The Pathological Organisation

It has long been remarked that society has become individualistic to a pathological extent. That it is now populated by selfish monads totally oblivious to the needs of others or any notion of solidarity. But while this is true, I think that over the past few decades individualism has undergone a subtle, though significant, change. It is no longer about individual freedom, however egotistical. Individualism is now primarily concerned with policing and correcting the behaviour of the individual – especially for those at the bottom of society – and positing futile personal solutions for patently social problems.

The former can be seen most vividly in the concept of “zero tolerance” which has spread like wildfire across the world since its birth in New York in the 1990s. In its original incarnation, zero tolerance claimed that violent and serious crime could be reduced by first cracking down on “incivilities” and minor offences, such as graffiti or fare dodging. Though crime did indeed fall concurrently, the role of zero tolerance policing in this is highly dubious. Crime also fell in other American cities that didn’t practice zero tolerance at the time and it was labelled by two criminologists as the “least plausible candidate” for contributing to the decrease in violent crime.

Nonetheless zero tolerance had an unstoppable momentum. Its precepts contributed to a colossal rise in the prison population in the USA. In 1975, there were 240,000 people in US jails. Last year there were 2.12 million with millions more on probation or parole. Prison populations have also risen spectacularly in other countries, though not to the same enormous extent. In Britain, for example, prison numbers have nearly doubled since the mid-1990s. And this is in the context of a significant drop in crime.

The ascendancy of zero tolerance is not limited to swelling prisons. Its basic tenet – no excuses and no justification for adjudged misdemeanours – has been enforced in a variety of different settings. Sanctions for benefit recipients – unheard of before the 21^st century – are routinely dished out for missing appointments, not applying for enough jobs or even attending the birth of your child.

Countless institutions – from pubs to political parties – far beyond any connection to the criminal justice system now proclaim a zero tolerance approach to racism, abuse, harassment or bullying.

 

The blind spot

But this obsession with policing, condemning and penalising individual behaviour has gone hand in hand with boundless tolerance for, and seemingly zero interest in, the wrongdoings of organisations.

Such leniency could be seen in reactions to the financial crisis of more than a decade ago. Common responses to a crisis of the banking system ranged from pinning the blame on geeky savants who designed financial products no-one could understand to spotlighting gullible consumers who borrowed recklessly. We need to regulate ourselves, counselled conservative historian Niall Ferguson.

It is revealing that the UK government responded to the financial crisis – a crisis with systemic causes triggered by the actions of corporate organisations – by intensifying the regulation of individual behaviour (and not even of the individuals who were culpable). Between 2010 and 2013, over a million sanctions were imposed on disabled and poor benefit claimants, a 345% rise on the 2001-8 average.

 

Under the Horizon

That the same mentality still thrives can be seen by the muted reaction to one of the gravest ever miscarriages of justice in Britain – the prosecution, sacking or financial ruination of hundreds of sub-postmasters  by the Post Office. The criminalisation was justified by an IT system, Horizon, that produced non-existent cash shortfalls in Post Office branches. But despite knowing that Horizon was faulty, the Post Office – backed up by IT supplier Fujitsu – blamed and persecuted innocent workers for years. Dozens went to prison, many more were heavily fined and some committed suicide.

The problem with blaming bad people at the top for this horrendous injustice is that those leading the Post Office were, by contemporary standards, exemplars of ethical behaviour. Paula Vennells, CEO from 2012 to 2019, is an Anglican priest and was awarded a CBE two years ago for “services to business and charity”. Tim Parker, chairman of the Post Office since 2015, and charged with overseeing its senior management, is also chair of the National Trust.

Nonetheless, despite, according to Vennells, running a business that “genuinely cares about the people who work for us”, the Post Office was guilty, in the eyes of judges, of “oppressive behaviour” and behaving like a “mid-Victorian factory owner”. An MP described it as “feudal”.

