William Golding’s 1954 novel Lord of the Flies is a story about the battle between competing ideas of democracy that would come to characterise Western politics in the twentieth century. A plane crashes on a deserted island, and the implied cause is a nuclear bomb. The only survivors of the crash are a group of young boys. They attempt to form a society based on democratic principles and elect the oldest boy, Ralph, as their leader. Ralph attempts to unite the boys around a common goal: build and maintain a fire, which will send smoke signals upward to oncoming planes, so that the boys can be rescued. However, the antagonist, Jack, is a stalking horse who has no interest in this goal and seeks to demagogically channel the boys to support his ‘savage’ vision of life on the island. His vision is that of a dark world ruled by the pursuit of self-interest, arbitrated through violence and aggression, where life is a constant Darwinian game of ‘survival of the fittest’. This individualism eventually comes to destroy the boys’ society.
In the battle between the power of the collective idea
and a radical individualism where everyone is ‘free’ to pursue their
self-interest, an almost worldwide consensus is that the latter has won out. But
this has not made us feel any freer than we did before. In fact, radical
individualism as it has played out in almost every part of the world is a
fiction that obscures the growing consolidation of money, power and domination among
a group of elites. Yet while people are beginning to discover this fact, they have
no power to do anything, because they have lost the vision of a collective idea
which would help them achieve any change. The radically individual society has
become more alienated than ever despite the new technologies which promised to ‘connect
the world’. The process by which individuals in society have become more alone,
more untrusting, and less emotionally connected to others has been ongoing
since at least the 1980s.
In a 1992 piece in The Republican, Bruce Jesson
tells a story of the emerging elites who have created this phenomenon of
overwhelming alienation and anxiety. This story of how the process unfolded in New
Zealand can be explained across the entire world. Jesson said that the new
elite is overwhelmingly comprised of leaders in the financial sector, as
finance had by the 1990s dominated the economy and financial logics had
permeated politics. This was the vision of a new ideological movement called
the ‘New Right’, which in Aotearoa had actually been initialised by the
traditionally left-wing Labour Party. Here, it was Labour who introduced us to
the new world of politics dominated by finance. Like the new technologies and
social media do today, the promise of finance was also that it would connect
the world. Finance is ‘fluid, mobile, moving constantly around the world’. It ‘recognises
no barriers between industries – or countries – and it treats each industry the
same way’. The universality of finance’s application to the world would create,
it was envisioned, a unified picture of that world in all its individualities.
The content of that world did not so much matter, only that the logics could be
applied to that content.
But, despite how the vision of the New Right’s world of
finance sounded, this did not in fact underlie a collective idea. Jesson
goes on to say: ‘[T]he new elite… is in a sense non-political. It has no values
or goals other than money. No moral sense, no loyalties, no concept of national
sovereignty. Its goal has been to depoliticise New Zealand society, and hand traditional
government functions as far as possible to business.’ This valueless,
aggressive pursuit of self-interested power and wealth consolidation was, he
described, ‘anti-democratic’. Gone was any sense of the collective idea and the
notion that the people outside of this process would participate or benefit in
any of its workings. In another piece Jesson published in the now defunct Metro
in 1995, he explained what would happen in this society, run by the ‘dull
boys’: ‘Intellect and power will be concentrated on one pole of society,
everyone else would feel helpless’.
Bruce Jesson clung to the belief that this growing divide
between the ‘powerful’ and the ‘helpless’ would inspire the old Leftists to
reach for the collective idea once more, to unite the working classes. But, in
truth, the Left has retreated. Jesson began to identify this in the mid-1990s
when he said that the New Zealand Left had become ‘insular’ and had turned
towards nationalism. This has only gotten worse over time. Now many Leftists themselves
think in terms of the individual. They no longer talk about the politics of
class groupings, only individual ‘privileges’ and ‘oppressions’, and chase
achievable goals at the margins rather than trying to unify people around a
collective idea. What is considered the ‘Left’ viewpoint in our political punditry
is increasingly dominated by middle-class liberals who are alienated from the
realities of working-class lives. The typical Pākehā attitude is that understanding
Māori
language and culture will inexorably lead them to understanding ‘te ao Māori’
-a falsely unifying picture of Māori people and their supposedly
collective worldviews and opinions – and how that false unity can stand alongside
leftism in ‘partnership’. Many left-wing activists today do not understand
economics, even sometimes proactively advertising their lack of interest in learning
more about how the economy functions, or how its logics affect the collective psyche
and social behaviour, and hence are unable to make coherent sense of our contemporary
situation.
