The Supreme Court continued its scorched-earth policy this week, handing down extreme reinterpretations of the Constitution and settled law. It is apparent that SCOTUS, as an institution, has decided to become an apparatus of certain ruling powers and has embraced its role as a thoroughly top-down institution that issues edicts to subjects below.
As I mentioned elsewhere, this approach, while anathema to us liberals and moderates, are exactly what certain segments of society want to see. They want these decisions forced upon the populace. Some of it is sadistic—they enjoy seeing their opponents thoroughly frustrated or in despair—but a good deal comes from a desire that the directives be implemented without compromise, upon themselves as much as upon anyone else. They want to see domination in action.
I’ve thought about SCOTUS’s moves and the fact that, despite the coup d’etat being disrupted and now exposed, those elements of the right wing are moving right along toward their endgame, which appears to be a fully authoritarian, totalitarian society. They are going for broke because they see the finish line and, it seems, they cannot go back to a rational politics. Whether it’s seen as too soft or too slow, returning to a measured approach to governance seems right out of the question, some sort of defeat.
So why is this? Why now, and why exactly can these elements not go back to rationality?
Recall that modern capitalism coincided with the Age of Exploration, which lead to the Industrial Revolution. In the wake of those forces and occurrences, imperialism was born and, downstream of that, the first inklings of fascism. I argue that fascism is necessarily predicated upon the practices of imperialism as they existed at the end of the nineteenth century, that it was a subsequent outgrowth, which is why it aligns so well with capitalism as a monetary system.
Once society moved toward Henry Ford’s productivity-increasing process of routinization, toward his method of breaking apart the method of creating a salable good, it also took its nascent steps toward moving away from the individual in society being first a citizen to being first a consumer. Erich Fromm, author of Escape From Freedom, calls this new person homo consumens. His nomenclature reflects his apparent viewpoint that 20th-century man was a new creature entirely, revolutionized but to his detriment.
Advertisements, originally called propaganda, aimed to influence this new creature by irrational means, appealing to ambitions or to social anxieties and fears. These propaganda drove homo consumens to purchase on impulse, not with measured consideration. The new man was being conditioned to consume at the highest level, not merely to satisfy creature comforts but to conform to consumption as a societal value.
“Homo consumens is the man whose main goal is not primarily to own things, but to consume more and more, and thus to compensate for his inner vacuity, passivity, loneliness, and anxiety,” Fromm tells us:
In a society characterized by giant enterprises and giant industrial, governmental and labor bureaucracies, the individual, who has no control over his circumstances of work, feels impotent, lonely, bored, and anxious. At the same time, the need for profit of the big consumer industries, through the medium of advertising, transforms him into a voracious man, an eternal suckling who wants to consume more and more and for whom everything becomes an article of consumption—cigarettes, liquor, sex, movies, television, travel, and even education, books, and lectures. New artificial needs are created and man’s tastes are manipulated. …
Homo consumens is under the illusion of happiness, while unconsciously he suffers from his boredom and passivity. The more power he has over machines, the more powerless he becomes as a human being; the more he consumes, the more he becomes a slave to the ever-increasing needs which the industrial system creates and manipulates. He mistakes thrill and excitement for joy and happiness and material comfort for aliveness; satisfied greed becomes the meaning of life, the striving for it a new religion. The freedom to consume becomes the essence of human freedom.1
And so the twentieth century went. Industry introduced new mechanisms to separate man from the essential fruit of his labor. This is a basic tenet of Marxist economic philosophy, that the estrangement of the worker from his product produces a fundamental sense of alienation. It produces a malaise, a nearly imperceptible sensation of dissatisfaction. Being thus separated from something so intrinsic, the individual in modern society is forever adrift from him- or herself.
Edward Strecker, a noted psychoanalyst at midcentury, gave an appraisal of society and the individuals made up thereof:
It is interesting to speculate as to what the mental patient might say in his own defense if he had his day in the Court of Mental Hygiene. Should a schizophrenic patient argue the matter of reality versus unreality … he might ask some rather embarrassing questions.
