The rhetorical ‘we’ and the intractability of politics

I was scrolling through one of my social media feeds when I saw a post with the quote, “The idea that some people may poison others is one of the most astonishing but least contested aspects of modern life.” I agree, but that’s not what I’m on about today. Attached was a Guardian article by George Monbiot, titled, “We are being poisoned every day, so why do we keep voting for more pollution? Ask a lobbyist.” Monbiot is a problematic columnist in my view, but the aim for today has little to do with him, and more to do with how “we” use “we,” and what — in addition to lobbyists — accounts for our seeming (actual?) inability to vote our way out of a crisis-wracked interregnum.

My response is twofold. The rhetorical “we” is always imaginary, and the intractability cannot be accounted for by tracing some causal pathway that leads us back to a singular source.

People like to imagine the world as constituted of people like themselves. Of course, there is such a thing as human nature, but by the same token, there is tremendous diversity across the culturally particular and personally irreducible. This heterogeneity is good at some scales, allowing for all manner of complementarity and grace, but it can also become pathological when it fractionates into an adversarial free-for-all.

We are caught then between the absolute necessity of hierarchies — from parents over children to masters over apprentices to managerial bureaucracies over pluralistic industrialized societies — and the well-proven fact that any one of these hierarchies can be corrupted. In regard to managerial bureaucracies, they’re Rube Goldberg affairs, constructed in response to unforeseen emergencies over time, with each new component sedimented by newly created dependencies. There are many opportunities at every level and across each field for plain self-serving corruption as well as sophisticated political manipulation. These corruptions and manipulations are likewise consolidated in every crook and crannie through a process of self-organization; by which I mean adaptations from within and without which become habitual, whereupon those very habits themselves ramify into every fissure of persons and practices.

Among the general population — which hardly sees itself as a WE writ large — the vast majority of people spend more time in a reactive rather than proactive mode, their telos being to (a) secure the survival of themselves and their loved ones, (b) establish a modicum of security and stability, and (c) seek whatever comforts are available to take the edge off of an amorphous sense of precarity, loneliness, disenchantment, and the loss of meaning.

There is no “we,” if by that we mean a self-conscious first-person plural.

Those with the time, space, information, and means to be purposeful and aim their intentions at power, are those who gain it. Once they’ve got it, they seek to expand and consolidate that power — often in response to the threat of competition from other power-seekers —and have likewise confected defenses of that power through politics. This is not some deep insight. Most of us know it intuitively. Power politics is the two-front struggle between the powerful themselves and occasionally between the powerful and powerless, upon whose parasitation the material substrate of power depends.

The reason there are few and far-between challenges to power from the parasitized powerless is — as intimated above — the dependency of the powerless upon the powerful, which has been achieved with remarkable success in late modernity through the generalized dependency upon general purpose money — that intentionally scarce ecosemiotic sign — the now near total enclosure of the commons, and the steady advance of technological de-skilling.

Politics, which has become purely power politics — as true of the oligarchic “democracies” as it is of autocracies — is but one aspect of the exercise of power, that is, control over the coercive regulatory functions of governments and states. This control over the apparatuses of governance is a necessary constant in the exercise of power — which has become power without authority (a more arcane discussion, but one with great import) — but even that is interdependent with all those factors one can easily identify: pre-political financial power, ideological power (media, etc.), and the power to disrupt solidarity or exploit divisions, even structural antagonisms, among the variably parasitized masses.

Even in legal governance, there are multiple fail-safes: courts to nullify legislative efforts, preemption, defunding regulatory agencies, and on and on. Every level and every field already controlled by the powerful (in the US, this means the ultra-rich and finance capital). Any puny assault by a rebellious idealistic grouplet, referring to itself as a rhetorical “we,” is simply exhausted and absorbed.

Power’s defenses are what the military refers to as “deep” — defense in depth — a set of defenses that begins far from the center, then proceeds inward in layers, each more and more formidable and lethal as threats draw nearer to the core. It’s layered with channelizing pathways, obstacles, mines, and a meshwork of constant and detailed surveillance. Beyond the outermost rings of defense, moreover, is a sustained intelligence effort that anticipates the motives and actions of potential threats.

Then there is that vast territory upon which these games are played we noted above, those granular habits of self-organizing accommodation. What people don’t often appreciate, when they fantasize the rhetorical “we,” is the fact that confronting power is not a mere matter of something like elections (this fantasy is a tranquilizing fiction), or seeking legal remedies in court, etc. etc. etc. What we’re confronted with, simultaneous with and in addition to the fail-safes built into governance, are the friction and inertia now self-organized into all those ramifying adaptations that have penetrated down through the very cells of a society.

The turtles of intractability go all the way down.

Of course, power is — in spite of itself — neither omniscient nor omnipotent, and, as history has shown, the structures of power, in the face of unanticipated and-or uncontrollable change, degrade and dissipate, leaving new forms of power to gestate inside the interstitial vacuums. We — and this is not a rhetorical “we” but a statement of common condition — are living in just such a period somewhere between degradation and dissipation. Think of the first challenges to Bronze Age power from the introduction of iron weaponry. Only bigger, and in the case of biospheric disruption far more permanent.

It is in the face of this manifold and multi-form intractability, once it’s intuited by the Monbiot’s and Marx’s and Minutemen Militia’s of the world — themselves in the grip of social engineering delusions —that people begin to imagine Revolution. Revolution is the chimerical mojo, the overturning, the start-from-scratch cloud-cuckoo of would-be social engineers. I held onto this particular mental lottery ticket as a Marxist for years. Others bought the same ticket with Trump, projecting their own desperate wish for a Great Overturning onto a scam artist. The rhetorical “we” always entails a rhetorical “they,” against which to direct all “our” effort.

There is a “they,” of course, when you talk about the powerful, more than one, in fact. But against the lightless angel of Power, which always eventually comes to elude the control of “the powerful” themselves, there is no point of entry, no route that can be mapped to a non-existent center, no flag to capture. You might as well try to grip Jell-O.

The most any of “us” is capable of, by way of “resistance,” is to apply tactical friction, to ameliorate the damages where and how we can, and as the opportunity arises. The real “we” is within reach, where we live and love.