What is it about control, about the habit of organizing others according to one’s wishes, of remaking them into one’s own image? It exists in the playground bully, the pernicious smothering of an overzealous mother, in the micromanaging office supervisor and, most troublingly, in the machinations of national governments. Like our seemingly fathomless appetite for sex and sweets, the impulse to manipulate another person has proven indestructible, and, if I may, I’d like to riff a minute on this baffling–and disturbing–human tendency.
Like Chet Baker, “I’m old fashioned / that’s how I want to be.” But there we part ways–I don’t believe “this year’s fancies are passing fancies.” The intellectual kind, at least. If they fade in the popular imagination, let’s chalk it up to something of a reculer pour mieux sauter. Like Lavoisier’s law of matter, I think ideas are neither created nor destroyed, even the particularly heinous ones.
So, just as the (supposed) dismantling of Daesh (IS, ISIS, ISIL, Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant) in Syria has only paused Salafi dreams of a caliphate in the Middle East and Europe, the death of Josef Stalin on March 5, 1953 did not halt the march of communism (nor make for particularly profound cinematic grist, unless you’re partial to four letter words).
It metastasized in the hearts and minds of the Czech people. Milan Kundera, iconoclast and favorite son, wrote in The Unbearable Lightness of Being that they were “convinced they had discovered the only road to paradise.” Not until the nonviolent “Velvet Revolution” of 1989 did they realize their blunder.
In Hungary, too, the Marxist dream of universal brotherhood found bonhomie with Soviet barbed wire and boots for much of the twentieth century, until 1990, when the soldiers finally boarded–in a stroke of tragic irony–thousands of railway cars bound for the heart of an empire in disarray. But it was a communism not so much of blackouts and breadlines but of private restaurants and–imagine it–used car lots. They called it gulyáskommunizmus, or goulash communism–a mix, like the savory dish, of ideologies.
Inspired by the “Polish thaw,” a loosened leash allowed for some movement of capital and consumer goods, even some dissent. But it was still a society monitored by secret police, a society where entrepreneurs erected their dreams in a clandestine side-show. Young Americans like to speak these days of their “oppression,” quaffing a small-batch IPA at brunch. Party hard-liners in Hungary permitted a single state-owned brewery, “and the beer was terrible,” notes a historian in The New York Times in 1983.
These countries did shed the yoke of communism, and one prays the beer has improved in due course, but the idea persists. As Rousseau observed, “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” The temptation to manage in toto, to curb if necessary, is terribly seductive to those who resent–and fear–the autonomy of others. For political systems of control–like those of the Soviet bloc yesterday and Xi Jinping’s China today–are fundamentally systems of fear–of achievement, of distinction, of possibility and, basically, of nature.
And these systems are extrusions of the people who build them. I know a man who cannot sit in peace at a quiet restaurant because he chooses, instead of making conversation with his table mates, to hone in on those transpiring around him. If the voices are too loud or vile for his liking, and because he cannot in good conscience interrupt them to say so, his temper simmers until it boils over and he exits in a huff. He despises the “spontaneous eruptions of joy” at a neighborhood ballpark, the evening lawnmowers and barking crows that trespass on his cone of silence.
To this man, and to bureaucrats of his ilk in positions of power, the unpredictable, liquid dance of life is a fount of anxiety and animus. It must be composed, tamed, willed into submission. And with force if it resists. His comfort, his illusion of protection, is sacrosanct. Hence, the exterior world–everything beyond his jurisdiction–is suspect. It is, ultimately, a canvas not for creation but criticism.
It is self-preservation–an existential fear of bodily death, really–in its ugliest manifestation, the embryonic spirit of malice and violence. Is it any wonder the most authoritarian societies are the most explicitly brutal? Fear rationalizes the objectification of the stranger, even of the friend, so that she can be coerced and corralled. Even her death is seen in the abstract. What matters is the continuation of the self. Homo homini lupus–“man is a wolf to man.”
Accordingly, this spirit, albeit a (to-date) diluted strain of the kind that ravaged so much of twentieth century Europe, has found sanctuary today in the peoples of the West, the very architects of its progenitor’s demise. They call it socialism. Perhaps out of guilt, spiritual lethargy or sheer stupidity it has been embraced, particularly by impressionable youth, with an almost messianic fervor. Why? It is a Weltanschauung that–in the wake of a retreating church–appears to offer identity, meaning (“Women have better sex under socialism,” claims author Kristen R. Ghodsee) and eventually–after the revolution, of course–security.
