Not Our First Rodeo — The Global Authoritarian Populism
I Rule or Perish
II Political Mafia, Anti-Meritocratic Communitarianism
III Narcissism, Cognitive Dissonance, and Victimhood
IV Genes and Human Agency
V The Will of the People
VI What Is To Be Done?
子曰：“不愤不启，不悱不发，举一隅不以三隅反，则不复也。”
论语 7 述而8
孔子
The Master said, “When there is no agitated attempt at thinking, I do not provide a clue; where there is no stammered attempt at expression, I do provide a prompt. If I raise one corner and do not receive the other three in response, I teach no further.”
Analects 7:8
Confucius
Ich möchte nicht mit meiner Schrift Andern das Denken ersparen. Sondern, wenn es möglich wäre, jemand zu eigenen Gedanken anregen.
Philosophische Untersuchungen
Ludwig Wittgenstein
I should not like my writing to spare other people the trouble of thinking. But, if possible, to stimulate someone to thoughts of his own.
Philosophical Investigations
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Write only those papers that make you cackle with glee.
On starting papers, or: how I got over professional despair and learned to love philosophy again
C. Thi Nguyen
I Rule or Perish
The self-perceived decline of countries that regard themselves as once having been mighty offers a fascinating deep insight into the darkest corners of the pshyche of ebbing nations, as the people who consider themselves a country’s core and bulk, its rightful owners, are overwhelmed by the fear of falling under Nirad Chaudhuri’s spell — Lack of power tends to corrupt and absolute lack of power corrupts absolutely — , which fuels a sour nostalgia for the largely imagined good old days in which they alone ruled the world, the waves, at the bare minimum their neighbors, or at the very least themselves, a resentful sentiment revealed by the 53% of the English who voted to leave the European Union.
England is one among many such nations whose self-proclaimed rightful bulk imagine as wobbling, from an intense longing for national pride. It is a global drift, but extreme cases such as Catalonia’s are often the best to analyze a general trend, because the underlying forces that empower a surging wave come to the surface sooner in the peripheral countries, unimpeded by the stronger institutions and traditions of liberty and sanity that delay their full destructive wrath as they become an engulfing tsunami sweeping the central countries as well, as soon as the bulk of both the ruling and the lower middle classes are haunted at the heart by “a terrible sense of disappointment. The pride of [the] modern [country] has been far greater than its accomplishments,” as Fouad Ajami wrote about Egypt. No matter the nation, there is always a strain of resentment at having lost a sometimes real but largely imagined mightier past, and a peevish nostalgia for a future which never came: Kojève’s “history of desired desires” in a game where there are winners and losers, either masters or slaves.
Globalization has disrupted the time-honored way of managing things which ensured that the right people — the “good people,” themselves — would always rule by relying on patronage games and an extended network of clients fed on public money and resources.
One of the steepest European cases of downfall in power is Catalonia. A once mighty nation ruling a Mediterranean Empire that lost independence five centuries ago, it was incorporated into Spain three times and into France twice, lost its independence war in the 17th century, was partitioned by Spain and France, became a dependency of those more powerful neighbors, and since has striven simply to avoid assimilation and disappearance.
In England, Catalonia, Serbia, Hungary, Pakistan, the United States, Thailand, Italy, Turkey, Poland, Israel, Brazil, India, to name a few, globalization has disrupted the time-honored way of managing things which ensured that the right people — the “good people,” themselves — would always rule by relying on patronage games and an extended network of clients fed on public money and resources. International competition, based on values of meritocracy, steadily and relentlessly erodes the very fundamental assumption that only the right people may thrive because they are protected by their caring right rulers. Meritocracy emboldens all people to fend and thrive on their own, therefore more and more non-right people prevail over the right people, who become globalization’s leftovers. The latter, traditionally in power, come to realize both their fading significance and the gradual disappearance of all that they hold dear, and fight back to restore their dominance, whatever it takes — even by crushing the rights and liberties of those “people of anywhere” whose wholesale destruction is needed for the rooted “people of somewhere” to think they are not being persecuted: Plato’s thymos gone berserk.
That is all just a little bit of history repeating endlessly, more than an eerie echo from the millennia-old hatred of country-side folks against the corrupted, god-less city; of deeply-rooted peasants and herders against fleeting merchants. A demonization of cities, whence both moral diseases and physical illnesses sprout to hover over the pure, unsullied heartland, which must revolt to obliterate those broods of rot, from Babylon to Sarajevo.
A backlash ensues and the majoritarian nationalism strikes back, as Mukul Kesavan defines it: “the claim that a nation’s political destiny should be determined by its religious or ethnic majority… Members of the majority faith and culture are viewed as the nation’s true citizens. The rest are courtesy citizens, guests of the majority, expected to behave well and deferentially. To be tolerated at the majority’s discretion is no substitute for full citizenship in modern democracies. It is a state of limbo, a chronically unstable condition. A polity that denies full citizenship to its minorities will, sooner or later, politically disenfranchise them or expel them on the grounds that, despite being residents, they aren’t citizens at all and actually belong elsewhere.” Those non-right citizens, who have been emboldened by global meritocracy, cease to behave well and deferentially just because they thrive by themselves unaided by the time-honored patronage networks; they cease to submit and need to be reminded of their place. “Majoritarian politics results from the patiently constructed self-image of an aggrieved, besieged majority that believes itself to be long-suffering and refuses to suffer in silence anymore … the nation was being subverted by predatory minorities,” whose threat to the status quo is regarded by the pampered majority as a threat to themselves, who enjoy a higher trophic level in the human food chain.
Supremacy is what majoritarians crave and fight to keep — in their fearful imagination, taking back control “to ensure that which all others achieve with maximal effort,… [our own] achieve with minimal qualification,” as Ta-Nehisi Coates writes. The dreary thuggery of so many populist leaders constitutes a potent message to their followers: ‘Work half as hard as those other people, and I will bestow upon you more than they will get by working twice as hard as you. Just look at me. I did it.’ The ghastly freakishness of Trump, Johnson, Bolsonaro, Modi, let alone Erdoğan, Maduro, Orbán, or the Catalans Puigdemont and Junqueras, is not an accident. It is by built-in design, for dominance to be made perfect: elevating the lowest of “our own” above those more qualified but not of “our own.” Their cavalier, low-life attitude toward law itself, and their recklessness in commiting crimes signal to their followers they are willing to do whatever it takes to protect them, first and foremost the kind of drastic actions that others shy away from. The felonies of those leaders, their insanity and depravity, become a means to buy the loyalty of the people they want to rally, driving them to act as facilitators at the bare minimum, as active hitmen at best. Who can better prove their commitment than those whose options are actually reduced to ruling the country or serving time?
