Structural stupidity
Hey there Open Moders,
(Open Moders is the nickname I have for you, my many fans, like how Mickey Mouse’s fans are call Mouseketeers, and Elon Musk’s fans are called malicious dipshits. [You know a post will be good when it starts with a parenthetical. And if there’s brackets as well, well, hold on to your hats, friends. {Please excuse my failing sense of humor.}]) I noticed the other day that the recent murder of that healthcare CEO and the media stories about it, like all current events,underlines that I’m right about everything. (I say potato, you say confirmation bias, you say potahto, I say “the Marxist doctrine is omnipotent because it is true. It is comprehensive and harmonious, and provides people with an integral world outlook irreconcilable with any form of superstition, reaction, or defence of bourgeois oppression. It is the legitimate successor to the best that humanity produced in the nineteenth century, as represented by German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism.”) I feel compelled to say that I’m not in favor of anyone getting shot, I’ve aged into a kind of pacifism, but I also think not all violations of ethical principles are of equal moral concerns and in a world where ethical compromises and injustices proliferate one has to be stupid to be surprised when ethical principles are violated.
But here’s the thing, and this what I want to talk about once I’ve (now that I’ve...? let’s find out!) finished the requisite throat clearing: there’s a systemic tendency toward elite stupidity. That’s one way to paraphrase who I wrote about the other day, maybe in my last post. If memory serves (“it's hard enough to remember my opinions, never mind the reasons for them” - and, in my defense, reading and committing to memory the many insights regularly generated here at Open Mode Industries, LLC isn’t my job, it’s yours!) I said that in a class society, the people who benefit from the subordination of others can not both a) see their subordinates as their moral equals and b) understand the organization and dynamics of the society they inhabit.
In my book (Injury Impoverished: Something Something Law and Capitalism - buy your require four copies today!) I used the terms moral imagination and social imagination to talk about some ways legal texts and actors officially conceptualize social relationships and people. In those terms, there are pressures to hem in the moral and social imagination of people in positions of relative social power. Further more, this isn’t a relatively static pressure like the force of gravity bearing down, but rather it plays out dynamically - pushes and pulls, sudden instabilities, etc - over time: the powerful face a systematic tendency to stupefaction (not least because if they have accurate moral and social perception they will feel real distress) punctuated by being periodically mugged by life in various upsetting ways. Once mugged, the time- and place-specific organization of their sometimes-convenient-sometimes-inconvenient stupidity sometimes has to give way to a new such specific organization of stupidity, in a way that is newly convenient. That all takes time and its effects can linger sometimes. Related to all of this is that various institutions in society produce various kinds of ideological and sometimes literal palliatives for the distresses involved.
This latest incident with the healthcare CEO is a case in point. The response wherein lots of regular people express their justifiable rage at how awfully they’ve been treated while rich powerful people feel shocked to learn this is how many others feel about this incident is a case in point of that structural stupidity. To put it a little less polemically, we could call it the systemic production of inaccurate social and moral perception. Yet another way: at some point in his Poverty of Theory (one of the best shitty first drafts and the worst executed fantastic books in the history of socialist intellectuals!) EP Thompson mentions that he and Raymond Williams understood the idea of determination - not the personal quality like perseverance but rather the social conditioning/production/making of phenomena - in a relatively non-determinist way, as the exertion of pressures and the setting of limits. Being higher up on the food chain is to face pressures and limits on one social and moral imagination. Structural stupidity is a shorthand for that and as I said I think we can see that in the totally wild ‘all lives matter, each of us bears a piece of the light of divinity in us’ responses to the murder of a CEO whose job was to hurt and kill people by deprivation, albeit in laundered/mediated fashion, responses all the more bananas given they’ve often come from Democrat electeds, people in the party that has to a significant degree been carrying out the genocide in Gaza over this past year. Dead kids, whether from drones or denial of care? Not even noticed. Murdered CEO? Moral outrage. These are responses that can only make sense if the people saying them are lying cynics or lack object permanence. And to an important degree, the Democrats and other institutions are institutionalized forms of lack of object permanence.
I think structural stupidity is also a nontrivial factor in why the Democrats tend to be so offensively out of touch with reality in ways that show up in various gaffes, omissions, insensitivities, etc which are sometimes an electioneering liability and sometimes a source of widespread disaffection from electoral democracy. It’s not that all of them are individually stupid, though I do suspect that marinating in all that a- and im-moral muck and lack of grasp of how society actually words does eventually corrode people’s moral character and intelligence (more on this in a moment), and all the more so when they get rich. It’s also that they’re beholden to rich and powerful people who are subject to structural stupefaction. And again that stupefaction occurs through/is organized by institutions and elite cultures that work in various filtering ways: this isn’t an analysis that says the rich are stupid therefore they become rich, it’s that being in those contexts exerts pressure upon and sets limits for those people, ones that are on balance convenient for them (that convenience fosters feedback loops that sustain these dynamics) though in not especially uncommon contexts they’re suddenly liabilities that have to be dealt with. (‘Oh fuck I’ve developed object permanence, it burns! someone fix me!’ kinda thing, though that’s more of a rational reconstruction stated in explicit terms when what really happens a lot of the time, I suspect, is a kind of gut level discomfort leading to seeking to prevent any explicit realization.)
