Tuesday, 9 May 2023
Those Dismal Souls
It’s remarkable how many people seem to like the idea of the government enforcing certain laws and rules much more heavily than is currently the case. Even to the point of advocating demented revenge on those who step out of line. Pandemic rules for example - an unforgettable lesson in the popularity of enforcement.
The traditional left/right political spectrum is too simple to bring out this unlovely aspect of political reality. Left v right doesn’t work well as a model of what goes on in the shifty world of political psychology. The lure of enforcement for its own sake is politically attractive, lurking behind the façade of righteous action.
Eventually we end up with what we see today, bureaucrat enforcers pursuing enforcement behind that righteous façade. Enforcement is their business, the enforcement trough contains all the bureaucratic nourishment they need for piling on lots of flabby growth.
A ghastly love of enforcement is all around us, saturating everything mainstream. To take a common example, media anguish needs only a single dismal soul to be possessed by a suitable grievance inadequately mitigated. Outrage, fury or merely sadface, they don't really care. A bottomless pit of grievance sustains this media ploy forever and a bottomless pit of dismal souls may be taken as given.
There is no way to disentangle grievance from the wider politics of enforcement. Without grievance there is no righteous enforcement, but it is quite impossible to vote against it, even imaginary grievances invented by bureaucrats, the media and those dismal souls.
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2 comments:
There's the old 1950 study of The Authoritarian Personality by Adorno et al. They try to identify personality traits which gave rise to Nazism, and focus in Freudian terms on childhood experiences. The trouble is, they are cultural Marxists trying to explain fascism, and they completely ignore the fact that socialists and communists are usually the equals of fascists when it comes to authoritarianism.
We need a new understanding of what makes the petty tyrants tick. Would we all be like that, given the opportunity? Or do certain people seek out such positions? The interesting point regarding the covid shenanigans is how the authoritarians didn't correlate neatly with other social factors. The fanatics were just the same as the rest of us, and they still walk among us...
Sam - "We need a new understanding of what makes the petty tyrants tick." I agree and I suspect psychologists in government nudge units have some ideas. They must have known that pandemic policies would bring out the petty tyrant in a large number of people, including people we think of as "nice".
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