It is a page straight out of Bin Laden’s playbook: to implement acts designed to provoke widespread, angry responses from their opponents. Those acts range from terrorist attacks –which ISIS has shown off later with cartoonish villainy– to continuous disruptions of the legal order; from blatant discrimination and oppression to cultural wars. The aim is to generate hostility and turn the in-group and the out-group against one other, by triggering a backlash from those opponents who were first provoked to lose their political and legal senses and drive them to opt for a harsh crackdown. “If we succeed in dragging them into the arena of sectarian war,” Zarqawi wrote to Bin Laden in 2004, “it will become possible to awaken the inattentive Sunnis as they feel imminent danger and annihilating death.”
When collective retribution is suffered by most of the beleaguered group that the populist leaders want to rally, they parade themselves as their only protectors and defenders, banking on victimhood and proclaiming that all the members of the in-group are attacked as such, against the very existence of their core identity, be it Muslim, White, Catalan, Hindu, or whatever. An ISIS-like strategy by which those dismal leaders, before becoming a main cause of their countries’ problems, were and are a deep-seated symptom.
But competition and meritocracy, albeit restricted locally, created globally an open playing field which promotes the “wrong” kind of people, upwardly mobile and not subservient — not “our own,” those loyal, humble, unsuccessful people to which nepotism and the capture of public resources benefit. “Sooner or later,” Anne Applebaum writes, “the losers of the competition were always going to challenge the value of the competition itself. More to the point, the principles of competition, even when they encourage talent and create upward mobility, don’t necessarily answer deeper questions about national identity, or satisfy the human desire to belong to a moral community.” Authoritarian populism provides to its adherents just that: protection, belonging, meaning, as long as you let your soul, your brains, your dignity and freedom fade and fall. As long as you yield to serfdom. Hence their voting morphs from a choice of policy proposals to a tribal mark of might and allegiance which emboldens the parties and candidates who are perceived as one-of-our-own, whatever policies they favor, because their supporters will embrace them nonetheless, and will go on voting for them as a sign of loyalty and belonging, in a hyperpartisan divided society where everyone dreads and hates each other and is constantly summoned that not voting for “our own” means to surrender the country to those who want to destroy it, so they cannot afford to lose the elections. Where a leader like Junqueras feels righteous enough to call people to vote for “the good to vanquish the evil in the elections.” The good, of course, was him.
Sullen, state-spoiled brats so accustomed to milk other taxpayers’ money that they conceive both the tariffs that everybody pays to keep their unsustainable jobs and the taxes that other people pay to feed their unworkable lifestyle as their god-given privilege, eager to follow whoever promises them more and improved safeguards from a world they neither comprehend nor appreciate. Scared, angry, happily prone to follow the bleakest thug they may find, not despite his or her vile brutishness but precisely because of it. Unleashing the worst evil that humans are capable of. Wickedness runs amok thereafter, deftly exploited by nauseating rulers who, as Iyad el-Baghdadi indicates, morph their offer from “We give you jobs and you shut up” to “We protect you and you shut up,” using a steady flow of serious threats to parade as protectors, and exploiting their followers’ economic stagnation and decline to add on top of it brutality, repression, hopelessness, disinformation, complete lack of individual and political rights, and invasive security establishments, lording over societies where “everyone and every group is afraid, everyone is anxious, everyone is suspicious of others, everyone is in pain over their own grievances to see the other’s grievances.”
“[They] fear irrelevance, and are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late,” Yuval Noah Harari says, “Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power but feared they were losing their economic worth” — an angry, hectic cri de coeur to avoid becoming the useless losers of a global modernity of merit and competition among marketable skilled people with no place whatsoever for them and which upends their own dominant place in society, following an unattainable dream to preserve and freeze a brick-and-mortar society against the technological, economic, and demographic changes of a modernity where “all that is solid melts into air” and “every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe” has seen its halo strippen. A spectre is haunting the world, 170 years after Marx wrote: “Constant revolutionising of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation…. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.” Their lives being depleted of meaning, their values drained of pride. The former spine of the nation reduced to a basket of despised deplorables whose derided diminishment is a harbinger of worse to come: the utter erasure befitting to a clutch of cranks, like a sand drawing that fades under the uncaring wave.
II Political Mafia, Anti-Meritocratic Communitarianism
The upheavals of global competition have torn the social fabric of traditional societies. Again Catalonia is a good proxy, where forty years of unrelenting and systematic patronage and clientelism from the plundering Catalan institutions had coalesced thus:
1.- Being in power for so many years “has given it the time to centralize power, monopolize the country’s media, and build up a patronage network of highly dependent and therefore very loyal local intermediaries. [It] has also created a new bourgeoisie that is characterized by pliability and a predilection for political favors instead of marketable skills. Civil service, state-owned and state-controlled institutions, and the burgeoning circle of companies winning public procurement contracts are stacked with these people. The entrenchment of local hierarchies and politically dependent elites — as well as the reinforcement of the idea that one’s fate ultimately depends on politics and connections, not personal achievements — will fundamentally influence [its] social structure for years to come. Brutally effective propaganda campaign against all enemies, foreign and domestic, with the help of seemingly unlimited public funds [and] pro-government media has shaped a parallel reality. It has not only played on historical resentment of foreign domination but has also taken advantage of people’s deepest fears. And [it] has offered them a cure: stability, security, and homogeneity. The internal logic of this system — in which political calculations trump moral considerations — provides no opportunity for self-correction.”