It is only when viewed organisationally that its actions become explicable. According to the Private Eye investigation, under Vennells’ leadership, the Post Office, since its split from the privatised Royal Mail in 2012, was obsessed with the bottom line and achieving financial independence from the government by 2020. Nothing could get in the way of that objective and Horizon’s infallibility had to be upheld at all costs.

This “relentless focus” resulted in a culture of unquestioning loyalty. According to one insider quoted in Private Eye: “If you wanted to belong and fit in, you had to put the future of the Post Office first. If that meant turning a blind eye – or worse – that’s what people would do”.

But as soon as the failings at the Post Office are viewed in this light, the problems become so overwhelming they have to be – from the perspective of a supporter of this corporate capitalist system – deliberately ignored. How many other organisations have a “relentless focus” on the bottom line? How many others reify ‘leadership’ and inculcate a rigid culture of loyalty among their senior management? Notwithstanding the stakeholder rhetoric, these are attributes that all hierarchically-run organisations – be they private, public or ‘voluntary’ – are, after decades of neoliberalism and the tutelage of business schools, expected to have.

Toxic Operations

We have become accustomed to exposés of toxic cultures within organisations. But these invariably apply to the head office, senior staff or vestigial practices among the workforce (individual failings again). They rarely apply to the toxic manner in which an organisation’s management treats its workers or the public in general. This is despite such problems being endemic.

In April, an academic study based on interviews with civil servants found that top-down pressure from management in the Department of Work and Pensions during the Cameron coalition years resulted in the deliberate perpetration of “psychological harm” on claimants. Expectations “from above”, the authors noted, acted as a “moral anaesthetic” and resulted in local targets for sanctions, a process which “made invisible the needs and interests” of the claimants subject to such withdrawals of income.

Since they were bailed out in the financial crisis, banks have colluded to manipulate interest rates, rigged the foreign exchange market, plundered small businesses, laundered money for drug cartels, and helped thousands of wealthy clients evade tax (apologies this list is not exhaustive).

Phone hacking and other forms of harassment by newspapers resulted in a long-drawn out public investigation into ‘press ethics’ a decade ago. But a recommendation for an independent press regulator was rejected by David Cameron and in 2018 the Conservatives scrapped the scheduled second part of the inquiry (Leveson 2) on the grounds that the press “had cleaned up its act”. Presumably, clearing out “all the bad people” was sufficient.

And according to a report leaked last year, the permanent officials of the Labour party viewed members and its elected leadership with withering contempt and undermined the party’s 2017 General Election campaign, conceivably scuppering Labour’s chances of becoming the largest party in the Commons.

If not denied or ignored, these organisational scandals have resulted in, at best, grudging apologies, the removal of miscreants and heartfelt promises that ‘it won’t happen again’. But, strangely, it always does.

Fleeting Obedience

In the 2019 book The Disobedient Society, I attempted to chart the extent to which – despite protests to the contrary – obedience still plays a dominant role in social affairs. Taking a cue from the American psychologist Stanley Milgram, I stressed the importance, for obedience to work, of people freely choosing to follow the instructions of others above them in hierarchical organisations. This is now primarily evident in the employment contract, which lays great weight on its voluntary nature to morally differentiate it from forms of forced labour, such as ‘modern slavery’.

However, the subjects in Milgram’s experiments – and in all subsequent ‘Milgramesque’studies – had a very fleeting relationship with authority. Though many were faultlessly obedient, their actual contact with, in Milgram’s phrase, “the person of higher status”, lasted no more than an hour. Their equivalent in today’s society is probably the ‘on-demand’ worker who carries out tasks in line with instructions, but remains self-employed and does permanently join any organisation.

All the cases above of organisational dereliction were perpetrated by a cadre permanently ensconced within a hierarchical set up. This does not diminish obedience. If anything, it enhances it as obedience becomes strengthened by notions of loyalty, reciprocity, “fitting in” or fear of reprisal if behaviour does not meet expectations.

