FUNDAMENTALS TO MISUNDERSTANDING POLITICS
Chapter 1. 0 What Drives Leaders and Followers?

(See Chapters 0.0 here, 0.1 here, and 0.2 here.)

Newt Monk: Of course, I would prefer no leadership, a civil way to live that involved no coaches, no captains, no jefes…. No bosses, no bullies, no bureaucrats and instead just jacks and jennies grazing green grass aplenty. I suppose it’s just a sentimental nostalgia for the imaginary anarchy of Arcadia and all that. If only a way of life could be found that involved no judges, no jailers … and no jerks!

Oak Boat: If only!

Newt Monk: Indeed. Instead I am stuck being an ass from one of Aesop’s old fables.

Oak Boat: How do you mean:

Newt Monk: Aesop of Egypt, the storyteller whom legend says was once a slave, has a fable that goes like this:

At the unexpected sound of an enemy approaching, an old man was stricken with terror and tried to persuade his donkey to run away so that he wouldn’t be captured. The donkey obstinately asked the old man, ‘tell me, do you suppose the victor will make me carry two pack saddles instead of one?’

The old man said he did not think so.

‘I rest my case,’ concluded the donkey. ‘What difference does it make who my master is, if I always carry one saddle at a time?’ [i]

Newt Monk: What strikes me is that how the worker (the ass) asks worthwhile questions, and even knows some of the correct answers to those questions. But that donkey’s master can only cower amid his own ignorance.

Oak Boat: Pitiful.

Newt Monk: Pretty plenty pitiful indeed. But what really strikes me as a reader-listener of this fable is my own self-awareness.

Oak Boat: How so?

Newt Monk: I am aware (and am aware that I am aware) that I am no master (of any sort) as found in the fable. I’d wager instead that I am akin to something between a man and an ass. Because I don’t sympathize with the old man’s ignorance the way I do with the ass’s indifference, because what drives that indifference is a human-all-too-human cry for freedom. I’d wager that’s why Caesar once observed that “all men naturally long for liberty and despise a state of servitude.” Caesar realized that because he too was once a slave.[ii]

Oak Boat: Still, no team can win all its games without a coach. All politics involves the question of who will rule?

Newt Monk: Yep. I’m afraid something to the effect of what you just said has already been said by every sagacious student of humans being from ancient Plato to the late-twentieth-century political philosopher Karl Popper (1902–1994) to the early-twenty-first-century British hip-hop artist, author, and social critic and advocate: Akala.

Oak Boat: How so?

Newt Monk: Plato’s formulation of all human politics boils down to: “the wise shall lead and rule, and the ignorant shall follow,” and “slaves should be subject to the control of their masters.” As a deep reader, and severe critic, of Plato’s ideas concerning governance, Popper has explained that, back in the days of old Athens, “Plato saw the fundamental problem of politics in the question: Who shall rule the state?” while these days, “modern writers … believe that the main problem is: Who should dictate? The capitalists or the workers?”[iii]

Oak Boat: Well, who do you think should, bucko?

Newt Monk: I said earlier: I’m no one’s master. I. Am. No. Leader. I am, therefore, someone who’s “for the workers,” of course. Thus the “most fundamental problem of all politics” is for Popper, “the control of the controller, of the dangerous accumulation of power represented in the state.”[iv] However….

Oak Boat: However! How about hownever, huh? How many “howevers” do we have to have here, bucko? Don’t you know it’s hot out here in the summertime?

Newt Monk: (ignoring him) And despite this seemingly fundamental question of “Who shall rule the state?” according to Sir Popper, most garden-variety Marxists residing in the free West during the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries “never realized the full significance of democracy as the only known means to achieve this control.” But I digress (I guess?) ….[v]

Oak Boat: I do not deny that you indeed did suggest: that you did digress.

Newt Monk: Well, I didn’t mean to, because I’m not really that interested in the Marxism stuff. I’m more interested in how and why Popper omits to mention throughout his magnus opus: The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) ….

