What Desires Are Politically Important?

Your Royal Highness, Ladies and Gentlemen,

I have chosen this subject for my lecture tonight because I think that most current discussions of politics and political theory take insufficient account of psychology. Economic facts, population statistics, constitutional organization, and so on, are set forth minutely. There is no difficulty in finding out how many South Koreans and how many North Koreans there were when the Korean War began. If you will look into the right books you will be able to ascertain what was their average income per head, and what were the sizes of their respective armies. But if you want to know what sort of person a Korean is, and whether there is any appreciable difference between a North Korean and a South Korean; if you wish to know what they respectively want out of life, what are their discontents, what their hopes and what their fears; in a word, what it is that, as they say, «makes them tick», you will look through the reference books in vain. And so you cannot tell whether the South Koreans are enthusiastic about UNO, or would prefer union with their cousins in the North. Nor can you guess whether they are willing to forgo land reform for the privilege of voting for some politician they have never heard of. It is neglect of such questions by the eminent men who sit in remote capitals, that so frequently causes disappointment. If politics is to become scientific, and if the event is not to be constantly surprising, it is imperative that our political thinking should penetrate more deeply into the springs of human action. What is the influence of hunger upon slogans? How does their effectiveness fluctuate with the number of calories in your diet? If one man offers you democracy and another offers you a bag of grain, at what stage of starvation will you prefer the grain to the vote? Such questions are far too little considered. However, let us, for the present, forget the Koreans, and consider the human race.

All human activity is prompted by desire. There is a wholly fallacious theory advanced by some earnest moralists to the effect that it is possible to resist desire in the interests of duty and moral principle. I say this is fallacious, not because no man ever acts from a sense of duty, but because duty has no hold on him unless he desires to be dutiful. If you wish to know what men will do, you must know not only, or principally, their material circumstances, but rather the whole system of their desires with their relative strengths.

There are some desires which, though very powerful, have not, as a rule, any great political importance. Most men at some period of their lives desire to marry, but as a rule they can satisfy this desire without having to take any political action. There are, of course, exceptions; the rape of the Sabine women is a case in point. And the development of northern Australia is seriously impeded by the fact that the vigorous young men who ought to do the work dislike being wholly deprived of female society. But such cases are unusual, and in general the interest that men and women take in each other has little influence upon politics.

The desires that are politically important may be divided into a primary and a secondary group. In the primary group come the necessities of life: food and shelter and clothing. When these things become very scarce, there is no limit to the efforts that men will make, or to the violence that they will display, in the hope of securing them. It is said by students of the earliest history that, on four separate occasions, drought in Arabia caused the population of that country to overflow into surrounding regions, with immense effects, political, cultural, and religious. The last of these four occasions was the rise of Islam. The gradual spread of Germanic tribes from southern Russia to England, and thence to San Francisco, had similar motives. Undoubtedly the desire for food has been, and still is, one of the main causes of great political events.

But man differs from other animals in one very important respect, and that is that he has some desires which are, so to speak, infinite, which can never be fully gratified, and which would keep him restless even in Paradise. The boa constrictor, when he has had an adequate meal, goes to sleep, and does not wake until he needs another meal. Human beings, for the most part, are not like this. When the Arabs, who had been used to living sparingly on a few dates, acquired the riches of the Eastern Roman Empire, and dwelt in palaces of almost unbelievable luxury, they did not, on that account, become inactive. Hunger could no longer be a motive, for Greek slaves supplied them with exquisite viands at the slightest nod. But other desires kept them active: four in particular, which we can label acquisitiveness, rivalry, vanity, and love of power.

Acquisitiveness – the wish to possess as much as possible of goods, or the title to goods – is a motive which, I suppose, has its origin in a combination of fear with the desire for necessaries. I once befriended two little girls from Estonia, who had narrowly escaped death from starvation in a famine. They lived in my family, and of course had plenty to eat. But they spent all their leisure visiting neighbouring farms and stealing potatoes, which they hoarded. Rockefeller, who in his infancy had experienced great poverty, spent his adult life in a similar manner. Similarly the Arab chieftains on their silken Byzantine divans could not forget the desert, and hoarded riches far beyond any possible physical need. But whatever may be the psychoanalysis of acquisitiveness, no one can deny that it is one of the great motives – especially among the more powerful, for, as I said before, it is one of the infinite motives. However much you may acquire, you will always wish to acquire more; satiety is a dream which will always elude you.

But acquisitiveness, although it is the mainspring of the capitalist system, is by no means the most powerful of the motives that survive the conquest of hunger. Rivalry is a much stronger motive. Over and over again in Mohammedan history, dynasties have come to grief because the sons of a sultan by different mothers could not agree, and in the resulting civil war universal ruin resulted. The same sort of thing happens in modern Europe. When the British Government very unwisely allowed the Kaiser to be present at a naval review at Spithead, the thought which arose in his mind was not the one which we had intended. What he thought was, «I must have a Navy as good as Grandmamma’s». And from this thought have sprung all our subsequent troubles. The world would be a happier place than it is if acquisitiveness were always stronger than rivalry. But in fact, a great many men will cheerfully face impoverishment if they can thereby secure complete ruin for their rivals. Hence the present level of taxation.

