A psychoanalytic train of thought kept running through my mind as I read this excellent essay, perhaps as a supplement to Foucault rather than as an alternative. When David McGrogan refers to what I would redescribe as 'the policing of fun' by state-approved experts, said experts might be "onto something" - about themselves, which they would rather project onto the 'uneducated' masses (who they seem to view as a humanoid species of sheep).
The something is what psychoanalysis would call "jouissance" - often translated (misleadingly) from the French into English as "enjoyment." This isn't the same as pleasure, which is in fact homeostatic and self-limiting (if you take pleasure in, say, eating strawberry cake, you tend to stop after a generous slice because you start to feel the unpleasure of fullness or sickliness if you go beyond that).
But enjoyment subverts homeostatic regulation because it's an effect of "drive" not biological instinct, and what's disturbing is that it's a universal feature of all speaking animals like us humans, whether we're educated or not. When unleashed, it's the enemy of order and hierarchy; in the strawberry cake example, if we're in the grip of 'enjoyment' rather than pleasure, we'll eat the whole cake and start gorging on another one, almost delighting in the shattering of the normal distinction between pleasure and pain that enjoyment effectuates.
And another problem facing the legislatively-minded is that prohibitions tend to excite it, even as they might simultaneously evoke a desire to obey in the more compliant parts of ourselves. When something becomes taboo, it stops being merely pleasurable and (potentially) starts to become 'enjoyable', in fantasy at least: enjoyment, as opposed to pleasure, ignites deliriously in the breaking prohibitions. And the more controlling amongst us are, from this point of view, managing their own susceptibility to the temptation to madly enjoy by projecting onto others. Social hierarches (like the distinction between the "expert" and the "uneducated") offer a pathway for the direction of these projections - "sh*t slides downhill" as the aphorism puts it.
The desire to control is often an effect of an unsettling intimation that one's own unconscious drive to enjoy is becoming animated, and of course the weakening of ego-control that alcohol can produce is especially terrifying in this condition of a pressure to enjoy stirring within one. For others, most of us in fact, alcohol in the company of friends is a gateway to pleasurable interaction - fun. It's far more likely to become a gateway to uncontrollable enjoyment when its socially prohibited into becoming a solitary pursuit.
But, hey, why worry about that when an 'expert' is deliriously enjoying her acclaim as a state-approved knowledge simulator, replete with career rewards and generous grants for further equally misplaced measures to manage their perturbing enjoyments vicariously?
Thank you - I think psychoanalysis in its Lacanian and Laplanchean forms, in which the unconscious is social and political, has a great deal to offer political analysis.
Great response here, Peter. The Cialdini book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion comes to mind. Apparently over 5M copies sold. I wonder how many of the 5M actually read the book. I mean clearly those who advised the gov during lockdowns had read the book...
A great summary of the technocratic mindset but I think it’s worse than you suggest. They have a set of prissy ideas and values and are cookahoop when they find something to fit their worldview. In this case they amplify their junk science because they really don’t like the idea of cheerful peasants. Another example is the Climate Change Committee who go further and have manipulated wind data to promote net zero activities.
Regarding the view experts have of themselves, I recently read CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength, in which they all come to a very sorry end indeed as it result of their hubris.
The manipulation around making life "better" for us is also visible in the concept of "Liveable Neighbourhoods"', which is how Bristol City Council refer to the soon to be trialled "Low Traffic Neighbourhoods". The only metrics considered are air pollution from traffic in the actual street, and number of motor traffic accidents. Nothing else is apparently relevant to life being "liveable".
Also, considering the current UK government's own attitude towards partying and alcohol, outside of hospitality venues, anyone who is taken in by an attempt by the state to micromanage its citizens' behaviour in this respect is perhaps not thinking straight.
With my comms hat on I've noticed that many academic papers bear uncanny resemblance to a form of promotion called 'content marketing'. The paper discussed fits this bill to a tee. Content marketing is just a more subtle form of advertising, but of course the point is always to sell something. My tipple tonight will be a 16% artisan pastry stout. Cheers.
I approve of the Ardbeg! Excellent choice. If I had my druthers I'd have a career in whisky character descriptions. A shame the price of Ardbeg skyrocketed.
But a nos moutons... I am particularly drawn to this:
"What is commonly called ‘wokeness’ is just what has resulted from a certain subsection of academics becoming interested in the topic of how the State can ‘found, preserve and expand domination’ in society on the basis of securing substantive, rather than formal, equality."
Your observation here is one I too have been attempting to leak out into the world. Woke and Scientism (i.e. expert authority peddlers) are two sides of the same coin, and in fact the latter philosophically (metaphysically) underwrite the wokesters they try so hard to disavow.
Another brilliant piece, David. Thanks. And slainte mhath!
You are right, it starts with the size of a glass or wine and ends in things that require a much stiffer drink...
As Captain Mal puts it in underrated Serenity movie: "A year from now, 10, they'll swing back to the belief that they can make people...better. And I do not hold to that.
