I saw someone, on Twitter, saying that the majority of people are evil because they don’t always wear masks in public, and thus are risking the lives of the immunocompromised. I pointed out that, if this is true, a good four-fifths of everyone is evil. She enthusiastically embraced this consequence.
I see this all the time. Once you start looking for it, you’ll see it everywhere: people claiming that a majority of people are so sinful as to be worthy of political condemnation. First-world Maoists. Mad dog conservatives. ID pol fanatics.
It’s so fucking stupid.
I
Way back, closer to the last century than to today’s date. I was studying first-year medieval history, my lecturer remarked that during peasant rebellions and the like, rebels almost always said that they were not trying to overthrow the king but, instead, his wicked advisors who had so cruelly misled the beneficient monarch to harm his own people.
There are many reasons why they said this. For one thing, it probably had an element of truth- all monarchies have at least a latent tendency towards being ceremonial monarchies where “advisors” hold all the real power as I discussed in my essay “Granting textual authority to overcome textual tyranny”. If the king never makes a decision himself, he can never be wrong- hence the ever-present desire to delegate away decision-making. To be clear, of course, there are plenty of monarchies that vigorously resisted the forces and incentives that tended to make the king a figurehead, but even among these, advisors have to play an important role- one person can’t make all the decisions themself. So when the peasants said the bad decisions were coming from the king’s advisors, they probably had a point.
The more fundamental reason they blamed everything on bad advisors though was likely practicality. There would always be a king. If they disposed of the current king [no easy thing in itself], he would just be replaced, quite possibly with an heir from his own family. The new king would have plenty of reason to want to kill the old rebels- after all, they had a history of killing and disposing of kings. Although it’s post-medieval, look at what happened to the Regicides of Charles I if you don’t believe me. The odds of success and long-term survival were much higher if you set yourself the more modest aim of overthrowing a wicked clique of advisors than overthrowing the king.
And there were other reasons, equally important. Kings have always been very popular. Religious and political propaganda made the king seem inviolable. Etc. etc. The end result is that rather than trying to condemn the king, you try to will into being an alternative ‘reality’ in which the king has been misled, you offer it to the king as a polite exit, and hope that, true or not, the king will take it.
II
In a democracy, “The people” are a little bit like the king.
Just like a medieval king, at a superficial, constitutional level, the people run the joint.
Just like a medieval king, on a deeper level, their “advisors” (the political class) really run the show.
And also just like a medieval king, if you did want to clear out the current political class/advisors [in total- not just a government house coup], your best bet would be to appeal to them- to try to rouse them in the vigorous assertion of their own interests.
If it was so obvious to people in medieval times that condemning the king is a bad political move, why are there so many people out there so politically facile and immature as to condemn the people?
Indeed it is, in one sense, far more insane to condemn the people than the king. It is at least in theory possible to replace the king it is fucking insane to imagine that you can replace the people, so absurd that it’s a punchline of one of the great poems of the second half of the 20th century.
Brecht wrote:
After the uprising of the 17th of June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed on the Stalinallee
Which stated that the people
Had squandered the confidence of the government
And could only win it back
By redoubled work [quotas]. Would it not in that case
Be simpler for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?
It was understood to be a reductio absurdum, the people can’t be replaced. In a sane system, we have to win their love, not vice-versa.
Only Brecht’s satire was of a Stalinist bureaucracy, such a bureaucracy had a real capacity to push the people around. You’re a nobody, so if you want to influence things, attacking the people is even crazier.
So, whatever happens, if you want to make the world a better place [through politics anyway…], you have to tell yourself that the people are not wicked, they have been misled by their wicked advisors. That’s the name of the game. If you want to make even a semi-serious attempt at changing things, figure it out. If they’re frustrating you, chin up, and find a way to love them.
I get it. I find the average person’s views on, for example, prisons, revolting, but because I am an adult, I recognize:
These people have been shaped through ideology (wicked advisors) and
I have to live with these people in society, so working myself up to hate them is probably a bad idea.
So I reconcile myself to focusing on the good in them. I’d suggest anyone who wants to remain or become sane, effective, kind, and helpful do the same.