Vanity is a motive of immense potency. Anyone who has much to do with children knows how they are constantly performing some antic, and saying «Look at me». «Look at me» is one of the most fundamental desires of the human heart. It can take innumerable forms, from buffoonery to the pursuit of posthumous fame. There was a Renaissance Italian princeling who was asked by the priest on his deathbed if he had anything to repent of. «Yes», he said, «there is one thing. On one occasion I had a visit from the Emperor and the Pope simultaneously. I took them to the top of my tower to see the view, and I neglected the opportunity to throw them both down, which would have given me immortal fame». History does not relate whether the priest gave him absolution. One of the troubles about vanity is that it grows with what it feeds on. The more you are talked about, the more you will wish to be talked about. The condemned murderer who is allowed to see the account of his trial in the press is indignant if he finds a newspaper which has reported it inadequately. And the more he finds about himself in other newspapers, the more indignant he will be with the one whose reports are meagre. Politicians and literary men are in the same case. And the more famous they become, the more difficult the press-cutting agency finds it to satisfy them. It is scarcely possible to exaggerate the influence of vanity throughout the range of human life, from the child of three to the potentate at whose frown the world trembles. Mankind have even committed the impiety of attributing similar desires to the Deity, whom they imagine avid for continual praise.

But great as is the influence of the motives we have been considering, there is one which outweighs them all. I mean the love of power. Love of power is closely akin to vanity, but it is not by any means the same thing. What vanity needs for its satisfaction is glory, and it is easy to have glory without power. The people who enjoy the greatest glory in the United States are film stars, but they can be put in their place by the Committee for Un-American Activities, which enjoys no glory whatever. In England, the King has more glory than the Prime Minister, but the Prime Minister has more power than the King. Many people prefer glory to power, but on the whole these people have less effect upon the course of events than those who prefer power to glory. When Blücher, in 1814, saw Napoleon’s palaces, he said, «Wasn’t he a fool to have all this and to go running after Moscow.» Napoleon, who certainly was not destitute of vanity, preferred power when he had to choose. To Blücher, this choice seemed foolish. Power, like vanity, is insatiable. Nothing short of omnipotence could satisfy it completely. And as it is especially the vice of energetic men, the causal efficacy of love of power is out of all proportion to its frequency. It is, indeed, by far the strongest motive in the lives of important men.

Love of power is greatly increased by the experience of power, and this applies to petty power as well as to that of potentates. In the happy days before 1914, when well-to-do ladies could acquire a host of servants, their pleasure in exercising power over the domestics steadily increased with age. Similarly, in any autocratic regime, the holders of power become increasingly tyrannical with experience of the delights that power can afford. Since power over human beings is shown in making them do what they would rather not do, the man who is actuated by love of power is more apt to inflict pain than to permit pleasure. If you ask your boss for leave of absence from the office on some legitimate occasion, his love of power will derive more satisfaction from a refusal than from a consent. If you require a building permit, the petty official concerned will obviously get more pleasure from saying «No» than from saying «Yes». It is this sort of thing which makes the love of power such a dangerous motive.

But it has other sides which are more desirable. The pursuit of knowledge is, I think, mainly actuated by love of power. And so are all advances in scientific technique. In politics, also, a reformer may have just as strong a love of power as a despot. It would be a complete mistake to decry love of power altogether as a motive. Whether you will be led by this motive to actions which are useful, or to actions which are pernicious, depends upon the social system, and upon your capacities. If your capacities are theoretical or technical, you will contribute to knowledge or technique, and, as a rule, your activity will be useful. If you are a politician you may be actuated by love of power, but as a rule this motive will join itself on to the desire to see some state of affairs realized which, for some reason, you prefer to the status quo. A great general may, like Alcibiades, be quite indifferent as to which side he fights on, but most generals have preferred to fight for their own country, and have, therefore, had other motives besides love of power. The politician may change sides so frequently as to find himself always in the majority, but most politicians have a preference for one party to the other, and subordinate their love of power to this preference. Love of power as nearly pure as possible is to be seen in various different types of men. One type is the soldier of fortune, of whom Napoleon is the supreme example. Napoleon had, I think, no ideological preference for France over Corsica, but if he had become Emperor of Corsica he would not have been so great a man as he became by pretending to be a Frenchman. Such men, however, are not quite pure examples, since they also derive immense satisfaction from vanity. The purest type is that of the eminence grise – the power behind the throne that never appears in public, and merely hugs itself with the secret thought: «How little these puppets know who is pulling the strings.» Baron Holstein, who controlled the foreign policy of the German Empire from 1890 to 1906, illustrates this type to perfection. He lived in a slum; he never appeared in society; he avoided meeting the Emperor, except on one single occasion when the Emperor’s importunity could not be resisted; he refused all invitations to Court functions, on the ground that he possessed no court dress. He had acquired secrets which enabled him to blackmail the Chancellor and many of the Kaiser’s intimates. He used the power of blackmail, not to acquire wealth, or fame, or any other obvious advantage, but merely to compel the adoption of the foreign policy he preferred. In the East, similar characters were not very uncommon among eunuchs.

