Authority's eclipse of reason

The practice and consequences of being trained to obey

One of the recurring questions we tend to come up against in the Aesthetic Resistance podcast is how people in general are to recover their independent rational agency.

This not only regards how we can restore (or inaugurate anew) institutions of sound research and communication, but how our faculties of critical thought, analysis and inquiry are to be rehabilitated in the wake of what in practice amounts to generations of cognitive and not least spiritual trauma.

While the last couple of years of violent technological isolation and a propaganda of unprecedented intensity bring the situation out in stark relief, the offending structures are much older, and deeply intertwined with urbanization, forced factory schooling and electronic mass media (going back to the telegraph).

In other words, the covid situation and the contemporary age of propagandized digitality are merely the last iterations of a centuries-old process. They’re simply an aspect of the operations of a vast institution of discipline, bread and circus whose structures have been around us all of our lives, and whose chief mode of intervention is the inculcation of submissive roles and identities.

Our high-scoring subjects do not seem to behave as autonomous units whose decisions are important for their own fate as well as that of society, but rather as submissive centers of reactions, looking for the conventional “thing to do,” and riding what they consider “the wave of the future.” This observation seems to fall in line with the economic tendency towards gradual disappearance of the free market and the adaptation of man to the slowly emerging new condition.

Research following the conventional patterns of investigation into public opinion may easily reach the point where the orthodox concept of what people feel, want, and do proves to be obsolete (Adorno, T. (1950). “Remarks on the Authoritarian Personality”. The Authoritarian Personality.).

I was an insufferable piece of shit in elementary school.

I started reading early, so I quickly had a decent grasp of the skillset that this institutional setting favours. Since I therefore inevitably learned to regurgitate a smattering of established facts and narratives before most other kids did, I also took great pride in believing myself much more intelligent than my peers.

E. Irving Couse, The Historian, 1902

This is of course also fostered by the context. You get perks and privileges for conforming in this way, since it’s equated with virtue, talent and diligence. And the double effect you achive by extolling this sort of child is to both in everyone’s eyes confuse a sort of midwit conformism with intelligence and critical thinking, while also implicitly punishing all of the rest, who possess a perhaps less narrow skillset or healthier focus of interests. The fact that children’s competences and passions emerge very unevenly is another damning argument against age-regimentation and the erection of hierarchies of skill at this level.

And it’s in this process that authority first becomes a proxy for truth, and soon enough its arbiter.

Why? Because the pinnacle of academic excellence (and what passes for intelligence) is placed out of reach of almost everyone, while those few at the top, through their perks and rewards, are unfailingly inculcated with a submission to authority and the “correct” narratives, and effectively taught to identify with the system.

When my sister was in high school in the 90s, there was a set number of students that could receive a particular grade in any single class. A few could be placed at the top and bottom, and the majority was fitted in the middle. In other words, they assumed a bell curve distribution for grades, and then in some utterly backwards bullshit maneauver actually assigned them according to that template - with an inevitably tenuous relationship to genuine performance even according to their own standards.

It’s “scientific”, you see.

Auditorium of an abandoned high school in Detroit

C. S. Lewis once reflected that the experience of arbitrary and evil misuse of power during his time in middle school was invaluable to him, and to many of his peers. It not only gave them a proper understanding of the darker side of authority and a healthy hatred thereof, it also brought the classmates closer together, united for their common good against this little simulacrum of the tyrannical state.

But we ourselves were (as the Trades Unions say) ‘solid’. Beaten, cheated, scared, ill-fed, we did not sneak. And I cannot help feeling that it was in that school I imbibed a certain indispensable attitude towards mere power on the one hand and towards every variety of Quisling on the other. So much so that I find it hard to see what can replace the bad schoolmaster if he has indeed become extinct. He was, sore against his will, a teacher of honour and a bulwark of freedom.

The Dictators and the Secret Police breed in countries where schoolboys lack the No Sneaking Rule. Of course one must wish for good schoolmasters. But if they breed up a generation of the ‘Yes, Sir, and Oh, Sir, and Please, Sir brigade’, Squeers himself will have been less of a national calamity (Lewis, C. S. (1986). “My first school”. Present Concerns.).

