POC are just like you and me. Sure, there are technical, mostly visual, differences between us. However, considered in the grand scheme of things, such differences are quite trivial.
Far from a weakness, this diversity is a strength; we all play a role in moving our democracy forward, and ensuring the public realm remains a lively and vibrant place. Of course, by POC, I am referring to People of Commentary.
POC are everywhere. Turn on the television and you’ll be greeted by POC. Scroll through any social media feed, and without much effort, you’ll find posts made by POC. Walk through the middle of London, and soon enough, you’ll sight chattering congregations of POC.
Given the apparent omnipresence of POC, one eventually begins to ask: where did they come from? Were there this many POC in Britain 50 years ago? Yes, I know I’m pushing my luck.
In all serious consideration, the voice of commentators, self-described or not, for better or for worse, constitutes a large chunk of public, especially political, discussion in Britain.
Conversely, and it would seem simultaneously, we have witnessed a rapid decline of public intellectualism over consecutive decades. Indeed, the noted absence of intellectuals from public life is underscored when most people struggle to define what an intellectual actually is.
Many are inclined to believe that the British are, by their very essence, an anti-intellectual people. Distrustful of abstraction, they very much prefer a hodgepodge philosophy of empirical observation and sainted “Common Sense” – both of which, especially the latter, intellectuals supposedly and infamously disregard.
An immediate glance at ongoing matters would support this position. Despite the fundamental disagreements constituting the “Gender Wars”, it is clear that both sides consider Britain, thankfully or regrettably, uniquely resistant to transgenderism. In my view, this can be traced to our Anglo-Saxon forbearers, who gradually removed the notion of gendered words in our language besides the ones which speak to the empirical (that is, biological-anatomical) distinction between men and women.
All this said, empiricism isn’t exactly synonymous with “anti-intellectualism”, just as the names Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, George Berkeley, or Edmund Burke rarely come to mind when discussing “anti-intellectuals”. We can safely assume that intellectuals primarily deal in ideas, but we can’t safely assume said ideas are purely rationalistic and abstract.
Herein lies the distinction: there’s a difference between contemporary “anti-intellectualism”, which has contributed to the explosive ascendancy of POCs, and the “anti-intellectualism” which is distinctly “intellectual” in nature – pertaining to the limits, rather than uselessness, of intellectualism-as-abstraction. As such, we should consider post-war anti-intellectualism as a degeneration of a healthier and more measured position.
Without placing too much weight on the origins of Britain’s post-war anti-intellectualism, I would argue that such a precise attitude be attributed to the popularity of the ideas of George Orwell, as conveyed by cultural osmosis, rather than extensive reading; specifically, his preoccupation with ‘Ordinary People’ and the ways in which they are different to the class of ‘Intellectuals’ whom Orwell sought to disassociate himself.
This is an excerpt from “Ides”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
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The Internet as Mob Rule
The ancient Greeks believed political constitutions repeated in a pattern called kyklos (“cycle). The idea first occurs in Plato’s Republic, gets elaborated by Aristotle in his Politics, then reaches its apogee in Polybius’ Histories.
Unlike modern theorists of cyclical rise and fall of civilisations, such as Oswald Spengler, the kyklos doesn’t have a zenith or golden age. It’s rather a waxing and waning of stable society types, followed by unstable society types. What characterises a stable society is that the ruling class and citizens both strive towards the common good, conceived as the objective purpose of human beings, which results in their happiness and flourishing. Society becomes unstable when its members stop having the common good in mind, and instead strive after their selfish private interests to the detriment of other citizens.
Kyklos then presupposes several things. First, it isn’t culture specific. Its objectivist outlook means it applies equally to all political human groups, always and everywhere. Second, the engine that drives history is human virtue and vice, and not economics, class struggle, or war. These are secondary factors resulting from the characters of human beings. Healthy economies, contented class structures, well-won peace and just wars all result from virtuous people. Third, the stable government types are various. Kyklos defends neither monarchy, nor aristocracy nor a republic exclusively. It isn’t a Whiggish or utopian theory of history, that says if and only if a certain group are in power all will be well. Rather it claims that whatever group are in power, they must be virtuous to rule well. Vice immediately leads to disorder.
