther, “always deduces one thing from the other and thinks everything to the worst.” The famous extremism of totalitarian movements, far from having anything to do with true radicalism, consists indeed in this “thinking everything to the worst,” in this deducing process which always arrives at the worst possible conclusions. P.477-8.

Foucault’s discussion of rationality is similar to the idea expressed by Oliver Wendell Holmes quoted and sourced here:

… the whole outline of the law is the resultant of a conflict at every point between logic and good sense — the one striving to work fiction out to consistent results, the other restraining and at last overcoming that effort when the results are too manifestly unjust.

I think this is a pretty good description of the political problem we face today. The Democrats at bottom are trying to work with reality, sometimes aware of the limits of theory and sometimes willing to learn from experience. The Republicans at bottom are only interested in their truth: a vile and corrupt form of neoliberal capitalism. They intend to follow this “truth” to the ends of rationality regardless of the consequences in the real world.

And it finds a receptive audience in the mass of alienated people who make up the Trumpian base,

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