When I try to explain in conversation the extent of the fall that accompanies the loss of reality, I repeatedly find myself referring to a subtle distinction that Sigmund Freud discussed in his seminal work The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis. He tells the story of a young woman, hopelessly in love with her sister’s husband, who now stands at her sister’s deathbed. She could say to herself, ›The capable have free rein,‹ but her sense of piety prevents her from doing so, and as a result, the neurotic woman must repress her desire. But how does the psychotic woman deal with the situation? She says to herself, »My sister is not dead at all.‹1
If Freud understands denial of reality as the hallmark of psychotic reaction formation, it can be conversely deduced that any mindset refusing to accept reality is itself at risk of drifting into psychosis. If this observation, presented as a rhetorical léger de main, provokes a protest or at least a frown, it’s because the transfer to society is by no means obvious. This becomes even clearer when, in a conceptually parallel way, Psychosis is juxtaposed against Sociosis—where the latter is initially understood in a completely value-free manner as collective repression of reality. That the phenomenon exists as such, no, even more, that it enjoys such great popularity, goes without saying— we only have to consider ideologues and believers of all stripes. For none of those involved would ever think of interpreting the articles of faith put forward with such verve as psychotic delusions. What protects such a collective belief system from self-awareness, even when it indulges in a completely delusional Worldview, is its group characteristic: that it operates within a collective feedback loop (now commonly referred to as a ›filter bubble‹). And because Sociosis, over time, develops a certain internal logic, anyone who assimilates its introject comes to understand it as the valid, realistic Worldview. Here is precisely where the difference between Sociosis and Psychosis becomes apparent. It is how its collectively assured certainty explains the asymmetry between individual and collective psychology, which Nietzsche had already summed up in perfect brevity:
Insanity in individuals is something rare — but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.2 (Friedrich Nietzsche)
I will never forget how, as a young author, back in the days of real existing socialism, I attended a conspiratorial meeting for the first time, organized by some artists in Prenzlauer Berg. But it wasn’t all that conspiratorial, because hundreds of young people were gathered in an old building’s large attic to listen to the poems of poets critical of the system. An acquaintance had taken me, the curious Westerner, there. And it was a truly formative event, because I’d never experienced such collective excitement before: words spoken into an electrified, breathless silence – provoking a palpable physical excitement in those around me. What irritated me, however, was that the poems recited there were strikingly simple, allegories in which a malicious king forced his subordinates into the wildest contortions, compelling them to call black white and white black. Seen in this light, the relief, even the cheerfulness, evoked by the poets’ words was nothing less than an act of liberation, a laugh with which the imposed burden could simply be shaken off. Naturally, no one, absolutely no one, was convinced by these imposed restrictions on speech and thought. Paradoxically, however—and this was the situation’s disturbing aspect—the rulers nevertheless seemed to have succeeded in damaging their subjects’ freedom of thought. For if the only response to violence is sarcasm, it’s paradoxically replicated, whereas the experience of freedom, as something taken for granted, doesn’t even appear on the intellectual horizon. The literary scholar Hans Mayer described this narrowing of perspective (which had, for him, characterized Brecht’s style since 1933) as slave language – and this becomes clear in the beautiful aperçu with which Brecht reacted to the events of June 17:
Stating that the people had forfeited the confidence of the government. And could win it back only by redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier in that case for the government to dissolve the people and elect another? (Bertolt Brecht)3
By shifting the focus to the oppressor’s perspective, you lose sight of your own. This was precisely the difference, that profound incomprehension haunting me during that evening in Prenzlauer Berg. Because in my world—that of a Westerner—there was no sense of that inner censor’s power, which on the other side of the Wall was a second nature, if not an everyday necessity.
