Part 1: The Death Of the Citizen
It is no coincidence that it is Thymos (that spirited side of the soul which deals with the character traits necessary for virtuous acts, such as courage) which Fukuyama sees both as the problem for the end of history; and biotechnics. Surprisingly to people who don’t actually read Fukuyama, he does refer to an obstacle for liberal democracy of which Thymos is central in. Thymos designates an innate impulse which incorporates many psychological and philosophical categories, such as rage, recognition, resentment, yet it also—hence the reason it is significant to bio-technics—speaks to our sense of integrity which is central to our ontological awareness concerning what we are.
The thymotic psyche is that which tells a people that enslavement is worse than death and humiliation is worse than physical pain. In this sense its common designation as the ‘spirited’ side of the Platonic soul makes sense—not because it has anything to do with the immaterial spirit of Christian transcendentalism—but because it is what sets us apart from mere animalistic instinctual desire and from calculated fight/flight responses. It is the aspect of ourselves which puts an ontological conception of man over the mere biological preservation of man.
And although, according to Plato, spirit(or thymos) must be responsive to reason and should not overpower it, we should also note that reason needs thymos (or spirit) to properly reign in the appetitive desires, stopping them taking over and destroying the soul 1). In fact, man’s capacity for heroism and war shows these things are often in tension with each other. So, what can we say about the era of copying; the last man; the last MAN, not the last life form? The ‘last man’ is one who defined by his thymotic deficit. No religion, nation, glorious mythological deeds, or now even historical progress gives him a grounding to strive beyond his mere biological self preserving instincts’, or in other words, he lacks the opening to distinguish himself as more than an inheritor of a pre-established security-obsessed blueprint of progress. One inherits assets, but spirit is claimed, we could say.
Concerning the struggle-component to the condition for virtue—yes, of course we have been overwhelmed with the ‘post war’ eras moralistic horror of the irrationality and ‘barbarism’ of the blood thirstiness of the past—yet only because we cannot grasp the ontological disaster which far outweighs the squeamishness of men growing up in gated communities. So, what will force this technocratic ‘post war’ homoeconomicus to rethink his relationship to his prudish aversion to (perhaps necessity) of an endurance of violence, pain, boredom and death, as conditions for something higher and greater?
The face of bio-technical alteration of human beings is the only thing to which (especially with the death of religion) operates as the window to think through the stupidity of a world so entrenched in an obsession with both mimicry and consumption; not to mention a world willing to sacrifice itself for the sake of security and efficiency. But in what sense are we at risk of an unworthy sacrifice? We hear so much about mankind’s irrational inability to put aside supposedly petty qualms in order to unite or overcome the threat which something like climate change or nuclear war poses. Yet, this call to ‘survive’, is just a re-affirmation of biological self preservation, and ends there. Where is the call to ‘survive’ the onslaught of bio-technologies?; as in, to survive, ontologically, and not just biologically? This would require us to rethink our very definition of survival.
Now, of course our biological drives to survive are not so easily separated from some transcendent ethical duty. Some abstract moral duty prioritized over the material reality of biological life is not what I am simply arguing; nor is this manner of thinking any longer able to stir any sort of ethically substantial practice and action. However, the prioritization of human nature which neglects thymos is inevitably going to be something which overlooks the ontological threats of scientism and bio-technics in order to further entrench a sort of appetitive primacy, in which protection from threats (in the clear cut sense of pain, death and poverty) are the only lenses we are allowed to make grand speeches in the name of survival! We should re-encounter death which exceeds the loss of biological life.
Hobbesian Hangover
And so, we should look deeper into this primacy of appetitive survival over all other concerns. Hobbes is perhaps most guilty of designating the self preservation modes of human anthropology as being exclusively a concern against a merely biological death —and not other forms of death (like enslavement or domicide). Hobbes sees enslavement as coming primarily from our own conflict-prone nature. Freedom is then assumed to be a task of restraint from the psycho-political motivation of violent conflict.
In the theme of restrain and endurance, we can find the answer to Hobbes’ theoretical flaws. I assume the reader is at least superficially familiar with Hobbes to follow the following line of argumentation, but in case not, I will point out exactly which aspect I refer to. Hobbes ultimately suggests a move from state of nature to civil order, all in a justifiable spirit to create some sense of psycho-political grounding on which we can aim for higher human tasks without having to constantly get stuck in a mode of predicting the potentiality of others who might destroy all that we hope to achieve. For example, to build a home if one can simply tear it down. To love other people if one can just take their life and send you into a spiralling blood feud against their killer.
