Of "Kakistocracy": A Few Words

The reader of this blog may be familiar with the words "oligarchy," "plutocracy," "kleptocracy."

"Oligarchy" refers to government controlled by a small group.

"Plutocracy" refers to government by the rich.

"Kleptocracy" refers to government by thieves who use their positions of authority to rob the public.

"Kakistocracy," derived from the Indo-European root word "kaka," the meaning of which I imagine most readers can figure out for themselves, refers to government by society's worst.

A more obscure term, when a handful of commentators dared to use the term in public a few years ago it caused quite the sensation, but I am not sure that it has entered really common usage. According to Google's book-checking Ngram viewer usage of the word between 2016 and 2022 merely doubled from a very low level, so that as of the later date one is still about 280 times more likely to encounter usage of the word "oligarchy," forty times more likely to encounter "plutocracy," and about sixteen times more likely to come across even the relatively newfangled "kleptocracy." This is in spite of there being room to argue that even those three words are less frequently used than they ought to be in English, especially when we discount their use to fling abuse at other countries on officialdom's "Disapproved" list.

I might add that the word kakistocracy would seem to have a particular usefulness in a society in which conventional wisdom-guarding elites (in complete, ironic, obliviousness to the concept's flaws, pointed out by the very sociologist who coined the term!) ceaselessly refer to their society as a meritocracy. Those who disagree can point out to them that it is in fact the other, opposite thing with the rather pungent label, their supposed "meritocracy" in fact a "merdeocracy," and the singers of meritocracy as a contemporary actuality, if actually believing their own claptrap, apparently unable to tell Shinola from the other thing.

The Hired Killer in Fiction

Writing of David Fincher's film The Killer David Walsh remarked that "[h]ired killers like these . . . with their automaton-like precision and fanatical attention to detail," are fantasies, and about that Mr. Walsh is of course entirely right. Read up on the relevant subjects--crime, intelligence, covert operations--and you never find anything like these stock figures of so much thriller fiction. Ever.

So where did they come from?

I suppose one can see in these figures a combination of two "petty bourgeois" fascinations--the fascination with the criminal who refuses to be bound by society's rules (indeed, Walsh cites this again himself), and with the "professional." The petty bourgeois, after all, is a great admirer of the professionals whose competence and whose "standards" fiction endlessly, wildly, exaggerates. In the hired killer we get the merger of the two, making the figure irresistible to their imagination--which, after all, is substantially the imagination to which the pop culture industry plays.

The Petty Bourgeois' Romanticizing of the Outlaw

I have often seen writers refer to a fascination with crime and criminals as being distinctly "petty bourgeois," but I do not remember any of them clearly explaining why they think that is so in an explicit way. What I have gleaned from them is the view that, being petty bourgeois such people are not on top, and frustrated--their lot, if far from the worst society has to offer, still that of the "bound but unprotected" and they naturally not liking it much. At the same time being petty bourgeois they are essentially individualistic and conformist, so that they do not imagine, let alone desire, any other world than this one. They just want to change their condition in the one that exists. And the rule-breaking criminal, who is at the very least refusing to be bound, and if they get big enough, in some degree protected too in a society where corruption is not unknown (else what need for an Eliot Ness or a Batman?), has a fascination for them as someone doing what they would like to be doing, or would like to have done in the past (such that they would be enjoying the benefits of those actions now).

Certainly thinking of Robert Merton's "theory of anomic behavior," which I understand to have been the result of his examination of crime, this seems to track. As Merton wrote society sets goals for its members and sanctions particular means for realizing those goals--like individual economic advancement through education and getting a job (or, less often these days, be-an-entrepreneur-in-a-legal-line-of-activity). The conformist accepts goal and means--getting ahead, and getting the job supposed to lead to that. The rebel and the "retreatist" in their different ways and for different reasons refuse goal and means--disbelieving in getting ahead, and refusing to pretend the way taking the job requires them to do. The "ritualist" Merton describes as rejecting the goal but accepting the means--in the sense that they do not really believe in all that getting ahead stuff, but get a job anyway and go through the motions (because, frankly, it's very, very tough to live without a source of income). However, there is one other category--what Merton called "innovators"--who accept the goal but rely on a less than approved means, i.e. accepts "individual economic advancement" as a life's purpose but pursues the object through illegal business activity. They are not rebels, they accept the success-striving recommended to them, they just resort to disapproved means to go about it--while not advertising those means, or necessarily meaning to persist in them beyond their attainment of their goal.

