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Psychology of the Private Individual
Critique of Bourgeois Consciousness
Chapter 5. Bourgeois spheres of life as viewed by the righteous person
An individual who, with the consciousness of his freedom,
arrives at the ideal of righteousness allows himself a quid pro quo in the
carrying out of all his dealings that is really something. His attitude
toward social relations, his readiness to conform, makes him see the bourgeois
world as one set up precisely for him as an individual human being. It
accommodates him with its rights and concessions, with its dictates and offers,
it actually only organizes everything he feels as needs, duties and inclinations.
The expedient arrangement of
the world already becomes clear to the moral subject in the division of the
spheres of life:
— Political rule, carried out as democracy, creates
order while at the same time granting him — alongside “indispensible”
restrictions — freedom of opinion, the sovereignty of the subjugated person,
whom nothing ever suits when he goes along with things; who goes along with
everything of his own accord and enjoys this — so much so that he remakes his
assent to state force into the fairy tale that force is not a political
means and he lives free from force.
— Competition, the way the citizen’s working life,
his work, is organized, is not considered to be a comparison made with him
and against him. For him, it is the fulfillment of his need for fairness that
is his due. He is extremely conversant with the lie that an individual’s performance
determines his income, his share of wealth, and his social position overall. He
is equally conversant with the wish, expressed in the pose of protest, that
this is how it really should be. He just insists on holding his own in
the comparison with others.
— Finally, private life is regarded by a citizen —
despite the detailed regulations imposed on it by the state — as the sphere of
life where he can do whatever he likes without interference from
annoying authorities and other people, his sole purpose being to please himself.
Thus the bourgeois subject, in agreement with the
dictates and restrictions that oppose his interests, by no means submits to the
force and obstacles he continually encounters out of “insight into his
powerlessness,” gnashing his teeth. What he does, even and particularly if
he belongs to the majority who fail miserably, is something quite different. A
citizen idealizes the harsh conditions for success as the means of
success — and the complaint that these conditions do not correspond to his
ideal circulates as criticism. In each sphere of life, critical people discover
the imperfect realization of principles they think should be valid — and
they especially like to try improving one sphere by transferring the ideals of
another to it. Their conclusion: things are not quite all right yet,
but…
5.1. The democrat’s servile spirit:*
Self-confident championing of prevailing
conditions
Bourgeois society can come up with an amazing achievement:
the exploited and ruled majority are of the free opinion that they are getting
a good deal. The democratic servile consciousness justifies ones own willingness
to submit more or less continually, and particularly when others show certain
signs of rebelling, with the “argument” that it wouldn’t work any
other way. On those occasions when an objection to a very precisely defined
phenomenon of political life, conditions at work, etc., is made, a decent
citizen feels challenged to defend the bourgeois system lock, stock and barrel.
For this much he does realize: the criticism attacks his way of making himself
useful — which is why he swears on the spot that he can’t imagine things any
other way. Somebody has got to govern, and if there were no rules everything
would go haywire, not just traffic; if there were no wage incentives no one
would lift a finger, and without anybody somehow in charge no one could get his
act together, other people especially would let it all hang out — and nobody
wants that, least of all me… As for communism, it might be a nice idea but
unfortunately unworkable. A decent citizen, a dogged freedom fighter to the
end, would never put up with anything like what you saw over there in the
former Soviet Union and its allies!
5.2. The citizen as Mr. Clean
Just because the individual has freely decided to assign his
materialism a backseat to his idealism doesn’t mean it has to be pursued in the
shadows. For the transfiguration of state, competition and private life into
the most expedient institutions for seeing to it that everyone, oneself
included, can show off their abilities and their decency to advantage leaves
enough room for announcing one’s own interests. However, these interests do not
make their appearance simply as such; they are presented precisely as befits
honorable things of long standing in the world. The
classical form of hypocrisy, making one’s demands in the name of prevailing and
accepted rules, is applied in a multitude of ideologies, which are easy for
anyone to appreciate and reject as “constructive criticism“
and “a useful contribution.” Any dismay about one’s own
situation, just as any discontent with other people’s real or imaginary
advantages, is recast as concern about the functioning of an institution, a
moral custom or social life as a whole. Any disagreeable phenomenon of
competition is turned into a crisis, and the state’s dealings with citizens
into a matter of life and death for values that are fairly sacred to us all. Bourgeois journalism leads the way here, because it specializes in
the most recent cases for lamenting the erosion and undermining of law and the
family, currency and democracy, old-age pensions and public opinion, etc., etc.
— all in the name of the citizens, of course, who eagerly learn that this is
the only permissible way to get grievances off their chests. This
yields the much-praised climate of tolerance, in which the moth-eaten class
struggle and its “mindset” withdraw. Alongside the naked materialism
of envy, there are therefore also subtler forms used by a bourgeois subject to
go after his peers, but never after those who actually land him in the soup
with the reason for his righteous concerns. Everyone is a
little guardian of public morals, who laments the decay of at least nine
principles of occidental civilization per day — and is also proficient at
putting this grievance into action in the form of slander and the like.
How pointless it would be to question these shining examples
of abstract free will about what good this does them…
5.3. Criticizing one sphere with the ideals of another
Someone who considers bourgeois conditions to be the institutionalized
form of his most sovereign human nature also finds in them the standards for
criticism when, in spite of everything, he is displeased at times with quite a
bit. As a fanatic of democracy and its forms of intercourse — whose substance
and purpose, effective rule, is totally irrelevant — he comes up with all the
democratic ideals when he thinks he has discovered something amiss outside the world
of politics. In the sphere of competition, i.e., at work,
one is ignored and never has any say since others call the shots unilaterally;
in private life there is genuine discussion with everyone voicing an opinion on
an equal footing and even full recognition of women and children — so much for
“making changes” these days. But then too, the
harshness of competition also works as an idealized principle. As
soon as such a critical citizen discovers how comfortably political party
careers advance in comparison to getting ahead on the assembly line, he gets to
thinking — and demands a proper selection process in politics for political
pros. And in private life, many a bad decision can be noted among one’s own
and the opposite sex if one applies the criterion of comparative performance:
“She’s dating him,” that loser…? But the nicest thing of all
is to apply maxims of private life, which of course are construed as terribly
humane in utter opposition to nasty politics and to the work/business life
where everyone has to assert himself, to the other branches of bourgeois society:
there needs to be more leniency and you-know-what-I-mean in politics,
lots and lots of solidarity in the working world and above all more humane workplaces.
It’s so easy to scale the heights in borrowing ideals with this to and fro: the
separation — so goes the argument — between private life, career and
politics hinders humaneness; the humane motto: in all circumstances be responsible,
always a good citizen!
Note
*
Ger: “Knechtsbewußtsein.” cf. Hegel, The
Phenomenology of Mind, where it is often translated as “consciousness
of the bondsman.”
© GegenStandpunkt 2007