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from Aurelien2022 Website
"Mere Anarchy"
Last week, I
suggested that these days
governments and the private sector were increasingly following a
policy of nihilistic destruction, which was the logical, if
uncomfortable, outcome of the kind of apocalyptic individualism now
rampant everywhere after the unchallenged triumph of Liberal
ideas...
They are all logically deducible from the
ultra-individualist, almost autistic, mindset that Liberalism at its
worst entails, and it may be worth saying just a word about that
first.
Either they are competitors, and thus a challenge to the Liberal ego and to its personal and financial freedom, or they are subordinates, to be used to secure more personal and financial benefits for yourself, or finally they are Non-Playing Characters, to be manipulated, ordered around, remonstrated with and legislated for, such that the world that results is closer to your vision of how it should be.
This is to say that in a Liberal society there are no traditional links of family, community friendship, even mutual commitment. There are only coincidences of interest, to be exploited for as long as they last, and then to be abandoned.
(The disastrous argument that "the personal is
political" extends this thinking to personal relations, which are
then seen as the equivalent of political or business alliances based
purely and temporarily on mutual self-interest.)
Wars or famines overseas offend the Liberal concept of how things should be, and it's therefore normal to demand that Somebody should Do Something, to bring the world closer to how it should look.
(People starving in the streets, on the other hand, is just How Things Are...)
So there develops a sense of fear and disorientation when crises such as those in Ukraine and Gaza cannot be confined to the symbolic level, and escape from the TV or the Internet to have indirect and even direct practical consequences near home.
Indeed, and as we'll see, the fact that Liberal politics consists very largely of the manipulation of symbols makes it especially ill-adapted to the real-life difficulties of the world today.
Perhaps never before in human history, therefore, has so much been misunderstood about so many important things by the few who govern us.
The kind of nihilistic looting I described last week is entirely logical for the Liberal mind:
Some of that benefit is intellectual, or at least it is presented as such.
Controlling the lives, and even the speech and thoughts of others, and thus trying to remake societies, can be very exciting and fulfilling in certain cases.
Now there is, of course, a long and honourable history of social reform, in which some Liberals in the past participated, and which was designed to do practical things to make the lives of ordinary people better.
But the modern tradition of social reform deals overwhelmingly in signs and symbols, in abstractions and norms, with the intention of taking the giant Lego set that is society, and making a more pleasing design out of it.
And because the motivation is fundamentally
aesthetic (even if it wears ideological garments) negative results
are irrelevant.
Whilst the subject of education is vast, and I am not an expert on it, there is one tendency that every parent has seen. That is the belief that "forcing" children to learn things is aesthetically wrong, and that children should "work things out for themselves," except perhaps in such areas as gender studies.
What this means in practice, for example, is that in many countries children are not taught to read phonetically as was traditionally the case, but by deduction from looking at words with similar letters.
This doesn't work, and has led to a catastrophic decline in literacy in many countries, but that's irrelevant, because the model itself is non-hierarchical and participative, which means it must be aesthetically and ideologically right.
The same is true of mathematics, where, as Tom Lehrer remarked acidly sixty years ago now,
It's rather as if there were no driving tests and no driving instruction, and aspiring drivers were told to "work it out for yourself."
(Psychologically, of course, rote learning has always been more effective because, by making certain rules and procedures automatic, the conscious mind is freed for other things.)
And indeed the schools that Our Children
go to still use traditional methods.
What I mean by that is that,
This is why people naively expect that voting in a new government will change things, and complain when it doesn't.
Yet the actual substance of politics today is a largely post-ideological struggle for power, not between Parties as such but between collections of individuals with episodically overlapping personal interests.
Those who complain that politics increasingly resembles competition between manufacturers of breakfast foods see more clearly than perhaps they realise, with the difference that such manufacturers do at least praise the virtues of their products:
We have arrived at what I like to call The Party, because politics today in western countries increasingly resembles politics in a one-party state:
On the one hand there are pre-emptive moral norms to be obeyed, on the other hand a series of allegedly "scientific" theories about the workings of the economy.