Given that most people in putatively rich countries have to rent themselves out to hierarchical organisations in order to procure the means of survival, obedience, though widely ignored, is an expected and real form of behaviour. However, the power of entrenched vested interests at the top of organisations is equally palpable.  Whether motivated by profit maximisation, competitive rivalry or other metrics of success, these tight-knit groups can – and do – act pathologically, treating employees or the wider public as if they were insentient obstacles to be overcome or exploited.

It’s just that in a society obsessed with the moral failings of individuals, if the spotlight happens to fall on them it is only for a brief moment.

 

 

 

 

Obedient Subjects? The disputed and misunderstood legacy of Stanley Milgram

 In 2019, I published a book called The Disobedient Society in which I argued that, contrary to our protestations of our personal freedom, obedience still plays a dominant role in our societies. Referring back to Stanley Milgram’s famous obedience experiments of the early 1960s – which he subsequently interpreted as demonstrating the ease with which we become “agents” for the wishes of authority figures – I highlighted that the very fact that we perceive our following of orders as voluntary, exemplified by the employment contract, serves to camouflage which is really going on.

Six decades on, controversy still swirls around what Milgram did or didn’t discover in New Haven in 1961. So I thought it would be useful to elaborate what I think of these controversies and how Milgram still informs the book’s central idea. In a very astute review of the book one writer, for example, asserts that Milgram’s findings, blighted by revelations of how participants were unduly pressured into going along the experimenter’s instructions, must now be considered mere metaphors for obedience.

Electric Dreams

To recap, the Milgram’s experiment (s) consisted of instructing participants to give electric shocks via a machine to a – usually hidden – stranger, with the proviso that they were told they could leave at any point. However, the shocks weren’t real. The machine went up to 450 volts, enough to conceivably kill the victim, but it was an elaborately designed fake – no-one was being shocked at all. The entire set-up was to ascertain how far participants would go ‘under orders’.

Milgram – through the experiment he oversaw – has been plausibly accused of haranguing some participants to obey and going on ‘shocking’ the victim. If participants hesitated or expressed doubts at any stage they were to be encouraged to continue with phrases like “the experiment requires that you continue” or “you have no other choice, you must go on”. However, these lines were supposed to be used only once – if the participant still refused to play ball, the experiment was halted and they were labelled “disobedient”.

However, recordings of some of the Milgram sessions suggest that the experimenter (not Milgram but an employee, an ‘agent’ of Milgram you might say) went further than he should have, continually pressing participants to continue, “railroading” them according to Gina Perry’s 2012 book Behind the Shock Machine.

Milgram has also been accused of not telling all participants afterwards that the shocks were fake and in one study of arranging for friends, rather than strangers, to play the roles of ‘teacher’ and ‘learner’.

However, it should also be borne in mind, that there wasn’t a single a Milgram experiment but 23 variations and the most frequent obedience rate was 60%.

I Don’t Believe You

The idea that Milgram’s results were invalid really rests on another conception – that many participants saw through the ruse, that they didn’t truly believe anyone was being shocked. Milgram always asserted that the vast majority of subjects were fully taken in by the elaborate deception but according to interviews conducted by the ‘learner’ (the actor playing the victim), immediately after the experiments, many obedient participants claimed that they didn’t believe anyone was being harmed.

So high obedience rates are not what they seem on the surface. What they really reveal, in this view, is a desire to go along with what the experiment demands. Obedient subjects feel safe in the knowledge that no-one is really being hurt from them playing along, so they do what they are told.

However, there are reasons to doubt this hypothesis (and not just based on Milgram’s post-hoc survey of participants). In one of Milgram’s variations (no 4) the actor playing the learner comes out from the other room where he was hidden in almost all of the other variations and sits next to the subject. The subject’s role here is to physically place – wearing heavy rubber gloves for protection – the learner’s hand on a metal plate apparently conducting electricity if he makes a mistake remembering the word-pairs (the experiments are presented as a way of discovering the effects of punishment on memory).