This excellent piece has echoes of some of Thomas Sowell's work, specifically A Conflict of Visions and The Vision of the Anointed. They, the self-anointed or technocrats, whatever we might call them, really do think they know what's best for the proles, and seem blind to the problems they create. The question I ask myself a lot is how best to fight back against it all. That fact that actors like Neil Ferguson can be serially and radically wrong but still in post is not very encouraging.
I find the notion of ‘Experts’ running our lives so very tiresome, even before the question of consent. The ‘Experts’ ruling argument fails on its own terms, as no one will ever be more expert on my life than me and no one will ever be more expert on my family than its members. Consequently, no one else will ever be ‘Expert’ enough to make decisions for me and my family. The end.
All true, David. It is probably also worth noting that many UK Universities receive substantial funding from sources other than the State - or at least the British State.
According to the House of Commons Library, about £10 billion out of £14 billion total funding for Universities (in 2021/22) came from tuition fees.
For British students, those fees are paid from student loans. Even if you count student loans as funding from the State, overseas students occupy a significant proportion of University places. Those overseas students pay something like three times as much as UK students do via tuition fees. In Imperial College London, for example, 40% of students are from outside the EU and therefore pay overseas fees - which means something like two thirds of Imperial's tuition fee income comes from overseas students.
We definitely need a revolution. The only civilised way to revolt that I can think of is to stop voting. Voting legitimises all of this madness because whoever you vote for, it is in essence, a vote to be governed. It is the giving of consent to being nannied and to being required to pay for it all.
A psychoanalytic train of thought kept running through my mind as I read this excellent essay, perhaps as a supplement to Foucault rather than as an alternative. When David McGrogan refers to what I would redescribe as 'the policing of fun' by state-approved experts, said experts might be "onto something" - about themselves, which they would rather project onto the 'uneducated' masses (who they seem to view as a humanoid species of sheep).
The something is what psychoanalysis would call "jouissance" - often translated (misleadingly) from the French into English as "enjoyment." This isn't the same as pleasure, which is in fact homeostatic and self-limiting (if you take pleasure in, say, eating strawberry cake, you tend to stop after a generous slice because you start to feel the unpleasure of fullness or sickliness if you go beyond that).
But enjoyment subverts homeostatic regulation because it's an effect of "drive" not biological instinct, and what's disturbing is that it's a universal feature of all speaking animals like us humans, whether we're educated or not. When unleashed, it's the enemy of order and hierarchy; in the strawberry cake example, if we're in the grip of 'enjoyment' rather than pleasure, we'll eat the whole cake and start gorging on another one, almost delighting in the shattering of the normal distinction between pleasure and pain that enjoyment effectuates.
And another problem facing the legislatively-minded is that prohibitions tend to excite it, even as they might simultaneously evoke a desire to obey in the more compliant parts of ourselves. When something becomes taboo, it stops being merely pleasurable and (potentially) starts to become 'enjoyable', in fantasy at least: enjoyment, as opposed to pleasure, ignites deliriously in the breaking prohibitions. And the more controlling amongst us are, from this point of view, managing their own susceptibility to the temptation to madly enjoy by projecting onto others. Social hierarches (like the distinction between the "expert" and the "uneducated") offer a pathway for the direction of these projections - "sh*t slides downhill" as the aphorism puts it.
The desire to control is often an effect of an unsettling intimation that one's own unconscious drive to enjoy is becoming animated, and of course the weakening of ego-control that alcohol can produce is especially terrifying in this condition of a pressure to enjoy stirring within one. For others, most of us in fact, alcohol in the company of friends is a gateway to pleasurable interaction - fun. It's far more likely to become a gateway to uncontrollable enjoyment when its socially prohibited into becoming a solitary pursuit.
But, hey, why worry about that when an 'expert' is deliriously enjoying her acclaim as a state-approved knowledge simulator, replete with career rewards and generous grants for further equally misplaced measures to manage their perturbing enjoyments vicariously?
Very interesting observations.
Thank you - I think psychoanalysis in its Lacanian and Laplanchean forms, in which the unconscious is social and political, has a great deal to offer political analysis.
Great response here, Peter. The Cialdini book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion comes to mind. Apparently over 5M copies sold. I wonder how many of the 5M actually read the book. I mean clearly those who advised the gov during lockdowns had read the book...
A great summary of the technocratic mindset but I think it’s worse than you suggest. They have a set of prissy ideas and values and are cookahoop when they find something to fit their worldview. In this case they amplify their junk science because they really don’t like the idea of cheerful peasants. Another example is the Climate Change Committee who go further and have manipulated wind data to promote net zero activities.
Regarding the view experts have of themselves, I recently read CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength, in which they all come to a very sorry end indeed as it result of their hubris.
The manipulation around making life "better" for us is also visible in the concept of "Liveable Neighbourhoods"', which is how Bristol City Council refer to the soon to be trialled "Low Traffic Neighbourhoods". The only metrics considered are air pollution from traffic in the actual street, and number of motor traffic accidents. Nothing else is apparently relevant to life being "liveable".