Oak Boat: Ulf, that’s a big book! (But I did  kind of like it.)

Newt Monk: No doubt. And, it’s not only big, but heavily (and occasionally highhandedly) critical of Plato’s teachings so that Popper essentially blames Plato for encouraging, promoting most of the totalitarian forms of government that have emerged in the West during the last two millennia.

Oak Boat: That’s a long stretch time there, bucko. Especially for blaming somebody for something, even if that somebody is Plato, and that something is totalitarianism.

Newt Monk: Yeah, a mighty long stretch of time, spanning not only within breathe of Plato’s own Ancient Athens, but extending down through the ages—all the way down to the fall of the final Reich; down to the slow decay of all-things-Soviet; then down to Balkans in 1990s; alongside the Bath Party of Iraq; down through the ages to twenty-first-century America and her domestic infestation of spliner faction militia movements all infected by messianic “identity” ideologies—they’re all totally totalitarian, dude!––though only partially the conceptual progeny sired by Old Man Plato (whom they will never call their “daddy”).

Oak Boat: Totally.

Newt Monk; But while Popper is busy pointing his finger at Plato, blaming the Athenian philosopher for much of the mess that various totalitarian ambitions of the past two thousand years of history have polluted and pock-marked across large portions of the Occidental side to Gaia’s bosom….

Oak Boat: The Occidental side of Gaia’s bosom? Oh, you mean the geopolitical teat we affectionally call “the West?”

Newt Monk: Yeah sure. But I say Sir Popper might also have had the courtesy to have reminded his readers that, amid all that critiquing of Plato as the prime source of totalitarianism, Plato had himself once been a slave—yes, a slave––not unlike Caesar, and not unlike Aesop.[vi]  

Oak Boat: You’re saying that if we readers would consider (and dig into) Plato’s past enslavement a little more closely, it might well aid us in our attempt to better understand why the prescription an elderly Plato later dispenses at Laws (690B)––there where he formulates who should (and should not) be leaders as well as who should (and should not) be their followers in his (the author’s!) hypothetical city––seems so severe?

Newt Monk: Yeah, or at least, seems so “severe” to us so-called “moderns,” yeah.

Newt Monk: Basically.

Oak Boat: You’ve reminded me of a passage from a little book by an American philologist Alexander Welsh (1933–2018). It’s called What is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives (2008), and in it Welsh discusses the work of Jamaican-American sociologist Orlando Patterson, particularly Patterson’s studies into the historical origins of the concept of the Western idea of “freedom.” Summing up some of Patterson’s theories, Welsh writes:

Both Athenian democracy and the Roman republic derived their notion of free independent citizens from the condition of their opposites, the slaves who lived in their midst. The presence of slaves makes it all the more attractive to identify with a group of the citizens.[vii]

Newt Monk: Right, and if you’ve been a slave before, like Plato supposedly was––we’ll never really know for sure––you might sincerely find (as well as strongly feel) that being a citizen is rather “more attractive” than subservience.

Oak Boat: Certainly (I suppose).

Newt Monk: And while slavery remains, with the exception of our nation’s incarceration industrial complex, abolished throughout these United States of 2024, one of our country’s contemporary essayists, Wesley Yang, has I think, quite aptly articulated how our present political situations contain close parallels to the greater Greco-Roman slave situation(s) of the ancient past. Indeed, our present political situations may even project a distinct set of shadows to crawl across the general surface of history.

Oak Boat: How so?

Newt Monk: Because, at least from Yang’s perspective as a Gen X (or Y) American, “You could … say that our culture feeds off the plight of the poor in spirit in order to create new dependencies.”[viii]

Oak Boat: Ouch! If that’s the truth, it certainly does hurt.