Fatalism is perhaps one of the very real problems Hobbes’ philosophy attempts to surpass; and his philosophy deals predominantly with our predictive capacities of which fatalism corresponds to (predicting disaster, pain, loss, revenge ect.) Hobbes’ state of nature can be seen—not just as violent or disruptive—but as overwhelmingly predictive (like Nicias). We simply don’t have the capacity to constantly pre-empt the potential harm of others, conflict, death, destruction, and achieve something of a higher civilization at the same time; or at least this became the predominant idea which intellectuals responding to the English civil war, began to assert. We can assume this premise is in fact true. The kinds of hopelessness and fatalism which stems from a total loss of any social stability, cooperation, trust and an honour in one’s word, is a very real threat which we couldn’t blame a soul for wanting to be rid of. The problem lies, rather, in the conceptualization of potentially destructive possibilities—and how they are practically addressed. Which part of this violent potentiality became the fixation of the liberal mind?
Hobbes categorized the thymotic impulses of glory in the same category as the conditions for a state of nature. They are 1) Competition 2) Diffidence (insecurity) and 3) Glory. Competition is the most animalistic. It simply refers to resource limitations and competition of fulfilling basic material needs inside a limited physical space. Diffidence is again not exclusively human but exaggerated by the rational superiority of human intellect to predict many moves in advance. An animal makes fight or flight calculations just like a more intelligent human, but humans ability to perceive so many moves in advance, means that a perpetual predictive violence which simply reinforces itself and takes hold. The security states of the post 9/11 era where blowing up jihadi recruitment centres which then only operates as the very motivation for the further recruitment of Jihadis, exemplified this perfectly with its label ‘forever wars’, and ‘pre-emptive strikes’.
Lastly, glory, which is exclusively human in its greater meaning, is what gives humans the capacity to fight beyond their fear of death and pain for more than the fulfilment of material or biological needs, but for conceptual and deeply intimate feeling of what is right, and not to mention a sense of honour, the necessity of a sense of justice and a recognition of the legitimacy of how we exist within that order.
This ‘maniacal’ disposition, Hobbes began the liberal nullification of, by way of the modern state whom were to hold exclusive rights of using force to the ends of justice. He even went so far to believe Greek Homeric texts shouldn’t be accessible to the general public through English translations (which ironically he was involved with), due to the kind of glory-seeking and disobedient behaviour common to its characters.
Hobbes never sought a simple legal monopoly of physical force to the state, but this legal monopoly was itself the product of the psycho-political alienation of glory, of which meant that anybody curious enough to step over the borders from the state nature to civil order, had to leave their glory seeking impulses at the door. The question is, with the replacement of the state itself with algorithms and ‘experts’ who are loyal to no particular people or nation, this monopoly of glory-seeking justice to the state, becomes more of an extinction of the dignity of human beings, as a whole, rather than a safe-keeping among a central authority.
Hobbes could never predict the nature of modern mass media, drone strikes, algorithms, technocratic multinational institutions and so on. And so, the deeply human character to glory—at least for him—was never at such risk of extinction (rather indefinite political suppression with the exception of a central authority). Yet, for us, when states of perpetual fear take hold, when algorithms and data collection begin to replace human judgement, when ‘leaders’ become so good at immunizing themselves from the consequences of their ‘decisions’, is it not glory which is exactly the thing which holds onto something deeply redemptive and precious about human nature?
Crisis in Leadership
The state was, in fact, less of a secular replacement of a King and more of a commercial steward; a corporation of stewards whose job was never to lead but to exterminate the possibility of leadership, indefinitely. At least, this is what I would argue in light of recent political developments concerning the true nature of the state ; especially the true nature of the now common ‘emergency state’, which replaces leaders with crisis-managers, indefinitely; and so replaces the embodiment of a leader-moving-towards, for the sake of a ‘leader’ which simply averts risk.
This error which assumed leadership should be structured on the authority of having exclusive access to force, stems from how Hobbes’ view of restraint and endurance differ from the more nuanced classical view of restraint already outlined in Laches? (And certainly in Homer)
Thus the great failure in liberalism beginning with the creation of the Hobbesian distinction between a state of nature and a civil order—or the later bourgeois imperialistic notion of civilization vs barbarism—is in emphasizing the existence of human impulses towards glory as the main focus of the state of nature and not focusing on the predictive (like Nicias) faculty of human rationality which is both the self-preserving impulse and the pre-emptive aggressive (or controlling) psychology of security. After all, real glory requires one to control their self-preserving instincts— not just because it supposedly leads to ‘irrational’ displays of violent outbursts—but because a fair fight , for example, is degraded in its potential for proving a more courageous and honourable nature, if it reduces itself to some form of deceit, cheating, or overly efficient form of aggression reduced to superficial utility.
