Investing in our stories.

Investing in our stories.
However truthful or not our stories might be, and despite how much they may cost us, we have strong motives to keep the faith. As we form and act on our stories, we cling to them ever more fiercely, even in the face of sometimes overwhelmingly contrary evidence. Disbelief puts at risk our egos and social standing as well as personal gain.

• Our model makes us feel successful. The leaders of even mildly successful movements, if they can stay out of jail, can access greater oppportunities for adoration, control, money, and sex. Then there’s a host of activists for whom mass movements provide something of a career ladder-- particularly important for some groups, such as lefties and some Christian women, whose ideologies may limit other opportunities. For fifteen years I made a living as a movement bureaucrat, best jobs I ever had.

But among the less tangible benefits available to the rank and file, I believe special knowledge is one of the most attractive. I remember how accomplished I felt circa 1970 when I could churn out for my professors class analysis a la Monthly Review (it took me another year before that framework began to feel confining). I see it in the Air Force enlistee just back from basic training, confident and enthusiastic about the highly structured system he’s beginning to figure out; in the Bible-code guy next door who beamed when I called him a scholar; in the GED student who tries to authorize biology lessons with quotes from the Good Book; in the young woman who carries in her head the histories and critiques of scores of bands. The Military Channel broadcasts shows like "The Anatomy of an Abrams Tank," and my local library has shelves full of quite detailed war technology; evidently there's a big amateur market for this kind of knowledge. A friend of mine spends many hours a day playing video games, advancing by mastering ever more elaborate rules, programming his own brain as thoroughly as the game designers program the hardware. Did you ever trade sports stats with a pal? Or maybe you had a little wager going on who blocked Bo Zbop’s jump shot in the bottom of the 9th at the 1964 World’s Cup.

Ireland's Brazilian informants were likewise hungry for knowledge. Severino explained, "Doctrine is like school. At first you go to school without understanding. But the way you learn opens up little by little and the pupil begins to understand. . . . improving, improving, and after all that confusion he ends up as you've ended up, a teacher or even something else higher. So with religion here. . . " (49).

As with grade school, any structured environment or body of knowledge gives us clear paths to and recognition for mastery-- regardless of how well we can apply it to the world outside our little enclave. Given our limited brains and time, it's not surprising that we tend to prefer a fixed, finite body of knowledge to the endless process of trying to understand our very big world. Once I’ve memorized the Turner Diaries and the other hate classics, I have standing among my fellow racists and reassurance that the world is orderly, that it has handles I can manipulate. Hard to give that up for a less orderly, less complete, more accurate understanding.

This applies even to very useful skills. Jack Metzgar recalls that his dad memorized the Steelworkers’ contracts and used that knowledge to defend co-workers in the daily battles for management (Metzgar 20). There was a risk over time, though, that in depending so heavily on the contract and the rules and the people who could work them, the union would discourage participation by the rank and file (49). Plus it's never a good idea to present a fixed target to your enemy; while workers fortify their strong points, corporate strategists are busily laying minefields, digging tunnels, diverting rivers, and shifting their forces to more advantageous battlefields.


• We adopt the bosses’ Story.
ID•E•O•LOG’•I•CAL HE•GEM’•O•NY. Ideological hegemony. Can you say it four times, fast?

The idea is that not only do we salute, shuck & jive, bow and scrape, kowtow and suck up to our bosses, we also take their rotten values as our own. Marx called it “false consciousness”-- false because supposedly we are thereby acting against our own self-interest (which is not so easy to define-- see INTEREST, EXPECTATION, RISK & ACTION below).

Scott (1990 p. 70ff) says this theory comes in two flavors. The “thick” version is that, through their dominance over the churches, schools, press, and so forth, the most powerful people train us to like what they like. The “thin” version is that we do what we’re told because we have to-- we see no other choice in the face of overwhelming power. Writers such as Barrington Moore start with the thin version and “fatten it back up”, claiming that years of subordination inevitably train our minds as well as our bodies; that even if we start out resenting the boss, the unremitting necessity to obey sets up a cognitive dissonance that we can only relieve by coming to truly accept our subordination. Or as Scott puts it, “ . . . those obliged by domination to act a mask will eventually find that their faces have grown to fit that mask” (1990 p. 10).

Scott argues powerfully against either proposition. His strongest evidence is the fact that as far back as we know, people who are pushed around sooner or later push back-- through theft, sabotage, strikes, riots, revolts and a hundred other acts of resistance. He notes that even where the aims are reformist --lowering taxes, for example, or raising wages-- the very act of challenging the bosses can lead to revolution, as with many of the peasant and slave uprisings of the past. The freedom movement in Iran drew huge mass support at first for a relatively narrow challenge to election fraud in 2009; it soon came to be seen by both sides as a threat to rule by the mullahs. And even outwardly conforming employees, slaves and servants may harbor fantasies or plans for turning the tables. Our acts of public deference, Hail to the Chief and all that, say nothing about our private feelings. We can kiss ass all day and still hate the boss. That we sometimes claim the sanction of the distant king, or Jesus, against the local lord does not mean we actually value those authorities in themselves. So Scott is very skeptical about assuming that the people who dominate our behavior also control the way we think.