‘Structural’ is a flawed term here insofar as it can imply a static condition. This stupefaction is dynamic, playing out in real time, pressures facing counter pressures in pushes and pulls, limits under stress and exerting stresses, convenient fog periodically punctured by rays of light kinda thing. As I’ve said on here before, evil motherfuckers like David Lyin’heart exist to comfort the comfortable as they continue to benefit from afflicting the afflicted. I think part of what ideologues like him do is act within that dynamism where convenient ignorance, useful moral devaluation, and comfortable denial that one thinks what one thinks and does what one does, get challenged and need to be shored up. The ideologues plaster over gaps in the walls that prevent elites from perceiving social reality and the dignity of their subordinates accurately, because (pardon the mixed metaphor) that accurate perception creates frictions for people higher up within the social division of labor such that there’s demand for relief from the sudden unwanted acquisition of object permanence - and of course it’s not packaged that way, it’s wrapped in various smugness-fostering rhetorics of merit and quality. I may have said this before but I don’t think it’s an accident that lawyers, MDs, and quants loom large among these courtiers. Those qualifications take a fair bit of hard work and thus reflect socialization into willingness to eat a fair amount of shit en route to really making it (ie, they’re trustworthy as soldiers, or rather, propagandists for the waging of all the literal and metaphorical foreverwars), socialization into a fair bit of self-confidence, and into being untroubled by bracketing. What I mean by comfort with bracketing is that those areas of expertise foster a sense that the contexts and kinds of knowledge that aren’t considered in their frameworks are often not understood as a trouble absence but rather as irrelevancies rightfully ejected from consideration. That confidence in determining relevance and not being interested whatever is ruled out of bounds as irrelevant is useful to them as courtiers, being both a way to help them live with their own structural stupidity and a way to soothe their superiors: ‘we’ve considered all the relevant details, since any detail we haven’t considered doesn’t matter.’ To some extent, the graphguys’ main contribution is all the blank space behind the lines depicted. This or that indicator’s moving in whatever direction while everything else in the world is blanked out, and that blanking is the fundamental product those people sell and their customers buy.
I’m gonna stop in sec but two last things. One, above I said I’d say more about people’s character and intellect getting corroded by their contexts. As a full blown crank I am a man of many pet theories, one of which is that intelligence is mostly a useless concept at best and often an actively pernicious one serving to justify hierarchy and authorize bad people in their badness. What we often think of as intelligence is often more a matter of ethical or inethical action and relation to other people: proceeding with intellectual integrity produces higher quality inquiry and improves capacity for doing inquiry over time. Proceeding without intellectual integrity works the other direction. So it’s not that institutional authorities are bad because they’re stupid, it’s that they’re stupid because they’re bad, and they’re a lot of pressures exerted and limits set that sustain that state of affairs and restore it when it becomes embattled.
Second, I think of this little newsletter of mine as orbiting, even if sometimes loosely, around what I sort of flippantly call covid zero zealot marxism, or less flippantly, further trying to get a handle on social murder as reality in capitalism, for the sake of grasping the covid pandemic as to a significant degree a state project (one significantly determined by the larger context of capitalist social relations). I have other interests though (such as my impeccable musical tastes - I’ve been on a dub kick lately, and holy shit that shit is GOOD), including stuff I’ve written for the mighty Organizing Work web site, about labor law, class politics, and revolutionary unionism. (I got into some of this at tedious length in my response to Tony Smith’s lovely review of the marxist state theory book.) In relation to those interests, I’m interested in how people go from living in this hellscape that’s handed to us (or into which we’re thrown) as just a given we have to take, to understanding the malleable of our social condition and, very closely related, to how collective action over the hellscape and the formation of collective subjects in opposition to the hellscape comes about sometimes. Part of my complaint about the National Labor Relations Act is that it exerts pressures and sets limits against the process of forming a collective subject.
One nerd scholar term for some of this is ‘class formation’, meaning something like ‘how the working class or large groups of workers form cultures and collectivities and collective action sometimes’. It seems to me that the historical record is relatively clear that often times the capitalist class or sections thereof become collective subjects largely reactively, in reaction to crises sometimes and, I think more often, in response to action by the working class. That is, capitalist-class class-formation often lags working-class class-formation and, closely related, working-class class-formation is often an engine driving capitalist-class class-formation. (The state is often a big part of this as well but I can’t get into that just now.) So, in terms of what I’ve said above, when opposition gets intense enough, the structural stupidity of people further up the food chain becomes a liability and there open windows for them to be temporarily less stupid. That can take somewhat progressive forms if they’re forced into it - redistributive social policy, basically - and it can take extremely repressive reactionary forms as well. A smarter ruling class is not a benefit to the rest of us, it’s really quite open-ended, scarily so.
What I’m saying is that there’s a historical tendency here for structural stupidity to be challenged (I mean this specifically as a shared quality, whereas above I was talking more in terms of individuals finding their convenient stupidity challenged, with the implicit assumption on my part being that the background conditions including general structural stupidity were not up for grabs). When this larger-because-collective puncturing of structural stupidity occurs it tends to be in periods when the context changes significantly from crisis and/or massive class struggle. There often follow changes so things work a little differently for a while (which is not at all to say necessarily work better), until the crisis and/or struggle has been massaged enough that it stops being so disruptive. That challenge to the exertion of pressures and limits is then relative resolved and those pressures and limits set back about structurally stupefying the powerful. That’s how it seems to me anyway, and I think we can all agree I’m right.
Alright, Open Moders, I’m out. Back to grading papers, going to meetings, and trying to use internet dub playlists to prevent full-blown spiritual death. Until next time, you keep keen and don’t let ‘em turn you mean. (That slogan needs work. I’m never gonna make millions this way, ugh, fuck.) So, uh, anyway yeah - catch you later!