In fact, the popularity of cognitive psychology such as Steven Pinker, and a flowerily optimism which puts man’s technical and commercial innovation as the central focus of human beings capacity for cooperation which goes along with it, is largely just the current stage of an error deep at the heart of liberal modernity, where trust in mutual self interest which made trade—not just a practical but a moral good—was put in front of any expectation for cooperation based on honour3). After all, animals may cooperate (often in a herd like mentality) for the sake of mutual self interest, but only humans can act with honour which exceeds that self-interest. Our optimistic and progressive views about the technical and commercial basis for some form of human ‘evolution’ is underwritten by the destruction of the ontological distinction between humans and animals which honour signifies. In other words, at the heart of liberal modernity is the idea that cooperation is synonymous with trust in shared nature of appetite, rather than appeal to innate sense of justice.
Giving Honour to the Fall
I grew up on the coast of Southern Ireland. Given that the relatively small town was lacking in a lot of the typical facilities common in bigger places, many young people, particularly boys, spent their time in the ocean. Summer months were spent surfing and cliff jumping. Cliff jumping is quite literally just jumping from high up places into the ocean below. The ledges range from 10 to 50 feet. Something significant occurs when you are jumping off a new ledge for the first time (or even the 2nd 3rd and 4th time). You are told by somebody else where the exact right place to jump is (to avoid any rocks in the surrounding area). This person, normally a friend, was told by somebody else—maybe an older brother or older friend—who then jumps from the ledge, and tells you where to jump. He was likely told by somebody else and so on and so on.
When you jump, two things are occurring. The first is that you are overcoming instinctual self-preservation instincts which are screaming at you on a psycho-physiological level. Dizziness, nausea, mental images of what could go wrong ect. Yet, there is another force one can experience when looking down over the ledge, trying to force yourself to jump; something which is more than a cheap thrill. You are putting immense trust in the transmission of knowledge concerning where exactly to jump. If this knowledge is incorrect and for example, the water is not as deep as it should be, or if some hidden rock lies beneath, the jump quickly turns into a suicide attempt.
The need typical to young men to prove themselves to others, is too easily degraded to a stupid vanity or sheepish instinct to follow somebody else for the sake of it ‘unthoughtfully’. Parents often complain about their children and the kinds of ‘bad influences’ they acquire when they say ‘if HE jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?’. In this case, yes. Quite literally. And this is beauty of it as a ritual. By participating in the ritual, one is being more than simply initiated into a group. They are being initiated into a transmission of knowledge which is intimately embedded in a particular place. One can’t attain this knowledge through a book, or a map or a click, but only a jump. A real living act with all its dangers included. This builds ‘trust’ on a far deeper level than the mutually self interested ‘trust’ of trade which liberal politics built itself upon.
It builds trust in a culture—a culture embodied in a space. The ‘currency’ of this initiation is not the acquirement of goods, but the virtue of courage. And, here’s the catch. One only attains this virtue through a form of glory. This ritual I describe, is after all, not some group-therapeutic act held together safely, under the guise of over-educated empathy leaders, under the restrictive limits of medical standards, all with blatantly overbearing Christianised psychology where everyone enters the room with a pitiful ‘fallenness’ . No. This ritual does not begin with the safety of a public humility seeping from the admittance that we are fallen. It begins from vertigo and gives a sense of honour to this ‘fall’—an almost stupid trust in both the word of another and their desire to prove themselves—and turns to very fall into a height. It is done in a layer which—is as far as I can tell— at least closer to wilderness than anything available to anybody living in a first world country, today. We have, as already asserted, replaced the virtue of a shared engagement with wilderness with the predictability of appetite. On that note, we should engage with the glory-suspicious tone of liberalism (and later forms of technocracy).
Self Preservation is not Self Regulating
What Hobbes failed to realize is that the sort of restraint from impulsive violence that he wished to formalize in the sovereign state—by way alienating its citizens from the moral justification for using force—was a violence which stemmed from a psycho-political force which also gave humans the remarkable ability to subdue biological instincts of self preservation , themselves; this restraint of course being one in the name of a higher cause which exceeded the fear of pain and death. In simple terms, our prudish self preservation needs to be restrained in order to actually have concerns about ideals beyond our own immediate gratification. The overemphasis on the restraint of militant honour-seeking impulses is blind to the need to restrain self preservation, itself.
The civil society, since Hobbes, is one that designates citizen by way of a deeply spiritual alienation from one impulse(glory), but naturalizes the other(self preservation). So surely in the era of hyper security, over bearing emphasis on economism and rational prudence to noble displays of violence in the name of honour seeking (and the cult of heroes), has been extinguished, while the predictive and rational forms of violence seen in technological and economistic control and destruction, are seen as ‘inevitable ‘ steps of civilized progress. One would think our present society is a civil order, par excellence, full of exemplar citizens; exaggerating their civic character, expressed through reason and passivity. Well, recent events would beg to differ.