Neither the one nor the other is to be questioned. These assumptions are pretty much common among our political elites and the parasitic Professional and Managerial caste (PMC) which services them.
All opposition, or even (and perhaps especially) intelligent criticism, is ruled out in advance.
The result is a discourse which on the one hand is dominant (you find it everywhere) and on the other hard is marginal (because outside the PMC, nobody believes it.) In traditional one-party states a lot of effort went into spreading the word and mobilising the masses.
Today's Party cannot be bothered with such
trivia, and relies on picking off and destroying visible opposition
through the use of social media and, if necessary, imposed
ideological discipline.
The smug, introverted world in which Party functionaries live is not the real world that most of us inhabit. To actually take power and to formally rule, it's necessary to do tedious things like win elections, and the Party is not very good at that.
It is so sure of the correctness of its ideas that it doesn't actually try to persuade the unpersuaded:
Having no real ideology of its own except power, it simply demands that the electorate vote for them.
Surprisingly enough, this isn't working, and
because our modern political class has never had to develop basic
political skills, it now has no idea what to do now.
The problem is that whereas the Greek concept of rule by the Best People (aristoi), or the later concept of rule by divine election, or even the contemporary theories of Political Islam, can actually be set out in rational terms and people can in principle be persuaded of them, nothing similar exists today.
In true Liberal tradition, the justification for their rule by today's elites is essentially one of assertion:
No wonder it's hard to find converts outside the PMC.
Let's look at each of those two, and the
potential consequences.
Now this is partly traditional Liberal elitist arrogance, the product of a technocratic mindset that believes all problems have a single rational solution.
It is well summed up in Simone Weil's posthumously published essay advocating the abolition of political parties (as, she notes, cocaine has been banned, so why not political parties that are just as dangerous?)
Parties, she thought, are just instruments of division and emotion.
She quotes with approval Rousseau's idea that, whilst passions vary, all rational examinations of a question will necessarily arrive at the same conclusion. Parties, and by implication debate, are thus unnecessary.
It is striking that this totalitarian Liberal
approach provoked so little opposition in 1950, when the essay was
published, or even today.
If theory is more important than reality, if facts are, as Althusser maintained "concepts of an ideological nature," which have to be tested against theory to see if they are correct, then any form of traditional pragmatic government is pointless.
If it's true that uncontrolled immigration, or the export of jobs overseas accompanied by de-industrialisation, are good things, then any evidence suggesting the contrary is by definition wrong and can be ignored.
Thus, in the case of Ukraine, since,
...then victory, or at least the defeat of Moscow, is inevitable.
It's just a question of time...
And if it's symbols that fundamentally matter, then it's more important to have, say, a Police Chief with the right skin colour than it is to stop rising crime, since crimes themselves are only ideological concepts.
Traditionally, political parties have listened to their voters and tried to articulate their concerns.
This habit, now denounced as "populism," has been replaced by a stony disinterest in the lives of ordinary people and a refusal to listen to their worries and aspirations.
In a genuine one-party state (where such things might well not happen anyway) dissidents could in theory be ignored.
In states that retain the formal trappings of multi-party systems, however, there is always the chance that political figures and even parties will emerge that do actually articulate popular concerns, and do promote popular aspirations.
At that point, our modern political elite does
not know what to do, because they no longer have the political
skills to respond to such a challenge, even if they thought they
needed to do so.
But the problem is that voters no longer think in these abstract terms, and they are far more interested in what governments do in practice than what they say in theory.
The result of this attempt, unsurprisingly perhaps, has been the destruction of traditional parties of Left and Right, and their ingestion by a featureless Blob with an amorphous and vaguely Liberal ideology, in which, as I suggested last week, individual politicians seek their own advancement at the cost of any remaining party loyalty.
