💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › david-graeber-can-t-stop-believing.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:05:02. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Can’t Stop Believing
Author: David Graeber
Date: November 2012
Language: en
Topics: magic, politics, belief, academy
Source: Retrieved on 3rd September 2020 from https://thebaffler.com/salvos/cant-stop-believing

David Graeber

Can’t Stop Believing

I.

Politicians are by definition dishonest. All politicians lie. But many

observers of American politics agree that over the last few years, there

has been something of a qualitative change in the magnitude of political

dishonesty. In certain party precincts, at least, there seems to have

been a conscious attempt to change the rules to allow for a level of

flagrant, over-the-top lying about political opponents that we rarely

see in other countries. Sarah Palin and her “death panels” pioneered the

new style, but Michele Bachmann quickly took things to even more

spectacular heights with her wild claims of government plots to impose

sharia law on the United States or secret plans to abandon the dollar

and replace it with the Chinese yuan. Mitt Romney didn’t top either

Palin or Bachmann in the grandeur and magnificence of his lies, but he

did try to make up for it in volume, having based his entire

presidential campaign on an endless string of fabrications. Many of the

lies coming out of the Republican side are, in fact, so brazen that it’s

hard to see them as anything but conscious provocations. It’s as if

their candidates have begun daring the media and the Democrats to openly

call them liars.

What are we to make of this? First of all, it can hardly be a

coincidence that all three of the above-mentioned politicians are deeply

religious. Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann are evangelicals; Romney has

been a Mormon bishop. In these religious circles, belief and lies are

matters referred inward to one’s internal state. That is why the

religious supporters of such politicians remain untroubled when the

media reveals their statements to be untrue. If anything, their

supporters are likely to react indignantly toward any journalist who

suggests lying is the result of conscious dishonesty. Charismatics and

evangelicals embrace a form of Christianity in which faith is almost all

there is to it. If you are speaking about people of faith, the ones who

have opened themselves to the divine spirit, then there can be no

questioning the purity of their intentions. And then some secular

liberal elitist media type is calling them liars?

What the Republican Right is performing is a theological version of an

essentially magical style of political performance: they are whisking a

universe into being through acts of conscious faith. The limit is

that—as long as the other side isn’t stupid enough to echo Bob Dole’s

famous “stop lying about my record!”—the magic works only on those who

already see them as morally superior.

For liberals, of course, all this means that Republicans live in a dream

world of their own devising. They see themselves as the “reality-based

community,” the folks that doggedly insist on gathering facts and

figures and examining the world the way it really is.

The origin of that phrase is telling in itself. It comes from a New York

Times Magazine essay by onetime Wall Street Journal correspondent Ron

Suskind. Called “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush,”

the essay is, for the most part, an elaboration on the same point I just

made, namely that for Bush’s fans, the purity of his inner convictions

was what really mattered. But the passage that made Suskind famous was

one in which he reports a conversation with an unnamed “senior adviser

to Bush” that, he says, “gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency”:

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based

community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions

emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and

murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut

me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he

continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own

reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you

will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study

too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors ... and

you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

For liberals, this passage confirmed everything they’d always wanted to

believe. Buttons and T-shirts announcing “proud member of the

reality-based community” soon appeared. The phrase became a shibboleth.

But there is reason to believe that even here, things are not exactly

what they seem. There have since been other journalists pointing out

that Suskind’s work often combines a suspiciously too-good-to-be-true

quality with quotations whose sources, when they are identified,

vehemently deny having said what he claims they said. Neither has anyone

else ever claimed to have heard a Bush aide say anything remotely like

this. It’s possible that Suskind himself just made the whole story up.

Is the very idea of a “reality-based community” itself an extraordinary

pretense? In fact, what is really striking about political debate in

America today is that both the mainstream (read: extreme) Right and

mainstream (read: moderate) Left have gone so far in creating their own

realities that meaningful conversation has become impossible. There once

was a time, for instance, when liberals and conservatives could argue

about the root causes of poverty. Now they argue about whether poverty

exists. Once they debated how to overcome racism. Now it’s common to

hear conservatives insist that, just as the only liars are those who

accuse them of lying, the only racists are those who accuse others of

racism. But the other side does the same thing. If a Christian

conservative wants to discuss the dominance of mainstream U.S. culture

by a secular-minded “liberal elite,” or a Rand Paul supporter wishes to

talk about the relation of the Federal Reserve and U.S. militarism, they

will be met by a similar wall of incredulity.