We have already seen in the Covid lockdowns of the 2020/21 that medical passes attempted to replace the rights of citizenship. My rights suddenly became based on my conformity to the therapeutic measures of the health-state and their profiteering pharmaceutical backers, and not my country. The idea of the civil man who cares for his nation, community and some form of mutual respect embodied in law, is not at threat through the revival of rivalling pagan warlords—or glory seeking military conquerors—but rather from the destruction of any civil conception of man by way of the overbearing cowardice of a health and safety apparatus which wishes to condemn the very idea of a shared civil identity (citizenship).
For the first time in human history the very intimate sharing of space which made political thinking necessary to begin with, was almost entirely replaced with digital mediation which totally abolishes any experience of shared space with a network of work-communication and app-driven consumption. We could say that the social media technologies which made the Covid lockdowns possible, were the total overvaluation of people, at the sacrifice of places. Of course, the citizen, which is a response to a place (a polis), faced its greatest danger yet. This threat came about through the end of seeing this polis as being a physical embodiment of body-politic; a body made up by citizens. Instead a network-politic, made up of nodes and data has emerged.
What motivates this de-citicizing of man? This is predominantly a result of the traditional notion of citizen being too other, bound with expectations which homo-economicus squirms at. He is not ‘safe’ enough. He has not appeased by neurotic predictive, calculated herd mentality enough; all of which was the underlying desire of the grotesque term ‘health passes’. Health passes mark a view on man as a flat, grey puddle of sterile matter, whose virtue is simply expressed through the cheap signalling of a shallow bio-pleasantry. Health passes, in order to get inside a café to munch on sugary carbs and soy-milk cappchionos, proved that both bio-preservation and consumption became absolutely primal; and expressed themselves through the atomization of the body-politic in favour of a pod-politic.
Our science today, concerning the risk aversions which rational self-preservation necessitates, is indistinguishable from the sorts of data collecting which would allow insurance companies the ideal excuse to weasel out of having to pay for anything. In order to create this appetitive profiteer of the health and safety market, we must facilitate an array of health surveillance, where the prude self preserving instincts of liberal man are no longer distinguishable from those of the miser.
Concerning so called ‘order’ our ‘citizens’ today demand a ‘law’ based on stripping himself of any potentiality which might offend, make jealous, or even have any bare minimal critical thinking skills, left over. He must be reduced away from citizen and mutilated into some plastic man whose only existence in a shared social world or minimum proximity to others, must be premised of the total spiritual levelling, to make him—in the spirit of therapeutic conformity—that which can only recognize comfort, safety and consumption. The citizen is dead, like God, not because of aggressive impulse and love of glory and conquest, but because of a submission to the appetitive and predictive theories of man. He ate himself, we could even say; and the shell of whatever was chewed up and spit out, is the new ‘citizen’.
If Virilio predicted the break of science and reason (a coupling which turned out to be more of an assumption than an eternal brotherhood), then I am predicting the break up of the Hobbesian notion of citizen and rational self-preservation. Rational self-preservation, or the economic primacy of human nature, is more suited to medico-serfdom of perpetual emergency states, than a citizen.
Part 2: The limits of Market Sublimation
Intro:
We are beginning to see the relationship between what these essays are primarily about: Pod world; the podification of man, by which I mean the hyper-atomization, the destruction of humans as embodied and spatially attuned beings, and the relationship between the kinds of psycho-politics which modernity opened up (primarily through homo-economicus) and the way in which these things are intrinsically linked and feed off each other. We have seen the limits of the anglo-liberal tradition and its overemphasis on rational self preservation, theories of contract and cooperation which stem from the practice of trade and the psychology of mutual self interest and appetite, which came along with it.
The question the following chapter will ask is: is the recognition-based (or Hegelian) liberalism seen through Kojeve and Fukuyama sufficient? It does, after all, not consider self preservation or appetitive impulses as so angelic and primary. These—as we will see—are quite contrary to the anglo-liberal tradition. In emergency states, it is largely due to the habit of putting mere bio-preservation over any sense of integrity which so often leads us into the kinds of spatial and ideological enclosure which I have been describing throughout these essays. So, does this other brand of liberalism (which gives thymos its time of day) hold a valid alternative?
The Scientist as Sheep-hoarder
Some engagement with Nietzsche is necessary before we tackle this question further.
We are unknown to ourselves, we knowers: and with good reason. We have never looked for ourselves, – so how are we ever supposed to find ourselves? 4)
This quote by Nietzsche is the first sentence is his magnus Opus ‘Genealogy of Morals’. GOM is one of those ground-breaking works where by an analysis of human soul is seen through an error. What is this error? Nietzsche saw this mistake in his speculation of an infamous slave revolt in morality and the consequent unleashing of resentment as highest virtue—and so lays out a world in which a great ignorance reigns, dressed up as a supreme morality and ‘inevitable’ trajectory of the human soul. The inevitability of Christian faith has however been long atrophied and in its place an inevitability of technological change, which necessitates certain dogmatic views of human nature, has taken over.