2.- “A political mafia intends to get rich by running the country. This distinction is crucial simply because such a government must hide what it is really doing. When all is hidden, a collective denial of facts occurs, leading to a culture of chronic rumors. Only the most diligent can learn a thing or two about what the ruling mafia is really doing. And that’s how it has to be, since its wealth has been obtained through corruption and crime. In order to successfully hide their actions, our leaders bury the populace in lies, and in order to do so successfully, they have to undermine the state and its institutions, intimidate the media, and pay off people, which they do relentlessly. These are the weapons our leaders use to undermine critics and the opposition, and to fiercely protect the government and all its corrupt mess. Public opinion is manipulated. In a society as weak as [ours], a lie is not used for ideological seduction, but to reinforce the reliance on authoritarian government. This dependency has always been there. The current government chooses its ministers, MPs, and the editors of the pro-government media by how brutal and willing to lie they are. They have risen to power by presenting themselves as the guardians of an abandoned [people], making appeals to nationalism and patriotic selfishness.”
This is how Zselyke Csaky and Vesna Pešić define authoritarian populism’s methods in Hungary and Serbia. Read from Catalonia — or Pakistan, Italy, Turkey, they sound eerily familiar. Those populist rulers parade themselves as the only ones who have the moral right to be in power, to bestow government jobs and riches on their clients in exchange for loyalty, discredit the judges who may tackle their crimes, and stifle the media that could expose them. This makes it much easier for them to steal and loot both public and private riches with impunity: anticompetitive, antimeritocratic, “invariably [replacing] all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty”, as Hannah Arendt shrewdly wrote. Decades of this diet have nourished a kakistocracy in which the best are marginalized by the worst in order to keep power, cronyism is all that dictates who is nourished and how much from the spoils of public assets there to be strip-mined, and officials offer no more than Hamilton’s “pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of [the president’s] pleasure.”
Nothing threatens an entrenched supremacy more insidiously than a genuine meritocracy where race and gender and class cannot thwart the rise of anyone according to their talents and diligence, who thrive in a competitive, open, global world, enjoy a personally earned achieved rather than ascribed status, and fade under bigotry and protectionism. Therefore, merit itself must be derided and sacrificed, and humility and self-abasement become compulsory — lest privilege wobbles.
Shortcuts provided by group thinking and its clues greatly ease the decision about whom to trust: the “us”, those who share the illusion of sharing the same values, griefs, desires, resentments, who define their identity on the boundary beyond which the “other” marauds, especially when people feel their survival is threatened and being attached to one’s group is the most secure.
The system relies on two protective mechanisms: a suffocating communitarianism to keep people tightly held together, and a superiority complex to over-compensate their grim, bleak reality, which together prevent those hapless peoples from any clear-eyed deed to get anything done, improved, or achieved. Backwardness self-perpetuates. Symbolic deeds and aesthetic pantomimes are all they are capably endowed to. Where the exoskeleton provided by the state is enfeebled by its unbroken plunder by the patronage webs, which have dragged on for decades or even centuries, and especially where the state is perceived as alien, both the political-media establishment and the upstarting fringes, the whole country as well, sink in a quagmire of narcissism and cognitive dissonance where the community exerts itself on extracting compliance from their members, by sanctions if they stray, by protection if they give in; always eager to violate individual rights because the imaginary collective rights alleged to need protection outweigh the actual rights lost.
Haunted by the utmost fear of colonized –or merely power-stripped, I would add– peoples as Pankaj Mishra defines it, “the possibility of being swallowed up by the dominant alien culture in their midst,” terrified by the prospect of being degraded into a mere tourist attraction exploiting the scattered dots spread by their wreckage; their threatened and therefore unstable sense of identity, their acute awareness of its helpless vulnerability, their unrelenting anxiety of being overwhelmed by modernity and their own dependency, are overcompensated by clinging to narcissist grandiosity, from the official promotion in Modi’s India of bogus science teaching that the ancient Indians invented and used the atomic energy and flights, the Internet, and head transplants, as the Vedas demonstrate; to the more modest but not less officially promoted Catalan bogus historians who demonstrate that, from Shakespeare to Leonardo da Vinci, from Cervantes to Columbus, all were Catalan and wrote in Catalan. In both cases, a universal wicked conspiracy has deprived Indians and Catalans of their shining heirloom.
Those phenomena present themselves deeply degraded in their Catalan avatar, which is more complicated than interesting as Omar El Nayal observed. The others become instruments to be manipulated either into believers in the Catalan attitudes’ and aims’ righteousness, or into enemies to be feared and scorned at — those wicked Spaniards and their fifth column inside which poison good Catalans. A brew of bravado, contempt, and utter disregard and dismissal of thought and reason, let alone criticism, fuels a people truly convinced of its mission to offer themselves to the world as the ultimate model of goodness and moral superiority. No interest whatsoever in the real others, let alone empathy. Self-deceiving complacency rules, breeding one of Hannah Arendt’s roots of totalitarianism: “a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.”
Thinking beyond the group requires cognitive investment, whereas shortcuts provided by group thinking and its clues greatly ease the decision about whom to trust: the “us”, those who share the illusion of sharing the same values, griefs, desires, resentments, who define their identity on the boundary beyond which the “other” marauds, especially when people feel their survival is threatened and being attached to one’s group is the most secure; when identity and belonging may easily unleash the chauvinism at their core. Wars have erupted, Daniele Giglioli recalls, “under the pretext of establishing who is the greatest victim, who first became a victim, and who has been victimized the longest.” If a war broke out between Sweden and Denmark, it might be fought over which country is the more compassionate and places the greatest weight on individual responsibility and sacrifice for the greater good of the equally compassionate majority.
III Narcissism, Cognitive Dissonance, and Victimhood
From the pro-independence point of view, Catalonia is a great country. Period. If things don’t add up that way it must be because of Spain. Being special, the paramount good guys, other nations will rush to recognize their moral worth by crowning a sovereign Catalonia instead of the ethically bankrupt, inferior Spain. Narcissist nations in decline are prone to indulge themselves in moral-high-ground-boosting, and they often get it by harming themselves to relish both in victimhood and in fantasizing their foes may be harmed the more.
A striking example of this narcissist grandiosity is the Catalan centuries-old and never-ending threat to opt for independence unless getting a better deal from Spain, a crude blackmail never recognized as such but disguised as a demand for concessions. The implications are clear: their very membership is a favor granted by the Catalans to Spain, and independence is not a real aim but a mere instrument of extortion, often to redress a Spanish balance heavily tilted against Catalan interests, which is the lot of every vanquished people as the Romans learnt the hard way from Brennus.