I come now to other motives which, though in a sense less fundamental than those we have been considering, are still of considerable importance. The first of these is love of excitement. Human beings show their superiority to the brutes by their capacity for boredom, though I have sometimes thought, in examining the apes at the zoo, that they, perhaps, have the rudiments of this tiresome emotion. However that may be, experience shows that escape from boredom is one of the really powerful desires of almost all human beings. When white men first effect contact with some unspoilt race of savages, they offer them all kinds of benefits, from the light of the gospel to pumpkin pie. These, however, much as we may regret it, most savages receive with indifference. What they really value among the gifts that we bring to them is intoxicating liquor which enables them, for the first time in their lives, to have the illusion for a few brief moments that it is better to be alive than dead. Red Indians, while they were still unaffected by white men, would smoke their pipes, not calmly as we do, but orgiastically, inhaling so deeply that they sank into a faint. And when excitement by means of nicotine failed, a patriotic orator would stir them up to attack a neighbouring tribe, which would give them all the enjoyment that we (according to our temperament) derive from a horse race or a General Election. The pleasure of gambling consists almost entirely in excitement. Monsieur Huc describes Chinese traders at the Great Wall in winter, gambling until they have lost all their cash, then proceeding to lose all their merchandise, and at last gambling away their clothes and going out naked to die of cold. With civilized men, as with primitive Red Indian tribes, it is, I think, chiefly love of excitement which makes the populace applaud when war breaks out; the emotion is exactly the same as at a football match, although the results are sometimes somewhat more serious.

It is not altogether easy to decide what is the root cause of the love of excitement. I incline to think that our mental make-up is adapted to the stage when men lived by hunting. When a man spent a long day with very primitive weapons in stalking a deer with the hope of dinner, and when, at the end of the day, he dragged the carcass triumphantly to his cave, he sank down in contented weariness, while his wife dressed and cooked the meat. He was sleepy, and his bones ached, and the smell of cooking filled every nook and cranny of his consciousness. At last, after eating, he sank into deep sleep. In such a life there was neither time nor energy for boredom. But when he took to agriculture, and made his wife do all the heavy work in the fields, he had time to reflect upon the vanity of human life, to invent mythologies and systems of philosophy, and to dream of the life hereafter in which he would perpetually hunt the wild boar of Valhalla. Our mental make-up is suited to a life of very severe physical labor. I used, when I was younger, to take my holidays walking. I would cover twenty-five miles a day, and when the evening came I had no need of anything to keep me from boredom, since the delight of sitting amply sufficed. But modern life cannot be conducted on these physically strenuous principles. A great deal of work is sedentary, and most manual work exercises only a few specialized muscles. When crowds assemble in Trafalgar Square to cheer to the echo an announcement that the government has decided to have them killed, they would not do so if they had all walked twenty-five miles that day. This cure for bellicosity is, however, impracticable, and if the human race is to survive – a thing which is, perhaps, undesirable – other means must be found for securing an innocent outlet for the unused physical energy that produces love of excitement. This is a matter which has been too little considered, both by moralists and by social reformers. The social reformers are of the opinion that they have more serious things to consider. The moralists, on the other hand, are immensely impressed with the seriousness of all the permitted outlets of the love of excitement; the seriousness, however, in their minds, is that of Sin. Dance halls, cinemas, this age of jazz, are all, if we may believe our ears, gateways to Hell, and we should be better employed sitting at home contemplating our sins. I find myself unable to be in entire agreement with the grave men who utter these warnings. The devil has many forms, some designed to deceive the young, some designed to deceive the old and serious. If it is the devil that tempts the young to enjoy themselves, is it not, perhaps, the same personage that persuades the old to condemn their enjoyment? And is not condemnation perhaps merely a form of excitement appropriate to old age? And is it not, perhaps, a drug which – like opium – has to be taken in continually stronger doses to produce the desired effect? Is it not to be feared that, beginning with the wickedness of the cinema, we should be led step by step to condemn the opposite political party, dagoes, wops, Asiatics, and, in short, everybody except the fellow members of our club? And it is from just such condemnations, when widespread, that wars proceed. I have never heard of a war that proceeded from dance halls.