We never look for ourselves, Nietzsche asserts. Instead we started looking at ourselves. An observation which Nietzsche understood as life-rejecting in its moralism, but also —I would argue—life-copying. It gazes at man hoping to find a formula, a blue-print or map to simply follow, and not to discover, dare to adventure, or risk to travel. There is an unmistakable pattern in both the simplistic life-rules for sheepish parish members to follow, and for a simplistic map the scientist wants to reduce life to. We perhaps see this most obviously during ‘health campaigns’ where a class of medico-technocrats claiming the authoritative throne of expert-of-the-day, marches a myriad of lost and confused new followers away from their Godless anxiety and into new pastures.
The difference between my obvious analogy to Moses and the lab-coat wearing prophets of catastrophe which gained favour during the Covid Pandemic, is that instead of leading their sheep to new lands, they lead them to new spatially-inclined habits we can call Pod-World. A mask, a two meter rule, a new flag to wave out their window(designed specifically to let their neighbours know they are not one of those dirty populists), these are all guides into a new direction, emotional disposition, and atomized(likely privatized) space in which (especially for younger generations) the rosy, optimistic expansion of secular, middle class adults, has seem to come to an abrupt chasm. This chasm must be guided around; although guided towards what, is still ambiguous. Judging by the total lack of rationality expressed by these prophet-scientists like Fauci, the early 2020s showed that the safety of delusion is one very likely direction these new shepherds are herding us to.
New systems of quasi-religious scientism even had the religious convictions described by Nietzsche, concerning resentment fantasies. The strange, glib enjoyment displayed by liberals at their right wing citizens for dying when not getting vaccinated(ignoring those who died and did), showed the remarkably old-testament turn of modern science. In this turn, biblical catastrophe smites your enemies while the chosen ones are designated by being saved from it. This strange force that swept through modern civilization in 2020—should you put lambs blood on your front door in the shape of expressing pious belief in blatantly politicized public health authorities—would avert you, and leave you unscathed. Your political enemies, on the other hand, would not be so lucky.
Of course, the actual empirical outcome of who was and was not affected by the Covid virus, was likely more to do with underlying risk factors such as age and co-morbidities like obesity. Yet, dying visions need to reconciled and reality often has a hard time making a difference here. The interesting thing to note here is how the civilized, enlightened liberal adult, supposedly the embodiment of both rationality and economic progress, is in fact caught into a deeply delusional relationship with the world; one where the digitally mediated pod they have ‘built’ around themselves further detaches them from any social reality, which could act as a wake up call.
This is has had gargantuan consequences for how we perceive progress. If curing cancer and robot maids never came true, the new horizon of futurism can be replaced by the new sheltering complexes of highly politicized catastrophe management.
But how did science, proto-sectarian political hatred and idolatry become infused like this? Well, it could have emerged through the error that ‘knowing oneself’ is the same thing as staring at oneself, or putting one’s existence into the quantifiable measurements of scientific experimentation, social status (and bank accounts). This ignorance Nietzsche depicts, however, is not simply a lack of enlightened knowledge but it gets to the very base of a certain inability (and perhaps unwillingness) to form a proper phenomenological perspective by which the kinds of experiences such as feelings of powerlessness (relating to catastrophes like natural disasters or science experiments gone wrong) and mass feelings of political hatred, and how they get culturally placed (formed) through various methods of repression, ignorance, projection, distraction and so on.
The lack of knowing ourselves that Nietzsche eludes to in the first passage of GOM, asserts a total failure in the history of self understanding; likely because life itself is rejected in favour cheap obfuscation. It also leads to outbursts of herdish following to those offering us cheap ways out of the misery of life and into new pastures (like the Metaverse, or indefinite lockdown world, or billionaire trips to Mars)
The Liberal Retreat
A similar error occurred in the history of liberalism. One in which a cheap form of conflict management was taken up as the crisis in the inability to properly form, value and experience the kinds of psycho-political forces which lead to violent conflict, took precedent. This error is seen in the contrasting views of Hegelian liberalism vs Anglo-liberalism. The latter being the one that was inspired most by Hobbes and Locke, and saw to replace the thymotic impulses of man with leaders that were given authority based on monopolizing access to those feelings, as already discussed. (the modern state).
