Misanthropic Thoughts

What follows is not quite something I believe, nor even something I fear. It is something I fear I believe, my worst tendencies as a thinker and person. I share them in the hope it will be purgative, and also hoping that maybe others who are afflicted with similar thoughts might at least feel some camaraderie. Here is how society seems to me when I am at my worst.

The very top echelons of our power hierarchy are occupied by extremely wealthy people, or those who have managed to secure high office in states large enough to seriously push back on capital. For the most part this latter means politicians and generals in the USA and China, though Putin and the odd EU bigwig might just about count here. These people are, when of sound mind, amoral sociopaths whose goals are utterly alien to the rest of us. Our global social order filters for callous disdain for human lives, hardening one's heart to the sufferings of the main part of humanity, and single minded focus on accruing wealth and leverage in a post-material status game whose participants have long ago reached escape velocity on ever actually facing want. 

It is not, to be clear, that past ages did not filter for some of these things. They were just tempered by other features; albeit usually characteristics that were bad in their own way. The machismo honour culture of the officer corp was a real force among the generals within Prussian militarism, the odd fanatical true believer could make it to the top in the age of Church dominance, and so on. And steady state economies kept almost everyone poor in both fact and expectation, the misery of which was a de facto hard limit on the number of people who could dream of accumulation aeternal. So it's not that these past ages were better in who they selected for, even if they were more varied. In terms of how they shaped society, for the typical person having to live under these self-declared prophets and heroes, they were frankly worse.

But our present rapacious ruling class does have a couple of tools available to them which past ages had not. First, a destructive capacity whose only analogue are apocalypse myths of old. Since the mid-twentieth century, at least, these people have the organisation, knowledge, and technological capacity to deliberately bring about mass death on a scale hitherto unrealised.  Set aside the obvious, though no less noteworthy for that, cases of our capacity to design nuclear and biological weapons. We have also become acclimatised to less striking instances of this in many regards. What shocked the world at Guernica was actively sold to the public as cool in the Shock and Awe campaign of the Iraq war.  Israel's military has of late been effectively starving a small nation's worth of people, scaling up the horrors of Medieval siege warfare to suit our modern capabilities. The case of the Rwandan genocide shows that our ability to coordinate people en masse through propaganda campaigns and mass media is in its own way an expansion of our destructive powers.

And that speaks to the second thing, the techniques of modern propaganda and communications technology. People have always been en masse ignorant and had beliefs about the social order which were utterly devoid of truth or justice. But the extent to which you can quite deliberately create and propagate specific lies, advantageous to you and your immediate goals, is very much a novelty. The age of smartphones and social media has, at the least, exacerbated this, with large swathes of the electorate now routinely occupying a fantastical world whose inner logic is frankly non-existent, and whose only load-star (one cannot help but notice) is that the practical upshot, the end result of the public's latest delusion, is always and only that we simply must give more wealth and power to hard-right super-elites. The fact that the language used to describe these realms of delusion is called "populist" or "anti-elitist" only adds a layer of cruelty on top of it all, like we are being laughed at all the time by the people who rob us of our freedom through their idiotic dupes.

Now, they are not all powerful in this. There are competing factions with access to these weapons and propaganda tools. The public are buffeted between them, assailed or threatened by their weapons on the one hand and having to sift through the competing lies and half-truths of their paid propagandists on the other. We have no respite. But that also means no one person or faction is uniformly getting their way. This need not amount to an opportunity for anything good - but at least it means none of our little aspirant god-emperors ever actually feel fully satisfied in their mad quest for power. We shall be slaves just the same? Yes, we have always been slaves - but tasting defeat, having their will occasionally thwarted, can cause the ruling class to go mad from the shame.

Which then speaks to the other problem. All of the above was qualified with "when of sound mind". Relentless accumulation of power for its own sake, wealth piled upon wealth like a dragon guarding its hoard, the silencing of one's foes simply because one thereby exercises cruel dominion over them. This is what those who rule us are like when mentally well. But while their normal functioning is not really psychologically recognisable to the greater part of us, their derangements are not essentially different from your worst colleague, family member, or pub-regular, going on awkward rants while everyone tries to avert their gaze and politely change the subject thereafter. The tech world, due to their penchant for being Very Online, have given the rest of us a mirror into what it is like when these people break. Having briefly experienced a period of worker push-back to some of their designs and a nascent unionisation drive in the 2010s, the venture-capital wing of the tech world was overtaken by delusions of a Great Race betrayed by a Conspiracy of Untermench trying to Trans Our Children, no doubt instigated by (((people))) with a near(?) daemonic hatred of civilisation per se. Romantic delusions of purgative violence, a cataclysmic restoration of a past golden age wherein national/ethnic/racial/spiritual Purity is once again secured, all led by a strongman who embodies The Will of the True Volk, follow quick on the heels of this nonsense.