What is serious about excitement is that so many of its forms are destructive. It is destructive in those who cannot resist excess in alcohol or gambling. It is destructive when it takes the form of mob violence. And above all it is destructive when it leads to war. It is so deep a need that it will find harmful outlets of this kind unless innocent outlets are at hand. There are such innocent outlets at present in sport, and in politics so long as it is kept within constitutional bounds. But these are not sufficient, especially as the kind of politics that is most exciting is also the kind that does most harm. Civilized life has grown altogether too tame, and, if it is to be stable, it must provide harmless outlets for the impulses which our remote ancestors satisfied in hunting. In Australia, where people are few and rabbits are many, I watched a whole populace satisfying the primitive impulse in the primitive manner by the skillful slaughter of many thousands of rabbits. But in London or New York some other means must be found to gratify primitive impulse. I think every big town should contain artificial waterfalls that people could descend in very fragile canoes, and they should contain bathing pools full of mechanical sharks. Any person found advocating a preventive war should be condemned to two hours a day with these ingenious monsters. More seriously, pains should be taken to provide constructive outlets for the love of excitement. Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.

Interwoven with many other political motives are two closely related passions to which human beings are regrettably prone: I mean fear and hate. It is normal to hate what we fear, and it happens frequently, though not always, that we fear what we hate. I think it may be taken as the rule among primitive men, that they both fear and hate whatever is unfamiliar. They have their own herd, originally a very small one. And within one herd, all are friends, unless there is some special ground of enmity. Other herds are potential or actual enemies; a single member of one of them who strays by accident will be killed. An alien herd as a whole will be avoided or fought according to circumstances. It is this primitive mechanism which still controls our instinctive reaction to foreign nations. The completely untravelled person will view all foreigners as the savage regards a member of another herd. But the man who has travelled, or who has studied international politics, will have discovered that, if his herd is to prosper, it must, to some degree, become amalgamated with other herds. If you are English and someone says to you, «The French are your brothers», your first instinctive feeling will be, «Nonsense. They shrug their shoulders, and talk French. And I am even told that they eat frogs.» If he explains to you that we may have to fight the Russians, that, if so, it will be desirable to defend the line of the Rhine, and that, if the line of the Rhine is to be defended, the help of the French is essential, you will begin to see what he means when he says that the French are your brothers. But if some fellow-traveller were to go on to say that the Russians also are your brothers, he would be unable to persuade you, unless he could show that we are in danger from the Martians. We love those who hate our enemies, and if we had no enemies there would be very few people whom we should love.

All this, however, is only true so long as we are concerned solely with attitudes towards other human beings. You might regard the soil as your enemy because it yields reluctantly a niggardly subsistence. You might regard Mother Nature in general as your enemy, and envisage human life as a struggle to get the better of Mother Nature. If men viewed life in this way, cooperation of the whole human race would become easy. And men could easily be brought to view life in this way if schools, newspapers, and politicians devoted themselves to this end. But schools are out to teach patriotism; newspapers are out to stir up excitement; and politicians are out to get re-elected. None of the three, therefore, can do anything towards saving the human race from reciprocal suicide.

There are two ways of coping with fear: one is to diminish the external danger, and the other is to cultivate Stoic endurance. The latter can be reinforced, except where immediate action is necessary, by turning our thoughts away from the cause of fear. The conquest of fear is of very great importance. Fear is in itself degrading; it easily becomes an obsession; it produces hate of that which is feared, and it leads headlong to excesses of cruelty. Nothing has so beneficent an effect on human beings as security. If an international system could be established which would remove the fear of war, the improvement in everyday mentality of everyday people would be enormous and very rapid. Fear, at present, overshadows the world. The atom bomb and the bacterial bomb, wielded by the wicked communist or the wicked capitalist as the case may be, make Washington and the Kremlin tremble, and drive men further along the road toward the abyss. If matters are to improve, the first and essential step is to find a way of diminishing fear. The world at present is obsessed by the conflict of rival ideologies, and one of the apparent causes of conflict is the desire for the victory of our own ideology and the defeat of the other. I do not think that the fundamental motive here has much to do with ideologies. I think the ideologies are merely a way of grouping people, and that the passions involved are merely those which always arise between rival groups. There are, of course, various reasons for hating communists. First and foremost, we believe that they wish to take away our property. But so do burglars, and although we disapprove of burglars our attitude towards them is very different indeed from our attitude towards communists – chiefly because they do not inspire the same degree of fear. Secondly, we hate the communists because they are irreligious. But the Chinese have been irreligious since the eleventh century, and we only began to hate them when they turned out Chiang Kai-shek. Thirdly, we hate the communists because they do not believe in democracy, but we consider this no reason for hating Franco. Fourthly, we hate them because they do not allow liberty; this we feel so strongly that we have decided to imitate them. It is obvious that none of these is the real ground for our hatred. We hate them because we fear them and they threaten us. If the Russians still adhered to the Greek Orthodox religion, if they had instituted parliamentary government, and if they had a completely free press which daily vituperated us, then – provided they still had armed forces as powerful as they have now – we should still hate them if they gave us ground for thinking them hostile. There is, of course, the odium theologicum, and it can be a cause of enmity. But I think that this is an offshoot of herd feeling: the man who has a different theology feels strange, and whatever is strange must be dangerous. Ideologies, in fact, are one of the methods by which herds are created, and the psychology is much the same however the herd may have been generated.