Common sense dictates that the entire ruse is most vulnerable to being seen through in this variation. The actor-learner has to do some serious and convincing acting, as opposed to, in most other variations, pressing play on a tape recorder at various intervals, broadcasting his pre-recorded screams. So if the disbelief hypothesis is correct, obedience rates should be high here – a sign that participants realise they are being deceived and do what is expected of them. Actually, they are very low – 30% – one of the lowest in the entire series of experiments.

Conversely, in another variation (Study no 13) where participants do not have to directly ‘shock’ the victim, but merely read out the word-pairs while a confederate of the experimenter flicks the switches on the shock machine, obedience rates are very high – in fact, at 92.5%, the highest in the series.

So when the subject was physically closest to the victim, directly inflicting pain, obedience rates were low but when the subject was furthest away from the victim, playing a secondary (though important) role, obedience was very high. These are the kind of results you might expect if most participants had no doubts the presented scenario was real or at least had limited scepticism.

More evidence that Milgram hit upon a genuine phenomenon, as opposed to merely ‘discovering’ a disturbing propensity he contrived to find, is given by the fact that replications of the obedience experiment in other countries recorded, with one notable exception, similar results.

Ethical Obedience

There was then a long gap when ‘Milgramesque’ experiments did not take place for ethical reasons. The reasons concerned the traumatic effect on participants. In several Milgram variations if subjects obediently continue ‘shocking’ all the way to the end they have good reason to believe that the now silent learner is dead or at least seriously injured.

Then in 2008 a California professor came up with the idea of the “obedience lite” experiment. A copy of Milgram’s shock generator was used but with only 10 switches going up to 150 volts. Milgram’s machine had 30 switches, with the highest being 450 volts. However, browsing Milgram’s results, Professor Jerry Burger of Santa Clara University found that the 150 volts was a common stopping point – “a point of no return”. If subjects went beyond the 150 volt mark they often continued all the way to the end.

So here was a way to conduct a Milgram-type experiment without inflicting trauma on participants. And it turned out Burger’s results were comparable with Milgram’s. 70 per cent of his participants were willing to go beyond the 150 volt level – with Milgram it had been 82.5.

Burger’s innovation has allowed a new generation of Milgramesque experiments to take place. For example, between 2014 and 2017 in Wroclaw, Poland, two researchers carried out what they assert is “the broadest program of empirical investigations of obedience since the times of Milgram’s studies”.

In total five studies were carried out using a replica of Milgram’s machine. As with Burger, the highest switch was normally the tenth (150 volts), though in one study subjects were allowed to go up to the 15^th switch (225 volts).

The researchers, Dariusz Doliński and Tomasz Grzyb, are adamant their findings should not be compared with Milgram’s. The one obvious difference is that Milgram’s subjects were encouraged to press 30 switches but they stopped their experiments long before that. But there are others, such as who was recruited, the location, the life experiences of the subjects and the sternness of the experimenter.

However, they are also clear that their experiments show the enduring reality of obedience and the ease with which, given the right circumstances, ordinary people can be induced to obey. 85-90% of their participants (split equally between men and women by the way) exhibited “total obedience” – i.e. they went all the way to the 10^th switch. In addition, the verbal prods – “the experiment requires that you continue”, etc., the same as with Milgram – rarely had to be used.

Secret Agents

In fact, the comparisons that can be made with Milgram are fascinating. Despite wide cultural differences and a gap of over five decades, the overwhelmingly dominant result – in both cases defying predictions – was obedience. Moreover, Doliński and Grzyb believe that Milgram’s original explanation for the behaviour of participants – that they enter what he termed an “agentic state” – is hard to refute.

Milgram defined the agentic state as a “social situation” in which a person is open to “regulation by a person of higher status. “In this condition”, he claimed, “the individual no longer views himself as responsible for his own actions but defines himself as an instrument  for carrying out the wishes of others”.

