Examples Of Not-Free People
Index to posts in this series.
In the last two posts I’ve described several responses to Existential Ambiguity set out in Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics Of Ambiguity. In this post, I give some examples, and offer a suggestion for using the Existentialist conception of freedom to argue with Trumpists.
Infantile people. There are few people forced into infantile behavior today. De Beauvoir gives some cringey examples from prior times, women denied any agency from birth, for example.
Sub-men. These are people who close themselves off from their freedom. They merely respond to whatever stimuli move them the most. De Beauvoir says these are the people recruited to do the dirty work of tyranny. Examples include Nazi thugs, the secret police, the torturers and their supervisors, and the people who operated the concentration camps and the gas chambers. An obvious parallel today is the ICE goons terrorizing people around the country.
Serious people. These are people who cling to the structures of belief and rules of behavior handed to them by others. They pretend these are immutable facts rather than human constructions. They surrender to others their power to make moral judgments. This, I think, is the largest group.
I think Adolf Eichmann is a good example, at least the Eichmann Hannah Arendt describes in Eichmann In Jerusalem. He obeys the rules he is handed by the regime, and strives within those structures to carry out his orders and advance his career.
In the same way, all the Good Germans who went along with the entire Nazi project, followed the rules, sacrificed themselves and their children to the war effort, ratted out their Jewish neighbors, ignored the assaults on the Jews and others, didn’t question their own participation in the evil.
We see examples of this everywhere today. Of course we don’t know the precise motivation of Trump voters, but apparently few of them have changed their minds despite his abuses. They do not exercise moral judgment about his attacks on people he doesn’t like, whether it’s John Bolton, James Comey, or a bunch of guys looking for day labor jobs at the Home Depot.
Adventurers. In the last post I discussed Don Juan as an example of an adventurer. As another example, here’s a character describes his father, a businessman, in Trade Me, a novel by the Supreme Court clerk turned novelist Courtney Milan:
There is no end to my father’s ambition. Whatever it is he wants, he lays out a plan and grabs it, and once he has hold of it, the only thing he can think about is the thing that is next on the horizon. P. 209.
Passionate people. One possible example of this is the German philosopher Martin Heidegger. From what I know, there is nothing to suggest he had Nazi tendencies or was particularly anti-Semitic. He entered and then left a Jesuit Seminary, studied under one Jew and had an affair with Hannah Arendt, also a Jew. But when the Nazi regime took over, he accepted a position as Rector of a major German university and a few days later joined the Nazi party.
He explained himself in an interview published after his death. He called it a compromise to join the Nazi party to save the university, and said he saw an “awakening” in the rise of the Nazi party that would be good for Germany. There’s more. I read this to say he thought his work was more important than the damage done by joining the Nazis.
My book club read The Director: A Novel by Daniel Kehlmann. It’s historical fiction about the German film director G. W. Pabst. The character Pabst is a solid example of a passionate person. He loses his subjectivity in his drive to direct films, doing horrid things to carry out his cinematic vision. His end is a living version of Mozart’s punishment of Don Juan.
Critics. There aren’t many examples of critics. Perhaps one is Jean-Paul Sartre, who seems to have been convinced that his version of Existentialism was a universal truth. I say this because when Albert Camus published his book The Rebel, Sartre dispatched one of his followers to write a scathing review, claiming that Camus was not a real Existentialist. The vitriol was one major reason for the split between the two.
I note that critics aren’t the same as rabid religious leaders. They are simply serious people who take their tenets to crazed extremes, and seem thrilled to ally themselves with fascists. Thus, cult leaders and the New Apostolic Reformation leaders don’t count.
Discussion
1. I think that de Beauvoir is right: people unwilling to live their freedom are easy prey for tyrants. Some are active supporters, because they think they can hammer people they despise. Some are passive, thinking they’ll prosper under the tyrant’s regime. Some aren’t paying attention.
2. Ever since the shitter-in-chief got elected I’ve hoped that this kind of reading would help me find things I can do to fight fascism. My first hope was that in these older writings there would be hints of things people might have done that would have slowed the rise of fascism. Sadly no.
So my second hope was that I would find tactics that might fight fascism among Trump’s less crazy supporters. I see a couple of things. Polanyi says that when change becomes too rapid, people resist it. Arendt says that the intellectual elites abandoned society to the mob. De Beauvoir says that people who are not fully free are easy marks for tyranny. And always in the back of my mind, C.S Peirce tells us that people become very uncomfortable when they suddenly doubt an idea they’ve held, and this is the only thing that will make them think again.
I tried to imagine using these insights in a conversation with some people I knew pretty well in my Church Choir in Nashville. I think they were sincere Christians, and I’m guessing a lot of them voted for Trump.