This inflated sense of self has been always built on by the unionist camp arguing that Catalonia should stay in order to run Spain, to lead and not to leave, since its superior know-how, moral supremacy, and mystical europeanity since Carolingian times, make Catalonia the natural leader of a half-African, Central Asian “Españistán,” retarded Spain — words that they utter with a casualness that speaks volumes. No Catalan unionist ever wonders whether 47 million Spanish citizens really want to be led by 7.5 million of Catalans, with a GDP less than a fifth of all the Kingdom of Spain combined; no Catalan unionist media, let alone politician, ever ventures throughout Spain to find out. It would require a genuine interest in others, and empathy, that narcissists, independentists and unionists alike, utterly lack.
Instead of recognizing and actually tackling Catalonia’s growing irrelevance, a fact known to all but treated as taboo and never discussed, people are fed one appeal to grandiosity after another by a willfully blind media subservient to self-serving politicians, unionist and independentist alike, continuously coddling Catalans with the sort of half-baked truths that make Spain look awful and, by implication, Catalonia superior.
The remedial communitarian placebo is to reduce this dissonance by actively avoiding situations likely to exacerbate it, to ignore or reject any conflicting information, to seek support from like-minded mates, to coerce others into persuasion, to put their trust blindly on caring leaders, gnomic Mandarins, and wise Brahmins, and to discredit and silence any dissenter as an enemy of the people, a ward-worth resentment-driven mad traitor.
Even a deeply entrenched frame of mind cannot fully insulate itself from reality, though, so cognitive dissonance comes to rescue their wobbling sanity in order to provide some consistency between their grandiose self-image and their grim reality — the age-old tricks to lessen psychological tension and distress experienced by people who simultaneously hold two contradictory beliefs, confronted every so often by new information that conflicts with one, the other, or both.
The remedial communitarian placebo is to reduce this dissonance by actively avoiding situations likely to exacerbate it, to ignore or reject any conflicting information, to seek support from like-minded mates, to coerce others into persuasion, to put their trust blindly on caring leaders, gnomic Mandarins, and wise Brahmins, and to discredit and silence any dissenter as an enemy of the people, a ward-worth resentment-driven mad traitor. Hence the authoritarian mindset they need to save the ebbing nation’s disappearance, and the steady refusal of any critical thinking whatsoever. When their beliefs are confronted with contradicting evidence, they encapsulate inside childish inanity, trample logic under their feet, and turn again and rend you.
“Direct and indirect warnings are sent,” Gul Bhukari recalls, “but the message is always the same: Shut up. Clearly, dissent somehow threatens them; challenging the official narrative threatens them.. Abduct me, bully me, chase me out, but… I won’t shut up.” Repression, exclusion, and mediocrity become the only game in town to ensure survival, retreating further from an epistemic bubble, which might shield them from exposure to unwelcome information and arguments, to an echo chamber, where other voices are heard but undermined. That is the final stage of sectarianism, because, as C. Thi Nguyen states: “mere exposure to evidence can shutter an epistemic bubble, but may actually reinforce an echo chamber… Escape from an echo chamber may require a radical rebooting of one´s belief system.”
The more a stubborn reality tears down their ludicrous beliefs, the more they protect themselves from such reality retreating into their sectarian bubble, utterly impervious to facts and reason. People whose epistemology relies on rejecting both truth and objective facts, cling solely to the narrative of their leaders, which becomes reality by sheer repetition to overwhelm, overwork, and overburn the brains of those whose preexisting beliefs secretly desire that all those lies were actually true. Hence, they are true. An illusory truth. The prevalence of absurdities would not last, even with all the never silent propaganda upholding them, if a significant portion of the country were not willing to believe and participate, without their readiness to suspend rational thinking in exchange of warm belonging into a parallel universe of national bliss.
Leon Festinger noted that each stage of failure only reinforces the pre-existing beliefs of the group, because failure cannot, must not, will never be blamed on the sacred cause itself, which begets the group as such. Therefore, its members compete in zeal to identify the culprits: themselves, insufficiently steadfast or suffering enough to merit salvation; or the others, those sabotaging unbelievers who only deserve to fully bear the wrath from the good people in order to cleanse the community by becoming the scapegoats who temporarily restore order, which is attained from ritualistically staged human sacrifices — sometimes, not-so-symbolic rituals as well. The more a belief is collectively held with deep conviction and has triggered hard-to-undo actions, the more likely people will become more fervent believers when confronted with incontrovertible evidence.
A victimary process, Pierpaolo Antonello et al. write, “is the missing link between the animal world and the human world, the principle that explains the humanization of primates,” when an endless stream of blood begins by its first pouring over the abhorrent, since its repetition redresses the equally endless nefarious transgressions which the sacrificial lamb is invoked to heal. For René Girard, “It is the first symbolic sign ever invented by these hominids. It is the first moment in which something stands for something else. It is the ur-symbol.” The first form of social attachment, and its hidden gist.
Human brains have limited cognitive skills, and can easily be overloaded to became unable to distinguish fact from fiction, truth from lie. A falsehood becomes true if they have been exposed to it previously, if it confirms strongly-held convictions, if they are emotionally whipped up by it, receive it from multiple sources, and hear it continuously spread. The “illusory truth effect” bias sprouts from being exposed to a lie repeatedly, even from those who debunk it. When hunting the Snark the Bellman knew, “What I tell you three times is true.” Zia Haider Rahman explains it deftly: “Their kind of self-belief seems essential to survive what would otherwise assail them as wave after wave of cognitive dissonance, statements of one thing while knowing the opposite. Surely the dissonance would drive them mad so that the only way through it all is for them actually to believe what they say.”
The cult-like devotion which their leaders are surrounded by ensures there is no such thing as a bad decision, because “for the true believer the pain caused by even the worst policy is merely proof of certain gains just around the corner,” as Sadanand Dhume writes about Narendra Modi, echoing Hannah Arendt’s “Instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.” They trust blindly anything which comes from their side, and just as blindly refuse everything which comes from the other side as biased, false, evil. No regrets when things go awry, as they surely will, they always find an explanation founded on blaming scapegoats whilst they continue to refuse thinking and learning. Knowledge and belonging have always been at odds because both trade in the same commodity humans badly strive for: Meaning.