Simplifying in the extreme, the kyklos model runs as follows. Rule can be by one person, several, or many. When these rule for the common good, they are just, and are called monarchy, aristocracy and republican respectively. When they rule for their private interest to the detriment of society, they are tyranny, oligarchy and democratic respectively.
It’s important to note that by “democracy” I don’t mean here a system of popular representation or voting. The virtuous form of this is called a polity or republic in classical thinking. In the latter, bonds of authority and specialised expertise remain. In the former, absolutely everything is sacrificed for the sake of equality of the masses (see below).
A good monarch rules with benevolence. His successors are unjust and become tyrants. The nobility removes them, creating an aristocratic state. These in turn degenerate into oligarchs as they grow decadent and self-interested and begin to oppress the poor. The people rise up and remove them, creating a republic where all citizens have a say. But the mass of citizens loses the bonds of political friendship, grows selfish, and the republic becomes a democracy. Democracy eventually deteriorates to a point where all bonds between people are gone, and we have a mob rule. The mob annihilates itself through infighting. One virtuous man seizes power, and we return to monarchy. The cycle begins anew.
With these preliminaries out of the way, I come to my point. I believe the present age we are forced to live through is highly ochlocratic. Of course, it’s not a pure mob rule since we have non-mob elites and a rule of law. I also think our age is oligarchic (dominated by elites swollen with pleasure). But it’s more ochlocratic, I contend, than it was a few centuries ago, and enough that mob behaviour characterises it.
The defining trait of unstable regimes, as I’ve just said, is vice. However, vice doesn’t just happen spontaneously as though people awake one morning deciding to be selfish, spoilt, and cruel. Evil people, as Aristotle notes, often believe they are good. Their fault is that they’ve mistaken something which is bad for what is good. For example, the man who hates the poor falsely believes money is the same as goodness. The man who mocks monks and sages for their abstinence believes all and only pleasure is good. Even when we know what is good for us, ingrained habit or upbringing might make the illusion of goodness overpowering. A lifetime of cake-gorging can condition one to the point it overrides the knowledge that sugar is bad for health.
I think the Spanish thinker Jose Ortega y Gasset in The Revolt of the Masses (1930) unwittingly echoes Plato when he points to the faults of the democratic “mass-man” of the twentieth century. All human societies need specialised minorities to function. The more demanding and specialised a field, the more those who do it will be a minority of the population. Further, all societies, to function, need sources of authority which aren’t decided by a majority vote. Modern democracy has created the illusion that the unspecialised mass is sovereign and has no reliance on anybody. It has achieved this mirage through artificial liberation: creating unnatural freedoms through constant government intervention and technocratic engineering.
This in turn has supported vices out of unthinking habit. The mass-man accepts his lack of qualifications and is proud of this absence. He isn’t one deluded about his knowledge. Quite the opposite. The mass-man is someone who openly declares he knows nothing but demands to be listened to anyway because he’s a member of the sacred demos. In short, according to Ortega y Gasset, the ideology of the mass-man is: “I’m ordinary and ignorant, and so I have more of a say than those who are specialised and learned.”
The internet is a democratic medium par excellence. This isn’t to say that its members are all egalitarian and individualist, rather, its very construction assumes egalitarian and individualist ideas, and these force themselves onto its users whether they be willing or not.
Here we can extend the criticisms that Neil Postman makes at television in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1985) to the web. On the internet, all information is available to everyone. Anyone can create it, and anyone can opine on it. The medium doesn’t distinguish for quality, so the greatest products of human civilisation sit alongside the basest, on the same shelf. There are no filters online for expertise or experience, indeed, any attempts to create such filters are decried as “gatekeeping”. As a result, the internet has no difficulty settings (to use a metaphor). Getting through the easier levels isn’t mandatory to reach the harder ones. You can skip ahead, so to speak, and mingle with the pros as their peer.
Someone might object here that I’m exaggerating, since online communities monitor themselves all the time. I can indeed post my amateur opinions onto an internet space for astrophysicists, but these will mock and exclude me once I become a nuisance. However, this isn’t an answer. The internet is built on the assumption of mass wisdom, and the only way to enforce hierarchies of value on it is by banding a mob together. The space around remains anarchic. Yes, there are communities of wise people online, but these exist in an ocean of communities of fools. The medium presents them all as equally valuable. Which communities grow powerful still depends on the wishes of the mass.