The problem is that the Blob and its ideas are usually very unpopular, and it has been impossible to prevent the rise of individuals and parties from outside it. In France, where this process is the most advanced, Mr Macron has succeeded in largely destroying the parties of the traditional Left and Right, in part by offering some of their major personalities government positions.
The result has been a "centrist" block which has not had a majority since 2022, and will probably disappear at the next elections, leaving a gaping hole where conventional French politics used to be.
Neither the Rassemblement national of Marine
Le Pen, nor the Islamo-Wokist clown car of Mr Mélenchon
can hope to fill the gap, and there is a great deal of alarm about
what might follow in 2027.
Indeed, if you are not a fully paid-up member of the PMC, and don't parrot its ideology faithfully, you are seen as by definition part of the problem. The actual problem, of course, is that these negative criteria are broad enough to include nearly all of us. However, we are instructed not to vote for certain people, sympathise with certain opinions, or fail to condemn them strongly enough.
In particular, the idea that even mentioning
certain subjects will "strengthen the extreme Right," has become a
central part of the PMC discourse.
And by the usual process of the inflation of political terms, we have to add "fascist" and even "Nazi" as well.
Phew...
It's worth pointing out that these are terms of abuse, not objective labels, and that very few of the PMC, who wield them like clubs, could actually explain what they mean by them. The idea that at even mentioning such subjects will "strengthen the "Fascist-Nazi-Right" (OK, I made that one up) is particularly bizarre, and frankly stupid in terms of practical politics.
If you refuse to talk about the problems of ordinary people, and then try to forbid anyone else from talking about those same problems, you simply discredit yourself, and leave the field open for others.
The explanation, of course, is that the PMC understands little, is deeply divided in spite of its surface unity, and so finds it impossible to articulate policies, or even positions, on most sensitive issues.
Thus, treatment of women in immigrant communities, including child marriage, polygamy and genital mutilation, pits feminists on the one hand against anti-racists on the other, and both have significant support within the PMC.
Any open debate about these subjects would result in different interest groups clawing each other's eyes out, so it is important that they are not raised by the PMC, and that others are prevented from raising them as well.
Only in that way can an uneasy internal peace be
maintained.
When you have evacuated politics of every remotely sensitive subject and forbidden its discussion elsewhere, you have nothing to offer your prospective voters apart from the chance to hate. Your only argument is that there is a [fill in your own term] Right that must be defeated at all costs, even if it means people voting not just against their own interests, but against common sense.
It's striking in any case quite often the political programmes of the [fill in your own term] Right are not very different from the policies of centre-Right governments of a generation ago, nor, in some cases, from policies of governments of the Left.
I've heard it argued, for example, that,
When you treat people like idiots, they just ignore you and walk away, and it's hard to blame them.
And now the latest trick is to claim that saying
certain things, or for that matter not saying them,"strengthens"
some weird and improbable international cabal of people like
President Xi, Mr Putin and Mr Orban.
Because the purely negative rhetoric of the Party, painting our current situation as a rerun of the 1930s, and treating every election as the last chance to defeat the forces of darkness, simply isn't working. In fact, as any traditional politician could have told them, refusing to offer the electorate anything except gimmicks, and talking incessantly about your opponents, actually strengthens those opponents.
Thus, whilst psephological swings come and go, the [something] Right continues to gain strength, as do other parties on the fringes of the conventional political system, and as indeed does the Abstention Party, which is gaining ground even in countries where electoral participation has been high.
So the most likely scenario for 2027 in France is that the RN - by far the most successful party in 2022, with 37% of the vote - will have an even larger number of seats but not an absolute majority and, once again, it will be impossible to form a stable government.
And the level of participation will continue to fall, as people see no point in voting. (The outcome of the 2027 Presidential election is frankly impossible to foresee.)
There is no magic about liberal democratic
systems after all, no categorical imperative to get out and vote, or
even take an interest in politics. Political systems have to earn
support, and the Party in every western country has not only failed
to earn it, it has refused even to see the need to do so.
I made the point last week that political systems require care and maintenance to avoid the effects of entropy, and that by and large this has not been done.