You may have been feeling that I have allowed only for bad motives, or, at best, such as are ethically neutral. I am afraid they are, as a rule, more powerful than more altruistic motives, but I do not deny that altruistic motives exist, and may, on occasion, be effective. The agitation against slavery in England in the early nineteenth century was indubitably altruistic, and was thoroughly effective. Its altruism was proved by the fact that in 1833 British taxpayers paid many millions in compensation to Jamaican landowners for the liberation of their slaves, and also by the fact that at the Congress of Vienna the British Government was prepared to make important concessions with a view to inducing other nations to abandon the slave trade. This is an instance from the past, but present-day America has afforded instances equally remarkable. I will not, however, go into these, as I do not wish to become embarked in current controversies.

I do not think it can be questioned that sympathy is a genuine motive, and that some people at some times are made somewhat uncomfortable by the sufferings of some other people. It is sympathy that has produced the many humanitarian advances of the last hundred years. We are shocked when we hear stories of the ill-treatment of lunatics, and there are now quite a number of asylums in which they are not ill-treated. Prisoners in Western countries are not supposed to be tortured, and when they are, there is an outcry if the facts are discovered. We do not approve of treating orphans as they are treated in Oliver Twist. Protestant countries disapprove of cruelty to animals. In all these ways sympathy has been politically effective. If the fear of war were removed, its effectiveness would become much greater. Perhaps the best hope for the future of mankind is that ways will be found of increasing the scope and intensity of sympathy.

The time has come to sum up our discussion. Politics is concerned with herds rather than with individuals, and the passions which are important in politics are, therefore, those in which the various members of a given herd can feel alike. The broad instinctive mechanism upon which political edifices have to be built is one of cooperation within the herd and hostility towards other herds. The co-operation within the herd is never perfect. There are members who do not conform, who are, in the etymological sense, «egregious», that is to say, outside the flock. These members are those who have fallen below, or risen above, the ordinary level. They are: idiots, criminals, prophets, and discoverers. A wise herd will learn to tolerate the eccentricity of those who rise above the average, and to treat with a minimum of ferocity those who fall below it.

As regards relations to other herds, modern technique has produced a conflict between self-interest and instinct. In old days, when two tribes went to war, one of them exterminated the other, and annexed its territory. From the point of view of the victor, the whole operation was thoroughly satisfactory. The killing was not at all expensive, and the excitement was agreeable. It is not to be wondered at that, in such circumstances, war persisted. Unfortunately, we still have the emotions appropriate to such primitive warfare, while the actual operations of war have changed completely. Killing an enemy in a modern war is a very expensive operation. If you consider how many Germans were killed in the late war, and how much the victors are paying in income tax, you can, by a sum in long division, discover the cost of a dead German, and you will find it considerable. In the East, it is true, the enemies of the Germans have secured the ancient advantages of turning out the defeated population and occupying their lands. The Western victors, however, have secured no such advantages. It is obvious that modern war is not good business from a financial point of view. Although we won both the world wars, we should now be much richer if they had not occurred. If men were actuated by self-interest, which they are not – except in the case of a few saints – the whole human race would cooperate. There would be no more wars, no more armies, no more navies, no more atom bombs. There would not be armies of propagandists employed in poisoning the minds of Nation A against Nation B, and reciprocally of Nation B against Nation A. There would not be armies of officials at frontiers to prevent the entry of foreign books and foreign ideas, however excellent in themselves. There would not be customs barriers to ensure the existence of many small enterprises where one big enterprise would be more economic. All this would happen very quickly if men desired their own happiness as ardently as they desired the misery of their neighbours. But, you will tell me, what is the use of these utopian dreams ? Moralists will see to it that we do not become wholly selfish, and until we do the millennium will be impossible.

I do not wish to seem to end upon a note of cynicism. I do not deny that there are better things than selfishness, and that some people achieve these things. I maintain, however, on the one hand, that there are few occasions upon which large bodies of men, such as politics is concerned with, can rise above selfishness, while, on the other hand, there are a very great many circumstances in which populations will fall below selfishness, if selfishness is interpreted as enlightened self-interest.

And among those occasions on which people fall below self-interest are most of the occasions on which they are convinced that they are acting from idealistic motives. Much that passes as idealism is disguised hatred or disguised love of power. When you see large masses of men swayed by what appear to be noble motives, it is as well to look below the surface and ask yourself what it is that makes these motives effective. It is partly because it is so easy to be taken in by a facade of nobility that a psychological inquiry, such as I have been attempting, is worth making. I would say, in conclusion, that if what I have said is right, the main thing needed to make the world happy is intelligence. And this, after all, is an optimistic conclusion, because intelligence is a thing that can be fostered by known methods of education.