It's no surprise Hobbes’ most famous work came from the British civil war. This crisis in experiencing man’s potential for violent struggle led to a new market for quick fixes to the disruptive and existentially painful nature to human capacity for violence. These quick fixes which make up the bulk of modern culture, are the basis for liberal modernity in the Anglo tradition, (from techno surveillance, to pharmacological numbing, to a bureaucratic view of justice, to the de-sublimation of consumption). The most horrific sacrifice made in this Faustian deal for quick and easy conflict resolution, was the total alienation of man from said feelings which make the ability to accomplish heroic deeds, possible.
Fukuyama sees this failure in his commentary on the distinction between Hegelian and Anglo view of human nature.
By way of Kojeve, Fukuyama notes the Hegelian significance of our ontological self-conception is determined by this heroic overcoming of a mere animalistic survival instinct.
‘, man's human desire must win out over his animal desire for self-preservation. And that is why it is important that the primeval battle at the beginning of history be over prestige alone, or an apparent trifle like a medal or a flag that signifies recognition. The reason that I fight is to get another human being to recognize the fact that I am willing to risk my life, and that I am therefore free and authentically human.……….…. Where Hobbes and Hegel differ fundamentally, however, and where the Anglo-Saxon tradition of liberalism takes its decisive turn, is in the relative moral weight assigned to the passions of pride or vanity (i.e., "recognition") on the one hand, and the fear of violent death, on the other. Hegel, as we have seen, believes that the willingness to risk one's life in a battle for pure prestige is in some sense what makes human beings human, the foundation of human freedom. Hegel does not "approve," in the end, the highly unequal relationship of master and slave, and knows full well it is both primitive and oppressive. He understands, however, that it is a necessary stage of human history in which both terms of the class equation, masters and slaves, preserve something importantly human. 5)
Fukuyama understands the risk of the Anglo-liberalism as a vulgar de-ranking ourselves to the ontological level of those who cannot overcome their mere animal nature. For this, he is correct. Anglo-liberalism cast humans to a level where the very idea of bio-technical control became possible because it is simply a mere extension of the logic of industrial farming applied to humans. This problem however is more than merely theoretical. It is reflexive in what we do. It commands the murky waters of belief because the more we believe it is truly irrational to overcome relative urges to merely consume and survive, the more we become last men. Theories of human nature are active and not passively theoretical. Fukuyama grasps that theoretical depravity of Anglo-liberalism but does his Hegelian liberalism offer a solution?
The Limits of Market Sublimation
Fukuyama recognizes the innate thymotic state of humans, the need to go beyond our animal needs and be recognized as something more—and the role that that particular psychology plays in history. Yet, Fukuyama could also be seen as one whose political theories are built on a massive aggrandisement of market sublimation(Pride in work, lawful careerism as ambition, a liberalization of self-love through purchasing power). He more or less believes the only solution to this problem (which he bravely acknowledges) is by way of sublimation of aggressive, ambitious and ‘megalothymia’ impulses to the market. The battle-to-death (which embodies a being highly attuned to being-to-death), is for any liberal, however, a ‘stage’ and one that ‘must be surpassed’ by sublimation of that being into liberal methods of competition such as career, consumption, diplomacy, perhaps art, and a work ethic. And while there is nothing bad about these things individually, their relationship to this thymotic impulse is not to be so lightly assumed. It often ends in quite comical results. Fukuyama once even gave the example of Donald Trump as somebody whose more megalomaniacal impulses were expressed lawfully through mechanisms available through the mediation of money and the glorification of television (celebrity). Quite ironically, this totally lawful and liberal mode of ambition embodied in Trumps celebrity entrepreneurialism, is found suddenly repulsive by liberals when he is seen in the political realm. This just may indicate a certain exclusionary method of market sublimation. It is designed to ‘keep down’ as much as it can ‘raise up’. It is liberalized, much like Frankfurt school theorists thought of the liberalization of mass culture, to keep people in their place.
Since we are on the topic of Trump…..Trump, however, perhaps got tired of his monetary and celebrity sublimation, and sought the more directly disruptive realm of politics. Although, when push came to shove, a rather boring political figure, Trump’s transition from celebrity billionaire to his brand of populism is quite reflective of the limitation of market sublimation of thymotic energies. I was always fond of that James Bond film title ‘The world is not enough’. It eludes to the chronic dissatisfaction of humans whom have an ambition which torments them as much as it inspires and motivates them. An undeniable passion lies within, though. The world is so beautiful that it cannot truly be gasped quantitively. ‘Not enough’ could just mean immeasurable; and the market has attempted to put a measure on just about everything.
If we were to make a film about Donald Trump, we could borrow the formula of this title and say ‘Money and television are not enough’. Whatever motivates Trump is some insatiable motivation for more. But he will never be satisfied because this is some degraded form of Glory reduced to quantitively external objects in a market of constantly changing value. He implicitly understood this (at least for a time) when he decided to run for president.