I do not recall Merton saying anything about this, but I think that what those who picture crime as an object of fascination to those sincerely eager to get ahead, but disappointed in the sanctioned options and their results--perhaps especially in times of declining prospects for the "middle class." Few act on such nonsense--but all the same, the attraction on this foolishness on some level has its part in making criminals very popular protagonists in contemporary pop culture.

David Walsh Reviews David Fincher's The Killer

David Walsh has recently penned a review of David Fincher's Netflix film, The Killer, and taken the film as an occasion to consider Fincher's now three decade-old record of directing feature film, paying particular attention to such movies as Fight Club, The Social Network, Gone Girl, and the more recent Mank. Walsh argues that while "each of [Fincher's] films has intriguing and even insightful moments," Fincher tends overwhelmingly toward superficiality, particularly evident in his "predilection for brutal, irrational behavior," and identification of "certain alienated moods," while never having much to say about "their origin or trajectory," and certainly not their "social sources." All in line with a "shortsighted, limited vision of humanity and society" apparently consisting of little but "general misanthropy," "pervasive darkness," and "the desire to make people uncomfortable" it is not, but only by the credulous confused with, "criticism of capitalism, corporations, contemporary civilization . . . modern marriage" that leaves us with the "chilly and banal" at that level, only underlined by the "style" over which Fincher fans gush so much.

I cannot say that I have tried to follow David Fincher's work, but I have seen a fair bit of it all the same, and going by that Walsh seems to me to do an exceptional job of summing up the (very limited) strengths and (considerable) weaknesses of a filmmaker who, in spite of the plaudits with which les claqueurs of the entertainment press lavish him, has a "body of work" with "many more minuses than pluses in" it, just as Walsh seems to me to have been one of the few to grasp the profound limitations of Quentin Tarantino's work (especially as his career went on).* Walsh seems to me equally correct in treating Fincher's outlook and its limitations as not merely his own, but characteristic of that cohort of filmmakers that emerged in the '90s, and has increasingly dominated the American cinematic scene ever since, of which Fincher is a star.

* The few others who did grasp Tarantino's limitations include Gary Groth, and James Wood. It seems significant that neither is by profession a film reviewer, and that neither seems to have been much heard from since regarding Mr. Tarantino.

The Films of Joel and Ethan Coen

Recently looking back on The Big Lebowski I encountered Graham Daesler's essay about that movie, which also takes up the matter of the Coen brothers' broader body of work. Over its course Daesler waxes poetic about his subject, which makes for an entertaining read--and if, as tends to be the case when writers wax poetic, he seems to me to give those of whom he writes more credit than is really due them, he is not without insight, or alertness to the limitations of, the movies and filmmakers he writes about, remarking in particular the Coen Brothers' misanthropy. The charge can seem easy given that misanthropy pretty much characterizes their whole generation of "indie" moviemakers, but it certainly seems not just warranted here, but fundamental to their choices of characters, and what they do with, or rather, to, them, with an evident sense of superiority and sense of self-satisfaction (presenting a parade of "dimwits, yokels, rubes, phonies . . . only to wreak havoc on their lives" in a manner Daesler compares to "kids collecting ants so they could incinerate them with a magnifying glass") in narratives in which meaning is pointedly elusive.

All that seems exemplified by the Coen brothers' 1991 film Barton Fink. That movie, "built around a protagonist who learns nothing and gains nothing, replete with red herring clues and meaningless symbolism" on the way to an ending Daesler describes as enigmatic, is "[t]he closest that Hollywood has ever come to making a Dadaist movie." I might add that it is particularly hard to escape the politics implicit in the Coen brothers' postmodernism in that movie--those of the hard right, all too evident in their deeply unpleasant caricature of a left-wing intellectual in the eponymous "learns nothing and gains nothing" protagonist.