Is it not possible that in the individuality of the mental patient … there is an unconscious protest and in that protest a lesson? Perhaps a segment of that protest is against a scheme of standardized industrial civilization, so efficiently standardized that tens of thousands of human beings are counted among the fortunate because they are given an opportunity to push a piece of tin under a machine which will punch a few holes in it, or perhaps the chance to attach a small part to something destined to become a motor-car, as it passes before them on a revolving belt.2
Reflecting upon this, Ernst Simmel said, “In the framework of our ‘standardized industrial civilization’, work itself is losing its primary aim of maintaining the individual’s contact with reality. Instead it tends to lessen his contact with reality and to make him a more easy prey to the ‘crowd-mind’.”3
This view, understood in respect to Fromm and Marx, makes clear the effects of alienation from work. It leads to the desire to escape from freedom (that is, from individual responsibility; that is, reality). It is work that grounds us to reality, and the distance created between it and the individual who produces it creates a chasm of unreality and illusion that plagues modern society.
Wilhelm Reich, in The Mass Psychology of Fascism, said:
The elimination of illusory gratification and its replacement by the genuine gratification derived from a genuine interest in and relationship to work and the establishment of international cooperation among workers are indispensible preconditions for the uprooting of the craving for authority in the character structure of the workers. Only then will the working masses of people be able to develop the forces necessary to adapt technology to the needs of the masses.4
When taken in light of the synthesis of ideas of Simmel, Fromm and Marx, this seems to point to the possibility that authoritarianism is part and parcel to industrialization and that the type of work offered and engendered by routinized work processes (i.e., conveyor-belt activity) leads to conveyor-belt mentality. With such a consciousness, workers ever alienated from their work and thus alienated from their very contact with and source of grounded reality cannot help but crave authoritarian governance as a parallel to their fragmented and disembodied lives. Can we escape authoritarianism without also superceding or abandoning industrialization?
This conception brings me to the heart of this essay. Work (whether wage-labor or salary) is one of the strongest and deepest measures of social control, societal methods designed to induce conformity. Many societal institutions, including the education system, religious institutions, professional societies, and more (even including the armed forces), help funnel human activity into productive forms or, barring that, into benign, “recreational” aims. Without direction, humans tend to get restless. It is by the great institution of work that the ruling class can maintain its distance from the mass but also enforce and instill such values as will produce society-wide conformity.
The roboticization of work processes, which accelerated throughout the twentieth century but especially after the 1970s, will rob the ruling class of one of the major mechanisms of social control. Thus we see this overt move to authoritarianism, even before robots have taken over most sectors of labor. The masses must be brought under the thumb long before they get a sense of freedom from their otherwise enforced—yet alienated—labor (compelled, in order to stave off starvation). They must be brought under control now, while politico-economic forces can still be so manipulated.
So this is what I see. Fascism is coming to America now because, soon enough, too many of the masses will be expelled from the necessitating strictures of work, because there won’t be any work for them. The processes of automized, roboticized labor will evict them from the workplace. Thus cast off and without an overarching mechanism of control, the masses would begin to form small grassroot groups and associations, much as was found in de Tocqueville’s America in the nineteenth century. This could lead to a loss of control over the masses. So authoritarianism must be instituted now so as to forestall such a dawning consciousness.
Keep in mind, also, Reich’s assessment that authoritarianism is something that portions of society innately desire. He says it is something they crave. This explains in part the reaction of some people who have responded with celebration in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. Even though it reduces women to second-class status, the supporters—both men and women—clamor for the installation of force. They desire to be controlled, due to their societal conditioning (especially that of irrationality). Better to institute authoritarianism now, while the conditioning is still operant.
1 Fromm, On Disobedience and Other Essays, pp. 32-33.
2 Strecker, Beyond the Clinical Frontiers, as quoted by Simmel in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, pp. 45-46.
3 Simmel, “Anti-Semitism and Mass Psychopathology,” in Anti-Semitism: A Social Disease, p. 46. Emphasis added.
4 Reich, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, p. 267.