The next stage, to silence, blackmail, coopt, and convince the unbelievers, is even easier: How many people are willing to risk their career, economy, family and friends, their social standing to think for themselves, to endure opprobrium by breaking with groupthink, to stand alone if necessary? How many are strong enough to suffer being treated as traitors, moral wrecks, swivel enemies of the people on the receiving end of obloquy? To be ostracized and become a scapegoat has never been a career prospect nor a rallying cry for the many, and never will. There are some individuals who do not embrace lies even if they help the larger truth they uphold, whose adherence to truth and dignity overcomes their reluctance before the likely outcome their values lead them to. But not so many.
Countries so hopelessly lost in themselves enter a loop where powerlessness feeds delusions which empower impotence-boosting fantasies, with no end in sight while slowly fading into oblivion. Expect nothing thereafter from those nations. They are doomed to depend on the kindness of strangers.
It is therefore no surprise that Catalonia’s independence aim has stalled in a quagmire of wishful thinking, a Marxian “sigh of the oppressed creature” that is both heart-warming and ineffectual: a substantial part of the Catalan people and their mainstream politicians and Brahmins do not want independence, they just desire it as a gift that will be bestowed upon them by a warm-hearted international community which will force Spain to allow a legally-binding referendum on independence — a sheer nonsense that can only be explained by sophisticated theoretical constructs such as Lévi-Strauss’ floating signifier, “in itself void of meaning and thus apt to receive any meaning”, and Lacan’s objet-petit-a: “the recoil imposed on everyone, in so far as it involves terrible promises, by the approach of jouissance as such.” Those Catalans wish independence but don’t want it, they actually want the moral supremacy provided by victimhood, the oxytocin-fuelled dream of their repression, to lose themselves in an endless scopophilic drive to the captivity of the function of desire itself, which perseveres for its mere sake “through which will be revealed the gamut of the object in its — pregenital — relation to the demand of the — post-genital — Other.”
All those peoples and groups that modernity and globalization have left behind crave to be victims and relish that feeling: the ultimate proof that they are right and good, to attain Giglioli’s mysterium iniquitatis, the elevated status of those who have been aggressed (or would like to be, or pretend to have been.) Assuming a real or fake narrative of victimhood and martyrdom, thinking about themselves as a besieged, beleaguered people, is the beginning of a slippery slope toward retribution and revenge against an enemy who victimizes them; which in the right scenario, led by rulers who spread and inflame passions and who wield the unbridled powers that only a mighty State may provide, becomes the best means to justify themselves to abolish moral boundaries, in order, Fintan O’Toole points out, to “inure people to the acceptance of acts of extreme cruelty. Like hounds, people have to be blooded. They have to be given the taste for savagery. Fascism does this by building up the sense of threat from a despised out-group. This allows the members of that group to be dehumanised. Once that has been achieved, you can gradually up the ante, working through the stages from breaking windows to extermination.”
When paranoia meets jingoism, a pervasive shadow of looming harm threatens anyone of being drawn before the court of death: “Many people are excited by this kind of exercise of power, its unchecked quality, and they want in their own lives to free up their aggressive speech and action without any checks: no shame, no legal repercussions,” is Judith Butler’s reminder about the populist leaders as the embodiment of their followers’ projections, of their uninhibited will of destruction that intensifies and accelerates the freedom of sadism after constraints are lifted — when people submit to the sheer, spectacular effrontery of their leaders and deceit, malice, recklessness work as an attracting allure: the attributes of power itself.
IV Genes and Human Agency
The most nutritious soil for the authoritarian populism to take root and grow are people who are already used to the stasis of living tightly held together by means of a hegemonic communitarianism. The dynamics and functions which have led different peoples to that barren plateaus are as varied as their history and prevailing ideologies and social arrangements determine, in a process with neither a subject nor a goal, in an Althusserian neither empiricist nor idealist development.
One peculiar trait that suffuses the communitarianism of the Catalans, as it is imposed by a centuries-old social set of incentives, rewards, and punishments, is a collective mindframe which is both extremely risk-averse and unwilling to grab power in a confrontation with Spain that, even if peaceful, would drive them out of their comfort zone of moral supremacy as the paramount good and smiling guys and gals: Europeans, civilized, unlike the Spaniards.
The very communitarian mindset developed by them to survive as a distinct people under the centuries-old authoritarian Spain until the 1970s prevents them from getting anything done in a global, meritocratic world, let alone gaining independence. Their mentality is an effective and resilient tool to ensure the survival of a non-independent nation in hard times. However, once it reigns as the mainstream ideology that permeates and rules over society, once it becomes the limits within which individuals may think, it only allows survival — up to a point, for the time being.
The national narrative combines love for the motherland with grievances for its plight and recurrent re-enactments of its historical mistreatments and depredations, sometimes real but always inflated, and often largely imagined, at the hands of its historical enemies, dating back centuries. Deft leaders know how to stir up grievances to bind followers together with a sense of shared beliefs and endured harms, a recipe both to conquer hegemony and to become a sect — a ruling sect.
Their opponents become anti-national, any disagreement is branded as treason and sedition to the self-anointed “community of the good”, impervious to any acknowledgement of errors lest not compromise the community’s sense of righteousness, whose goodness arouses a deep feeling of warm protectiveness among its members from the outrages against a people that, like all peoples think about themselves, is uniquely and exceptionally fine.
