Bigger than Sex
There are a lot of sex stories that are bigger than sex, and Krystal Ball’s monologue today starts out as a dive into our weird fascination with how candidates seek sex, but then she reveals a deeper problem with how we get meaning in our lives, and why we are so averse to evaluating politicians based on the policies they push.
Morse is a progressive politician, but that doesn’t matter because he may have hooked up with some college Dems. However, Ball’s point here is much deeper. It’s about how much more comfortable we are with the politics of self-actualization than we are with using politics to secure our rights internally and decide on the terms of war globally.
A characteristic feature of modernity is that freedom becomes the defining normative standard. What’s good is good because it promotes freedom. What’s bad is bad because it is a problem for freedom. However, there are different varieties of freedom. Objective freedom is secured and expressed in institutions in the world, and subjective freedom is about the emancipation of an inner quality from the dictates of the world. The freedom of inner subjectivity characteristic of late modernity is a complete emancipation from objective existence.
What does this mean?
It means that the objective content of the aims doesn’t matter. What matters is people’s conscience, passions, and beliefs about it. What is essential isn’t what happened, but how people feel about it and whether whatever aspirations they had are actualized by it, and this is what legitimizes the politics of self-actualization.
Three points:
1) You see this in art as the subjects change from the world affecting drama of royalty and power and material degradation, to “action that is no longer necessitated by any specific conflict or situation. It rather proceeds from the independent resolve of individuals, who set out on adventures simply in function of their conscience, passions and beliefs.” (Richard Dien Winfield has a solid essay on this called Romanticism and Modernity.)
2) Since autonomy is no longer subordinated to being accountable to any objective content, people can reveal their autonomy in chasing ANY self-selected aim. The aspirations and drama of someone aiming to be the best hedgefund manager in history are equally valid and deserving of respect as Harriet Tubman or Robert Smalls, escaping slavery and then going BACK to free more people. The danger is that even Cori Bush becomes relevant not because of anything she wants to fight for, but because she fought hard for something she believes is important. And if someone else believes something else is important, we validate that fight, too. That’s an enormous problem.
3) Since there is no objective standard to legitimize one heartfelt pursuit over another, people can be brazen in their independent or small pursuits because what matters is their inner autonomy. (Hegel somehow anticipates all of this in the mid 19th fucking century.) What we are left with is a politics that has nothing to do with sussing out the objective good of anything that’s done, but instead, is wholly trained on the inner dramas of the participants’ drives for self-actualization.
If you know rich folks, so I’m sure you’ve seen the phenomena of someone securing venture capital, regardless the utility or dignity of their business, because the funder/uncle/grandma just wants to see little Chad or Becky succeed in following her heart.
The effects of these subjective pursuits look like virtue signalling, but I think we are witnessing something different, where virtue signalling effectively signals the fulfillment of virtue because what happens doesn’t matter.
To be clear, it’s not just that we don’t hold politicians accountable for the policies they push, we don’t hold anyone accountable for the content of their actions. For example, we don’t hold parents accountable for their children. But if we did, we could ground better policies for supporting parents with the material and cultural foundation they need in order to fulfill their jobs.
The only people we hold accountable for the content of what they do, rather than what they feel like doing or work to do, are stigmatized populations. I suspect because we don’t make any illusions about their subjective freedom mattering.