Also, considering the current UK government's own attitude towards partying and alcohol, outside of hospitality venues, anyone who is taken in by an attempt by the state to micromanage its citizens' behaviour in this respect is perhaps not thinking straight.
That Hideous Strength is required reading.
Currently Australian governments are concerned about
the effects of vaping on Our Health...The tax on pub booze
goes up in a week or so, so government & its Experts are
leaving booze alone, at least for now...
Typically well argued - thanks.
With my comms hat on I've noticed that many academic papers bear uncanny resemblance to a form of promotion called 'content marketing'. The paper discussed fits this bill to a tee. Content marketing is just a more subtle form of advertising, but of course the point is always to sell something. My tipple tonight will be a 16% artisan pastry stout. Cheers.
Yes, quite!
I approve of the Ardbeg! Excellent choice. If I had my druthers I'd have a career in whisky character descriptions. A shame the price of Ardbeg skyrocketed.
But a nos moutons... I am particularly drawn to this:
"What is commonly called ‘wokeness’ is just what has resulted from a certain subsection of academics becoming interested in the topic of how the State can ‘found, preserve and expand domination’ in society on the basis of securing substantive, rather than formal, equality."
Your observation here is one I too have been attempting to leak out into the world. Woke and Scientism (i.e. expert authority peddlers) are two sides of the same coin, and in fact the latter philosophically (metaphysically) underwrite the wokesters they try so hard to disavow.
Another brilliant piece, David. Thanks. And slainte mhath!
I strongly believe that nobody who has made the effort to properly understand whisky could ever be a technocrat.
I'm guessing you're familiar with Burns's "Scotch Drink": "Let other poets raise a fracas / 'bout vines an' wines an' drunken Bacchus..." Och, those excise men!
May Gravels round his blather wrench,
An' Gouts torment him, inch by inch,
What twists his gruntle wi' a glunch
O' sour disdain,
Out owre a glass o' Whisky-punch
Wi' honest men!
You are right, it starts with the size of a glass or wine and ends in things that require a much stiffer drink...
As Captain Mal puts it in underrated Serenity movie: "A year from now, 10, they'll swing back to the belief that they can make people...better. And I do not hold to that.
So no more runnin'.
I aim to misbehave." https://www.americanrhetoric.com/MovieSpeeches/moviespeechserenitymisbehave.htm
If you think it’s bad with alcohol, try smoking. Prof. John Staddon seems to be the last lonely voice of reason on that subject.
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Unlucky-Strike-Private-Science-Politics/dp/1908684372
'twas said "War is the health of The State !"
But also, it seems. "Your health is the health of The State !" ?
Funnily enough this is the point Foucault was indirectly making.
When The State, in its Wisdom has eradicated all traces
(and Memories) of Booze, there will be Huxley's SOMA...
So Take Heart !!
This excellent piece has echoes of some of Thomas Sowell's work, specifically A Conflict of Visions and The Vision of the Anointed. They, the self-anointed or technocrats, whatever we might call them, really do think they know what's best for the proles, and seem blind to the problems they create. The question I ask myself a lot is how best to fight back against it all. That fact that actors like Neil Ferguson can be serially and radically wrong but still in post is not very encouraging.
I find the notion of ‘Experts’ running our lives so very tiresome, even before the question of consent. The ‘Experts’ ruling argument fails on its own terms, as no one will ever be more expert on my life than me and no one will ever be more expert on my family than its members. Consequently, no one else will ever be ‘Expert’ enough to make decisions for me and my family. The end.
All true, David. It is probably also worth noting that many UK Universities receive substantial funding from sources other than the State - or at least the British State.
According to the House of Commons Library, about £10 billion out of £14 billion total funding for Universities (in 2021/22) came from tuition fees.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-7973/
For British students, those fees are paid from student loans. Even if you count student loans as funding from the State, overseas students occupy a significant proportion of University places. Those overseas students pay something like three times as much as UK students do via tuition fees. In Imperial College London, for example, 40% of students are from outside the EU and therefore pay overseas fees - which means something like two thirds of Imperial's tuition fee income comes from overseas students.
https://www.imperial.ac.uk/admin-services/strategic-planning/statistics/trend-analysis/student-numbers/
Thanks for the reading tip, analogy - I'll check that book out.
We definitely need a revolution. The only civilised way to revolt that I can think of is to stop voting. Voting legitimises all of this madness because whoever you vote for, it is in essence, a vote to be governed. It is the giving of consent to being nannied and to being required to pay for it all.
Soiling one's ballot apparently is better. Umm, I mean "spoiling."
I think not - by registering to vote in the first place, you have consented to being governed.
"Government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil; in its
worst state, an intolerable one." - Thomas Paine
And it required a full seven authors (and their resumes) to produce this wondrous piece of research.
The ability to think and publish alone seems to be a rare quality.