When the internet produces a rare fruit of quality, this is because by sheer accident, the wishes of the mass have corresponded to reality. It isn’t an in-built feature.
The result is that the internet functions like a classic mob regimen or ochlocracy. The medium has no sensitivity to quality, but rather responds to will, provided enough people are behind it. Those who wield influence online do so because the mob will has selected them. They are our modern versions of Plato’s Athenian demagogues, or rabble-rousers of the French Revolution. A mass of ignorant and desperate people swirls around equally ignorant and desperate demagogues who promise them whatever they want. Demagogues rise and fall as the mob is first enamoured then bored of them. As the internet has grown to encompass our whole lives, this ochlocracy has spilt out into the real world.
In this space, truth entirely drops out. It’s a common fault of the ignorant to confuse desire with truth since desires are often hotly felt and what is very vivid seems real. Our egalitarian internet machine therefore is wont to magnify desires rather than realities. And because it magnifies desires, these ever more get confused with reality, until mob wishes would replace the common good of society. I believe a good example of this is how the online demagogue-mob relationship works. When internet personalities, especially political and social influencers, fall from grace, it’s usually because their followers realise they can no longer get what they want out of them (seldom do demagogue and mob cordially separate because each has become wiser). The power lies with the followers and not with their purported leader.
Which brings me back to kyklos. A classic Greek political cycle resets when a virtuous individual takes the reigns from the mob and establishes a monarchy. He recreates justice through his personal goodness. This was more likely, I think, in ancient societies where religion, community and family were stronger, and so the pool of virtuous people never entirely depleted. If our ochlocratic internet is indeed a stage in a kyklos (or a component of an ochlocratic stage), and it ends, I think it will end with one demagogic idiocy imposing itself on the others by force.
A population conditioned by the internet to think mass-appeal as equivalent to truth will readily accept a technocratic whip provided it claims to issue from the general will. Which idiocy gains supremacy is a matter of which can capture the greater part of the mass in the least time, to form a generation in its own image. This is why I don’t think the current trend of the internet becoming more regulated and censored is good. The regulators and censors come from the same debased crop as those they regulate and censor.
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My Vitalism (Magazine Excerpt)
In a world that is innately tragic, how does one remain cheerfully vital? There seems no end to the forces that wish to crush one’s joie de vivre. Whether it’s the deadening omnipotence of the modern technocratic mode of organisation, the overbearing coddling of our moralistic culture, or just the old-fashioned primordial fate of the great tragedians and philosophers, we cannot escape an assault of forces intent of making us submit to despair.
The world often feels like a great slimy toad, sitting on our chests and allowing its toxic ooze to envelope our nostrils and lungs until we choke. How many people give in to it I wonder? Millions? How many human beings surrender their souls to the devilish incubus that haunts them? This is the primary question of human existence and one that has become pertinent to the present moment in art. In a high culture full of worthless slush that threatens to drown us all in its mediocrity and potent purposelessness, the moment of choice is thrust upon us all as individuals: either we swim to sweet terra firma or fall beneath the murky surface.
Yet, as old King Canute once showed us, the tide is never-ending. In a deeper, spiritual sense the assault of despair will never end. We die and suffer. Our loved ones die and suffer. Religions are exhausted and nations fall to ruins. Given this, do we still have the strength to embrace life?
This is an excerpt from “Blast!”. To continue reading, visit The Mallard’s Shopify.
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Orwell’s Egalitarian Problem
George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book whose influence exceeds its readership. It resembles a Rorschach test; moulding itself to the political prejudices of whoever reads it. It also has a depth which often goes unnoticed by those fond of quoting it.