Communitarianism, especially when its implicit populism and authoritarianism thrive, needs to be believed as all-encompassing to efficiently herd the people. The coterie-anointed enablers, with all the taxpayers’ money, media, and GONGOs controlled by the government and the institutions, define who belongs to the “good people” and who does not, treat dissent as blasphemy, launch campaigns of lies and slanders and unleash relentless assaults against anyone who dares to disagree or tries to hold them accountable. Their aim is to bully everyone into submission, to reduce everyone to silence, and to expel the dissenters, physically or symbolically, to the foreign foe they secretly work for –be it Pakistan, Spain, Soros, Brussels, or whatever– in order to expose them as traitors. As Jan-Werner Müller has noted, populists do not like having to cope with any form of political opposition or constraint: “when ruling, [populists] refuse to recognize any opposition as legitimate. The populist logic also implies that whoever does not support populist parties might not be a proper part of the people — always defined as righteous and morally pure… [their] idea of the single, homogenous, authentic people is a fantasy.” Their opponents become anti-national, any disagreement is branded as treason and sedition to the self-anointed “community of the good”, impervious to any acknowledgement of errors lest not compromise the community’s sense of righteousness, whose goodness arouses a deep feeling of warm protectiveness among its members from the outrages against a people that, like all peoples think about themselves, is uniquely and exceptionally fine.
Karen Stenner points out the innate predisposition in humans, prevalent in around one third of them, to prize oneness and sameness whilst fearing diversity and complexity “manifests most powerfully under conditions of perceived threat… especially when losing a sense of shared identity and beliefs… When they’re induced to fear that [their valued ends], and the social arrangements that serve them, might be at risk.” That is the right time for authoritarians to thrive and impose their will over the third of people “who seek out diversity, complexity, novelty, new and exciting experiences”, another innate human predisposition. Both make evolutionary sense to ensure survival of a human group: if too many within a group refuse novelties, such as a new source of food or individuals met for the first time, the group may starve or the gene pool may dry up. Too many people striving for novelty and the group risks poisoning itself trough inedible food or hidden infection from deadly pathogens which people who are met for the first time may carry. “For group selection to work,” Steven Phelps explains, “the decisions made by the individuals, which behavioral ecologists regard as ultimately selfish, must somehow align with the differential success or survival of groups.” It looks like a kind of Adam Smith’s trade and market, where billions of exchanges and refusals, of trials and errors, automatically channel self-interested decisions toward group gains, “and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society.”
Kathryn Paige Harden pithily and rightly expresses that “Insisting that DNA matters is scientifically accurate; insisting that it is the only thing that matters is scientifically outlandish.” Nevertheless, the ages-old theological dichotomy of determination versus free will, which permeates the Abrahamic religions, raises the predestination head once again to dismiss human agency, to reduce it to the mere outworking of god’s decision (or genes’ decision, in its modern incarnation). The more individuals are told by both religious and secular determinists that they are no more than puppets whose strings are manned by a higher, hidden master, the more the fear of the Mad Scientist skyrockets, and any linkage between genetics and human agency is threatened to be rocked by both the Scylla of determinism and the Charybdis of the Doctors Frankenstein and Moreau.
It is a secularized religious view that demeans the ingenuity of animals and humans in order to submit them to anything to be conceived as mightier than themselves, provider of meaning and purpose, be it god or her modern avatars, nature or genes, often defined by loose metaphors; a residual internalization from religious concepts which must be spotted and torn down to free the human reasoning from the hard-wired preconceptions of a past that is not even past; and an immanent obstacle to scientific thought badly needing a Bachelard’s epistemological rupture from the very aforementioned dichotomy itself, because in a structure, a system, a George Eliot’s “web [where] one cannot disentangle a strand without touching all the others,” that causality-naive dichotomy has the same place than god in Laplace’s description of the universe: “I had no need of that hypothesis.”
The prevalence of authoritarians, as those basic but malleable orientations are constantly in motion whitin the individual, tips the societal balance toward stagnation, decay, and, ultimately, death. In a threat-filled society, though, they gain the upper hand, making things even worse than they actually are, because, as Linda K. Skitka et al. have pointed out, scarcity of resources coupled with the higher cognitive load posed by an increasing awareness of deadly hazards is a powerful incentive to turn the liberal-minded into authoritarians, upending Karen Stenner’s equilibrium: “Communities with a good balance of people who seek out diversity, complexity, novelty, new and exciting experiences etc., and those who are disgusted by and averse to such things, avoid them, and tell the others to do likewise, tend to thrive and prosper in human evolution.” A delicate, invisible equilibrium between xenophobia and xenophilia that permeates all social arrangements, like dust in the air that only a beam of sun makes suddenly visible, and all-pervading as Gilbert and Sullivan’s Private Willis sings:
Nature always does contrive
That every boy and every gal
That’s born into the world alive
Is either a little Liberal
Or else a little Conservative
Those universally human phenomena are colored by the prevailing mindframe in any given society. In the Catalan case, the cult of victimhood and the desire to be defeated lead to a cherished wish which warms their hearts, with none of the strong will and clear-eyed attitude that are needed to make wishes come true. Catalans badly lack both of them and regularly vote for spine-less run-of-the-mill politicians that assuage their fears and moral virtues delivering nothing, in all good conscience for them all, people, politicians, and Brahmins alike, to warmly share wound-licking communitarian therapy sessions.
Spain quickly saw and called their bluff. As a result, the pro-independence Catalans upped the stakes to keep their farce going and applied a well-tested political strategy: to delay everything until a millenarianist Badiou-inspired event brings independence as a gift bestowed by the international community, sparing themselves from a full-blown confrontation with Spain. “We go slowly because we go far away”, they profess, in a routinized version of their self-proclaimed goodness, when inquisitorial zeal and millenarianist excitement fade but mutual surveillance, ostentatious social control, and ceaseless activism thrive. When the belief in imminent independence is replaced by its endless, Arthurian pursuit.
A cargo-cult indeed, with all its trappings of worship of heroic ancestors who command to mimic modern rituals in order to surpass those proud domineering foreigners who oppress our people bringing about decline, as long as unanimity reigns crushing the non-believers — Xhosa´s amagogotya, the stingy-ones, those who hope not in the millenarianist promises and whose mere existence threatens to attract failure over the suffering, faithful, good people, who exert themselves in renewed fervor when way too often deadlines are moved, failures are ignored, fiascos are turned into clever moves of a secluded, secret, shrewd strategy, and unmitigated defeat is interpreted as empowering. Always unsullied by reality.
