Staying Bought: The High Price Of Being In Charge.

Counting The Cost: Only through the creation of elaborate strategies of denial and deflection can those whose salaries depend on keeping the system going preserve their sanity. Very few people are able to embrace the injustice they daily dispense, but even fewer are unaware of its impact on their wellbeing.

WE’VE ALL MET THEM, blokes who rely on the opinions of blokes just like themselves for guidance and inspiration. The sort of men for whom evidence is much less important than what they “just know”. Tell them that they’re wrong and they’ll tell you that: “No, you’re wrong.” Provide them with evidence, and they’ll accuse you of “making it up”. Whip out your smartphone and allow Professor Google to confirm your claims and, if they don’t immediately punch you in the face, they’ll simply turn away and pretend you’re invisible. Such men are a significant and often dangerous obstacle to human progress at any time – but never more so than when your country’s government is chock full of them.

What makes these blokes so impervious to evidence-based arguments and/or expert advice? Are they simply poorly-educated? It’s tempting to think so, but that would insult all those poorly-educated people who are, nevertheless, hungry for information and always eager to learn.

Working-class people growing up in nineteenth and twentieth century communities where educational opportunities were strictly limited proved this point over and over again by reading everything they could lay their hands on. So hungry for information and knowledge were they that those who had yet to attain full literacy would often club together to pay for someone to read to them while they worked.

One of the many sad stories emerging from the Christchurch earthquake was the loss of the impressive library of socialist, economic and trade union literature collected over more than a century by the Canterbury Trades Council. With the Trades Hall severely damaged by the quake, Christchurch authorities prohibited any recovery attempt. Eventually, the library’s rare and irreplaceable volumes, many of them first editions, were simply gathered up with the rest of that broken city’s rubble and buried.

No, imperviousness to rational argument is not the consequence of an inadequate education. Those who are open to knowledge will never attempt to discourage or silence those who are ready and willing to impart it. Reliance on a narrow set of ideas and assumptions, accompanied by relentless antagonism towards any person, group, or institution daring to suggest that those ideas and assumptions might not be altogether reliable, is most often an indication that ideological diversity would pose a material threat to the impervious ones’ dominant political, economic, social and/or cultural status.

No one has ever summed up this walled-in mindset more succinctly than the “muck-raking” (i.e. scandal exposing) journalist, novelist, and socialist agitator Upton Sinclair (1878-1968). Of such obdurate types he wrote: “It is hard to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon him not understanding it.”

Such individuals simply cannot afford to be broad-minded and tolerant of difference and dissent, because if they were they would very soon come to the realisation that the ideas they cling to and the assumptions they make are utterly incompatible with recognising and upholding the rights of other human-beings. Blindness to the rights of others may be evidence of sociopathy, or even psychopathy. Certainly, a lack of empathy offers no impediment to being a successful oppressor. The principal explanation for social sadism, however, is that, having been paid to deliver it, the perpetrators feel obliged to satisfy their paymasters.

If a political party receives millions of dollars in donations from individuals and corporations with a powerful interest in the unimpeded exploitation of human-beings and the natural world, then the chances of that party taking effective measures to protect workers and the environment are slim. If a donor makes huge profits from the sale of fossil fuels, then he, she, or it will not expect the recipient politicians to prosecute the fight against global warming with excessive vigour. Almost invariably these expectations are met. Once bought, it is only right and proper that a purchased politician should stay bought.

And it’s not just politicians who find themselves in need of exculpatory ideologies. All those whose job it is to tell other people what to do and how to live would find it difficult to carry out their responsibilities without believing firmly in the idea that some people are born to be leaders and others are born to be led. By owning or operating a small business, one has already declared for the economic exploitation that makes profit possible. Salaried employees seeking rapid promotion in a large corporation are unlikely to preach socialism in the staff cafeteria. Those who have spent years (and borrowed thousands) studying for their PhD are much more likely to be meritocratic than democratic. Democracy is all very well, but the poorly educated need to be guided by those holding the appropriate qualifications.

As the British Labour cabinet minister Douglas Jay, without the slightest sign of embarrassment put it in his pamphlet, The Socialist Cause. “In the case of nutrition and health, just as in the case of education, the gentleman in Whitehall really does know better what is good for people than the people know themselves”.

Which only proves that it isn’t just those boorish right-wing blokes in the pub (and the National-Act-NZ First Coalition Cabinet) who rely for inspiration and guidance on people as morally compromised as themselves. Revolutionaries as well as reactionaries will defend their interests (and salaries) by trotting-out ideas, assumptions, and justifications unsupported by evidence, and which they will not test in open debate. Not without a bloody big fight anyway, and probably not even then.

Inequality and exploitation extract an enormous intellectual and moral toll from those burdened with their perpetuation. Being the beneficiary of an unjust system comes with a devastating psychological downside. Only through the creation of elaborate strategies of denial and deflection can those whose job it is to keep the system going preserve their sanity. Very few people are able to embrace the injustice they daily dispense, but even fewer are unaware of its impact on their wellbeing.

Is this what Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels meant when they penned the final sentences of The Communist Manifesto? That in order to win the world, one must have nothing to lose.

