The Political Formula
The first and last social technology
Part 2 of the series.
In the previous installment, we looked at Robert Michel’s Iron Law of Oligarchy. One way of defining the Iron Law is that it generalises Gaetano Mosca’s observation that all societies are divided into a (small) governing class and a (large) governed class to all types of large organisations, explaining the mechanism by which they end up that way regardless of their original constitution. Gaetano Mosca, for his part, was the founder of the Machiavellian school, pioneering the practice of empirical, realistic political theory.
Among Mosca’s most important contributions was the concept of a Political Formula, which refers to a belief or set of beliefs which make those who believe in them more loyal to the regime. The specific content of a political formula is as diverse as the content of human culture and thought, but, upon inspection, every political order turns out to have beliefs, believed in by the majority of the population, which have the objective function of supporting the continued existence of the regime. Some historical political formulas practically announce themselves as such, for example the continually derided ‘Divine Right of Kings’ that was in vogue in the late Middle Ages and early Modern Era, but a huge range of beliefs have been employed to this purpose, including many that on first sight would appear to be egalitarian or anarchical.
Political formulas are a indispensable feature of a political order because of the inherently insecure nature of political rule. Bonds of loyalty created by family ties are not scalable, so the government of a state must maintain its position by rewarding some of its subjects and threatening others. Both of these cost, and resources cannot be conjured from thin air, so government can be modelled simply as organisation that takes from some of its subjects to give to others. At any given time, most people are losers in these transfers and so will conclude that they have more to gain than lose from a change of regime. (They are probably wrong about this since most regime changes result in a period of chaos in which most are worse off, but this doesn’t matter). At the strictly material level, the art of government is a game that can’t be won. A government that does not make use of the opportunity to inspire loyalty in its subjects through ideology is leaving the proverbial 50 dollar bill on the pavement. If it is too fastidious or incompetent to do so, then it will swiftly be replaced by another regime able to wield information as a tool of rule.
A political formula is also important for another more profound reason. Even people who are either successfully bought off and/or intimidated to the degree that support of the regime is in their objective best interests do not like living that way. For psychological reasons, people do not want to admit to themselves or others that they are dominated or bought off by others. A political formula meets a genuine demand on the part of the ruled to believe that their being ruled is just and proper. Similarly, most rulers do not want to ponder the objectively parasitical nature of their existence, even, if, as is frequently the case, they provide effective protection services to those whose surpluses they are extracting. Where the political formula fits in coherently with other beliefs held by the ruled and rulers alike, both are happier and better able to fulfill their role within the wider social order.
One important consequence of this is that, as a rule, those upset with the regime for whatever reason will not usually respond by rejecting the regime’s political formula, but rather by attempting to appropriate it. The plea of ‘Dems are the real racists’ has long ago become a melancholy cliché on the far Right, but the truth is that the more ordinary white Americans are abused and humiliated by their government, the more they desperately and sincerely want to believe that they, and not their rulers, are the true custodians of the beliefs that, objectively, are the the political formula of the ruling class. Occasionally, this tendency can grow to such an extent that regime stability is threatened, but, more usually, this just dissipates opposition energies as certain objectionable features of a regime come under attack while leaving its core unthreatened, indeed strengthened.
The identification of a set of beliefs as the political formula of a regime should not be equated with debunking them. It is true that most political formulas are false, for the simple reason that there are more false ideas than true ideas, but, strictly speaking, the truth status of a belief is independent of whether it forms part of a political formula. Similarly, it should not be be hastily concluded that those who propagate political formulas do so cynically and with malicious intent. To the contrary, all things being equal, sincere believers will do a better job of promoting a political formula than cynics. Regimes in which the elite have silently concluded that their public myths are bulls**t are usually not long for this world.
As a very rough and general rule, the more true and coherent a political formula is, the more successful it will be in inspiring loyalty. Every single lie or contradiction, even those that, taken on their own, are effective tools of manipulation, are potential sources of destabilisation. The belief that any criticism of the king will result in instant death by lightning will work wonderfully with a sufficiently credulous populace, but is easily debunked, bringing the house of cards crashing down. Successful political formulas over the long term are either sufficiently true or sufficiently vague to avoid overt disproof. Another rough and ready rule is that a regime that is generally competent and beneficent will have an easier time promoting a political formula, since it can include belief in its own worthy qualities in the political formula.
However, there are important exceptions in which the sheer manifest falsity of a political formula becomes a source of its strength. We may liken this situation to a bubble economy. Ordinarily, people favour - all else being equal - a cheaper product over a more expensive one; if they didn’t markets wouldn’t be able to function. However, in a bubble, people seek to buy a product precisely because it is already overvalued, thus causing it to be more overvalued. Similarly, when faced with the reality that their political formula is worthless trash, and the corresponding horrifying truth that they are ruled like cattle by people with no right to do so, subjects will frequently choose to double down and intensify their belief in the regime’s political formula to preserve their own sanity. The subject of a generally well-run and pleasant polity who realises that, actually, Pharaoh wees just like everyone else, can, at least, content himself with the knowledge that he gets a pretty good deal. Conversely, a man ruled abusively and incompetently who sees through the lies has, unless he has a plausible hope of changing his regime, only the solace of despair.