Doliński and Grzyb tried, fruitlessly, to find other explanations for the obedience of their subjects. For example, the greater empathy of certain individuals or the expectation of swapping places with the victim. In the end, however, they were compelled to return to Milgram’s original hypothesis.

“Despite the passing of many years since the studies,” they say, “the agentic state Milgram proposed continues to appear an important and difficult to invalidate means of explaining the obedience of participants in experiments conducted within that paradigm.”

I am not trying to paint a picture of Milgram as a flawless seeker of truth. Although he belatedly came up with the idea of the agentic state, he didn’t think through the implications of what he was proposing and kept resorting to superficial explanations. For example, that ordinary people were torturers beneath the surface and that Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi executed for organising the Holocaust, personified the dilemma of obedience.

In fact, as the book elucidates, Eichmann was a complete red herring. He was an idealistic Nazi and, on occasion, consciously disobedient towards his superior (Himmler, head of the SS). Moreover, the ‘social situation’ of Milgram’s agentic state, with subordinates obeying orders and “superordinates” delivering them, referred explicitly to hierarchical organisations.  As noted long ago by Hannah Arendt in The Origins of Totalitarianism, Nazism was the very opposite of a hierarchical system. Authority derived directly from Hitler, not from thousands of ‘little füehrers’ lording it over their underlings. Eichmann embodied this very well. He was utterly bound up in the Füehrerprinzip, and felt no obligation to his alleged ‘superiors’ in the Nazi system, only to Hitler himself.

Voluntary Hierarchies

Thus, taking totalitarian systems organised around the leader principle out of the equation, you are left with three hierarchical systems that conform to Milgram’s definition: corporations, bureaucracies and conventional militaries.

However, Milgram also highlighted the crucial effect of what he termed “voluntary entry”. Participants not only freely signed up to the experiment they were told, unequivocally, they were free to leave at any point. Enlisted individuals do not have that freedom. Even if they joined voluntarily and were not conscripted, they are subject to military discipline and cannot just abscond.

So, in truth, you are left with two hierarchical organisations that embody Milgram’s agentic state and obedience to authority – corporations and government bureaucracies. Both are utterly dependent on waged labour.

 In part two, I want to examine the – widely unrecognised – implications of this dependence. Or what Milgram, whether he knew it or not, was really talking about.

Despite what Jordan Peterson says, the world is not your lobster*

I’ve been enticed back into reading about Jordan Peterson and his exemplary lobster. For the uninitiated, Peterson – ‘classical liberal’ and self-help guru – believes we should be inspired by the not so humble lobster, willing to fight all-comers (well other lobsters) for the best places to live. The lobster (and also the merciless wren, the chicken, the chimpanzee etc.) is an example of nature’s dominance hierarchy which is a “near-eternal aspect of the environment”. Older than trees in fact.

Humans, according to Peterson, are just as subject to the unforgiving laws of this dominance hierarchy. Despite our cultural pretensions and elaborate societies it still operates under the surface. “It’s inevitable,” avers Peterson, “that there will be continuity in the way animals and human beings organise their structures”. Thus, brutal economic inequality – the fact that 85 ultra-wealthy people at the top of society have as much as three and half billion at the bottom – is given a biological justification.

Read the memo: it’s inevitable, get used to it and don’t – the ultimate Peterson sin – start getting resentful.

The immediate temptation, to which many have succumbed, is to say Peterson’s examination of the natural world is hopelessly partial. Why choose to focus on the lobster or the status-obsessed chimpanzee and pass over the egalitarian, sharing bonobo or the unaggressive, vegetarian gibbon? An argument that can be traced back to Kropotkin’s highlighting of mutual aid among animals, in contrast to the simplification of the survival of the fittest.

Civilised hierarchies

However, this argument rather misses the point, or to be more precise, it concedes too much before it gets to the bone of contention. Because human hierarchies – that is actually existing hierarchies that have dominated the history of human civilisation before reformers, revolutionaries and utopians messed with them – are radically and qualitatively different to animal dominance hierarchies. In fact the latter don’t merit the appellation ‘hierarchy’ at all, the word originally applying to the rule of the high priest in ancient Greece, a uniquely human dispensation.