This essay was originally posted on The Democracy Project substack page on Tuesday, 23 July 2024.

Who Are You Calling "Evil"?

This ordinary-looking man, who lived in an ordinary-looking house, on an ordinary-looking street, who was tried in this ordinary-looking courtroom - for mass murder:  Could this balding, middle-aged man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and an ill-fitting suit really be responsible for the deaths of six million innocent people? Far from resembling Lucifer, Adolf Eichmann looked like a worn-out bureaucrat – which is exactly what he was. The philosopher, Hannah Arendt, referred to this profoundly demoralising discrepancy as “the banality of evil”.

THE PROBLEM OF EVIL has taxed the minds of men and women for millennia. Is evil a force, like gravity, that drags human-beings down into the depths of depravity? Does this force reside in a single conscious entity: immensely powerful and seemingly immortal? If so, is this entity motivated to pour its essence into individual human-beings: transforming them into monsters? Or is it, rather, that certain individuals open themselves voluntarily to the malignant forces of the cosmos: deliberately absorbing them in order to unleash evil upon others?

Many theologians (yes, theologians, because any discussion of evil cannot help straying into the realms of religion and metaphysics) reject the idea of evil as a universal force and dismiss entirely the idea that evil can be personified. Their definition of evil employs the concepts of absence and distance. Evil, they say, manifests itself in the behaviour of people who have become separated from God. (Or, if you prefer, from what is Good.) The more prolonged the absence; the greater the distance; the greater their capacity to behave in “un-good” ways.

Since religion and metaphysics make a great many people living in the twenty-first century uncomfortable, the Problem of Evil is often transferred into the realm of science – most particularly, the disciplines of psychiatry, psychology and neurology.

Of course, if the explanation for evil is neurological – i.e. some form of brain malfunction – then the concept is immediately stripped of its moral dimension. If someone behaves violently, inflicting pain and suffering upon the innocent because of some physical defect they cannot control, then they cannot be considered evil. Dangerous, certainly. But not evil.

The psychiatrists, by contrast, search for the causes of predatory and sadistic behaviour in the individual’s past. Traumatic events, experienced in infancy, are believed to influence the individual’s adult conduct. Violence and cruelty, especially, are thought to manifest themselves intergenerationally. Or, as the English poet, W. H. Auden, expresses the idea in his famous poem, “1 September 1939”:

I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

But, even this approach to the Problem of Evil leaves many people feeling troubled. Since we cannot control the things that are done to us in our infancy then, surely, it is unfair to hold adult individuals responsible for their aberrant behaviour. If the harm they inflict on others is generated by harms inflicted on them, then how can we call them evil? Our unease becomes even more pronounced when we discover that extreme trauma can leave not only emotional, but also very real neurological scars on its victims’ minds and brains. And, if that is true, then, once again, the concept of evil dissolves before our eyes.

Psychology only compounds these concerns. If human behaviour is the result of “drives” impelled by the mitochondria in our cells, our instincts; and if religious, philosophical and ideological systems are overlaid upon these drives in order to control and channel their social effects; then, again, the scope for individual human agency is severely limited. As the American socialist writer, Upton Sinclair, shrewdly observed: “It is very difficult to make a man understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”

The other great difficulty presented by the Problem of Evil is the way in which human-beings, upon being convinced that a certain course of action is not only entirely justified but entirely right, will proceed methodically to ensure that the course of action is implemented – no matter what the cost.

Dr Stanley Milgram’s horrible experiment, in which people were instructed to inflict electric shocks on participants who failed to answer set questions correctly, offers grim confirmation of this human weakness. Responding to the instructions of the authority figure overseeing the experiment, fully two-thirds of the participants were prepared to deliver potentially lethal shocks. They could hear the person screaming (or thought they could since no one was actually being hurt) but, when ordered by the man in the white coat to “continue with the experiment”, they obeyed.

In a society divided by class, gender and ethnicity there will inevitably be people whose salaries depend upon their willingness to deliver shocks – both real and symbolic – to their fellow human-beings. It is extremely difficult to convince such people that they are doing anything wrong. While the prevailing social and economic system and its practices are believed to be both justified and right, the actions of these people, and the consequences of their actions, will be similarly regarded.

The German philosopher, Hannah Arendt, observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann (one of the leading planners and executors of the Holocaust) in a Tel Aviv courtroom was struck by how ordinary he looked. Could this balding, middle-aged man wearing horn-rimmed glasses and an ill-fitting suit really be responsible for the deaths of six million innocent people? Far from resembling Lucifer, Eichmann looked like a worn-out bureaucrat – which is exactly what he was. Arendt referred to this profoundly demoralising discrepancy as “the banality of evil”.

Because, unfortunately, evil looks nothing like the artist’s impression: there are no horns, no tail, no cloven hooves, no whiff of sulphur. Life would be so much easier if there were! No, if you really want to know what evil looks like, then examine the faces of the people who live next door; the people on the bus; the people in the lunchroom at work. But don’t stop there. If you truly want to examine the face of evil – just take a look in the mirror.

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Tuesday, 14 August 2018.