Its detractors shrug with the air of a drunken (and fat) Jack Kerouac in conversation–on a 1968 episode of Firing Line–with academic Lewis Yablonsky and Ed Sanders of the Fugs before an amused William F. Buckley. When Yablonsky raises the subject of hippie endearment to psychedelic drugs we see a scowling Kerouac give an emphatic “thumbs down” as Sanders–a mile-wide smile creeping across his face–jerks his enthusiastically upwards.
“I believe in order, tenderness and piety,” slurs a visibly defeated Kerouac, lamenting ideals given short shrift by the unwelcome inheritors of his beatific vision–the hippies–who instead espouse a “misanthropic”–Buckley’s word–regime of disorder, callousness and profanity. Half a century on their children and grandchildren are the evangelists of socialism, a doctrine more virile than ever, operating under the guise of anti-fascism, moral rectitude and a cloak of shibboleths (“Good night white pride,“ “Resist!” “Destroy the patriarchy!”).
This is the metaphysical sputum of philosopher Michel Foucault’s infatuation with perversion–what his biographer, James Miller, termed “the creative potential of disorder”–that has legitimized violence and moved a protégé, author Édouard Louis, to declare, “There is no truth without anger” and “it would be indecent these days for writers to talk of anything else but violence.”
See? With a flick of the wrist–voilà–up is down, down is up. This is the modus operandi of the control freak–to limit, to critique, to cultivate the politics of j’accuse–and his grand strategy, socialism. It is nothing less than a contemporary incarnation of the fallout from original sin, what Paul Krause in The Imaginative Conservative describes as “the lust to dominate what would produce our happiness through an inversion of the natural order of right and wrong.”
Like the communist scourge before it socialism is predicated on this ineradicable lie. Ineradicable because it is the defining characteristic of human nature: our fallenness. Our malignancy. Cut it out of the lungs and it takes in the breast tissue. Snuff it out in Prague and it reemerges in Tangiers. Bury it there and it surfaces in Birmingham. In Portland. In Concepción. Ever in flux–hiding and seeking–like the sands of Namibia.
Look no further than Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party of the United Kingdom for evidence of its noxious presence. Just this past week, at a party conference, the “center-left” group voted (ironically) to abolish private schools–redistribute their investments and endowments to the state–if given the keys to govern in the next general election. Instead of acting as an agent of growth the socialist, remember, aims to displease. She demands submission. Wherever inequality leads (i.e. wherever liberty nourishes the kaleidoscopic display of life) the socialist follows. Wherever humanity thrives the socialist is there to bridle it and to shush it.
Because the desire to rule is a distortion of the gift of life. It is a cardinal feature of this world. From time immemorial subjugation has been–and remains–the way of the control freak. When the methods of the iron fist–i.e. those of Hitler’s Third Reich, Stalin’s Red Terror, Mao’s Cultural Revolution, etc.–meet resistance in men of conscience, they’re simply morphed into a less obvious but more duplicitous design. Tyranny, in other words–say, those of the business professional–, has merely been “rebranded” or–in those of the psychologist–“feminized” pari passu with modern sensibilities.
Alexis De Tocqueville, in the 1830s, recognized the phenomenon as a kind of perpetually wagging forefinger that “does not tyrannize” but “compresses, enervates, extinguishes and stupefies” with a “network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform.” Its fruit is a “new kind of servitude” wherein, “the will of man is not shattered but softened, bent and guided.” But instead of the merciful Lamb of God it is the administrative state that shepherds him from cradle to grave.
Any parent of a precocious child, or Silicon Valley success guru, will warn against this. Individuals learn through failure–there must be room for mistakes, or, rather, the possibility of making a mistake. This is a crucial qualitative distinction. For on the larger scale of governing, where F.A. Hayek treads, “it is more important to […] release the creative energy of individuals than to devise further machinery for ‘guiding’ and ‘directing’ them–to create conditions favorable to progress rather than to ‘plan progress.’” It was true in 1945, when much of Western civilization had been reduced to a smoldering ruin, and it is true still, today, on the brink of ever new catastrophes.
We are stubborn, broken creatures. We fill our sad hearts with too much cake and too much gin. But we mustn’t be told we cannot. “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,” says William Blake in his Proverbs of Hell, and later, “for we never know what is enough until we know what is more than enough.”
The control freak, however, knows and acts accordingly. If humanity is to ever escape the ceaseless cycle of violence, perhaps, as Carl Jung suggests, society must trade containment for caritas. Indeed, “Where love stops,” he wisely observes, “power begins, and violence and terror.”
Photo: Foucault, Michel. Date and photographer unknown.
Impolitic 