Only in early hunter-gatherer societies, can human arrangements be said to resemble dominance ‘hierarchies’ among animals in the sense that charismatic and talented individuals might acquire power. And even then, the evidence suggests tribal members were aware of the dangers of power becoming entrenched and embodied in certain individuals and took steps to ensure that, uniquely in the natural world, economic relations, family structure and political life were regularly shuffled.

The history of civilisation in all parts of the world, by contrast, and despite its undoubted benefits, is the history of dynasties, aristocracies, land-owners and empires on the one side and serfs, slaves, indentured labourers, and workers on the other. Slavery was an unmissable feature of ‘civilised’ society for thousands of years. It’s not a Western invention or imposition; it was only abolished in China in 1908.

In such societies, the facts of birth and inheritance were all-important. Intelligence, cunning, physical strength, charisma – or whatever other attributes Peterson thinks differentiates winners from losers – would at best have enabled the lucky incumbent to progress within their caste or class. Only very rarely would they have permitted them to rise within the hierarchy itself. Hannah Arendt’s description of the “caste conceit” of the British aristocracy in the 19^th century – “the pride in privilege without individual effort and merit, simply by virtue of birth” – could be applied to ruling castes and classes throughout history the world over.

‘God hath placed them there’

Such hierarchies were, in Murray Bookchin’s description, were “clothed in ideologies” because they were anything but natural. They were, however, intended to endure and such longevity was not merely secured by immense military power but also because most people, especially those oppressed by such hierarchies, were assiduously convinced of their, often divinely-ordained, legitimacy. Something animals obviously can’t be. Lobsters don’t bequeath their hiding places to their offspring nor insist to other lobsters left with stringy pieces of seaweed as camouflage that it’s blasphemy to object to such inequality because it’s been prescribed by the great lobster god.

Hence belief systems like the medieval ‘Great Chain of Being’ in which everyone – serfs, vagabonds, yeomen, lords etc. – had a recognised position because ‘God hath placed them there’.  In 17^th century England, parish priests issued weekly instructions for servants to obey their masters and behave “lowly and reverently” towards their betters.

In such societies, the personal attributes and characters of rulers might be a source of regret or rejoicing, but they were irrelevant for determining the power they wielded. As Bookchin noted about now infamous European monarchs:

Figures like Louis XVI of France and Nicholas II of Russia, for example did not become autocrats because they had genetically programmed strong personalities and physiques, much less keen minds. They were inept, awkward, psychologically weak, and conspicuously stupid men (even according to royalist accounts of their reigns) who lived in times of revolutionary social upheaval. Yet their power was virtually absolute until it was curtailed by revolution.

But, but ...  I’m guessing Peterson would instantly interject were he to be – unlikely I know – reading this: what you’re saying might be true for human hierarchies deeply ensconced in tradition and time-encrusted practices, but since the advent of liberal-democracy and capitalism and the demise of ancien regimes it has been possible for people born in difficult circumstances to, through their own native ability and self-discipline, rise in society and transform their lives.

“… the most valid personality trait predictors of long-term success in Western countries,” says Peterson “are intelligence … and conscientiousness.”

As a precursor, “success” needs to be defined. Because so much intelligence, conscientiousness and talent that doesn’t fit into money-making purposes and interest those organizations that hire people to do their bidding (and into which democracy is not permitted to intrude) simply withers or is actively suppressed.

Yea, even unto the Middle Ages

However, the other side of the coin is that liberal capitalism’s reputation for social mobility – progressing up the income scale during your lifetime – has been greatly exaggerated even on its own terms. So many of our current political leaders have emerged from privileged backgrounds and wealth amassed before y’know everyone had a crack at it. David Cameron is descended from King William VI and was brought up in a stately home, Boris Johnson’s full name is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson and Donald Trump inherited his fortune from his property tycoon dad.