Unanimity only is what will renew the nation through sacrifice and expiation, and overcome a disappointing modernity upholding the ancestral values and natural hierarchies of faith and humility, endlessly reenacting past glorious defeats to conjure them into a millenarianist victory of the good ones — themselves. Independence, the sacred event that awaits on the faraway horizon, may descend over its beleaguered worshippers if only they summon it by invocation or incantation in umpteen performances of symbolic defiances and cheesy braggadocio by sanctimonious brutes who have become addicted to the ever increasing discharges of the bond-tightening oxytocin provided by the community of the faithful. That same oxytocin which supports bonding by love and kindness also fosters fear and hate towards those who are not “of our own”, who are not the “good people” as they are, especially in desperate times, when desperate measures are taken without meaningful opposition. Authoritarianism reigns unabated thereafter, nourished by submission, aggression, and conventionalism, as described by Bob Altemeyer:
1. A high degree of submissiveness to the authorities perceived to be established and legitimate in the society in which one lives.
2. A general aggressiveness directed against deviants, outgroups, and other people who are perceived to be targets according to established authorities.
3. A high degree of adherence to the traditions and social norms that are perceived to be endorsed by society and its established authorities and a belief that others in one’s society should be required to adhere to these norms.
Their hegemony boosts Madison’s “degree of depravity in mankind which requires a certain degree of circumspection and mistrust” to overwhelm those “other qualities in human nature which justifies a certain portion of esteem and confidence.” Times are ripe thereafter for the worst angels of human nature to come to the fore, constantly in need of fresh human victims to be sacrificed for the sake of the survival of the community: the greatest good. Merrily “destroying and devouring one another” in a prosaic, slow, bureaucratic buildup from drudgery to horror. Merely following orders.
V The Will of the People
Those who are invited to belong and become the people are encouraged to see themselves as simple, humble, true-hearted, devoted, and good, a self-image enabled by a self-righteous swagger and unswerving oafishness. Only one thing is needed to belong: you must blindly believe what the caring leaders say, let them protect you with their munificent wisdom. Then you will become part of the People: those who have the right to lay down the terms of national identity, the right to define who has rights and who has not, and in doing so to privilege themselves over others in a herrenvolk democracy in which they alone enjoy full citizenship rights and freedoms, founded in their everlasting cultural and political hegemony.
Decades of this diet have transformed Catalans into a perpetual kindergarten of carnivorous Hobbits, a baleful slapstick of simpletons who need to escalate disruptions of the constitutional and legal order to provoke Spain out of its senses. Their de-legitimation moves have taken an unmistakable Trumpian turn, a populist illiberal stance that upholds the people’s will as paramount, above laws and judges, and anoints their leaders as the embodiment of people’s will and therefore above so-called illegitimate laws and subservient judges.
In fact, the Catalan Parliament passed in 2017 a law called “Foundational of the Republic”, a provisional Constitution which establishes that the President of the Supreme and Constitutional Court will be appointed by the President of the independent Catalonia; all Judges will be appointed, investigated, and fired by a commission whose majority will be appointed by the Government, which is allowed to rule by decree about almost everything, including the fundamental rights until a proper Constitution is approved, if ever. None of those decrees can be appealed to the Council of Democratic Guarantees. No need of a higher majority in Parliament to decide about anything, including the Constitution itself. An unelected Social Constituent Forum would determine the Constitution, which the elected Parliament is only allowed to “juridically articulate” and whose contents cannot be reviewed, let alone annulled, by any Court, be it Catalan or international. This exemption from any judicial review covers any decision approved by that Parliament exercising its constituent power, too. A majority gives itself the power to indefinitely suspend rights and liberties.
A regime of elected dictatorship in a perpetual state of exception is established, throughly deprived of checks and balances; a bare-faced majoritarianist state which even goes far beyond the “unitary executive” and “total presidential authority” doctrines concocted by the American far-right jurists who serve under Trump. Not even Erdoğan has approved a law like this, nor Putin, in their rubber-stamp parliaments. An unbridled Carl Schmitt would be the legal and institutional Founding Father of the independent Catalonia the present ruling parties foretold.
An astonishing stand indeed that defies the very principles of rule-of-law and checks-and-balances, which sprouts from their campaigns to negate judicial review and denounce judges as mere Spanish government’s stooges and minions — the Catalan rulers and their supporters project unto others what they would do themselves, if only they could. One of those rulers candidly uttered before me few years ago: “If we controlled the judges, we would not need independence.”
This ruthless, unrelenting assault on truth, facts, reason, civic virtues, and their extreme partisanship while pretending to be the All, the People itself, empowers glib leaders who do not even care to disguise their aim to destroy whoever refuses to yield to their shifting whims.
Putting “the will of the people” above the law, attacking the judiciary, sowing scorn for experts and rational arguments, and bullying dissidents — authoritarian populism reigns unabated in Catalonia. Those ruling populists, from far-right to far-left, band together because they all share basic beliefs: they are against law’s constraints on the majority’s power; they delegitimize non-majoritarian institutions as obstacles to what they allege is the “Will of the People”; they transform democracy from an instrument of inclusion into one of exclusion; and they build an autocracy to expel those who dare to dissent unleashing against them their frenzied, angry, self-righteous people — “It is not the Emperor”, Ece Temelkuran writes, “who pushes you to the edge of the arena to become merely a dissassociated observer, but his subjects,” all those who, one small act at a time, have lost their integrity and blind themselves clinging to a not-so-well rationalized persona, who accept “the leader’s hypocrisy and inconsistency as a tactic performed for the good of his people.”
In Catalonia as in Turkey and elsewhere, criticizing the government becomes akin to despising the people, all opposition stymied by its own core illegitimacy. Populists in power practice “a slow rodent-like gnawing away of the values, freedoms and foundations of constitutional democracy — one rat bite at a time… And it’s all being done under the garb of electoral democracy,… [a] giant unassailable moral alibi for all things odious any government does — ‘We were duly elected by the people!’. ‘People’s mandate’ is still the conversation stopper, with the power to silence… A slow poison has been drip-dripped into the soul of the body politic. Of intolerance, the willing suspension of disbelief, the acceptance of subversion of institutions, the love for Hindutva strongmen, and deep dislike for the… ‘upstart Dalits’ trying to overturn the ordained caste structure.” The India that has been turned into a sectarian Hindutva by Narendra Modi, as described by Farah Naqvi, matches perfectly with the countries which uphold a ruling class whose ideology divides society between good people and traitors, where populist pandering politicians have rendered partisan any honest appraisal of fact, where believed lies lure and uplift both rulers and ruled to the god-like heights of changing the nature of reality itself, to become the master race once and for all in a mystical communion of proudly self-proclaimed dunces who are mired in an echo chamber where words first meant their opposite but now mean nothing. A gallimaufry of floating signifiers apt to be filled by any meaning that the scornful Humpty Dumpty who rules may fancy — To be master signifies that “you can make words to mean so many different things.”