I imagine myself talking about immigrants with one of them. I think I’d make two points. First, I’d point to rising costs of food, and blame it on Trump’s sudden attacks on immigrants which has caused rapid changes in agriculture.
Then I’d point to the videos and reports of the vicious treatment of these hard-working people: violently kidnapped, held in appalling conditions, shipped to dangerous lands where they don’t speak the language, and separated from their kids. I’d ask how they reconcile that with the command of Jesus that begins the Parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37).
Jesus tells a lawyer to love his neighbor as himself. The lawyer (of course) asks who is my neighbor. Then Jesus tells the famous story, and asks who is the neighbor of the stricken man. The lawyer correctly answers the foreigner who helps. I know they’d see the point immediately; I must have heard that sermon five times over the years I was a member of that church. I’m sure they’d have some excuse, but they’d know it was fraudulent, which I hope would lead to doubt.
I imagine a lot of people at other churches might respond saying their preachers say otherwise. There’s my opening. Why did you let that preacher tell you what Jesus meant? Perhaps your preacher means well, but the most fundamental tenet of every Protestant group is that the individual has the ability, the right, and the duty to understand the words of the Bible themselves. Why are you afraid to make your own moral judgment and offer your own moral justification?
I think this line of discussion brings out the points I’ve learned from all these books. Would they lead to change? No, at least not in the short run. But it’s something I can do, and it might make a tiny difference before it’s too late..
Wikipedia says:
Pew Research says:
NOTE: These very same people voted for an adjudicated sexual assaulter and court sentenced convicted felon whose nearly every statement out of his mouth is a bald-faced lie.
Social scientist Giovanna Campani says:
NOTE: It my opinion that having a two-term black president broke these people
Occam’s razor:
I boil Trump voting down into three words: racism, ressentiment, and masculinism. At least one of these words applies to any Trumpie. The never-Trumpers may be hierarchical conservatives, but they’re usually no more racist, masculinist, or resentful than any normie.
You’ve captured two paragraphs I’ve been trying to write.
You’re overlooking the role of the media in this entire shift from a country that elected a Black moderate Democrat twice to the White House, to a country that would elect a multi-bankrupt, twice divorced marital cheat, and now a convicted felon.
The “neurotic losers” are in no small part “neurotic losers” because this country’s media does its best to ensure they are reminded of it regularly. Note the schism between left and right when it comes to matters they consider most concerning — economy versus crime, for example. That’s the work of the media on the vulnerable authoritarian personalities who are “neurotic losers.”
Having been in Florida since 1987, I’ve witnessed a common recurring theme that regularly occurs in the press: that shark attacks are on the rise. Not true.
You know what IS true? The ebb and flow of media reports pertaining to…shark attacks. If it bleeds in the water, and all that.
IMO it’s because Citizen’s United gutted campaign reform. McCain-Feingold wasn’t perfect but it was a start. Now, we have unlimited money in politics.
I think Obama’s blackness was a factor, but I think Obergefell’s legalization of SSM was also a factor. You will hear them say, “you don’t get to vote on right and wrong”. That attaches more to SSM (and abortion) than to Obama.
I have read about Martha-Ann Alito complaining about having to look at a Pride flag, for instance.
And the anti-gay, anti-trans thing connects to another thread, a thread of a perceived threat to masculine identity.
Masculine identity is changing and some folks really don’t like that. Because their permission to act in a certain way is being taken away.
These are the three major threads I see, and they are all connected to each other.
When one of creators of “Star Wars: The Acolyte” straight up said it was “The GAYEST Star Wars, evah!”, complete with a hot naked male Jedi scene that added absolutely nothing to the storyline, you have to wonder if there isn’t some kind of social “Newton’s Third Law” going on here (i.e., for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction).
love this approach – i do think each of us has a moral obligation to reach out to anyone who might still be reachable, before it’s too late
your words inspire hope – thank you
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A problem is the ongoing assault on the very idea of truth. The videofication of information channels, coupled with cheap AI tools capable of making convincing fake videos, is making it much harder to discern fact from propaganda. Even if you can convince someone that that thing they’ve just “seen with their own eyes” is a fake ginned up by propagandists, you unavoidably further the process of convincing them that all videos are fake – especially the ones with truths they would rather not believe.
There have always been propaganda and propagandists willing to deceive. Their efforts usually took the form of written and spoken word. But the video fakery industry (I don’t know what else to call it) has harnessed the much greater power of visual media to their ends. And now, the preferred method of receiving information seems to be video – even those things that would be much more effectively communicated in written form.