But this problem goes beyond just elections.
This brings us to the question of legitimacy.
Now, like pretty much the whole vocabulary of liberal democratic politics (including "liberal" and "democracy,") there is no agreement on what the word actually means, and too much speculation is in any case discouraged.
The dictionary does not help, because we discover that "legitimacy" comes from the same Latin root (Lex, meaning "law") as "Legal" and other associated words.
So a legitimate government is one that has been elected according to the appropriate law, and a legitimate organisation is one that obeys the law. Thank you...
In other words,
If the rules have been followed, then a government is legitimately elected.
Now of course this argument is a circular one,
but it's actually worse than that, because much depends on who
makes the law in the first place. Elections in the old
Soviet Union were governed by laws, and as far as we can tell these
laws were followed. Yet the West did not regard the Soviet
government as legitimate.
A government that leaves people to die of hunger in the streets may have been elected through a procedure which faultlessly obeyed the rules, yet many people would regard it as illegitimate in some wider sense.
And there can be real questions about representivity as well, especially in cases where only half of the population even vote.
In other cases (classically, the Ivory Coast elections of 2010), the result depends on the strength of various ethnic groups in the country, and even who is treated as eligible to vote.
In such controversial cases, to regard the winner of an election by a couple of percentage points as legitimate, in the sense that a rugby victory by a couple of points is legitimate, simply doesn't make sense.
As more than one African said to me at the time about the western obsession with Outtara's narrow victory, and the ultimate use of the military to enforce it,
But the fact is that when you see politics as
nothing more than the struggle for power, without an ideological
content, then that is indeed how you do things.
(Our leaders, after all, think that we are fundamentally stupid and will believe anything.)
In essence, though, it's really about the Liberal conviction that the world is full of sensible, rational people like them, who think the same as them, and so, following Simone Weil, if the results of an election don't correspond to what rational, sensible people should think ought to have happened, there must be something wrong with the elections.
And sometimes, among those parts of the PMC who
read books, or at least have heard of them, it will be argued that
anyone who wants to escape the suffocating straitjacket of permitted
PMC ideology is actually suffering from some authoritarian
personality disorder, and references to Adorno, Arendt
and Reich will swiftly follow.
The pattern for the future is likely to be the decline of the Party in its different manifestations, and the rise of protest movement parties, often transient, such that in parliamentary systems no government is possible, and in Presidential systems the result will inevitably be disputed, perhaps violently.
The lack of any agreed understanding of what legitimacy is, means that it will be impossible even to discuss such questions intelligently.
Likewise, the draining of any real substance out of politics makes it effectively impossible to organise a political party around any ideological programme:
In effect, people are just asking to be heard, asking to have their concerns at least acknowledged, and asking that the governments of various countries take their interests into account.
That's not much to ask, but it's more than the Party is prepared to offer, or indeed is capable of offering without destroying itself.
The result is likely to be less and less support
for existing political systems, more discontent, protest movements
and single-issue parties, and countries that are increasingly less
governable. At least...
The trite answer, of course, is,
None of this is necessarily wrong, but it's better to see such developments as demonstrating weakness rather than strength, and fear rather than any desire for repression for its own sake. (Indeed, the desire for repression for its own sake is pretty rare in history, if not actually unknown.)
But there are some fundamental distinctions here,
which are often ignored.
Many terrorist attacks, in Europe anyway, have been carried out by people who were in some way known to the authorities, and enquiries afterwards inevitably criticise those authorities for not having acted earlier, and prevented the violence.
The difficulty is that medium-sized western state with competent security authorities may well have 10,000 names of security interest in a database, for all sorts of reasons.
Yes, there are various clever technologies that might alert you to the possibility that something will happen, but no more than that.
To actually track peoples' movements over an extended period of time requires significant resources:
In any event, an increasing number of violent attacks are by individuals, unknown to anyone, who just decide to kill people one day.
Nothing can prevent that...
Here, it's even more a question of numbers.