I presume there are reasons those in our ruling class are so susceptible to this, but I wish to be clear that I cannot say for sure what those reasons are. They have access to the best psychiatric healthcare the world has ever seen. Our educational resources are vast and unparalleled in history and available even to plebeians to an astonishing degree. The world's spiritual and wisdom traditions can all be accessed by them through books, personal tutors, retreats; whatever means they would wish. Presumably part of what we have selected for in choosing our ruling class somehow involves being disinclined to seek these resources out, or unable to make use of them if one does. Likewise, I presume, a peculiar kind of psychological fragility is borne of wealth and power, wherein it makes the experience of any push-back, any failure, traumatic to an absurd degree. 

The nature of a highly unequal society is that the characteristics of the ruling class - in ours meaning the owners of capital and those able to effectively direct mass armed force, with no strict divide between them - become incredibly consequential for other aspects of the society. So I have focussed on them in the above. But please do not get the impression that I think the problems that ail us are the result entirely of filtering-for-bad-people-then-deranging-them. No, the rest of us have plenty of blame to share.

The group I am most intimately familiar with are the Regime Functionaries. Here I mean the class of professionals necessary to make a world like ours go round. The lawyers, doctors, journalists, engineers, middle managers. Educated without being leading experts, powerful in their little domains but no one of them really wielding serious social power, high income but not wealthy relative to their national ruling class. Middling sorts with a degree. In Britain they are sometimes disparagingly referred to as the Sensible Set. The people who consider themselves the solid backbone of Educated Opinion without necessarily being professional ideologues, though some of them are. Regime Functionaries are typically people who have done well in some facet of the more meritocratic elements of our social system, though that is often combined with having received a leg-up in the early stages of their education or career through various inherited advantages ("nepo-babies"). As a professor I am a Regime Functionary.



Regime Functionaries are largely weak-willed and thoughtless cowards, whose Sensible opinions dress up venal self-interest in perpetuating a system that empowers psychopaths, for no better reason than it regularly gives us gold stars and tells us we are very clever. Even where there are good things about our social order that Regime Functionaries will point to, these are epiphenomenal to their (our) reasons for supporting it; the emotional basis for which is their sycophantic need to support a status quo that has rewarded them (us - you get the point). Regime Functionaries have found reasons to accommodate themselves to every twist of the knife, every fresh horror imposed upon innocents the world over, so long as it can be presented as a foreseeable by-product of some Sensible Scheme ticking along, managed by people like the Regime Functionaries themselves. Those who know best. Indeed, since seeming above it all, like one has the ability to take a detached objective view wherein one sees both the wisdom and folly of all sides, is culturally highly valued by many in the pertinent class, they are often actively socially rewarded for coming up with counter-intuitive defences of what is morally horrific, and condemnations of what is evidently morally required of us. 

Here's why Smart Politics requires we send refugees into prison camps hosted by dictatorships. Why opposing the latest war the press have rallied behind is surely evidence you actually approve of war crimes. Why ostentatious cruelty to some tiny despised minority is actually an urgent national priority spurred by the public's legitimate concerns. Why it's good and normal that a few people richer than God dictate all policy forever. Anyone suggesting otherwise on any of these points is a fool, or a monster. A nightmarish fever-dream amalgamation of Robespierre-Stalin-Mao-Corbyn. Maybe our Regime Functionaries sincerely believe these things each time. But I think in addition, whatever our personal convictions, most of all we believe that finding some way of defending such claims shows us to be Smart, that perpetuating a system wherein such things are normal secures our relatively-advantaged position therein, that the people who would dare make us feel guilty for saying as such are bitter losers who deserve nothing but contempt. 

There are those who rule, there are those who manage on behalf of those who rule, then there are the vast majority being managed and toiling away on behalf of those who rule. Is there hope there, among them, the subjects and citizens of the world's nations? I don't see why we should think so. In those places I am most intimately familiar with, at least, the most fired up section of the population seems to be that which is defined by low-trust particularism; conspiracy mongers who seem to reject a priori the very idea of cooperation to mutual gain, and see in any overtures to that effect a terrible scheme to take from them and theirs. These irrationalists have entered into an unholy alliance with those men, permanently seething with resentment, who have been pushed down the social pecking order by the imposition of a relatively fair meritocracy. Relative, that is, to the days when women and ethnic minorities were simply forbidden de jure (or by the realities of international politics) from competing with them for spots in the Regime Functionary class. They have not responded to this by upping their game or accepting the increased material rewards of a wealthier society as just recompense for lower relative standing within -- no, they have railed with ever-increasing vehemence against the femoids and the ethnics who've dared to supplant their place in the Natural Order, reviving the most murderous and vile elements of 20th century politics in barely-revised forms to have their revenge on modernity.

Together this bigot-irrationalist alliance, backed by the more deranged members of the ruling class mentioned above, is sweeping many places around world; from the US to Brazil to Italy to the Netherlands to Japan and Korea. The UK shall soon follow, as it seems shall France. (What is happening in Italy and India and Hungary and Turkey and aspects of South African politics also seems to me related though I am less confident in these cases. Putin has, at the least, proven adept at appealing to these crowds.) In the main the left has proven somewhere between powerless and disinclined to stop them. Regime Functionaries have become the central class basis of the Sensible Moderate Left and their response to the bigot-irrationalist alliance has been some admixture of fear and cringing insecurity. Half terrified of the violence they threaten, and half believing in their hearts that perhaps they really are not the True Volk and the bigot-irrationalist alliance actually genuinely speaks for such more Authentically, they try again and again to appease them. But the irrationalists are not inclined to listen to the sort of appeals the Regime Functionaries are inclined to give, products of a meritocratic education as they inevitably are. In fact they have nothing but suspicious contempt for them. And the downwardly mobile bigots are, after all, motivated first and foremost by the prospect of making the Regime Functionaries pay for the sin of beating them; their relationship to this crowd really is zero-sum, they win just in case the Regime Functionaries lose. 