But even this desire for recognition which goes beyond accumulation of wealth and celebrity, was met with a sour taste. The very need for Trump to go into politics and be ‘one of them’ (rich, powerful, approvable in a way which exceeds being ‘rich and famous’) transformed into the need to become their greatest enemy. This transition is marked by the disappointment of their approval; their cheap reflection of pride and success is quite literally ‘not enough’. Not just because it is vulgarly quantifiable like a commodity, but also because it is met like a hangover, a stale taste and feeling of weightedness which indicates something illegitimate surrounds us and has simply gone on too long. This post-war technocracy and its idiotic conglomerate of increasingly pitiful and delusional managers, is a recognition which the most ambitious of us would likely find to be disappointing.
The point I am trying to make here is that more than simply a temporary resentment at the ‘liberal elite’ emerged with Trump. A repulsion at their vision and their embodiment of ‘success', emerged. This liberal and post-war market sublimation of ambition, glory and recognition has failed. This is the message of Donald Trump, even if he doesn’t know it.
The Protestant Twerk Ethic
In Republic and in Phaedrus, Plato emphasized the special relationship which spirit and reason hold in their task of restraining desire. The metaphor of a charioteer sees the need for the white (spirited horse) to restrain the insatiable cravings of the dark, desiring horse. In the passage on mental conflicts in Republic, the thymotic aspect is described as being the way in which self-rage (disgust or shame) is the only way that reason can put a stop to hopeless, enslaving and often undignified appetite of desire. It is perhaps, no wonder, that in the ‘post war’ era where the proud spirit is seen as antiquated, and the total loss of any shame or basic integrity regarding pleasure-seeking and then later with social media, attention-seeking habits of humans, that we see a massive triumph of late capitalist consumption in the form of the total death of that spirit.
The ‘spirit’ of capitalism through a protestant modernity gave production the higher spiritual place over consumption. Yet, it seems processes such as automation, de-industrialization and the in-built narcissism of the digital economy, no longer allows for any such ethical prescriptions being applied to capital. The consequences this had for the cult of work which protestant modernity unleashed, has yet to be recognized in its full significance.
There are two functions which made the triumph of liberal modernity possible (and likely modernity in general even outside the West in places like China). This is the sublimation of social competition and sectarian tensions through consumption—and the channelling of religious feelings of self transformation into the primarily-protestant religion of career. While the first is certainly not going anywhere, but does face a greater problem of the awareness of its decadency than it did just 20 years ago—the second has fundamentally hollowed out. Very rarely can somebody find a meaningful and purposeful identity based on career; or at least this is no longer a standard experience common for younger generations. The ‘pride of work’ which Fukuyama praises the success of liberalism in responding to thymotic needs, has been called fully into question.
This is the likely cause behind the fixation with identity and fandom which the internet has unleashed. This unleashing, however, is not some ‘great technological step’ but rather a quite desperate and often sad and futile reaction to the loss of the dominant belief system of what had already replaced religion in modernity; economic and moral improvement through career. The danger here is that without some fixed sense of self—which thymos is the primary faculty which corresponds to—all sorts of peculiar justifications and even misguided enthusiasm into bio-technically ‘designing’ our own identity, emerges. Capitalism may have lost its connection with rational adulthood, but it certainly didn’t lose its belief in efficiency. It could soon unleash a whole market of quick and efficient ‘self design’ methods, through bio-technologies.
The efficiency of self design is what bio-technics seduces us with. This is the likely reason why the more white collar—and thus the more career focussed that parents are —the more likely their children are to replace the pressure of this career-identity which lasts the majority of ones life, with some quick fix, progressive identity fixation, or even pharmacological intervention into that identity.
A great Marxist plot is not the cause of the obvious lack of political moderation which exploded in the 21st century, as some painfully ignorant conservatives have claimed. Rather, it is the left over of moral-economistic values which have already died, and now desperately scrambles for something to sustain itself in a world which economically and technologically has destroyed itself.
We could say, what we are seeing happening in front of our eyes in the 21st century is the total death of any (meaningful) market sublimation of thymotic impulse. Pride in one’s work is, after all, quite hard to sustain in an economy where one is paid more for getting half naked in a bath tub, filming it and charging lonely 14 year old boys 50$ for a jar of dirty bath water, than those who genuinely help keep modern society functioning, like firemen or lorry drivers. The financialization of the economy alongside the mass culture of internet is in a similar vein. While young women are selling their bathwater or buying property from money made on their softcore porn subscriptions, young men see the task of wealth accumulation through the new possibilities of mass gambling habits like meme-stocks, or real-estate flipping, or filming oneself in their uncle’s metropolitan pent house, posing as if its their own, selling courses to other broke people on how to get rich fast(or at least how to look rich fast).