Newt Monk: I’m sorry if it does. Along the same lines of the way ancient slaves were sorted from ancient citizens is the way we moderns partition all of our leaders away from us (their own followers) in day-to-day life! It is along these lines that British author, intellectual, and hip-hop artist Akala, in his book Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire (2018), questions how much “self-segregation is caused by the seemingly natural human appetite for tribalism, and how much is due to the social processes that shape a shared identity?”[ix]

Oak Boat: Hmm. While it’s, admittedly, quite a ways to stretch oneself across the Atlantic, I feel Akala’s point in regard to Great Britain partially overlaps with some of what Pulitzer Prize winner (and, for us, fellow Austinite) Lawrence Wright was getting at in his cultural survey God Save Texas: A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State (2018). I particularly sense some overlap when Wright notes how “Texas enjoys the singular blessing that every distinct culture must have: a sense of its own apartness. “[x]

(Continue to Chapter 1.1 here.)

NOTES

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[i] Aesop, Fables, trans. Laura Gibbs, (New York, Oxford UP, 2002, 2008), no. 11, (Phaedrus 1.15 = Perry 476), p. 9.

[ii] Though Caesar was once a slave, his translator Carolyn Hammond reminds readers that “Caesar figures in the historical record as both destroyer of the Republic and founder of the Empire,” (“Introduction,” p. xii). The founders of the Roman Republic, Romulus and Remus, are said to have also suffered as slaves in their younger days. See: Gaius Julius Caesar, Commentarii de Bello Gallico (The Gallic War), trans. Carolyn Hammond, (New York: Oxford UP, 1996), (III, x), p. 59 (quotation); Livy, Ab Urbe Condita Libri (Books from the Foundation of the City) in The Rise of Rome, Books 1–5, trans. T. J. Luce, (New York: Oxford UP, 1998), (I, v–vii), pp. 9–12; Plutarch, Βίοι Παράλληλοι (Parallel Lives), trans. Bernadotte Perrin, (11 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP; London, William Heinemann Ltd, 1919), Vol. I, “Theseus and Romulus,” (IV, i–ii), Vol. VII, “Julius Caesar,” (I, iv–II, iv).

[iii] Plato, Νόμοι (Laws), trans. Trevor J. Saunders, (New York: Penguin, 1970, 2004), (690B), p. 95; Karl Popper, “The Paradoxes of Sovereignty,” (1945) in Popper Selections, ed. David Miller, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1985), pp, 319, 320.

[iv] Popper, “Marx’s Theory of the State,” (1945) in Popper Selections, p. 335.

[v] Popper, “Marx’s Theory of the State,” (1945) in Popper Selections, p. 335.

[vi] Sonja Anderson, “This Newly Deciphered Papyrus Scroll Reveals the Location of Plato’s Grave,” Smithsonian Magazine, May 1, 2024; Diogenes Laertius, Βίοι καὶ γνῶμαι τῶν ἐν φιλοσοφίᾳ εὐδοκιμησάντων (Lives of Eminent Philosophers), trans. R.D. Hicks, (2 vols.; Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1925, 1972), Vol. I, “Plato,” (III, xviii–xix).

[vii] Alexander Welsh, What is Honor? A Question of Moral Imperatives, (New Haven, CN: Yale UP, 2008), pp. 23–24.

[viii] Wesley Yang, The Souls of Yellow Folk, (New York: W. W. Norton, 2018), p. 25.

[ix] Akala, Natives: Race & Class in the Ruins of Empire, (London: Two Roads, 2018), p. 194; Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, (New York: Basic Books, 1991), pp. 17–18, 42–43, 135.

[x] Likewise, former Secretary of Defense (as well as former Director of CIA), Robert Gates was informed upon his arrival to be the 22nd President of Texas A&M University, in Aggieland (and elsewhere): “If you’re on the outside looking in, you can’t understand it. If you’re on the inside looking out, you can’t explain it.” See: Robert Gates, A Passion for Leadership: Lessons on Change and Reform from Fifty Years of Public Service, (New York: Knopf, 2015), p. 17; Lawrence Wright, God Save Texas; A Journey into the Soul of the Lone Star State, (New York: Knopf, 2018), p. 89.