The more dissident left, on the other hand, are worse than useless. We have no good ideas about how to actually run anything despite being incredibly confident in our moral right to run everything. We are incapable of arranging a regular Tuesday night meeting without splitting into acrimonious factions accusing each other of genocide apologism for using finger snaps rather than jazz hands to signal assent, yet we say with a straight face society should hand us power over the economy. Or, worse, we pretend we are not saying this, we disavow ambitions to power and talk about the need to return power to the people or some such; with it swiftly becoming apparent to anyone who listens to us for more than five minutes - and credit to anyone with that degree of patience - that we clearly have some particular people in mind as appropriately deputised to use that power. Such disavowals of ambitions to power at least capture the emotional truth that this is at base a movement set up to be a permanent protest movement, secure in the righteousness of never having to actually govern.

The through line to all this seems to me the raw emotional power of anger and hate. These are boundless emotions, brooking no moderation nor proportionality. They are never satiated. People will, of course, tell you that they are no good foundation for a life well lived or a social movement to shape society. But in our honest moments we will also admit that giving in to them, letting oneself be guided by them, is cathartic. No other emotions it seems to me combine the raw motivational force, the raw ability to drive strenuous action, with the intrinsically pleasurable experience of actually undergoing the emotion. Not greed or avarice, which for any outside the ruling class at least are typically felt as unpleasant and limited in their motivational force. Not envy, whose motivational force seems to me borrowed from the fact that it quickly leads to hate. Not even love, which while powerfully motivating is often painful and demanding and shames us before its majesty. No, only hate and anger can drive us ever onwards while always making us feel good for being so driven. This is why we have our moral strictures against hate; we know we must tamp down on these natural emotions by the artifice of social convention, because unless we bind these demons they will corrupt and destroy us from within.

Hate and anger are now unbound because they have been made righteous. The American religious right is even starting to preach against "the sin of empathy", finally raising to self-consciousness what has been implicit in their politics for a long time. But they are simply ahead of the curve. The alliance of bigots and irrationalists now driving modern politics is characterised by its rage against modernity and its hatred of the various conspirators and out-groups it blames for its permanent dissatisfaction. The dissident left competes within itself for who can most elaborately rationalise why our murderous violence would be different and good actually, if only ever we got a chance to impose it. Regime Functionaries specialise in couching horrific actions, borne of the mad-dreams of our ruling class with its own objects of wrathful hate, in the cool terms of practical rationality. Sensibly Applied in accord with Moderate Common Sense. (Or, at least, in explaining why too strenuous an opposition to such actions would itself be the real crime.) The Ruling Class, perhaps unusual in that the degree to which avarice is a motivational force, grows deranged precisely because in the end the inner force of hate and anger can overwhelm them too. Our whole political and social order is the expression of these primal emotions finally being let off their chains, finally able to live out our innermost truth to its mutually destructive conclusion.

And, of course, this very post is full of these poisons; I am not immune from my diagnosis. In the main I faithfully play the part of the Regime Functionary even as I seethe at my own moral impotence and complicity with the evils I pretend to condemn. Still, I duly dole out credentials in my allotted role as subsidised labour-sorting mechanism, in accordance with the general strictures of meritocratic assessment that underpins this social order's logistical chain. I am a hypocrite, a coward, and an enemy of all that is best in the world. The only hatred which would actually be justified is that directed towards me; a sentiment which is itself ego-maniac, even as it makes a poor attempt to disguise itself as humility.

So there we have it. I stand amidst, and am myself an unremarkable and representative product of, a social order that ruthlessly filters for its absolute worst members and gives them supreme and unprecedented power; only checking them by playing them against each other. As satisfying as this can be there is no real reason to take pleasure in it; their thwarted ambitions tending to derange our ruling class into hate-fuelled maniacs. The management of the social order so governed is carried out by a class of snivelling regime functionaries whose capacity to rationalise evil would be impressive were it not so tragic. And in the main the socially conscious section of the broader population is divided between an alliance of irrationalist-bigots on the one hand, whose goals are intrinsically cruel where they are not outright insane. And on the other hand a dysfunctional dissident left who combine a complete lack of any noteworthy achievements or promise with an intensely smug self-righteous anger. In that last, at least, they are not unusual: all of these groups are noteworthy primarily for the degree to which we have found ways to rationalise and sanctify our anger and hatred, which I suspect shall ultimately bring this all down in cataclysm. Our society is a steep pyramid built atop the roiling sands of anger and insanity, and there will be no peaceful repose within its haunted chambers.