I’m sure you’ve all heard of it by now – nuclear/atomic scientists have this publicity stunt tool, where they claim that the “doomsday” clock they maintain is a few minutes from striking midnight, where midnight is a symbolic proxy for nuclear holocaust.

And every year Chomsky tells us not what’s wrong with the world (if anything) in appropriately demonstrated challenges we face, including the possibility of nuclear world war, but rather uses the metaphor of this clock and thus pulls a fast one right before our eyes – the Atomic scientists have calculated that the hour arm of the clock is past 11, and the minute arm of the clock ought to be at 56 minutes, or four minutes from the nuclear holocaust.

Now, multiple chunks of four minutes have lapsed since you got up this morning, or since last night, or even now as you read this, and yet no nuclear winter has been upon us. We all understand what they mean – what Chomsky and what the nuclear scientists mean is in metaphor to bring home the severity of the problem of so many nuclear weapons that can be so destructive to a world so fragile.

Why would I ever oppose something like that? Because it is absurd: the most complex and difficult field of science, reserved only for the most briliant among us, blames the public for some imaginary nuclear holocaust instead of themselves! All they have to do is withdraw their services, and nobody would be able to maintain the bombs or build new ones!

Becoming a profound thinker requires an understanding of Hegelian dialectics

The most profound thinker of our present age is in my view Slavoj Žižek, Slovenian philosopher and Director of the Birbeck Institute for the Humanities at the University of London. He demonstrates in much of his work how popular understandings of various topics suffer from a mistaken subject-object interplay, and resolves the conflict by an application of Hegelian dialectical reasoning. Below follows some examples of this approach and from this I hope you can begin thinking more broadly and apply the method to various dynamics in your life. Fundamentally, the error in our thinking begins when we fail to note our own bias, and present the topic in a manner that is beneficial to ourselves, rather than by beginning by a challenge to our own ego-driven profilic view. Profilicity is a concept created by the German philosopher Hans-Georg Meuller of the University of Macau. Zizek and Meuller approach their work from a similar epistemological angle:

Hegelian dialectics are briefly the interplay of the opposites of everything, since the subject (person) defines himself and his existence in contrast or differentiation, but communicates about the topic in a way that is beneficial to them – in essence profiling the truth, what Zizek would call ideology, as an objective truth.

Example 1: Homelessness

Homelessness is often said to be a problem of poverty. The idea is that if the person had money by which to pay for housing, and a job to support themselves, they would live in a home and be like everyone else.

Why, then, is homelessness only a feature of modern urbanized cities, and specially those in the West, rather than a feature universally of all human societies?

Policeman: You cannot stay here. This is a city park. (THESIS)

Homeless man: But I have nowhere else to go. (ANTITHESIS)

Homelessness is a problem of disconnection, alienation, and social exclusion, not poverty. Even if the homeless man had money to pay for a home, and a job, he may still have “nowhere else to go,” except his home. That is a problem of disconnection from human community, and the home-lessness is only a symptom. Humans live in communities of other humans, not as individual agents in proximity to other humans (neoliberal capitalism). (SYNTHESIS)

Example 2: Grieving for Loved Ones who died

Relative: I loved him so much. I grieve for him. (THESIS)

Person: But he is no longer in pain and is no longer suffering. You however are suffering, because you have lost the utility of that person, and no longer have them in your life to help you, listen to you, or do what they used to do for you. Therefore your grief is a combination of fear and a sense of losing something that benefited you, not a grief for the loss of the life or the ending of suffering for your relative. (ANTITHESIS)

We grieve not for the person who died, but for ourselves. We grieve that *we* will no longer have the person in our lives, which is a selfish impulse, not one about the deceased relative. (SYNTHESIS)

Example 3: Human Sexuality

Person 1: Human females are attracted to the highest status males – by securing a mate who is wealthy and high status, the female secures the necessary provisions for her offspring. Therefore, human males must achieve and seek prominence and wealth to be attractive to females. (THESIS)

Person 2: Bill Cosby and Harvey Weinstein were very high status males, were very rich, and yet they had to resort to rape and drugging women in order to have sex. Meanwhile, a visit to any school at the end of the day will show men who work as plumbers, and drivers and construction workers picking up their children from school. (ANTITHESIS)

Humans tell stories to ourselves to obtain a meaningful life. But the truth lies in the external experience of what we do, not what we believe or say. We explain all aspects of life in a manner that is rational, what the Frankfurt school called “Dialectics of Enlightenment.” But often, these stories are created due to an aversion to confront the aspects of our existence we would rather not accept as true: our animal nature that is driven by cosmetics of external appearance. (SYNTHESIS)

Example 4: Abortion

Pro-Life/Anti-abortionist: I oppose abortion because I care about the life of the unborn children.