It seems awfully strange for the mainstream Left to identify itself with

the tradition of Enlightenment empiricism when its greatest avatars have

spent the last generation trashing the very idea of objective reality.

The liberal class does have its own equivalent to the church, after all,

and it is the university. The university has its equivalent of

theologians, who interpret the works of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault,

and Jacques Derrida with as much reverence as radical thinkers reserve

for Karl Marx. And what do such authors do except trash the entire

Enlightenment project?

Both the mainstream Democratic Left and the Republican Right, in other

words, have long been working in the tradition of American humbug, hype,

and hucksterism; but they have justified it in different ways. The Right

has relied on a logic of faith and inner conviction; the Left once

preferred a rhetoric of science, and now prefers some kind of

poststructural anti-science—but both really come down to more or less

the same thing.

Both are appropriate to the social base of their respective parties—the

1 percent that provides its funding, culture, and sensibilities. The

Republicans are, notoriously, the party of business. It’s hardly

surprising that they idolize the inner confidence of the determined CEO

and are willing to say whatever it takes to close the deal, and then to

do whatever needs to be done to run the company. The Democrats are the

party of what Barbara Ehrenreich long ago dubbed the

“professional-managerial class”—a party of teachers, hospital

administrators, lawyers, social workers, and psychotherapists. Hardly

surprising, then, that the highest expression of their weltanschauung

would be the works of Michel Foucault, for at least twenty years a god

of contemporary U.S. academia, and a man who argued that professional

discourses are forms of power that create the very realities they claim

to administer. Or that during the nineties and aughts, decades when the

U.S. economy became more and more explicitly a financialized bubble

economy, and Hollywood and especially Wall Street money poured into the

Democratic party, the embrace of such ideas in intellectual circles

became more and more extravagant.

I’m not suggesting any simple, one-to-one connection here. It’s not as

if left-leaning American academics were directly influenced by Wall

Street funding. But the beauty of the system is that they didn’t have to

be. They lived just as much in a bubble-world as anyone else, and their

existing theoretical dispositions, born of the everyday common sense of

a professional world in which impression management is everything,

reflected the logic of a bubble economy.

I well remember attending conferences and seminars just before the crash

in 2008 where I listened to complex, jargon-filled presentations by

students of cultural theory or science studies, or even radical

political scientists. They claimed that the emergent logic of

“preemption,” “securitization,” and “financialization” betokened not

only the birth of unprecedented new forms of social power, but also a

transformation of the very nature of reality itself. “We on the Left

need to learn a thing or two from the neoliberals,” I remember hearing

one fresh-faced cultural studies grad student remark (cultural studies

grad students often consider themselves the cutting edge of the global

Left, even if they engage in no political activity), “because to be

honest, in most ways, they’re way ahead of us. I mean, these guys have

figured out ways to create value out of nothing!”

At the time, I remember answering, “You know, Wall Street insiders have

a term for that sort of thing. They refer to them as ‘scams.’” But I

don’t think anyone was really listening. Most academic radicals had

boxed themselves into a theoretical language according to which the very

idea of a scam was almost meaningless. By flipping from science to

anti-science, from Enlightenment empiricism to its opposite, the

academic Left has left itself with the notion that performance really is

everything.

The intellectual trends ran from the emergence of “performance theory”

itself in the late eighties, to the nineties rise of actor-network

theory, with its insistence that even the objects of scientific inquiry

are created by political processes of negotiation, persuasion,

alliance-building between scientists, institutions, objects, animals,

and microbes. But the essence of the matter is: during the period when

the American (and by extension North Atlantic) economy became

increasingly based on the production of financial bubbles of one sort or

another, its intellectuals simultaneously seem to have decided that

absolutely everything is simply the product of political performance.

The bubble economy was a kind of apotheosis of political magic.

But as any genuine magician (or successful politician) can tell you,

it’s not really that simple. True, we all accept that a president is

above all someone who knows how to act like a president; we endlessly

criticize candidates for any perceived inability to perform the part.

But if a candidate openly stated that performing was her only

qualification to be president, her chances of election would stand at

nil. In the real world, all the games of double- and triple-think remain

with us. All we have done is come up with different reasons to resist

having to think about them.

At least Ron Suskind’s (possibly imaginary) Bush adviser was aware that

faith is not enough when it comes to creating new realities: you need

military force too. The ultimate difference between the magician and the

politician is exactly that: the knowledge that he can, if it ever really

becomes necessary, call on men with weapons—whether armies or police.

This is his ace up the sleeve.