More institutional routes are also in similar vein. While long hours are certainly put into any professional or corporate job, these long hours are spent either coming up with tech product designs to further entrench the youth into attention seeking addictions for the sake of collecting their data and advertising, or helping multinational companies escape paying taxes. The digital economy is one massive perversion of status seeking desires which increasingly attaches themselves to border line delusional identity fixations, or to normalizing addictions like porn and gambling, or outright fraud.
Conclusion
The success of liberalism meant the atrophy of that faculty which intimately feels justice as a cosmic force; as an absolute overpowering movement which necessitates human life and thus regulates all lower faculties of appetite, cheap envy, deception and other forms of mimicry. We ‘enlightened’ past this—and through humanistic rationality decided we humans could simply determine our own interests as if a god itself. Now these ‘interests’ are god-like and reduce us to their play things. This error now traverses on bio-technical design. The fundamental question is whether a liberal, market framework can reclaim some semblance of dignity in this blind state.
In fact, when it comes to bio-technics, is market sublimation not the very danger itself?
The emphasis that recognition-orientated liberalism puts on property is understandable when it comes to the highly personalized and intimate space of a physical home. The problem for capitalism is when this category indefinitely extends to an empire of all objects. Property is no longer limited to physical objects external to us. It also now includes ourselves as objects of technical commodification and ‘improvement’. The line from Fight Club ‘ the things you own end up owning you’, is perhaps one of the greatest encapsulations of this expansion of ownership-ontology of ‘late’ capitalism.…Nietzsche’s warning concerning us not knowing ourselves, is reflected in the dismissal of priestly ‘improvers’ who want to reduce the passions and motivations of humans to a simplistic parish-friendly set of moral codes, is not so much a conspiracy to sabotage an opposing spiritual class, as much as a willing de-valuing of them for the sake of predictability, approvability and cheap conflict resolutions.
…… Who are these ‘improvers’ today? Well they would most definitely not simply be an isolated elite class of owners, as theorized in Marx . The rise of the middle class defies the certainty of that simplistic value hierarchy. It would also certainly not be a class of consumers to be moralized over from above, as technocrats now do in response to global warming. Rather, it has to be a dynamic which emerges from our own investment of some transformational desire to exceed our mere states as animals and consumers, through the misled infrastructure of technical and appetitive sublimation. We are not off limits to the category of property. We see property as an extension of our own social value, thus the bio-technical ‘improvement’ of mankind will be this grandest market reflection, yet. We will play ‘keeping up the Jones’ with our own children’s hormonal development, as American liberals have already showed us. This is not, however, an ‘excess’ of capital but likely the very logic of it simply applied to the new frontier of genetics.
Fukuyama grasps the dangers of bio-technics with surprising clarity in his work ‘Our Post Human Future’. He does this by undermining the sorts of human rights which stemmed from a view of progress as a set of legal and bureaucratic reassurances to consumer-participation, rather than grasping fundamentally with any sort or innate of even natural based theory of human nature which can form a properly political response. The implication is that a proper theory of human nature or natural law can be used as boundaries against the misuse of these technologies. What he doesn’t seem to grasp is that more is at work than simply a misled, badly informed or dysfunctional legal bureaucracy but what I call an appetitive mimesis which now aims back at the human being itself on the level of a bio-technical commodification.
The Anglo-Hobbesian brand of liberalism ignores spirit for the sake of biological preservation, at any cost. While the recognition-based liberalism offers no way to stop the liberalization of ambition sliding into a market of bio-improvements which simply mimic whatever insane and deeply ideological fads happen to be popular that month; fads which are not exactly healthy for the person being ‘improved’.
On a social level, systems of trials and (perhaps offensively militant) form of pedagogy would be necessary to re-cultivate the kind of restraint and discipline needed to combat the primacy of appetitive societies which triumphed in modernity. On the theological level, in order to actually return to a fundamental theory of human nature or natural law which could puts limits and boundaries on bio-technical design, we would need to delve back into the world of the very things which validate or express that law (like a King or God, or even a militant or more ascetic way of life, as opposed to an economistic or consumptive way of life ). This is also the very question which liberalism (out of fear of sectarian violence) so successfully erased from the minds of those occupying the time period of modernity (especially after the end of communism). To put simply, does—liberalism of any form—really contain the theological and thymotic potency to live up to this task; to respond to bio-technics?
Notes:
Plato Republic (individual and society)442a)Penguin classics, translated by Desmond lee
Hobbes Leviathan
Passion and the Interests by Albert Hirshmann
Nietzsche, GOM preface, Translated by Carol Diethe, Cambridge University Press
Fukuyama The End of History p150/156
Hi Raymond, thanks for your essays, I've been enjoying them a lot.
Which book by Virilio would you recommend starting with? I was looking at either Pure War or Speed and Politics.