Naturally this was very appealing to the critical community--but less so to me, which, I suppose, is how Big Lebowski, incoherent as that movie also is and mean-spirited as it can also be, made a sufficient impression on me that I had something to say about it all these decades later.

Of Corporate Anthems and the Insanity of the '90s

Back in November 1999 there was a Ford Motor Company commercial which had Charlotte Church singing over a lavish two minute music video glorifying the global automotive colossus and its then-subsidiaries Aston Martin, Jaguar, Lincoln, Mazda, Mercury and Volvo in a manner befitting the title "Global Anthem."

Seeing that commercial at its first airing I thought it was proof that the world had lost its mind.

The passage of a quarter of a century since has only confirmed me in that opinion--as has the fact that in all of the commentary I have seen, as people gush over the sheer technical virtuosity of the production and the expenditure of money and the number of people who saw it, and all the records it approached or broke in the process of becoming an historic global media event, I saw no evidence of apprehension of its social or political significance in the mainstream. How in those days when the utterly unhinged New Economy euphoria (or more accurately, marketing scam) with all its "market populist" idiocies was approaching its climax, people gawked in awe at what a quarter of a century before than Norman Jewison showed us in that film where sports fans rose for the corporate anthem, Rollerball--the media elite (and the idiots who let them do their thinking for them) with teary eyes embracing what had such a short time ago been repellent dystopia. And I think now as I did then of how very, very '90s all this was--the era's irony, as usual, absent when we needed it most, with all that says about the usefulness of irony as a response to the world's troubles.

"You Must Be Doing it Wrong!"

In the society we live in everyone is supposed to be striving for "success," and in doing so driving for "the very top." (Every student should be aiming for Harvard, everyone should be aiming for a place in the three commas club, and so forth.)

Yet anyone not completely detached from reality (admittedly, not being completely detached from reality makes it very hard to accept the "conventional wisdom" of this society) knows that there is very little room at the top, and even many, many rungs down from the top. There is in fact so little room that an individual can be doing everything "right," and yet getting nowhere, because the opportunity that no man makes makes all the difference between middling, even paltry-seeming accomplishment and "the commanding heights."

Yet in spite of this reality the conventional tendency is to assume that those on the commanding heights did the right things, and others didn't.

You're not a billionaire? Then you must have been going about it the wrong way, they decide, and start second-guessing every decision you have ever made in your life--never mind whether they are themselves billionaires.

The stupidity and obliviousness of this kind of response are staggering--and par for the course where the cult of success is concerned.

"Ya Gotta Have Faith." But Faith in What, Exactly?

It is a commonplace that people need "faith," but the statement is as ambiguous as it is banal.

Today it seems that when most hear the word "faith" they associate it with religion. Religion is, of course, usually exclusive--famously, often to the point of extreme intolerance. Yet those saying "ya gotta have faith" do not often seem to be recommending belief in a particular religion, at times seeming to imply that even something as hazy as the idea that "the universe always has a plan" will suffice.

It is, in short, a commendation of if not religion then religiosity, in the view that the world is an ordered place in a way not necessarily perceivable with the senses or recognizable through the exercise of reasoning from that sensory data--which may well indicate the opposite of any such ordering--with the implication that this ordering is somehow benign ("Whatever is, is right") and a denial that reason is a sufficient basis for humans getting along in this world.

Putting it bluntly, to speak of "faith" in this way is to champion an irrational, anti-rational and highly conservative stance in a shorthand fashion that, I think, goes right over most people's heads, with this perhaps its attraction for many, the fact that the statement is so ambiguous and so banal that few give a highly debatable position any consideration whatsoever making them feel the freer in asserting it.