Social mobility’s heyday under capitalism was actually in its post-war social-democratic incarnation when the rich were heavily taxed and finance forced into productive investment. Since the 1980s, after capitalism became more purely capitalistic, it’s gone down. A 2017 report found that in the US after the ‘inflection point’ of 1980, inequality skyrocketed and social mobility started “declining sharply”. The British Social Mobility Commission reported last year that inequality is now “entrenched from birth to work” and according to the UN Development Programme a “great new divergence” is taking place around the world, leaving educated young people stuck in low wage, dead-end jobs:

“What people perhaps 30, 40 years ago were led to believe and often saw around them," an UNDP administrator says, “was that if you worked hard, you could escape poverty.” Yet in many countries today, he says, upward social mobility is “simply not occurring” anymore.

This is modern-day capitalism, where intelligence and conscientiousness aren’t, after all, enough to help you lead a better life. And by the way, this conclusion is not impaired by Peterson’s revelation that human and lobsters share “basic neuro-chemistry” so you can administer an anti-depressant to a lobster and it will fight “harder and longer”. Anti-depressants have been administered to millions of human beings since the late 1980s, making evidently no difference to rates of social mobility.

Entrepreneurs and capitalists

Why, you might ask, does it have to be this way? Because capitalism is at heart a system where great wealth is extracted by people who do nothing to earn it. It isn’t, despite the advertising, a justice dispensing machine where, notwithstanding the rough edges, diligent and creative entrepreneurs are rewarded for the improvements they bring to people’s lives.

As author David Schweickart has astutely shown, the entrepreneur is capitalism’s “white knight”, routinely unveiled to justify ‘returns to capital’ that have nothing to do with inventions or improving methods of production. Vast fortunes are made and replenished daily simply by virtue of the ownership of real or financial assets:

In a capitalist society, enormous sums are paid to people who do not engage in any entrepreneurial activity or take on any significant risk with their capital. Trillions flows to shareholders who make an entirely passive contribution to production.

In fact, despite the enormous changes wrought by the economic system known as capitalism, the capitalist bears an uncanny resemblance to the landowners and landlords of past centuries who commandeered immense wealth and power without doing anything to deserve it. Indeed, capitalism has frequently coexisted with small coteries of landowners in most parts of the world. Which is why land reform was such a seminal political issue for numerous countries in the 20^th century – something you might be aware of if you manage to get over a fixation with capitalist white hats and communist black hats.

Don’t complain

The awkward problem is that wanting human society to replicate the daily fights for survival, nourishment and safety evident in the animal world requires not a laissez-faire approach, but massive government intervention in society. It demands severe taxation of the rich and punitive restrictions on inheritance. It compels instituting downwards as well as upwards social mobility, which means abolishing private education that works, in effect, to over-promote a small section of the population and lavish resources on them. And even then, the result would be a pale imitation of animal ‘hierarchies’.

But western societies are intent on the diametrically opposite policy. Every time in recent history – for example the 2008 financial crisis or the current Covid-19 crisis – the wealth of the moneyed and propertied has been threatened, governments stepped in to artificially protect it and institute bogus stock market booms.

Isolated conservatives and ‘classical liberals’ may have objected to this massive transfer of wealth from poor to rich but the vast majority – Peterson included – raised not a whimper of protest.

The grain of truth in Peterson is the emphasis on personal responsibility and the insistence that, whatever your circumstances, no-one, apart from yourself, determines how you react. But others before have expressed this anti-determinism better. “It makes no sense to complain since nothing foreign has decided what we feel, how we live, or what we are,” said Jean-Paul Sartre, trickily also a Marxist, in 1943.

But ignoring the structures of society that are not amenable to individual efforts to change them but can, nonetheless, still be changed collectively, is not only wrong but is liable to lead to depression and resentment, the very things Peterson says he wants to alleviate.

* my son