Mark Fisher metaphorised this global transformation of
the Left into an individualist movement as ‘entering the Vampire Castle’. In
the Vampire Castle, you think individualistically and only condemn individuals,
whilst pretending to offer a meaningful critique of social ‘structures’; you
aim to instil guilt in everyone for things they cannot control; you are
stoically serious, unfunny and cold; you protest grievances in the commodified
virtual world of popular culture rather than tackle head-on issues in the real
world of social isolation and despair. Not surprisingly, this largely Internet-driven
movement has failed to gain any traction among the wider population beyond being
ensconced in universities and parts of the public service. It has positioned
itself outside ‘bourgeois’ politics, but nonetheless its clear weaknesses have
been ruthlessly exploited by its opponents and it has done more than anything
else today to damage and isolate the ‘Left’ cause. But what Mark Fisher said
about the emotional states of the members of the Vampire Castle is even more
powerful today in our increasingly neurotic world. In the Castle, what holds
you together is not real connection or solidarity. It is the mutual fear and
paranoia of being the next one to be exposed and condemned.
With the Western Left in disarray, the power of finance
has allowed to continue its wreckage of the world largely untrammelled as it
subsumes everything into its false image of universality. People live in fear
and anxiety in an increasingly precarious world. This widespread fear has come
to be exploited, although not always successfully, by new right-wing forces.
While much of the Left today has lost any vision of unifying the people around
a collective idea, the Right has come to fill the void. It has exploited the
fragility of the Left, as it remains trapped, confused and fearful in the ‘Vampire
Castle’, and united working people around frightening, paranoiac, ultra-nationalist
visions of society. A variety of perceived external threats have been used as
scapegoats, the source of all their fears, to rally these devastated populations.
These are people whose lives have been destroyed by the logic of finance. They have
lost their homes, their jobs, become addicted to medication or hard drugs, and
are increasingly captured by xenophobic tabloid news which offers an unfiltered
reflection of their paranoid and anxious world. Consequently, ‘Trump-like’
leaders have been elected all around the world promising to eliminate the
scapegoated threats. They often pair this paranoia with a populism that
positions the working people against the elites – as Trump said, ‘drain the swamp’.
But the swamp is never drained; at most, new ‘swamps’ replace the old. And the
destructive power of finance remains unchanged.
This has not happened in New Zealand previously because of
Winston Peters, a politician who has created similar sentiments but channelled
it away from reactionary fascism. With Peters out of politics, the other force
pacifying this sentiment is the phenomenon of Jacinda Ardern. We have as our
Prime Minister an extremely popular politician. She has done this not by actually
changing anything about our reality of living under the relentless logics of
finance, but by reigniting the belief in a country of the power of a collective
idea. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Ardern continually referred to the country as
a ‘team of five million’. This has become a mantra repeated by public servants,
media figures, and managers, filtered down to working people. This phrase
united New Zealanders as individuals behind a common goal. The goal of the team
of five million was to accept and support the government’s ‘elimination
strategy’ against this deadly virus. New Zealand did this, and with this
widespread social support, the country has produced one of the most effective
responses to the virus seen globally. The only opponents of this strategy have
been the radical individualists of the Right, the Trump imitators, and the
conspiracy theorists. But they have, quite rightly, not been taken seriously by
many people. New Zealanders already believed in the government and its
collective idea.
Although this unifying of the people involves the same
logic as reactionary fascism – scapegoating an enemy as the source of misery
and rallying the people against it – the novel coronavirus was an authentic
enemy, communicated as such by the government, and one whose elimination
brought all kinds of people together in the process. It is possibly the most
progressive, humanistic transformation of a people ever enacted by a Western government
this decade. It is no surprise, then, that Ardern’s Labour party she leads was
re-elected to government in a landslide last year, while right-wing parties,
who at the time of the first outbreaks continued to promote the supremacy of
the economy and finance (with its vision of self-interested actors), were
utterly rejected by the electorate.
However, as I stated earlier, this is not a collective
idea that leads to any change. Labour does not understand the wider implications
of the power that has swept them to victory and made Jacinda Ardern so
stratospherically popular. Labour, as every other political party in Parliament
does, remains committed to the status quo: an increasingly narrow vision of
politics controlled by the Treasury benches and the financial markets that only
benefits existing elites. Chris Trotter asks, ‘What on earth had happened to
the “politics of kindness”? Why, when everybody was saying “Yes please!”, was the
Labour Government saying “No thank you!” The answer, of course, is because “everybody”
wasn’t saying it. Thanks to their polling agency and the participants in its
focus groups, the Labour leadership possesses a great deal more information
about the Kiwis clamouring for action on the housing front”. This ‘information’
that Trotter mentions is the surveyed opinions and individual interests done by
pollsters and marketers. Labour is committed, as National was, to upholding the
self-interested views of the democracy of public opinion – to the exclusion of
the true – against the power of the collective idea. In the democracy of that received
opinion, where pollsters ask a limited and carefully curated set of questions
to the electorate, all government does is act on that information to refract
the narrow vision of our age – and nothing changes.