The Age of Austerity and the Assault on Britain's Libraries

Reading United Nations' Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights Professor Philip Alston's report on his visit to Britain and assessment of what the "age of austerity" the Tories and New Labour inflicted on the country (which, to its credit, outraged the British government and gutter press) I remember being struck by his references to the country's libraries. This was a matter not just of their making books and other reading material available to the public, but their affording particular amenities of special importance "to those living in poverty . . . including . . . a safe community space," and "access to a computer"--the latter of special relevance in a time in which the government was making access to much of the social safety net online-only through its replacement of a half dozen earlier programs with the "digital by default" system of "Universal Credit," even though those who need that system most are exactly the people least likely to have personal Internet access. The result was that, as Alston put it, Britain's "[p]ublic libraries are on the frontline of helping the digitally excluded and digitally illiterate who wish to claim their right to Universal Credit," and indeed the country's libraries had to deal with "claimants who arrive at the library, often in a panic, to get help claiming benefits online," with the City Library in Newcastle (a city of some three hundred thousand) alone obliged to assist almost two thousand such claimants in the August 2017-September 2018 period alone.

Of course, this was as the libraries saw their resourcing shrink. Apparently the whole process so far has seen the funding of Britain's libraries slashed by over half and a third of the libraries themselves shut down, with all that this especially means for access to their services outside the more urbanized areas--even as the uses to which libraries are being put grow. (Not only are they safe spaces--they are now "warm spaces" as well.)

The situation seems describable as collapse--all as I suspect that the pain Keir Starmer (who experienced as he in in discarding solemn pledges needed no time whatsoever before his promise that there would be no return to austerity turned into a promise of austerity that he seems almost certain to keep, with warmth in winter one of those things he has explicitly promised to take away from many) means to inflict on the British public's more vulnerable members will be felt in this area as in many others in the months and years ahead.

"Yesterday's Revolutionary, Today's Reactionary"

Considering my experience of Thackeray's Vanity Fair my thoughts turn to what Professor Ron Singer has to say of the classic novel, namely that yesterday's revolutionary becomes tomorrow's reactionary. Professor Singer had in mind the telling of the story--the later "aesthetic stricture requiring objectively, purely descriptive fiction" with which Thackeray's very "talkative" narration is out of line, but one may wonder if that is not the case politically given how, as Singer explains, the book was seen as socially subversive as well. Still, if allowing that a work of two centuries ago can seem more conservative today than it did at the time, it does seem to me that some of Thackeray's contemporaries still come across as having more "edge" that way than he did. If Dickens, getting his history from Thomas Carlyle and loaded with English prejudice against a country "less favoured on the whole as to matters spiritual than her sister of the shield and trident" could see in the French Revolution little but the guillotine that has so dominated conservative (and thus, mainstream) imagination of the event down to Ridley Scott's Napoleon, his empathy for the downtrodden and hatred for their oppressors and consequent disgust for the Old Regime comes through, as does a sense of history as tragedy, so much so that one should never forget that before the first guillotine blade fell France was the kind of country which sentences "a youth to have his hands cut off, his tongue torn out with pincers, and his body burned alive, because he had not kneeled down in the rain to do honour to a dirty procession of monks which passed within his view, at a distance of some fifty or sixty yards," while the conventional stress on Madame Defarge as the villain of the story (rather than the Marquis St. Evrémonde and those he represented) seems exceedingly simple-minded--all as Dickens' virtues rather than his failings have served to make him unfashionable with the makers and unmakers of respectable opinion these days. For now, at least, I do not think anything remotely like that can be claimed for Vanity Fair.

On the Conservatism of Journalists

In considering the politics of artists and how they are not necessarily what people expect them to be I have found myself also thinking of the politics of journalists--another group stereotyped as Establishment-bucking "liberals" who in fact produce a very conservative product. In his exposé The Brass Check Upton Sinclair stressed the extent to which journalists went about this work in a cynical and increasingly demoralized way amid the very real compulsions of their business. Still, that hardly seems the case with every journalist, especially in an era in which the field is so glamorized. Indeed, just as with artists I can picture a host of factors impelling would-be journalists toward conservative attitudes, especially at the more elite levels of the occupation, even apart from what they are required to do by a Fourth Estate that is, in practice, a Big Business pressed by innumerable political factors to stay on the right side of the powerful, which does not hire, does not keep employed, does not promote to positions of responsibility, those it does not trust to conform to its standards.

