The sentence “Groups were being formed.” formed me. In German it goes thus: “Es bildeten sich Gruppen.” The sentence is Karl Kraus’ leitmotiv in “The last days of mankind.” If a day in mankind translates to a century in human years, maybe it’s a book about the third last day of mankind, the day culminating in the first world war. I was shaped by this sentence because it connects my instinctive autistic hatred for any and each group to the breakdown of what, for some reason, we call ‘our humanity’. Karl Kraus called himself “der Nörgler am Schreibtisch” (which I translate freely to “Mr. Grumpy at his writing desk”) and it’s time for me to re-identify with him. It is time to do that as this may well be the last day of mankind in which groups are re-formed (one of them is called ‘Reform UK’ in what has to be an ultimate act of self-satire) under the banners of what led to the second to last day of mankind. And so we have a right wing Spanish politician proclaiming Mexico did not exist before Spain invaded it. Or the right wing Dutch politician calling for using even more force against Gazans who try to migrate to the Netherlands than the force that is applied to them in Gaza. Let the absence of a left wing stupidity here not mislead you; such absence is only due to the absence of a left wing in our present Western world of protect-our-privilege-we-must. Here goes: this Mr. Grumpy hits his keyboard.
My whining has to start with a word I (thought I) coined several years - and blog sites - back: the selectorate. The meaning I attributed to what I thought was my word, was of a process of selecting those who could be elected in such a way that voting didn’t matter anymore, since whomever you could elect was already selected to be a type of person bound to sustain the very process that selected him. The group-forming example I often thought of was this: let us imagine that kissing ass is an integral part of this selection process. Then whomever comes out on top will have kissed ass and will require his (this is an intentional use of the masculine pronoun) ass to be kissed in recompense for his ass-kissing of the past. Kissing ass will be a more important feature in selecting leaders than any policy opinion whatsoever. A challenge to this example could lie in positing the emergence of a leader having the policy opinion that ass-kissing should not matter in the selection of leaders. He obviously can’t voice the opinion overtly at the beginning of his career as this would be incompatible with himself kissing ass. He could, however, conceivably, keep it to himself until he was selected as leader, to unpack and implement it in one swift move. Unfortunately, the ‘conceivably’ in the previous sentence is used ungrammatically as the rest of the sentence is, in fact, inconceivable. For one thing, in abolishing the ass-kissing our hypothetical - but counterfactual - leader wouldn’t be able to require his ass to be kissed any longer. But - not being able to rule on his own - he does need to rely on others to sustain his power long enough to execute this new policy. Alas it was the ass-kissing that kept the whole process sustainable. In abolishing it he has abolished himself as a conceivable leader. So, logic has it that a runner-up challenges him. This runner-up will oust the counterfactual leader swiftly, and abolish all his policies. The new - and very factual leader - will proclaim ass-kissing is a natural element in any group-forming procedure and he (still he) will conclude: “There is no alternative!”.
Maybe you find this too bleak an outlook on our fine democratic procedures. Maybe you like to dismiss it as coming from a typical Mr. Grumpy hitting his keyboard. Might I then suggest to change ass-kissing in the above paragraph with being male, being white or being rich? Be fair: your objection to my outlook will now shrink to the meager “I know change comes slow, but it does come eventually”. And my retort would be: ‘But does it, really?’. Don’t we have a male, white, millionaire leading the world based on proclaiming it is natural to be self-serving and explicitly asking all others to kiss his ass? And you might say this is just an ‘accident de parcours’, but is it really? Doesn’t he succeed in selecting ass-kissers to run for office? Does he not succeed in dominating the media? Does he not succeed in rallying people around him because “at least he dares to say things as they really are”? If you allow me a short retour to Kraus, one of the things that got him worked up in grumpiness was journalism. And here we re-encounter the idea of the media as the 4th pillar of democracy and I have to call, as Kraus called it, bullshit. Because what do the media do? They help form groups that don’t question themselves. For instance, a group of privileged Westerners protecting democracy because it organizes dissent in a civilized way. The thing that is then ‘said as it really is’, is that Western privilege can only be protected by increasing military budgets and decreasing social security budgets. The thing that is not said but that also really is, is that we can only keep the rest of the world down by doubling down on our Western democratic superiority and form a group of praetorian - empire and emperor-protecting - guards around it (no real left wing in sight).
The best defense of ‘pensée unique’ is that of organizing the semblance of dissent. Just like the best defense of structural ass-kissing is that of organizing the semblance of an option not to kiss ass. And this, my friends, is what Western democracy has become: the fig leaf for the status quo in which the privileged defend their privilege without having to expose the phallic hypocrisy of it/them all. Ancient Greece and Rome over and over again. The actual meaning of selectorate theory is the game theory of what leaders need to do - towards those selecting them - to retain their leadership. It likewise offers a bleak outlook on democracy as it functions only insofar the rules of the game are not rigged. My selectorate idea is both more damning and leaves open a truly better future - if we accept that we need to leave behind us the very idea that leadership and truth are the outcomes of some game, that we need to form groups around ideas and that democracy and science are a set of rules organizing dissent in a way that leads to the most beneficial result for all. It is more damning since it concludes that any group-building process leads to ass-kissing and privilege-protection, not because the game is rigged but because the ‘games’ language game creates the idea of winners and losers. It is that idea that corrupts all of it. It leaves open a better future because, as V. F. Cordova has it, there is nothing natural or necessary in building groups that dissent and view themselves somehow as the holders of the keys to civilization. The alternative exists and it is simply that of growing to realize that you are yourself formed as a part of overlapping and non-exclusive groups.
Think about that: not individuals forming groups arguing about which group is right but rather individuals being formed as part of groups trying to fruitfully coexist. Each individual being a unique cohabitation of various groups, there is no purity. (And make no mistake about it: it is purity that always is the very essence of the ass-kissing game.) A realization of one’s, necessary, impurity is liberating one’s self of the tyranny of needing to think that one needs to make the best of one’s self. Instead, one just starts making the best of it. Less ambition, more room for life. Cordova stresses a difference between raising children the American way and the native-American way. The former is all about discipline, about sitting still and performing to the very best standards. The latter is about exploring, trial and error and creating your own standards. The former is about uniformity. The latter is diversity. For this Mr. Grumpy to see a way forward, it is necessary to call into question the basis of our civilization: its education system. It is a system that ensures groups are always being formed. And that convinces individuals of the necessity of forgetting the groups their individuality is part of; that convinces them to go transcend the boundaries of their own groupie-ness. It is a system that tries to establish the empire of the super-ego and that discards (as human fossil fuels!) all those unable to live up to the ideal of the autonomous individual that sets the law for himself (masculine pronoun because this is the essence of the toxic masculinity that is - alas - available to all genders). Call into question, not discard. There’s no way back to times of pure nativity. Just the realization that what we believe was our biggest break-through was in fact also our worst rabbit hole. And that it is our worst rabbit hole because it is our biggest break-through: in the emancipation of the individual, we are left with the risk of individuals that long for groups and that form (or re-form) them. That is the burden that we carry as beings who are formed as part of a human group: how can we be human without destroying humanity?