The Elgonyi, natives of the Elgon forests, of central Africa, explained to me that there are two kinds of dreams: the ordinary dream of the little man, and the ‘big vision’ that only the great man has, e.g., the medicine-man or chief. Little dreams are of no account, but if a man has a ‘big dream’ he summons the whole tribe in order to tell it to everybody.

––Carl Jung, “Relations between Ego & Unconscious” (1928)[1]

I don’t know. But I don’t vote anymore. I’m now a radical nonvoter (I think). I feel utterly powerless, ever since the snow storm last year. It was like a revelation, an epiphany, an awakening.

Recently I started reading Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys (2019) and, in a particular passage, recognized a shared sense of powerlessness:

It was hard to miss the smile that tugged at Jaimie’s mouth from time to time. Turner wasn’t angry that Jaimie lied to their faces. He admired liars who kept on lying even though their lies were obvious, but there was nothing anyone could do about it. Another proof of one’s powerlessness before other people.[2]

Yes, once upon a time I possessed the capacity to admire politicians who “kept on lying even though their lies were obvious”—James Traficant (1941–2014) for example, whom I gather, was sort of low-rent version of Huey Long (1893–1935).

But now I’m stuck in a bog of disenchantment. And when you’re stuck, you feel mediocre. The Roman historian Livy tells readers that “men of mediocre ability escape envy, it generally aims its shafts at the highest”[3]––after the ice storm of 2021, I feel I am the very measure of a mediocre man.

But even though one is stuck, one is going to have to suck it up. For no one envies a person in pain (especially the pain of powerlessness in politics), for “nothing makes itself more unpopular quite so quickly,” wrote the Roman stoic Seneca, “as a person’s grief.” [4]

In more modern times, Professor Wittgenstein has taught that: “you learned the concept ‘pain’ in learning language”[5]––such as the pain of feeling powerless when being lied to––as with the character of Elwood in The Nickel Boys, as in Texas politics etcetera….

All I know is, I will no longer sacrifice anything upon the altar of admiration for political leadership, particularly at the local level. Those who look to leadership for answers are no different than those who look at pornography for partnership.

But, whether in novels or the minds of mediocre book-bloggers have those who have become disenchanted from such dreams of realpolitik now awakened? Do they now rise and walk in a brand-new life?

*****

One reads in The Nickel Boys that

[Thus said Dr. King]: Throw us in jail, and we will still love you…. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer, and one day we will win our freedom.

The capacity to suffer. Elwood—all the Nickel boys—existed in the capacity…. Elwood shook his head. What a thing to ask. What an impossible thing…. No, he could not make that leap to love. He understood neither the impulse of the proposition nor the will to execute it.[6]

That passage dimly resembles the Revelation in the second partition of the first volume of Proust when:

… at the hour when there awakened in me that anguish which, later on in life, transfers itself to the passion of love, and may even become its inseparable companion…. since one has doubts of them at the moment when one believes in them.[7]

Then again, the passage by Whitehead reminds me also of one by Professor Ta-Nehisi Coates in Between the World and Me (2015) when he explains that, “The question of how one should live within a black body, within a country lost in the Dream, is the question of my life, and the pursuit of this question, I have found, ultimately answers itself.”[8]

But now emerges the question of whether or not waking life and dreaming (or nightmaring) are interchangeable, something that can be exchanged for something else, like at the back-counter at Wal-Mart. For all dreams are ideologies; all ideologies are dreams. As the Czech playwright-politician Václav Havel (1936–2011) says in his essay “The Power of the Powerless”(1978):

Ideology becomes at the same time an increasingly important component of power, a pillar providing it with both excusatory legitimacy and an inner coherence. As this aspect grows in importance, and as it gradually loses touch with reality, it acquires a peculiar but very real strength. It becomes reality itself, albeit a reality altogether self-contained, one that on certain levels (chiefly inside the power structure) may have even greater weight than reality as such. Increasingly, the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important than the reality hidden behind it.[9]