The problem isn’t that people cite Orwell, but that people cite Orwell in a facile and cliched manner. The society of Oceania which Orwell creates isn’t exemplified in any contemporary state, save perhaps wretched dictatorships like North Korea or Uzbekistan. It’s thus not my intent to draw on Nineteen Eighty-Four to indict my own society as being “Orwellian” in the sense of being a police state, a procurer of terror, or engaged in centralised fabrication of history. A world of complete totalitarianism of the Hitlerian or Stalinist kind hasn’t arrived (not yet at least), but Nineteen Eighty-Four still has insights applicable to our day.In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the protagonist, Winston, is suffocated by the miserable tyranny he lives in. The English Socialist Party (INGSOC) controls all aspects of Britain, now called Airstrip One, a province of the state of Oceania. It does so in the name of their personified yet never seen dictator, Big Brother. When Winston is almost at breaking point, he meets fellow party member, O’Brien. O’Brien, Winston thinks, is secretly a member of the resistance, a group opposing Big Brother. O’Brien hands Winston a book called The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism. This book is supposedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein, arch-nemesis of Big Brother, and details the secret history and workings of Oceanian society, something unknown to all its citizens.
Oligarchic collectivism is the book’s term for the ideology of the Party in response to a repeating historical situation. Previous societies were characterised by constant strife between three social classes: the top, the middle, and the bottom. The pattern of revolution across history was always the middle enlisting the bottom by pandering to their base grievances. The middle would use the bottom to overthrow the top, install itself as the new top, and push the bottom back down to their previous place. A new middle would form over time, and the process would repeat.
INGSOC overthrew the top through a revolution, in the name of equality. What it actually achieved was collectivised ownership at the top, and so it created a communism of the few, not unlike classical Sparta. The rest of the population, derogatorily called “proles”, live in squalid poverty and are despised as animals. They’re kept from rebelling by being maintained in ignorance and given cheap hedonistic entertainment at the Party’s expense. INGSOC nominally rules on their behalf, but in reality is built upon their continual oppression. As Goldstein’s book puts it:
“All past oligarchies have fallen from power either because they ossified or because they grew soft. Either they became stupid and arrogant, failed to adjust themselves to changing circumstances, and were overthrown; or they became liberal and cowardly, made concessions when they should have used force, and once again were overthrown. They fell, that is to say, either through consciousness or through unconsciousness.”
In other words, the top falls either by failing to notice reality and being overthrown once reality crashes against it, or by noticing reality, trying to create a compromise solution, and being overthrown by the middle once they reveal their weakness. INGSOC, however, lasts indefinitely because it has discovered something previous oligarchies didn’t know:
“It is the achievement of the Party to have produced a system of thought in which both conditions can exist simultaneously. And upon no other intellectual basis could the dominion of the Party be made permanent. If one is to rule, and to continue ruling, one must be able to dislocate the sense of reality. For the secret of rulership is to combine a belief in one’s own infallibility with the Power to learn from past mistakes.”
INGSOC can simultaneously view itself as perfect, and effectively critique itself to respond to changing circumstances. It can do this, we are immediately told, through the principle of doublethink: holding two contradictory thoughts at once and believing them both:
“In our society, those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is. In general, the greater the understanding, the greater the delusion; the more intelligent, the less sane.”
It’s through this mechanism that the Party remains indefinitely in power. It has frozen history because it can notice gaps between its own ideology and reality, yet simultaneously deny to itself that these gaps exist. It can thus move to plug holes while retaining absolute confidence in itself.
At the end of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Inner Party member O’Brien tortures Winston, and reveals to him the Party’s true vision of itself:
“We know that no one ever seizes power with the intention of relinquishing it. Power is not a means, it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?”
It’s here where I part ways with Orwell. For a moment, O’Brien has revealed to Winston one-half of what Inner Party members think. Doublethink is the simultaneous belief in the Party’s ideology, English Socialism, and in the reality of power for its own sake. INGSOC is simultaneously socialist and despises socialism. Returning to Goldstein’s book:
“Thus, the Party rejects and vilifies every principle for which the Socialist movement originally stood, and it chooses to do this in the name of Socialism. It preaches a contempt for the working class unexampled for centuries past, and it dresses its members in a uniform which was at one time peculiar to manual workers and was adopted for that reason.”
Orwell creates this situation because, as a democratic socialist, he’s committed to the idea of modern progress. The ideal of equality of outcome isn’t bad, but only the betrayal of this ideal. Orwell critiques the totalitarian direction that the socialist Soviet Union took, but he doesn’t connect this to egalitarian principles themselves (the wish to entirely level society). He therefore doesn’t realise that egalitarianism, when it reaches power, is itself a form of doublethink.