I don’t completely buy it. Scott concedes that people will adopt the rulers’ values “if either of two rather stringent conditions are met. The first of these is that there exists a strong probability that a good many subordinates will eventually come to occupy positions of power. The expectation that one will eventually be able to exercise the domination that one endures today is a strong incentive serving to legitimate patterns of domination. It encourages patience and emulation, and, not least, it promises revenge of a kind, even if it must be exercised on someone other than the original target of resentment” (82). After a long day at the office, and our daily dose of abuse and humiliation from the boss, we feel ever so much better if we can go home and beat the wife and kick the dog.

Of course this is not only the principle of prison trustees and the Judenrat, those Jews in charge of bullying other Jews for the Nazis, but of racism, patriarchy, and capitalist competition itself. A somewhat mobile class system such as U.S. capitalism shows us exactly what we need to do to get ahead: pick our neighbors’ pockets by selling them junk, or underbidding them, or underpaying them, or defending the masters’ treasure against demands for social services. For sure, “Slaves, serfs, peasants, and untouchables have had little realistic prospect of upward mobility or escape from their status” (85), but even they had to compete with each other for their bosses’ favor. Here in the land of the fee we do compete, fiercely, and sometimes some of us can climb up over the bodies of our neighbors and co-workers.

Nor is it just the occasional crumb from the lord’s table we get, but also moral vindication. At the social service agency where I worked, we were for the most part sympathetic and helpful to the abused, deranged, and/or homeless people from whom we made our living. But as we talked to and about our clients, the note of moral superiority never took long to sound: stop scamming the system, become a responsible citizen, like me. We saw the scamming not as a challenge to the remote rich, but as an affront to ourselves-- as if this were our system.


Scott’s second condition of ideological hegemony occurs when “subordinates are more or less completely atomized and kept under close observation. What is involved is the total abolition of any social realm of relative discursive freedom” (83). Scott makes a good case that the prospects for resistance depend on a social space where people can talk freely to each other, where we can collectively analyze the situation and develop accepted standards for responding, individually and all together-- what Scott calls the “hidden transcript”. He cites “a few penal institutions, thought-reform camps, and psychiatric institutions” (83) as places where there may be little possibility for oppressed people to talk with and support each other. Referring to POW camps during the Korean war, Scott writes, “I want to emphasize exactly how draconian were the conditions that produced this compliance” (84) -- hunger, exhaustion, isolation, constant interrogation.

There is some contrary information on this point. Cummins writes, “In contrast to the North Koreans, who favored brutal interrogation techniques, the Chinese camps followed a ‘lenient’ policy in which violent measures were used far less often. This policy was extremely successful. Nearly all of their POWs are said to have collaborated with the enemy in one way or another” (19). I haven’t read details about the conditions in these camps. Clearly the POWs surveilled each other, often betraying attempted escapees, but by the same token they can hardly have been “completely atomized”.

Instead, as noted above, what brought the prisoners to the point of collaboration was the incremental ways their captors pushed them to take responsibility for small betrayals. And that, I think, is the big difference between Scott’s peasants and U.S. workers and consumers. Scott acknowledges that, while history is full of peasant and slave revolts, “the Western working class has apparently made an accommodation with capitalism and unequal property relations despite its political rights to mobilize . . .” (1990 p. 73). He underlines that here too workers do not passively accept exploitation; that we do fight back, individually and collectively. Even so, there’s not the widespread culture of resistance over generations that he sees among, say, Vietnamese peasants, and the clue is in the reference to our political rights.

If the key to accepting untruths is taking personal responsibility for them, a nominally democratic society is the perfect vehicle for accepted authority. Having no political rights, peasants and slaves cannot even in theory accept the authority of their lords and masters; choice never enters the picture. Here, on the other hand, we trade a very narrow, very limited range of choice for a strong pressure to accept the results of the process. If we have political agency, as leftists and rightists jointly insist, then we must accept some responsibility even for unfavorable outcomes. We try to distinguish what we’re responsible for and what we’re not --later I’ll write more about how we allocate responsibility and blame-- but in my society it may be a lot harder to harder to physically obey while mentally resisting. No one holds it against you if you suck up to the boss-- when the alternative is being drawn and quartered. But here we rightly scorn the worst brown-nosers, because they seem to have other options. The brown-nosers themselves have to come up with a story to justify what seems to be their own choice. And so, to a greater or lesser extent, do the rest of us. To reconcile our belief in our own agency and the destructive turn of many of our institutions, sometimes we simply decide that those policies and outcomes are not so bad, after all; that they are really for the best, and they are what we have freely chosen.

