Why Don’t More People Fight Back: The Kleptogarchy part 29

Why Don’t More People Fight Back?

Why do people submit to being pushed around by ‘bosses’ whose main focus appears to be self-aggrandisement? Most people are reasonable folk who just want to live their lives in as pleasant a manner as possible, without upsetting too many others. They like to co-operate, says Dutch historian Rutger Bregman, author of Humankind: a hopeful history.[1] Bregman argues that hunter-gatherer societies operated co-operatively, and that through history most people were not violent. He cites several examples of soldiers who avoided shooting at ‘the enemy’[2]. He questions the accuracy of experiments such as psychologist Philip Zombardo’s Stanford Prison Experiment, in which students role-played as prisoners versus guards, and the guards became brutal;[3] Stanley Milgram’s experiment at Yale University, in which one group of students gave electric shocks to other students who got wrong answers in memory tests;[4] and the apparent refusal of eyewitnesses to intervene in the fatal stabbing of a woman called Catherine Susan Genovese.[5] He also disputes the conventional explanations of events such as the environmental collapse on Easter Island,[6] although his view that conditions after deforestation were not too bad is questionable because after the trees were lost soil erosion was severe, habitats deteriorated, the birds that were important food sources disappeared, competition for food supplies intensified, and the society became more violent.

The story of identical twins Constand and Abraham Viljoen, and the acceptance by white people of the end of apartheid in South Africa,[7] is a fascinating insight into conflict avoidance. Constand became chief of the South African Defence Force while Abraham became an academic with keen to reach out across communities. Abraham backed Mandela and worked with him, but Constand was reluctant to consider the end of white rule. The first elections in 1994 could have been a disaster as the extreme right might have started a civil war, but after hardly speaking for four decades, the twins hammered out an agreement, to accept the results of the election, which saw Mandela take office as a conciliatory president.

If humans generally are well-disposed towards others, how come that Earth is not a beacon of selflessness? Bregman suggests that social psychopaths expect others to behave just like them: “Dictators and despots, governors and generals – they all too often resort to brute force to prevent scenarios that exist only in their own heads, on the assumption that the average Joe is ruled by self-interest, just like them.”[8]

An alternative explanation is that dictators and despots behave as they do because they know most people will not challenge them, preferring to live as quietly as possible under the political radar. People’s willingness to co-exist therefore enables social psychopaths to exert control and to indulge in self-aggrandisement. Only when leaders go much too far, and their disdain becomes blindingly obvious, do swathes of the public want to turn against them. And wanting to turn is not at all the same as actually turning, because giving up a quiet life is a huge step! In the end mass discontent foments revolutions, which are rarely peaceful.

For Bregman, participatory democracy is the way to stop leaders morphing into despots. He gives several examples, such as citizens assemblies in Porto Alegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and in Torres, Lara, Venezuela. Instead of professional politicians, subject to intense lobbying from powerful forces, you have citizens chosen at random and for a limited time. Yet citizens assemblies have not made headway as permanent institutions. The World Resources Institute[9] reported in 2018 that when a right-wing party was elected to govern Porto Alegre in 2016, the role of citizens in the city’s annual budget setting process was attenuated, to save money. The assemblies had already become less influential: between 1994 and 2004, 82% of citizen-approved spending plans had been implemented, but between 2004 and 2016, only 42% of a smaller total were enacted. In Venezuela, participatory budget setting began in Torres in 2004, and is the subject of a PhD thesis by Gabriel Bodin Hetland.[10] Citizens assemblies give people a voice, but that voice is granted by governments, and when governments are short of money, or have an authoritarian political stance, the participatory largesse is withdrawn.

Multiple strands of government sow confusion because lines of responsibility tend to be muddled. In addition, populations remote from centres of power are unlikely to know government leaders personally, and when politicians’ decisions damage them, there is scarcely anything they can do. In democracies they can wait for an election, but there are all sorts of ways of fixing elections. Lose votes here and there, add fake votes into the mix, impose criteria for voting such as insisting on official identity documents with the bearer’s photo. Autocratic rulers like bellicose nationalist Vladimir Putin, who has engineered change in the Russian constitution to enable him to remain President until 2036, and China’s Xi Jinping, now potentially President for life following removal of the previous limit of two terms, have subjects who lack even a vestigial democracy. Republics have a habit of transitioning into Empires, until the Emperors overreach themselves. The Roman Republic morphed into Empire in 27BC, with the accession of Julius Caesar’s adopted son Augustus. Only 15 years after the eruption of the 1789 Revolution against absolute monarchs, Napoleon assumed the mantle Emperor of France. Over the Atlantic the USA is no stranger to hereditary dynasties, with father and son presidents George Herbert Walker Bush and George Walker Bush, and the Clintons, President Bill and wife Hillary, the Democrats’ presidential candidate in 2016. The likely Kennedy dynasty was dashed by the assassinations of President John Kennedy in 1963 and of his brother Robert, who was seeking the Democratic nomination, in 1968. Younger brother Edward was also a potential president until the Chappaquiddick accident in July 1969, when his car passenger and aide Mary Jo Kopechne died after the vehicle left a bridge and sank in water.

