I was thinking the other day about the fundamental significance of anti-social egoism for right wing, conservative ideology, and not only in the context of bad economics in the conservative style. I thought I might say a few words on that this week.
I propose humanity is fundamentally a social species. We gain our power from our ability to form society, the word, communication, collaboration, coordination, the transmission of knowledge, technology, social organization, ethics, government, law, etc. Humans may be able to survive in isolation when necessary, having learned nothing from anyone nor passing anything along to anyone, neither being helped by others nor helping others, finding no need for communication. But it’s an unusual, extreme situation for a human. However, humans are also egoistic to some degree and generally desire some realm in which their own egoistic desires, interests may prevail. Attaining that balance is at the core of the human experience involving ethics, society, especially liberal political thought.
Right wing conservatism represents an unbalanced, myopic fascination with the ego, in which any check or impediment on the ego arising from consideration of others, society, ethics, law, government becomes anathema, an affront to one’s freedom, liberty, and so on. One sees it in the “greed is good” ethical proposition from anti-democracy bad economic in the conservative style, which falsely proposes neoclassical welfare economics establishes ethically optimal social relations will follow if everyone acts egoistically, ignores ethics. One sees it in racism, where one’s “race” is meant to grant one’s ego added weight and significance, and in bad religion, where a conception of “god” made in one’s own image is meant to grant special status to one’s ego, puff it up, make it grand. One sees it in support for violent, lawless anarchism, with the insistence one always be free to do as one likes, including resolving interpersonal conflicts in whatever way works to one’s advantage, such as at the end of a gun, ignoring all others. One sees it in support for fascism, which at least in its heady early days is about the promise of forcing one’s own views on others using sympathetic government force, rejecting the social discussion of ethics and determination of law, rejecting the ethos of democracy. One sees it in support for inaptly named “social” Darwinism, usually about some notion of “fitness” defined with respect to the individual, the ego, not the fitness of society, the “fittest” of which may involve altruism, a point seemingly lost on Herr Nietzsche and his ilk. One sees it in the general conservative inability to appreciate the value of human diversity at a social level, to understand why, say, homosexuality may persist in a social species even as it conveys no genetic advantage to a particular individual.
It’s in the collision of that egoism and the social nature of humanity that right wing ideology gets most interesting. Because in the end the intellectual artifacts of conservatism, such as fascism, religion, etc., can only express the ego of some, not all. Someone must submit. It’s that selling to egoists of submission that leads to the difficulties of late-stage fascism and religion, where the early triumph of the will for the many becomes narrowed to the few and the surrender of the will for the many, the slavish minions, the followers. It’s at that crucial stage an egoist either surrenders to another, grants it mastery, becomes a slave, attaches egoistic pride to serving another, or finally comes to see the fundamental difficulty involved and perhaps to appreciate the rigors of ethics, society, democracy.
In the final days of Nazism, some fascists famously killed themselves, but was it is because they considered the avatar of their own ego thwarted, or because they could conceive of no purpose in life beyond slavish servitude to the ego of the great and ostensibly merit-filled? Or, indeed, did simply maintaining their egoism in a small way to survive, thrive, under the conditions of fascist authoritarian rule by others lead them to make ethical choices they later found psychologically and philosophically unsupportable, incompatible with living? Other erstwhile fascists, of course, rejoiced at the fall of Nazism, albeit usually meekly, quietly. They had long since seen the fundamental problem of the hell their own egoism had wrought, but were too afraid, too weak to escape or fight that system once established.
And so with religion, now mostly a matter of egoistically shopping for a religion or sect that expresses one’s views but was formerly a hotly contested matter of state control, law, formal hierarchy, and cruel violence over whose vision, interpretation, ego would be enforced. Historically, some happily gave up their lives for the religious expression of their egos, some to slavishly follow the egos of others, others were only too happy to replace the iron grip of state religion with personal freedom, the expression of the ego in a small way. Indeed, some were likely only too happy to evade the need to perform what they inwardly considered unethical acts in the name of established religion, which once established they performed to satisfy the fundamental requirements of the modest ego, survival, advancement, etc.
And so with anarchism, where the early promise of the ego unchained by society, consideration of others, leads typically directly to the domination of the many by the few through violent intimidation, and thus to renewed interest of the many in ethics, society, law, government.
We all have egos, ideas, desires, preferences, values, ethical beliefs. But there are advantages to living in a human society with others who have those things as well. Think about it seriously sometime, and one may finally understand the strength and beauty of democracy. Think you’ve found a way to have all the advantages of human society but always have one’s way, enforce one’s will on others, prevail in every interpersonal conflict? You haven’t. It doesn’t exist. Get real or suffer the consequences, as have so many others in our sad history.