Abortionist: How could you possibly care about the life of all of the unborn children, given that you will not know any of them even if they were born. There are children dying right now all over the world, and you could probably help many of them by donating just a little money, and yet you do not. Therefore, you do not actually care about the child, you care because the act attacks a precept of your world-view that you treasure: that every mother loves her children more than anything else in the world. (ANTITHESIS)

Humans do not perceive the world as it is exactly since it is too complex and there are too many variables. Therefore we form cultural views which are usually taught to us about what is true and what is false and then act in the world according to those axiomatic principles. One of those principles is that of the mother who is all self-sacrificing and all-loving. It is a form of dogma, and myth. Plenty of mothers murder their own children, many mothers are cruel to their children, and many mothers abort their children. Therefore the opposition to abortion is actually acting out against an attack on a dearly loved axiomatic ideological premise which is rooted in cultural mythology, as the acceptance that not all mothers are universally loving would require the subject to embrace the possibility that their own mother didn’t love them. (SYNTHESIS)

Confirmation Bias

To hold an idea and convince ourselves we arrived at it rationally, we go in search of evidence to support our view. What could be more objective or scientific? But because of the pleasure principle and its unconscious influence, we manage to find the evidence that confirms what we want to believe. This is known as confirmation bias.

When investigating confirmation bias in the world, take a look at theories that seem a little too good to be true. Your first impulse should always be to find the evidence that disconfirms your most cherished beliefs and those of others.

Conviction Bias

We hold on to an idea that is secretly pleasing to us, but deep inside we might have some doubts as to its truth, and so we go an extra mile to convince ourselves—to believe in it with great vehemence and to loudly contradict anyone who challenges us. How can our idea not be true if it brings out in us such energy to defend it, we tell ourselves? This powerful feeling is evidence of the conviction bias at work.

Appearance Bias

We see people not as they are, but as they appear to us. And these appearances are usually misleading. First, people have trained themselves in social situations to present the front that is appropriate and that will be judged positively. Second, we are prone to fall for the halo effect—when we see certain negative or positive qualities in a person (social awkwardness, intelligence), other positive or negative qualities are implied that fit with this.

The Group Bias

We are social animals by nature. The feeling of isolation, of difference from the group, is depressing and terrifying. We experience tremendous relief when we find others who think the same way we do. In fact, we are motivated to take up ideas and opinions because they bring us this relief. We are unaware of this pull and so imagine we have come to certain ideas completely on our own.

The Blame Bias

Mistakes and failures elicit the need to explain. We want to learn the lesson and not repeat the experience. But in truth, we do not like to look too closely at what we did; our introspection is limited. Our natural response is to blame others, circumstances, or a momentary lapse of judgment. The reason for this bias is that it is often too painful to look at our mistakes.

Superiority Bias

We feel a tremendous pull to imagine ourselves as rational, decent, and ethical. These are qualities highly promoted in the culture. To shows signs otherwise is to risk great disapproval. If all of this were true—if people were rational and morally superior—the world would be suffused with goodness and peace. We know, however, the reality, and so some people, perhaps all of us, are merely deceiving ourselves. Rationality and ethical qualities must be achieved through awareness and effort. They do not come naturally. They come through a maturation process

Increasingly I found myself scratching my head when observing the complete incoherence of much of the political and social activism these days. It can be narrowed down to a sort of rage and fury and resentment that simultaneously demands compassion and kindness and understanding, provided you’re not white, and especially a man, and which, when pressed to the ultimate, responds by challenging the very logical structure we use daily to communicate. It’s a kind of working backward from emotional conviction to an irrational construction – in their methodology, one seeks rational arguments to to justify their already made emotional conclusion, rather than to reason through a problem to a logical conclusion.

Here’s the reality: going back to Bronze Age Greece, we find various indications of an obsession with appearing whiter and more fair. The traditional narrative around beauty frequently highlights the Venus figures, the ancient human fertility sculptures, that feature incredibly fat women, as an explanation that beauty is a relative concept, inculcated through environmental absorption of some kind, as an influence from the broader culture. So, given the dominance of the “white culture,” notably that of the USA, it stands to reason that the beauty standard would be the same as the dominant culture. It’s a reasonable argument, but it’s not true.

I’ve already mentioned the Greeks, who, prior to the Classical period and the Socratic philosophers, had a fairly common rationalization with respect to the weak, the disabled and the maimed. They were all cursed by the gods, for why else would they be this way? This is a reflection of the earlier Indo-European tradition of valuing male warriors, of promoting excellence, what the Greeks called arete, since, in a society that constantly had to defend against other warrior societies, most notably the Mongols, how else would one prepare a child to be ready and willing to run into a field where his life will be ended by a blow of an axe to the head. I can hear the wood being chopped as I write this.