They’ve gotta kill the rebel in you first. Or subvert her, preferably.

I.e. the insurgent attitudes which inevitably arise from our suspicion that we’re being cheated in the most ignominious and demeaning fashion must either be quelled or directed towards an end useful to the system.

People like me who are funneled towards an academic career or some managerial position tend to internalize the expert role, and generally come to identify with the authority of the system we serve. We’re almost part of the in-crowd, and we often happen to rub up against the elite, which many of us find incredibly exhilarating. We read the fancier newspapers, we own stock and property and get to feel like we’re “in on it”, like we’re part of the select few who really know what’s going on and get to touch the founts of power.

Our authoritarianism is mainly fostered through playing on our conceit and sense of self-importance. In concert with our privileges, this will effectively neuter most tendencies towards meaningful dissent. Indeed, through these means, intellectuals are some of the most propagandized people out there.

Naturally, the educated man does not believe in propaganda; he shrugs and is convinced that propaganda has no effect on him. This is, in fact, one of his great weaknesses, and propagandists are well aware that in order to reach someone, one must first convince him that propaganda is ineffectual and not very clever.

Because he is convinced of his own superiority, the intellectual is much more vulnerable than anybody else to this maneuver, even though basically a high intelligence, a broad culture, aconstant exercise of the critical faculties, and full and objective information are still the best weapons against propaganda … too much discussion, too much depth of doctrine risk creating divergent currents and permitting the intellectual to escape social control (Ellul, J. (1965). Propaganda.).

The working class is rather being played by the use of fear and hatred in relation to various sorts of enemy images. They don’t quite as much identify with authority per se, and are generally pissed off and discontented due to their relative lack of privileges, so their level of integration as useful idiots tends to be less advanced.

However, they will respond to Goebbels-type agitprop if it effectively can channel their distrust and rage towards some suitable scapegoat.

The authoritarians in these groups will thus more readily be fuelled by resentment and the desire for revenge.

Marcel Duchamp, Sad young man on a train, 1911-1912

So you’ve split society in distinct classes, you’ve created a managerial stratum that identifies with authority and incited those of lesser privilege towards suitable external or internal threats. This goes a long way, to be sure, but where does this substitution of authority for reason come in, more exactly?

I think there are three main factors involved here.

First of all, we have the role of the expert as anchored within the framework of the myth of Science. I’ve written a good bit about this institutional arrangement before, not least in this piece. Suffice to say that our society’s relatively small class of intellectuals and media pundits have come to assume the role of gatekeepers of truth and knowledge, a development exacerbated by every step towards increased mediatic, institutional and informational centralization. We’re fostered to trust not in ourselves, but in the arbitration of authorities set above us, and every deviance from their preferred narratives and norms is invariably punished, lest the system’s ideological reproduction be threatened.

The myth and redemptive promise of Science likewise anchors this intellectual subjugation, since it alone can advertise a utopia to rival the eschatological hopes of the great religious traditions. This supreme state where human beings may survive indefinitely, liberated from want and fear, and spread throughout the uni- (or metaverse). Challenge the experts, and you go against this whole edifice of science, technology and progress, which since forever has been marketed as key to everything good, true and beautiful in the world.

But a quite different factor also serves to augment our contemporary authoritarian epistemology. I here have in mind what one could term the paradoxical effects of our ideology of equalism. The idea since the Enlightenment is basically that sovereignty is justly and universally deserved by the human person. That “I’m as good as you” in every respect, and that therefore the unqualified right to self-rule is a positive one, derived from some sort of innate excellence common to all.

This is a half-truth. It’s a given that we’re all miraculously rational beings in possession of free will, but it’s far from true that we’re all also virtuous and proper custodians of these gifts.

And this peculiar half-truth at the heart of our mythology of democracy I think has two distinct effects.

It suppresses our ability to appreciate actual excellence. We’re ready enough to acclaim it in the abstract, at a distance, but can’t stomach nor readily perceive it in our neighbour. I have no real framework for properly honoring your excellence without loss of face and undue vulnerability, so I will more likely envy you for it or attempt to denigrate it.