It's really quite remarkable how often we take on ourselves responsibility for the crimes of powerful people, given that the whole idea of corporate capitalism is that “the market”, not some filthy rich CEO, decides who gets hired or laid off, who gets medicine or doesn’t, who eats toxic waste.

As for our capacity to maintain an attitude of resistance even when we can’t act on it, I think activists have to be careful not to read too much into the nasty things they hear us say about the boss. Scott is right that constant grumbling is one way to push back against the boss’ power, to set limits on his prerogatives, to raise the costs for any increasing demands on his part (1990 p. 156). But I’ve also seen situations in which workers will bellyache all day out of earshot of the employer, but won’t challenge him or her in public, even mildly, even where official procedures permit, even where the boss is surrounded by workers. Here the subordinate does not accept the boss’ authority in any kind of moral sense, but seems to accept his own helplessness in a very profound and lasting way. Maybe the employee is right; maybe it’s safer for him to vent behind the boss’ back; but that resentful, passive-aggressive style is not the same as and does not necessarily lead to active resistance.

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“The purpose of grumbling is often not simply self-expression, but the attempt to bring the pressure of discontent to bear on elites. If the message is too explicit, its bearers risk open retaliation; if it is too vague, it passes unnoticed altogether. Quite often, however, what is intentionally conveyed by grumbling is an unmistakable tone, be it one of anger, contempt, determination, shock, or disloyalty” (Scott 1990 p. 156).
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In retrospect, it seems that Halliburton's strategies at home and in the oil fields assumed a certain level of dissatisfaction among the rank and file, and assumed that would not turn into meaningful action. They were terribly, titanically wrong about Iraq; but they had a nice 8-year roll in the U.S., virtually undisturbed.

Nor do we have to accept our own subordinate positions as right and just, to accept many values that cement that subordination. Many popular practices such as competition, war, marriage, religion, and the Pledge of Allegiance, may not single me out for slavery, but centrally celebrate authority, property, domination and obedience. Others contribute indirectly. As I write these lines millions of shoppers are crowding the stories for the Christmas holidays (I’ve got to write fast, so I can hit the mall before closing time). In the next few weeks we’ll spend billions of dollars on products that cumulatively impoverish or kill producers, purchasers and consumers alike. We merry shoppers get some satisfaction, of course, but by far the biggest benefits (however you count them-- to me they all add up to more or less power in our lives) accrue to the people who purchase our work with the money to buy this doodadery, and in selling it to us take our money back again.

Just as insidious in my experience, because I’ve only lately come to appreciate its power, is the popular animus against government, fostered in the U.S. by both left and right, which works mostly to the benefit of the colossal private power of corporate capitalism. Do you remember when Watergate seemed like it might lay bare the corruption of the State and clear the way for democracy? Instead, we got Reagan, the militias and the Moral Majority.

When my employer, a social service agency, takes low income women to the bridal fair; when we bring the kids to movies starring talking animals with ethnic accents; when we jail millions for drug offenses, whose interests do we serve? To whom are we renting our minds and hands?


Finally, while sometimes we resist the boss, we may spend even more of our time fighting each other. Many of the tools we use to protect ourselves against the powerful --backbiting, ridicule, sabotage, group sanctions-- we apply even more often to our neighbors. We use the banners of the dominant order, too (patriotism, religion, Family Values) --to isolate and demonize our peers and rivals. Students in my GED class would often repeat the stereotypes about women on welfare --their laziness and cheating-- even while most of them took part in the welfare, food stamp, subsidized housing or state health coverage programs. Even in not taking responsibility for the system, we actively support it in practice, as good Germans, Just Following Orders.


What it all adds up to, I think, is that a certain level of sporadic resistance is predictable and quite compatible with a small set of people keeping a firm and comfortable grip on power. Whether we admire or resent the boss matters ultimately only insofar as it guides our behavior. More important is how to move from occasional individual resistance to ongoing collective challenges, and then to working democracy.

Second, and this makes me hopeful, we have more than one idea in our heads. We can both pine for the White Guy in the Sky --the ecstasy and sweet simplicity of surrender-- and at the same time revel in our own power and love for each other. I want to help make the Story that helps us make the choice.

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“I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.
“It’s the old story of spies: they infiltrate the secret service of the enemy, they develop the habit of thinking like the enemy, and if they survive, it’s because they’ve succeeded. And before long, predictably, they go over to the other side, because it has become theirs. Ot take those who live alone with a dog. They speak to him all day long; first, they try to understand the dog, then they swear the dog understands them, he’s shy, he’s jealous, he’s hypersensitive; next they’re teasing him, making scenes, until they’re sure he’s become just like them, human, and they’re proud of it, but the fact is that they have become just like him: they have become canine (Eco 467).
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