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It can be easily seen that Zionism is not only an extremely successful political formula, but one that is in the condition of the bubble. Zionism doesn’t make a lot of sense: if Judaism is true then Zionism is obviously false, but if Judaism is false Zionism is also obviously false. But it works like gangbusters. An astonishing number of Jews give up a significant proportion of their time to explain to increasingly bored and bewildered gentiles how great Israel is. Much of this propaganda is genuinely indistinguishable from parody. The Zionist regime makes extreme demands of its citizens, notably in the form of military service and an extraordinarily high tax burden, with rock bottom public services provided in return. Millions of Israelis live in conditions of urban squalor that, if they were Palestinian refugee camps, could be used to solicit charitable donations from around the world. Those seeking to escape dilapidation have no choice to but to settle in new cities, with a typical 2-hour commute to a place of work, consisting of row after row of artless concrete boxes which lack the most minimal concessions to the humanity of the tax producers who will live there. The response of the vast majority of the population, however, to this undisguised abuse is to double down on their loyalty, picking increasingly hackneyed scapegoats for their problems like the ‘the Left’ (last ‘in power’ briefly in 2001) or the Supreme Court. Instead of condemning the regime as a whole, they position themselves as its most determined and loyal supporters, defending it from subversion.
The most pitiful example of this, of course, is Religious Zionism. To take one example of many, the Zionist regime (under the most right wing government in its history) can go as far as deliberately bringing over half a million gentiles from the former Soviet Union (lobbying the United States to deny them entry so they had nowhere else to go), and National Religious servility to Zionism just gets more intense. Before the Gaza withdrawal, high-profile Religious Zionist Rabbis told their followers that the withdrawal could not happen because the regime was holy. We can leave aside here the precise motives of each one, and how many were bought and by whom. What is important is that according to their own explicit public statements we now know the Israeli state is not holy. And yet it is still holy, and so are all of its edicts. Go to any National Religious schul and compare how people behave during k’riat haTorah and how they behave during the prayer for the State and its security services and you will know all you need to know about ideological conditioning.
Clearly, Zionism has taken on the characteristics of an ideological bubble, in which its own manifest falsity, and the misrule of the regime, causes its subjects to become ever more emotionally invested in the political formulas that legitimate their subjection. The thing about bubbles, however, is that eventually they pop. At present, Israelis - unless they are Charedi - have a binary choice between belief in Zionism and bleak, lonely melancholy. The advent of a credible political movement that can give a realistic portrayal of a better world, and inspires confidence in its ability to get there, has the ability to set off a preference cascade that will make out current estimates of what is politically realistic irrelevant.
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Finally, a few brief observations about the role of a political formula in a Jewish state. If we start with the assumption that political formulas are inherently deceptive, then it’s easy to arrive at the conclusion that our goal should be the construction of a state without one, essentially what classic NRx was about. However, historical realism gives us no reason to believe that such a state is even possible, let alone desirable, and Judaism doesn’t call for it. Instead, the political formula of a Jewish state is Judaism. In such a state, the more committed to Judaism you are, the more loyal you are to the state, and vice versa. From another perspective, we can say that Judaism is a political formula waiting to get its state back.
An observant Jew, at the conclusion of a proper meal, will say a prayer for the rebuilding of Jerusalem and the return of the Davidic monarchy. Some people say this with feeling, others just rattle it off, but in either case they are talking about something abstract. In der Jüdische Staat, however, there would be nothing abstract about this prayer at all. From the most simple private meal, to a public banquet, Jews will say a prayer for the wellbeing and success of their king, a man of flesh and blood, issuing commands, rewards, and punishments to these same subjects.
Anyone reading this who doesn’t find this too strange to really picture is, I think, having himself on. We have all grown up finding it impossible to have this kind of reverence for a human being, let alone a politician. Even the most tepid support of a political figure has to be caked in layers of cynicism and irony to get past our lips. If you’ve got far enough to be interested in things like Postkahanism, you’ve also learned to be ironic and cynical about the things that modern society does have reverence for. For a time, cant recitation of official pieties made you angry, eventually you learned to laugh, finally even that became a bit passé.
When Moshiach comes, though, you will have learn to stop laughing at everything, to stop picking holes, to resist that urge to raise the eyebrow, to desacralize and mock everything real. What is holy, will no longer be an abstraction, no more a dream, but something all too real, not just all around you, but over you, demanding your obedience. The masses will have no problem with it, since they never had a problem with anything else, but for you, it’s going to be tough.