This is reinforced by the the story that equality is basically satisfied within the current hierarchical order and the representative framework of modern democracies. The notion that actual hierarchies are the result of talent, skill, ambition or intelligence will tend towards the confusion of actual excellence with privilege. An affirmation of authority which at the same time flatters us as nominal owners of the system, that we’re adequately represented as sovereign citizens.

This also renders suspect any notion of competence or knowledge that doesn’t square with the power structure’s proffered narratives. If you’re so smart, then why aren’t you up there with the vetted and legitimate experts?

Time and again, the observation has been made that individual anti-Semitism is switched on and off, just as the “spontaneous actions” against the Jews were produced and called off in the Third Reich. The insight into this aspect of anti-Semitism should somehow modify Sartre’s assumption that anti-Semitism is “a passion and at the same time a concept of the world.” Whereas there can be no doubt about the emotional basis of anti-Semitism: repressed libido transformed into destructiveness, this libido is nevertheless primarily “free floating,” as the psychoanalysts would call it. The transference to the specific object involves the ego.

The very fact that anti-Semitism is not a mere attitude, but a pseudo-rational ideology whose inherent untruth is never quite hidden to the fascist personality, necessitates the kind of ego involvement which Sartre interprets with the aid of the existentialist idea of “free choice.” The truth behind this concept is that the “weak ego” needs the anti-Semitic ideology for purposes of self-maintenance, however spurious the latter may be (Adorno, T. Ibid.).

At the micro-level, however, the all-too obvious disconnect between formal authority and competence, as perhaps exemplified by incompetent local politicians or corrupt officials, creates a significant and somewhat paradoxical resentment. In our society, this resentment fosters a sort of innate longing for a worthier hierarchy that attaches itself to any half-cocked claim to superiority. A psychological tension of this sort is probably a factor in the emergence of the contemporary radical right, which exemplifies both a pronounced politics of ressentiment and a strong identification with what’s construed as the rightful and deserved power in an authoritarian system.

All the same, the most important factor in the emergence of this epistemic authoritarianism is probably the mediatic technologies, and especially their emergent character of the last couple of decades. This network of disconnection is now almost the epitome of alienation, effectively isolating human individuals from our traditional communities and natural surroundings. They also flood us with this one-way barrage of often incoherent snippets of sensational information, which both obscures access conceptual structues of analysis and orientation, and precludes meaningful agency in the visible societal processes.

This last point is probably more important than I’ve realized. The situation we find ourselves in is one where anything of importance happening in society is completely beyond our control.

The global mass media cognitively infiltrates almost every aspect of our lived experience since we’re constantly online, and down to a fault, the events and occurrences that are presented to our observation are distant and convoluted narratives over which we have absolutely no agency. Compare this to traditional societies of a couple of hundred years back, where you had some agency in relation to almost everything that took place. Where just about every bit of information that you encountered was immediately relevant to yourself as an embedded agent.

Xavier Leprince, The Town Crier, early 1800s

The only way in which the current situation and media climate affords us anything akin to agency is through the ritual reenactment or participation in these distant or macro-level events over which we have absolutely no real power. Through accepting the roles ascribed to us, and submitting to the processes, narratives and social imaginaries of authority.

This is obviously conducive to the sort of low-intensity trauma that John Steppling often touches upon.

And on the topic of aesthetics, I think the active rediscovery of art and literature really is the only war forward in terms of rehabilitating critical thinking. That’s where it once began, and that’s where it’s going to find its resurgence, if ever.

But how is this going to happen in a world of TikTok? In a context of structurally inculcated attention-deficit disorder; of a decontextualized overload of information and trivial entertainment that stains everything with irrelevance and uproots any attempt at a coherent framework of orientation and analysis?

I don’t know.

I only know that we somehow have to recover our ability to tell stories and make sense of the world, for ourselves and by ourselves. We have to take back some modicum of self-reliance and then anchor ourselves firmly in that morsel of truth and from that point rediscover the universe anew, through our long-dormant faculties of creativity and rational interpretation.

There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till.

The power which resides in him is new in nature, and none but he knows what that is which he can do, nor does he know until he has tried. …

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.

And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

(Emerson, R. W. (1841). “Self-Reliance”. Essays: First Series.)