Whereas clearly a conscious effort is made by the likes of Plato to educate and inform through his Sokrates on the nature of the good, on the nature of virtue, on what it is to be virtuous and in turn to live a virtuous life, the pre-Socratic Greek society was anything but virtuous in the same way as we would think of it today. To them, beauty was synonymous with virtue. Strength was synonymous with virtue. And those who had neither were cursed by the gods, and fair game for mockery.

After all, it is from the ancient world that we get our first glimpses of what would later become eugenics, a natural progression from the ancient stupidity called physiognomy. Ironically, it’s first student is one Aristotle, but it’s primary promulgator and huckster is one Philo of Alexandria, from whom a significant neoplatonic work on the “Logos” also originates, and finds its way into the New Testament. Yes, that Philo, the Kohen Philo, the Jewish Alexandrian neoplatonist who had a great deal to do with the Christian theology, and who was based on his work on physiognomy, an elitist racist of the highest kind.

You see, physiognomy, though it must be taken in through a kind of Adam Smith-esque maturity on the nature of man, as something that each person engages in on a daily basis, and in fact, is primed for evolutionarily, is the profoundly ridiculous (rationally speaking) pseudo science on reading a man’s nature by the appearance of his face.

As the editor to the collection of essays by the Swiss physiognomist John Caspar Lavater wrote in the late 1700’s says in the preface to the collection from the late 1800’s:

Physiognomy, whether understood in its most extensive or confined signification, is the origin of all human decisions, efforts, actions, expectations, fears, and hopes ; of all pleasing and unpleasing sensations, which are occasioned by external objects, nor is there a man to be found who is not daily influenced by Physiognomy; not a man who has not figured to himself a countenance exceedingly lovely, or exceedingly hateful ; not a man who does not, more or less, the first time he encounters a stranger, observe, estimate, compare and judge him, according to appearances, although he might hitherto have been a stranger to the science of Physiognomy ; it is, therefore, a manifest truth, that whether or not sensible of it, all men are daily influenced by Physiognomy and as Sultzer has affirmed, every man, consciously or unconsciously, understands something of Physiognomy.

The most simple and inanimate object has its characteristic exterior, by which it is not only distinguished as a species, but individually ; and shall the first, noblest, best harmonized, and most beauteous of beings, be denied all characteristic ?

But, whatever may be opposed to the truth and certainty of the science of
Physiognomy, it must be admitted that there is no object, thus considered,
more important, more worthy of observation, more interesting than man, nor any occupation superior to that of disclosing the beauties and perfections of human nature. We do not consider any apology needful for the republication of a work so highly appreciated as Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy.

What the author to this work means to say, I suppose, is that ignoring the presence of an emotional response mechanism within each of us to be attracted to that which is beautiful and repulsed by that which is ugly doesn’t in all practical effect make it go away – suppressing the truth that this in fact happens merely leads to speech that is false, and at best, is wishful thinking, leading to all manner of self-deceptions and abuse by manipulative types who use the ignorance of the masses for their own purposes.

This illustrates effectively the error of much of the present-day social justice warrior approaches to all sorts of social issues. Not the least of these is the reality that suppression of speech has the tendency to result in radicalization of the group whose speech is suppressed that may have not happened had they been given a forum to express their grievances. But more than that, it results in a state of affairs where, by employing language that says whatever it is that is opposite of that which is condemned, is presented to all out of self-interest, and is not necessarily a true statement of the person’s actual opinion. Thus we see, for example, innumerable instances of virtue signalling behaviour, where companies who pollute the most put forth various ad campaigns about their commitment to green and renewable materials, where people could care less about everyone else posit themselves as humanitarians through virtue signalling statements about the poor and the racialized, and the legions of university professors who preach Marxist ideologies, but are multi-millionaires who live in palatial estates while sessional instructors are paid pittance and not even given benefits.

The reality of mandating by legal fiat the manner by which one must behave that is contrary to his nature has the result of people simply pretending to be a certain way, having learned what they cannot be or say, which makes the situation of discrimination or social problems simply go underground and become even more insidious because it is now done secretly, with those experiencing its negative consequences chasing shadows, and those who claim to be fighters of justice, having run out of actual racists and Nazis, now go looking for Nazis in bizarre things like hand signs, statements and songs, which they proclaim as being “dog whistles.” To make matters worse, they really believe this stuff. The Millenials and the i-gens have been done such a disservice by their mothers and society that has produced in their experience the very paradox they preach and live daily – while being told everyone is equal and every form of self or cultural expression is just fine and equal to all others, they were told by their parents one-on-one that they are better than everyone else and smarter, and more attractive and basically superior, leading to an incredible narcissism which is totally unsupported by objective criteria, so the question should be “Why would they NOT be jittery automatons who demonstrate and try to shut down every speaker they disagree with but why isn’t everyone like them,” given so few students have their own views and aren’t simply parroting the words of an authority figure.