There is the "professionalization" of journalism, which gives their field a rather conservative ethos, just as it does all professional fields. (The evocation of a priesthood by the word "professional" is not unimportant.)

There is what partly followed from this, the general upper-classness of those who are likely to have access to the educational credentialing while being in a position to brave the low starting salaries in that career.

There is their occupational contact with an elite, which often dazzles them--not least in its "show business for ugly people" form, as they identify upward and imagine themselves up on society's commanding heights with the people they write about, and even becoming one of them (up until they learn the hard way that they are not really members of the club).

And there is the fact that journalists so often see themselves as "storytellers," offering narrative rather than analysis--a tendency to which I suppose they are the more susceptible in that so many of those who do become journalists have literary aspirations, as the attempts at "color" in the nonfiction books they write all too clearly show.

Alas, the articles-puffed-up-into-books they tend to produce rarely show much sign of promise in that field.

The Conservatism of Artists, and the Hollywood Strike

Considering what Upton Sinclair (among others) had to say about the tendency of artists to conservatism I found myself thinking of the recent Hollywood strike. After all, there seems to me no question that Hollywood's writers, if commonly characterized by mainstream and right-wing commentators as a pack of "liberals," have for the most part produced a thoroughly conservative product, glorifying the rich and powerful, championing traditional institutions like religion, etc., etc., as they obfuscate or elide social realities that do not fit in with orthodox views of the world. Yet amid the deteriorating working conditions Hollywood's personnel have faced this last decade and longer, and the labor battles of more recent times, the writers found themselves personally confronting a less rosy social reality than the one they present in their movies in the process of just trying to pay their bills for having found themselves at the sharp end of neoliberalism-come-to-Tinseltown.

Of course, these days artists in Hollywood as elsewhere are kept on a very short leash by businessmen even more deeply invested in a conservative outlook than they. Yet, for whatever it may be worth, I wonder if their worsening lot and their fights with management have not had an effect on how they see the world.

That Particular Stony-Faced Expression . . .

I have observed time and again that a certain sort of person--usually of very low intelligence--responds to any remarking of the ills of the world, and especially those of society, with a certain stony-faced expression, in which the lower jaw tends to jut out in a rather simian fashion. No one ever asked anything of this person--but they compulsively reacted as if someone had just come to them for a large handout which they were refusing, often as merely the beginning of a display of conspicuous callousness.

The very low intelligence of such persons cannot be emphasized enough. But that is far from being the whole of the issue. There is what that low intelligence led them toward--a narrowness as well as weakness of mind that leaves them uninterested in anything they cannot eat, a deeply neurotic intolerance for any reminder that all is not well with the world as some completely unacceptable attack on their own personal selfishness, and frequently an idiot desire to swagger combined with an alertness to any opportunity to do just that by showing how much they do not care.

Bad enough as this all is, it goes further still with some--an ingrained contempt for the disadvantaged as such, and equal contempt as such for those conscientious about such matters, and the combination of raging conformism and self-importance that makes them think it is their duty to police others' statements and punish anything that they register as the scent of dissent.

Of course, dealing with such is loathsome--and the Internet is crawling with them.

The Searing of the Heart and the Cruel Irony of the Artist's Path Through Life

It seems to me safe to say that many artists become artists because they are more sensitive than others, and what another century would have called "sensibility" and "fine feeling" mean so much to them--and pursuing a career as an artist seems to them a way to save that from what they fear will be the deadening of their sensibility by the kind of workaday existence those not born rich typically endure, with its drudgery and innumerable meanness. Living from their art, living well from their art, thus seem a salvation from something unbearable. Alas, the artist rarely finds the alternative for which they hope in that artistic career, the more in as so few ever really do get to live well from their art, while even of those who do find their way to that all but the most fortunate are apt to find, as Balzac wrote in Lost Illusions, that by the time they attain success their "heart is seared and callous in every most sensitive spot," their faculty for that sensibility and that fine feeling by which they set store seared and calloused with it--and many apt to be reduced to pessimism and even nihilism. Indeed, the common fate is probably to find their heart "seared and callous in every most sensitive spot," without ever attaining success.