There are times when I just can’t stop questioning. I find virtue in it as a ritual. Questions like:

• Is The Nickel Boys more about doubting the possibility of loving one’s harm-makers rather than having become disenchanted by their capabilities?
• Must readers interpret Whitehead’s character of Elwood to interpret King’s words literally?
• Or must readers investigate the historical context of the speech to see if King was speaking literally, metaphorically, poetically, spiritually, subculturally, bureaucratically, democratically, and/or theologically?
• Or does the character within the book possess no need for adjectives in order to possess disbelief in King’s admonition?

After all, who needs specifics when the generality is already within one’s grasp?

Is political dreaming just a form of quackery (just as philosophy is a form of medicine)?[10]

And if Jung was not a quack but someone who studied dreams––the way a political scientist studies various ideologies––can readers accept his realization-as-remedy? Would Carl Jung and Colson Whitehead agree that dreaming is primitive, and waking life (in political as well as physiological ways) a more evolved, more enlightened mode of consciousness? For Jung reminds readers that dreams cannot be unbound from the paleolithic past out of whence they came:

Fantasies always have a highly original and ‘creative’ character. They are like new creations; obviously they derive from the creative activity of the brain and not simply from its mnemonic activity….[11]

The symbol-producing function of our dreams is an attempt to bring our original mind back to consciousness, where it has never been before, and where it has never known it. We got rid of it before understanding it…. Dreams and old primitive things from which the mind freed itself in the course of its evolution: illusions, childish fantasies, archaic thought-forms, primitive instincts.[12]

More to come (maybe).

NOTES

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[1] Jung, “Relations between ego and unconscious” (1928) in The Jung Reader, ed. David Tacey, (New York: Routledge, 2012) 126.

[2] Whitehead, The Nickel Boys, (New York: Doubleday, 2019), 129.

[3] Livy, The History of Rome Vol. VI – books xl–xlv, trans. Canon Roberts (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1924) XLV, xxxv, 282.

[4] Seneca, Letters from a Stoic, trans. Robin Campbell, (New York: Penguin Classics, 1969), Letter LXIII, p. 116.

[5] Wittgenstein, “Notes for Lectures on ‘Private Experience’ and ‘Sense Data’,” Philosophical Review, 77 (July 1968): 275–320 at 295–96; Philosophical Investigations, trans. G.E.M. Anscombe, P.M.S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 1953, 1958, 2001), Revised Fourth Edition by Hacker and Schulte, (2009) (Revised Fourth Edition, 2009) I. no. 384.

[6] Whitehead, Nickel Boys, 172–73, 195–96.

[7] Proust, À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time) – Vol. I Du côté de chez Swann (Swann’s Way) (1913), trans. C. K. Moncrieff, § “Combray.”

[8] Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me, (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015)11–12.

[9] Havel, “Moc bezmocných” (“The Power of the Powerless,”) (1978), trans. Paul Wilson, The Power of the Powerless, ed. John Keane, (Armonk, NY: Palach Press, 1985) V, 32.

[10] Livy has some old Roman named Appius Claudius cry out: “Ye gods, they are like quack physicians looking for work, who always want the state to be suffering some affliction that you will call them in to cure. Are you tribunes the champions or the enemies of the plebs?” (The Rise of Rome, Books 1–5, trans. T. J. Luce, (New York: Oxford UP) (V, iii), p. 284).

Marcus Aurelius says that philosophy is supposed to be a medicine, not an entertainment (V, ix); for “philosophy is a modest profession, all simplicity and plain dealing. Never try to seduce me into solemn pretentiousness,” (IX, xxix). See Meditations, trans. Maxwell Staniforth, (New York: Penguin, 1962).

[11] Jung, “The role of the unconscious” (1918), The Jung Reader 66.

[12] Jung, “Healing the split” (1961), The Jung Reader 359.