I think this is all creating a trap where truth becomes impossible to discern and therefore effectively irrelevant. It is still possible, with effort, to discern fakery – if you have the knowledge and the motivation to do so. But ongoing improvements to AI, along with the push to make it cheap and ubiquitous, may soon make that impossible. This will be a very difficult trap to get ourselves out of.
In the last few years, I have been fascinated by the famous statement of Abraham Lincoln “Public sentiment is everything. With public sentiment, nothing can fail; without it, nothing can succeed”. He further explained that “he who molds public sentiment goes deeper than he who enacts statutes or pronounces decisions,” because public sentiment determines whether laws are possible to execute or not.
So, ultimately it is about shaping public sentiment. Being in a church and persuading one or two people that you know personally is one small step. How you go about it depends on the relationship you have with these peolpe, how long they have known you, etc.
But ultimately, we are talking about public sentiment, which means lots and lots of people starting to think in a certain way. Humans on an individual basis like to think that they have freedom, agency, rational thoughts. But on the scale of millions of people, humans react a little bit like a school of fish or a flock of birds. Changing direction or shaping this seems hard, almost impossible. I think of it like a wild river. Its strength cannot be dominated, not really. But it may be possible to shift its course a little, using its own strengths.
The wild river is that peole in the US got angry. Public sentiment now is anger. They started to be shaplessly angry many years ago for many reasons, which can be colored left- or right-wing. Lots of problems not addressed for decades, politicians not having the fortitude to speak plainly about those problems, Congress doing nothing. That anger was then co-opted by DJT, convincing customers is what a con-man knows how to do. Anger can be a powerful public sentiment, but it needs to be pointed in the right direction. I think that clawing some of these people back will require accepting some of their anger.
[FYI – stray line returns edited to improve readability. /~Rayne]
I appreciate this analysis. Of all the reasons MAGA voted for Trump (Biden crime, election fraud, close the border, blah blah) the top reason was to lower prices, i.e., “We can’t take another minute of Bidenflation!”.
MAGAs are happy about the closed border and the ICE raids but where is their outrage over record high prices? Just yesterday on Fox Kayleigh McIdiot happily reported without a trace of anger that Hamburger Helper sales are up. Her demeanor implied “isn’t it great that we have a cheaper alternative?”. Despite Trump’s broken promises I still read comments like “At least he is trying!” and “inflation is down from Biden.”
Even when he is hurting them they remain devoted. It’s like an addiction. And MAGA media esp. Fox News is their dealer, delivering hourly hits of “Trump owning the libs” or “Trump flexing his power” or “Trump is getting even richer.” How do you treat an addict? You can’t, not until the addict admits to himself he has a problem. I would think the pain of record high prices would jolt them back to reality but it seems not to be painful enough. Maybe the upcoming insurance premium spike will do the trick. I sure hope so.
I am checking your/deBeauvoir’s list against Dororthy Thompson’s list from Who Goes Nazi? in Harper’s (https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/) and I am seeing overlap. Interesting reading.
Also, for the “neighbor” part, is that society has advanced beyond “my neighbors are close to me in kin, in religion, in blood, in everything” BUT how many places teach morality and empathy haven’t advanced. So, if a person decides that their neighbors don’t match 5×5 characteristics, then they have no neighbors and owe no empathy to anyone. The example you cite from the Gospels has a sneaky context buried in it of “Roman rule meant that more people could move and resettle more freely, so ‘neighbor’ no longer meant fellow Jews of varying degrees of relation but different ethnicities/religions/etc.”.
Age of Reason by Thomas Paine: The maxim of doing as we would be done unto does not include this strange doctrine of loving enemies; for no man expects to be loved himself for his crime or for his enmity.
The Catalans by Patrick O’Brian: Love your neighbor as yourself is not enough, nothing like enough, if you have a deep, well-founded dislike of yourself.
A Guide for the Perplexed by EF Schumacher: That you cannot love your neighbor, unless you love yourself; that you cannot understand your neighbor, unless you understand yourself; that there can be no knowledge of the “invisible person” who is your neighbor except on the basis of self knowledge – these fundamental truths have been forgotten even by many of the professionals in the established religions.
Peterr will correct me if I am in error. The foreigner in the parable is not just any foreigner. The Samaritan foreigner represented pure evil for the Jews at the time. It was the real point of the parable. The parable would be better understood today if the Samaritan were Hamas and helping the Jew in the way the Samaritan helped the Jew say immediately after the October 7 attack. So the question for us in terms of that parable is would we help Donald Trump or Stephen Miller, e.g., if we found one or the other injured alongside the road and bring him to a place of caring and safety? For the other side of the spectrum, would they do the same for Joe Biden or Kamala Harris? If neither side will do that, what real hope is there?
I hope you can make that point to anyone concerned and make a microscopic change.