Political realities are always a murky combination of fear, desire, and

double- and triple-think. You have to ask whether your average citizen

believes the given political order is just, or whether she believes that

everyone else believes it to be just. You have to ask whether she

believes there’s any way she can realize her dearest ambitions other

than within a world she already believes to be a scam; you also have to

ask whether she believes that trying to change things, or even loudly

pointing out that the whole thing is a scam, might get her seriously

hurt. (As the recent fate of Occupy Wall Street revealed, even when

middle-class white people go out on the streets to speak unpleasant

truths in today’s America, violence is a genuine possibility.) And then

you have to ask whether everyone else believes violence will happen if

they themselves try to change things—or just whether everyone thinks

everyone else believes that’s what will happen to them. The hall of

mirrors is endless.

II.

Amid all the routine distortions, opportunistic half-truths, and

fanciful ideologies that now make up the political discourse, any honest

interlocutor has to wrestle with the question of how self-deception

functions as a self-administered belief system. Students of the art of

propaganda have long noted its close formal mimicry of empirical

science, but the problem of mendacious packaging doesn’t account for the

deeper quandaries of self-conscious belief in one’s own preferred form

of propaganda. The conventional formulation of the problem asks how some

people can make themselves believe something that looks illusory to

other people. But this formulation assumes people can’t be wrong about

what they believe. Is it possible to think that you do believe something

when, in fact, you don’t, or to think that you don’t believe something

when, in fact, you do?

Actually, there is an entire strain of thought dedicated to

understanding how this might be possible. The term fetishism appears to

have been coined by European merchants working in West Africa, in order

to explain how their African counterparts made business deals. This was

back in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the Europeans were

after gold, mostly before they began trading in slaves. It seems that in

many African port towns at that time, it was possible to improvise a new

god to fit the commercial occasion; you could bring together some beads,

feathers, and bits of rare wood, or just pick up any peculiar or

significant-looking object you happened to find along the beach, and

then consecrate it with a mutual oath. More elaborate fetishes that

served to protect whole communities could consist of sculptures, often

strikingly beautiful, into which the contracting parties could force

nails, thus angering the newly created god to ensure it was in a proper

mood to punish transgressors. But for a mere business deal with a

foreigner, even an interesting piece of driftwood would do.

The act of swearing the oath transformed the object into a divine power

capable of wreaking terrible destruction on anyone who violated his new

commitments. The power of the new god was the power of their agreement.

All of this was just one step away from saying the object was a god

because the humans said it was, but everyone would insist that, no, in

fact, the objects were now vested with terrible invisible power. And if

some unexpected catastrophe did befall one of the contracting

parties—which was not at all uncommon as Europeans were constantly

getting wrecked in storms or dying of malarial fever—someone could

always say it never would have happened had the dead men not somehow

broken their word.

Did African merchants really believe in the power of their fetishes?

Many seemed to think they did, even if they often acted as if fetishes

were just a convenient commercial expedient. But the world of magical

charms is full of such paradoxes. What is absolutely certain is that

Europeans, used to thinking in theological terms, simply could not get

their minds around this practice. As a result they tended to project

their own confusion onto the Africans. Soon the very existence of

fetishes was being held out as proof that Africans were profoundly

confused about spiritual matters; European philosophers began arguing

that fetishism represented the lowest possible stage of religion, one at

which the fetishist was willing to worship absolutely anything, since he

had no systematic theology at all.

Before long, of course, European figures like Karl Marx and Sigmund

Freud began asking, But are we really all that different? As Marx noted,

Western history is a story of our creating things and then falling down

before our own creations and worshipping them like gods. In the Middle

Ages we did it with wafers, chalices, and reliquaries. Now we do it with

money and consumer goods. Hence Marx’s famous argument about commodity

fetishism. We are constantly manufacturing objects for our use or

convenience, and then speaking of them as if they were charged with some

strange, supernatural power that makes them capable of acting on their

own accord—largely because, from an immediate practical perspective,

that might as well be true.

When a commodity trader reads the Wall Street Journal and learns that

gold is doing this, oil or pork bellies doing that, or that money is

fleeing this market and migrating somewhere else, does he believe what

he reads? Certainly he doesn’t think he does. There would be absolutely

no point in taking the trader aside and explaining that gold and oil are

really inanimate objects that can’t do anything. The response would be

pure exasperation. Obviously it’s just a figure of speech. What do you

take me for, some kind of moron? But in every practical sense, he does

believe it, because every day he goes out on the trading floor and acts

as if it were true.