To see how this can be we must introduce an idea alien to Orwell and to egalitarianism but standard in pre-modern political philosophy: whichever way you shake society, a group will always end up at the top of the pile. Nature produces humans each with different skills and varying degrees of intelligence. In each field, be it farming, trade or politics, some individuals will rise, and others won’t.
The French traditionalist-conservative philosopher Joseph de Maistre sums up the thought nicely in his work Etude sur La Souveraineté: “No human association can exist without domination of some kind”. Furthermore, “In all times and all places the aristocracy commands. Whatever form one gives to governments, birth and riches always place themselves in first rank”.
For de Maistre the hard truth is, “pure democracy does not exist”. Indeed, it’s under egalitarian conditions that an elite can exercise its power the most ruthlessly. For where a constitution makes all citizens equal, there won’t be any provision for controlling the ruling group (since its existence isn’t admitted). Thus, Rome’s patricians were at their most predatory against the common people during the Republic, while the later patricians were restrained by the emperors, such that their oppression had a more limited, localised effect.If we assume this, then the elite of any society that believes in equality of outcome must become delusional. They must think, despite their greater wealth, intelligence and authority, that they’re no different to any other citizen. Any evidence that humans are still pooling in the same hierarchical groups as before must be denied or rationalised away.
This leads us back to the situation sketched in Goldstein’s book. What prevents the Party from being overthrown is doublethink. The fact it can remain utterly confident in its own power, and still be self-critical enough to adapt to circumstances. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the former is exemplified in the vague utopian ideology of INGSOC, while the latter is the cynical belief in power for its own sake and willingness to do anything to retain it. But against this, no cynical Machiavellianism is necessary to form one-half of doublethink. A utopian egalitarian with privilege is doublethink by default. At once, he believes in the infallibility of his ideology (he must if he’s to remain in it), and is aware of his own status, continually acting as one must when in a privileged position.
How does this connect to that most Orwellian scenario, the permanent hardening in place of an oligarchic caste that can’t be removed? As Orwell says through Goldstein, ruling classes fall either by ossifying to the point they fail to react to change, or by becoming self-critical, trying to reform themselves, and exposing themselves to their enemies. Preventing both requires doublethink: knowing full well that one’s ideology is flawed enough to adapt practically to circumstances and believing in its infallibility. The egalitarian elite with a utopian vision has both covered. If you truly, genuinely, believe that you’re like everyone else (which you must if you think your egalitarian project has succeeded), you won’t question the perks and privileges you have, since you think everybody has them. That takes care of trying to reform things: you don’t.
Yet, as an elite, you still behave like an elite and take the necessary precautions. You avoid going through rough areas, you pick only the best schools for your offspring, and you buy only the best houses. As an elite, you also strive to pass on your ideology and way of life to the next generation, thus replicating your group indefinitely. Thus, you simultaneously defend your position and believe in your own infallibility.Could an Oceanian-style oligarchy emerge from this process? Absolutely, provided we qualify our meaning. The society of Nineteen Eighty-Four lacks any laws or representational politics. It has no universal standards of education or healthcare. It functions as what Aristotle in Politics calls a lawless oligarchy, with the addition of total surveillance. But this is an extreme. What I propose is that egalitarianism, once in power, necessarily causes a detachment between ideology and reality that, if left to itself, can degenerate into extreme oligarchy. The severe doublethink needed to sustain both belief in the success of the project and safeguard one’s position at the top can accumulate over time into true class apartheid. This is, after all, exactly what happened to the Soviet Union. As the Soviet dissident and critic Milovan Dilas, in his book The New Class: An Analysis of the Communist System, put it:
“Every private capitalist or feudal lord was conscious of the fact that he belonged to a special discernible social category. (…) A Communist member of the new class also believes that, without his part, society would regress and founder. But he is not conscious of the fact that he belongs to a new ownership class, for he does not consider himself an owner and does not take into account the special privileges he enjoys. He thinks that he belongs to a group with prescribed ideas, aims, attitudes and roles. That is all he sees.”
To get an Oceanian scenario, you don’t need egalitarianism plus a Machiavellian will to power, forming two halves of doublethink. You just need egalitarianism.