There are copious examples from other parts of the world, including North Korea, Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Even in the United Kingdom, there is a hereditary monarchy with a limited political role but considerable influence and a cornucopia of palaces, estates, artworks and servants, when the housing charity Shelter calculates that well over a quarter of a million people in England are homeless[11]. Millions more are in inadequate housing that is too cold, mouldy, damp, expensive, or small. Shelter calculated that 17.5 million adults, 22 million including children in the UK suffer from poor housing.[12] That is one in every three of the UK’s 67.89 million people, and it’s getting worse due to workers’ falling real incomes, and government failures to ensure that sufficient, well-insulated new homes are constructed. Margaret Thatcher, UK Prime Minister from 1979 to 1990, enabled tenants of homes built by municipalities to buy their homes at large discounts. This was a popular policy, but by 2022 around half of all the homes sold under ‘right to buy’ were owned by private landlords and let privately, often at much higher rents than a local authority would charge. Buyers who took advantage of ‘right to buy’ saw opportunities for big capital gains, because after ten years they could sell on the open market. Owners often had no choice but to sell if they moved into a care home, to fund the fees. Children of deceased buyers often had to sell, to split the asset according to the terms of a will. Right to buy was a short-term feel-good policy with harmful long-term consequences, for which private landlords are often blamed, sometimes fairly but in many cases unfairly because rental properties are expensive to maintain in good condition, and not all tenants are clean and careful.

Margaret Thatcher may have thought she was creating a meritocracy, in which ambitious go-getters would transform the nations of the Union into that reductive term ‘UK plc’, but her pro-private, anti-public policies, and her disregard for old industrial communities, stabbed into the heart of the Union and accelerated the splintering apart. People who know they are viewed as disposable cannot be expected to show loyalty to leaders who worship at the shrine of economic growth.

It is unfettered economic growth that now threatens the existence of humans, and countless other species, on a very small planet with a thin, polluted biosphere. The religion of Economy First is no more than a death cult, yet even when we know this is happening, the psychopathic tendencies of rulers restrict possibilities for radical corrective action.

[1] Humankind: a Hopeful History, by Rutger Bregman, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020. Translated from Dutch by Elizabeth Manton and Erica Moore. First published in Dutch as De Meeste Mensen Deugen by De Correspondent in 2019.

[2] Ibid, e.g. p.217.

[3] Ibid, chapter 7, ‘In the basement of Stanford University’.

[4] Ibid, chapter 8, ‘Stanley Milgram and the shock machine’.

[5] Ibid, chapter 9, ‘The death of Catherine Susan Genovese’.

[6] Ibid, chapter 6, ‘The mystery of Easter Island’.

[7] Ibid, chapter 17, ‘The best remedy for hate, injustice and prejudice’.

[8] Ibid, p.7.

[9] ‘What if Citizens Set City Budgets? An Experiment that Captivated the World—Participatory Budgeting—might be Abandoned in its Birthplace’, by Valeria Lvovna Gelman and Daniely Votto, World Resources Institute, June 13^th 2018. https://www.wri.org/insights/what-if-citizens-set-city-budgets-experiment-captivated-world-participatory-budgeting, accessed January 25^th 2022.

[10] Making Democracy Real: Participatory Governance in Urban Latin America, by Gabriel Bodin Hetland, University of California, Berkeley, summer 2015. https://escholarship.org/content/qt5hr63406/qt5hr63406_noSplash_d26f8c08d39f37896f1bda31ac4e0f1b.pdf, accessed January 25^th 2022.

[11] ‘274,000 people in England are homeless, with thousands more likely to lose their homes’ from Shelter, December 9^th 2021. https://england.shelter.org.uk/media/press_release/274000_people_in_england_are_homeless_with_thousands_more_likely_to_lose_their_homes, accessed January 25^th 2022.

[12]  ’17.5 million people now impacted by the housing emergency’, from Shelter, May 26^th 2021.      https://england.shelter.org.uk/media/press_release/17_5million_people_now_impacted_by_the_housing_emergency_, accessed January 26^th 2022.