It's generally reckoned that in the old East Germany and in Ceausescu's Romania, 10% of the population was involved in regime security, some as professionals, the rest as informers and unofficial helpers.
No western state has remotely the resources to do anything of that kind, nor ever will, not least because the states themselves are becoming less capable all the time.
Once more, and with a vengeance, it's all about
numbers.
In fact, very few states, no matter how repressive in theory, can actually sustain themselves in the face of genuinely large-scale opposition:
The security forces of even tyrannical regimes may be formidable in theory, but they are seldom prepared to die for their patrons.
Indeed, it turned out that regimes that the West
had considered "strong," such as those in Libya and in Syria, were
actually built on sand, and violent repression simply produced even
more violent opposition.
Most regimes fall when their protectors decide they've had enough and go home.
I recall watching, with a colleague, a live broadcast from Belgrade in 2000, when demonstrators broke into the Presidential Palace, and the armed MUP guards did nothing to stop them.
We exchanged looks:
Likewise, no-one in Brussels today is going to
die for Mrs
von der Leyen.
Even a country like France, with a tradition of violent street demonstrations, could mobilise fewer than 80,000 police and gendarmes during the Gilets jaunes protests of 2018/19:
For that reason, the forces of order could only intervene from time to time, mainly when the safety of individuals was threatened.
Many shopping centres and businesses were destroyed while the police stood by, and, had the demonstrations gone on for much longer, or been a little larger, something in the system would have broken. And most western countries have proportionately fewer trained personnel than that.
It is quite easy to foresee that really large
scale protests in western countries would overwhelm the forces of
order quite quickly, and the government would lose control of the
streets.
They might try to introduce more oppressive measures and laws, they might try to recruit larger public order forces, they may try to censure the traditional media and control social media.
But there is only so much they can do to counteract the problem of sheer numbers.
They could in theory change their laws to allow the use of lethal force against demonstrators by police and soldiers, but that would be a huge and bitterly controversial step and might well bring governments down anyway, even if the uniformed personnel were ready to obey such orders.
I've always argued that you can't beat something with nothing.
The PMC state has an ideology and an organisation, even if they aren't up to much.
Successful changes of power structure come when there is an alternative waiting:
As Curzio Malaparte pointed out long ago,
The Islamists in Iran had invested decades in preparations for the Revolution and had a complete ideology available.
Yeats's The Second Coming has been cited
for years now, but it's not just that "the best lack all
conviction," it's that they lack organisation as well. And in
general the worst are just after money.
The political system will become increasingly fragmented and the state itself, including the security forces, will become progressively weaker and demotivated. But politics does not tolerate a vacuum.
What political scientists call "ungoverned spaces" don't actually exist:
In many parts of the world they include tribal and clan structures, extended family networks, religious organisations and disciplined political parties. We have none of those.
Nobody is going to band together to die for inclusive toilets.
Ethnic and religious identities exist, of course, but they are not a basis for organisation and political struggle. (The idea that "ethic minorities" could constitute a politically useful bloc in times of crisis will get a large bucket of cold water thrown over it.)
The politics of destruction I described last week has ensured not only the destruction of its practitioners, but of any organised means of replacing them.
Thus,
The result will be a kind of anarchy, not the hippy anarchy of the 1960s,
There is an order of sorts, but it is enforced by drug dealers and organised criminal gangs, often linked with religious extremists, who fight each other openly for power and wealth, and corrupt what remains of the local political systems.
Such forces can be driven out temporarily, but the resources, and more importantly the social and ideological foundations, for a better system, simply don't exist...!
These groups profit from the basic rules of power:
The current model of control of parts of cities by overlapping groups of criminals and religious extremists may start to generalise quite quickly.
At that point, the PMC's incantations against the [something] Right will reach their logical conclusion, and that Right itself will start to take de facto power of its own in certain places.
It's a lot larger and a lot meaner than the drug
gangs and the men with beards.
After all,
We'll see, soon enough, what the final results
are...
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