Long time readers
of this blog will be familiar with regular references to the famous Milgram experiment of the 1960s. This
was a psychological experiment in which an unerring majority of subjects, from
varying walks of life, displayed a willingness to inflict immensely painful,
possibly lethal, electric shocks on strangers - when ordered to do so.
It was a
microcosmic refutation of conservative efforts to attribute society’s ills to
ethical deficiencies or people’s inner cruelty, recklessness or credulity. Subjective feelings did not
matter. Cruel people did not inflict more shocks than kind people. Obedience, not personal disposition, was the
deciding factor.
While
conservatives such as Niall Ferguson chide that “we bay for regulation, though not of ourselves,” Stanley Milgram’s
frequently replicated experiment shows that obedience to institutional drives,
rather than wayward personal desires, explains human behaviour at the level of
the economy and politics.
It follows
that the economic stagnation we face, the “endless crisis” as it has been called,
has systemic roots. It is not the result of human frailties but the collective outcome of people rationally pursuing the aims of the institutions they work for (you can blame bankers and CEOs if you wish but replacing them all will
merely produce a new parade of faces to despise).
I still
think Milgram illuminates where conservatives like Ferguson just kick up dust swirls of
confusion. But the systemic/obedience explanation is not the whole story. As
Milgram himself concluded, obedience, to work, has to be willingly entered
into. Open compulsion just leads to resistance. People, in other words, have to
want to be used.
The only thing worse
than being exploited is not being exploited
And we do
want to be used; increasingly so. The vast majority of people are materially
bound to the capitalist system’s, smooth functioning. That’s an observation, not a judgement. We have careers, we covet advancement, we have families and
dependants to support. This is all the more acute at a time of economic
stagnation, when jobs are thin on the ground. There are 85 applications for
every graduate job in Britain.
It is in your rational self-interest to make yourself into the kind of person
that will make an employer choose you, rather than a rival.
As Oscar
Wilde might have said, the only thing worse than being exploited, is not being
exploited.
Yet at the
same time leaving the system to it own devices, a system that is driven by
institutional impulses and is not the collective sum of human desires, is to
invite disaster, looming and unending social, economic and ecological crises.
If it is
economically rational to accede to the institutional aims of the organisation
you work for and to obediently carry out its day to day tasks, it is also
economically rational to attempt to rise within it, to not be poor. “Our first
duty, a duty to which every other consideration should be sacrificed,” said the
socialist playwright George Bernard Shaw, “is not to be poor.” But here lies an
intractable rational problem. This explains how economic crises can happen
regardless of personal motives, but it also explains how the ‘machine’ will
just go on, dispensing its consequences, because there is no-one to intervene
to alter or transform its inner workings.
There is a
vague hope that somewhere along the line people will decide to rebel. Milgram
in his book, Obedience to Authority, likened
obedience to sleep. They are both states from which people can be shaken out
of. But in Anglo-American societies, at least, it seems clear that it is
forlorn to hope that economic decline, the economy pressing down more severely
on people, will spark rebellion.
The personal is not
the political
I think the
first and crucial step in resolving this conundrum is to divorce the personal
from the political. We have duties to ourselves and duties to society at large
and they are often not the same. The one writer I have come across who has
fully recognised our dual and conflicted nature in this regard is Dan Hind.
His 2007
book, The Threat to Reason,
was primarily about how being “enlightened” was not about fearlessly
denouncing fundamentalists, New Agers or postmodernists but seeking out the
truth about our own societies, the real nature of the state and of
corporations. But he also made a neglected, though profound point, in that
book. In order to transform the word, we first must give up, he said, the idea
of a unified self.
“Most of us
cannot and will not sacrifice our careers and the welfare of our families for
the abstract demands of universal truth and justice,” he writes. “But we are
nevertheless confused and distressed by the contradictions inherent in the
state and corporate bureaucracies of Britain
and America.”
Here is
Hind speaking:
The
philosophical keystone that Hind makes use of is the work of the eighteenth
century German thinker, Immanuel Kant. Kant said that our accustomed
definitions of ‘private’ and ‘public’ need to be reversed. When ensconced in
any institutional role, as employees, we reason ‘privately’, said Kant. It is
only when we are free as individuals to think, unencumbered by any
institutional ties, that we can hope to reason ‘publicly’.
It is
Hind’s insight that, unless we are independently wealthy, we cannot hope to
escape from this dual nature. “We do not have to renounce our private
identities as employees,” he writes. “But we must recognise that the sum of our
private identities does not constitute the full expression or our humanity.”
There is a permanent tension, Hind
says, between the requirements of our economic role and a wider commitment to an
accurate description of the world and the possibility of radically altered
institutional arrangements.
To fully
express our humanity and a desire to understand and change the world, we cannot
conflate the world-view of our employer with our own. The employer we must
detach from may be a corporation. But it can also be a government, a university
department, or an NGO. We have to accept our institutional life, but also step
outside of it.
A deathly logic
Since The Threat to Reason was published in
2007, the demands of our private identities, the inescapable need to survive
and prosper within the confines of this society, have intensified massively. This
has trapped us inside a deathly logic which says because we are materially
dependent on the success of our actual or would be employers, we should rationally
give them everything they want. “What’s good for General Motors, is good for America,” as they used to say in the US. Mould
yourself into the kind of person likely to succeed, ever-flexible, ever obedient
- sell yourself. At the wider level, make sure corporate tax rates are
competitive because the last thing you want to do, obviously, is frighten them
away.
What Hind
offers is a way to loosen this constricting grip. How we act and what we want
on a personal level, are vastly different and often in conflict with, how we
need to act and what we should want on a political level. To colonise
everything with personal needs and desires, is social suicide.
“An active
acceptance of our dual nature as private and public agents holds out the
prospect of a world transformed.”