It is hard to see how it could be otherwise in a society where art is nothing but something from which business can make money, and the price of trying to be one of the few who can live this way is far, far higher than the propagandists of "aspiration" allow--the more is as so many pay the price, with nothing but what they lost to show for it.

What Gets Read Online?

Over the years I have argued that, contrary to the advice peddled on any number of sites, the real reason no one is reading your blog is because the ratio of blogs to potential blog readers is extremely high--far more people wanting to write for an audience than people wanting to be an audience for this sort of content (especially as online life becomes less and less verbal and more and more audiovisual, vloggers replacing bloggers, etc.). Indeed, where people of conventional and conformist mind will call that activity extremely "competitive" I would say that the sheer number of people jostling for attention (600 million blogs existing in the world according to one estimate), and the terms on which they do so (our reliance on search engines indexing very little of the Internet with search subordinate to ad dollars, the unwillingness of search engine users to venture far from the first "hit," etc., etc., ad nauseam), renders the idea of competition, in the sense of some functional market mechanism whereby consumers make judgments about the goods on offer and those who deliver the goods get ahead absolutely meaningless, any such sorting process completely collapsing under the pressure. This is made even worse by the fact that this is not a remotely level playing field--with those who can spend lots of money on site design and gaming the search engines and buying promotion plausibly having an edge, those who have connections with or can otherwise gain access to larger platforms and especially legacy media definitely having an edge, and so forth, all as search engines and other such means of discovery (apparently) "reward" those who have had clicks in the past with more visibility and more clicks, and vice-versa, so that those who start out obscure are likely to only become more so. The result is that many a writer seeking an audience online learns the hard way that no matter what they put out there no one will see it--while the sheerest drivel by someone with a claim, however dubious, to being a "somebody," will be lavished with attention and praises.

Still, even acknowledging that this is a game in which only an infinitesimal proportion of the players can win any prizes whatsoever, played on the most profoundly unfair terms from the outset with the odds getting much, much worse for those who fail to make a lot of headway early on, I will not deny that it seems to me that some kinds of content are indeed more likely to gain an audience than others; that, even if very, very few of the purveyors of that kind of material gain any audience at all, the point is that they are producing what people are taking, however little good it does them, while one is likely to find that those who do have an audience tend to offer their readers such fare.

I doubt I will surprise anyone if I say that people are more inclined to the entertaining as against the informative, the simple and quick as against the complex and involved, the emotive to the cerebral--and thus, of course, the narrative over the analytical, the personal to the impersonal. When they do go in for information the same principles apply--as they favor what promises to be immediately and readily useful in their own personal lives for solving a problem they care about (even if it is a false promise) rather than require any actual thought on their part, let alone any interest in the wider world.

Meanwhile, one gets further appealing to the audience that is actually there online than the population at large, of which the online audience may be less representative than most think. The talk of "digital divides" may seem passé in a world where even a decade ago more people had cell phones than toilets, and a significant majority of humanity is online, but it is one thing to have access to the Internet, another to spend lots and lots of time online using the Internet to do things besides access the most essential utilities or perform the most essential online tasks so that one has a chance of discovering things and taking an interest in them; of being active in comment threads, forums, social media; of registering their "likes" and sharing those things they find interesting with others. Consider, for example, the difference between the white collar worker who has a desktop at work--inside their own office--and is little supervised during the working day, and the service worker who has to hand their cell phone over to management when they clock in and only get it back when they clock out. Consider the difference between the web-connected individual with the full range of devices, with their handy keyboards if they want to do any prolonged typing in searching for information or engaging in dialogues, as against the person whose sole online access is through that cell phone they hand over when they come in to work--or maybe their local library. Between those extremes there lies a lot of difference in the quantity and quality of time spent online--and what appealing to those at one end of that spectrum will get you as against appealing to those at the other, online life still disproportionately dominated by the socioeconomically privileged, such that appealing to them pays off better than doing otherwise (a fact that has had important implications for our politics).

Will working in the way suggested here make you an online star? Very likely not. But to the very small extent that anyone can hope to reach an online audience their odds of succeeding with this course are probably a good deal better than the opposite.