Just one attitude matters, no need whatsoever to deliver any promise but to protect “us” from “them,” those vermin, cockroaches, rats, and hyenas which are barely human at all, be it the elites, the Jews, the liberals, the Muslims, the judges, the LGTBIQ+ people, the experts, the Blacks, the godless, the Whites, the migrants, the Browns, the bankers, the Hindus, the scientists, the poor, the Yellows, the educated, the Spaniards, the women, the rich, the Roma, the foreigners, the seculars, the journalists, the Christians, the globalists, the politicians, the queer, the odd, the different. The doubters. The doomsters. The gloomsters. The resentful traitors. Whoever is not like them, the good people, in any given time and in any given society. Depending on who’s talking, “them” can mean wildly different groups, because it is the distinction, the divide itself that matters to leaders who win followers for targeting whatever “them” may threaten “us.”
This ruthless, unrelenting assault on truth, facts, reason, civic virtues, and their extreme partisanship while pretending to be the All, the People itself, empowers glib leaders who do not even care to disguise their aim to destroy whoever refuses to yield to their shifting whims. George Packer sums up what their regimes accomplish: “A third of the country locked itself in a hall of mirrors that it believed to be reality; a third drove itself mad with the effort to hold on to the idea of knowable truth; and a third gave up even trying.”
Whence those paralyzing tropisms sprout the likely outcome for decades to come — a weird psychodrama, an extremely boring and acrimonious topsy-turvy parade of cranky Catalans and annoyed Spaniards, the latter unwilling to let Catalans decide by themselves what their country should be, the former endlessly enjoying pitying themselves whilst starving in a desperate hunger to be loved, like a tale told by a deranged Blanche DuBois, full of sound and sullies, signifying nothing.
VI What Is To Be Done?
If you — hypocrite lecteur, mon semblable, mon frère — are tempted to think your country will be spared by this spreading horror, to think “It can’t happen here”, think again. There have been many harbingers: from Serbia’s Milošević and Karadžić to Italy’s Berlusconi, Turkey’s Erdoğan, Poland’s Kaczyński brothers, India’s Modi, Russia’s Putin, Israel’s Netanyahu, Venezuela’s Chávez, Catalonia’s Puigdemont and Junqueras, Thailand’s Shinawatra, Hungary’s Orbán, and so on and so forth. Few analysts realized it was a trend and a wave, so those sinister clowns were mainly dismissed with a wave of the hand as local crackpots of consequence only for the hapless countries that had fallen under their spell. A whiff of chauvinist condescension was part of the lot: you know, what can you expect from those retarded, half-civilized countries, prone to dictatorships and civil wars?
I began to sense something was happening with global consequences in the Nineties, faced with Berlusconi, Milošević and Karadžić. Perhaps my openly stated rebuke of Francoist ideology when I was a child, for which I was punished accordingly, and my clandestine militancy against the dictatorship when I was a teen, by which I risked torture or worse, had sharpened my antennae. Although I suspected that there was more to those leaders than nutty craziness, I lacked the conceptual categories needed to comprehend them, until I encountered in 2012 what smart and brave Indian analysts were writing about Narendra Modi and his Bharatiya Janata Party’s steady rise to power, and I started joining the dots which linked all those disparate countries, leaders, narratives, and policies: from Modi’s Gujarat to Mas’ Catalonia.
Now there is nowhere to wait out the tsunami, even the former cities upon the hill, once beacons of liberty, have been engulfed by Brexit and Trump. Therefore, attentive reader, send not to know for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.
Rely on the acute awareness of outsiders, those who recognize the tempest that churns below the surface because their mere existence hangs by a thread and they dread to become, as always, the first victims.
Pay attention to Aatish Taseer: “All over the old non-West, as well as in Western Europe and America, the symbols of belonging — race, religion, language — are being repurposed for a confrontation between what David Goodhart has referred to as the “somewheres” and the “anywheres,” the rooted and the rootless. I, with no tribe or caste, no religion or country, have had nowhere to go but to the cities of the West, where I hoped to wait out the storm. But, as my break with India acquired a cold new finality, exile turning into asylum, I could not help but ask whether any harbor would survive the destructive wrath of what may be coming for us all.”
Tu le connais, lecteur, ce monstre délicat. That is not enough, though. Speak out, rise up, and fight back. Do not just interpret the world: the point is to change it.
Rely on the acute awareness of outsiders, those who recognize the tempest that churns below the surface because their mere existence hangs by a thread and they dread to become, as always, the first victims.
“We would do well,” Zia Haider Rahman warns, “to listen to those at the margins, the minorities, the immigrants, for it is they who watch most closely, they who have most to fear, for they know that theirs is the door that will receive the first knock. So many dots that need connecting by people who fail to connect them. Connect the dots and the picture emerges. The oppressed always connect the dots. They are the dots.”
Rely on the daily acts of integrity and kindness of all the common people who neither believe nor difuse the lies, who act like Solzhenitsyn said in his 1970 Nobel lecture: “The simple step of a simple courageous man is not to partake in falsehood,… Let that enter the world, let it even reign in the world — but not with my help.”
Rely on those who know what an authoritarian regime means, those who fought and battle, those who won and fail. We will fight the menace of tyranny. If necessary for years. If necessary alone. We have already passed through that, this ain’t our first time at the rodeo.We shall never surrender. And we will win. Whatever the odds. Whatever it takes.
Alfons López Tena
Acknowledgment and Dedication
This essay would not have been possible without the encouragement, suggestions, insights, corrections, and kind guidance from Steven M Phelps and Zia Haider Rahman, and their example of intellectual rigor and moral compass. An undeserved gift as all true gifts are.
To Steven M Phelps, creator of knowledge, purveyor of meaning.
To Zia Haider Rahman, il miglior fabbro.