What follows from this? Nothing other than there’s also such a thing as an imposed denial of reality, whether it is enforced with naked or symbolic violence. While we are familiar with this as totalitarian rule, the question of Sociosis becomes much more complicated when we’re not dealing with a slave language imposed from above, but when it occurs of our own free will. What are the reasons leading groups into a sociotic logic of delusion? And above all: How does a group manage to keep unpleasant realities at bay – especially when there’s such a grotesque discrepancy between its belief system and reality? This is the question American social psychologist Leon Festinger attempted to answer in his book When Prophecy Fails – a book in which he tried answering the question of how a group of 1950’s UFO believers managed to convince themselves that a) the end of the world was near, b) that the chosen ones would be saved from the flood by extraterrestrial flying objects in a contemporary remake of the Noah’s Ark story, and c) how the failure of this precisely dated occurrence of this catastrophe could be explained. This remarkable research project began with the announcement in a local newspaper of a housewife’s prophecy she believed she’d received from an extraterrestrial intelligence through automatic writing, entitled: Prophecy from the Planet. Wake-up call to the city: Flee from the flood. It will overwhelm us on December 21, [1954].4 Because Festinger and his co-authors succeeded in infiltrating this apocalyptic sect as unofficial members, they were able to observe first-hand this group’s inner workings—and delve into this system’s delusional mystery. After having coined the beautiful term rationalization (which could be understood as a rationalization of madness), Festinger goes on to introduce the concept of cognitive dissonance.
»Dissonance and consonance are relations among cognitions -that is, among opinions, beliefs, knowledge of the environment,and knowledge of one’s own actions and feelings. Two opinions, or beliefs, or items of knowledge are dissonant with each other if they do not fit together - that is, if they are inconsistent, or if,considering only the particular two items, one does not followfrom the other. For example, a cigarette smoker who believes that smoking is bad for his health has an opinion that is dissonant with the knowledge that he is continuing to smoke.«5
In short: What’s considered to be the normal state here – as a harmonious Worldly relationship – is the consonance between action and worldview. And, if this harmony is disrupted, people will attempt to rationalize the situation by drowning out the dissonance. If they succeed, it doesn’t matter that they get lost in the wildest sophistry and most convoluted thought labyrinths. The crucial thing is how they regain the integrity of their own worldview. As valuable as Festinger’s insights may be, an individual psychological approach is of little help in understanding the Sociosis phenomenon as a reality loss affecting the dominant social discourse – or the classe politique – as a whole. The question is: How is something like this even possible? How can a society willingly enter into a sociotic state? And what are the historical circumstances favoring such collective denial of reality? Demoscopist Elisabeth Noelle-Neumann, who coined the concept of the spiral of silence, attributed this silencing of our sense of reality to an individual’s ›fear of isolation.‹ Because humans, as social animals, harbor a deep fear of social stigmatization, they remain silent in the face of what they perceive as public opinion—and consequently what’s acceptable to the consensus. Consequently, this can lead to a spiral of silence where »the winners speak – the losers remain silent«—thus to a silencing of reality. However, this insight, referring to the zoon politikon’s unchanging Nature, is of little help in answering the question of how a particular era can lose itself in sociotic delusions, while at other times it can prove much more resilient and realistic. Now, we don’t have to look far to see the most bizarre dissonances in everyday life. Keeping in mind that with the digital revolution we’re facing far greater humiliations than those which Freud lists in Civilization and Its Discontents6, we can clearly understand that such a Sociosis has its advantages: Namely, how it allows us to keep our contemporary Psychotopic intellectual impositions at bay, along with all those shocks that could potentially disrupt our own grandiose self-image. But how can we persuade ourselves that we are still masters in our own house? – By connecting our phantasms of grandeur to the batteries of the past. And this is all the easier because they’ve been immortalized in countless stories, novels, and films. Consequently, people draw on the archives of dead ideas as they spruce up yesterday’s revolutionary slogans, dusting and polishing them as they attempt to make them look new again. Put another way, Victor Hugo’s remark that nothing in the world is as powerful as an idea whose time has come can be transposed into its phantasmatic form of the sociotic:
Nothing in the world seems as powerful as an idea whose time has passed.
When the illusion of its appearance has replaced the Existent, it’s because we are no longer encountering Reality, but rather the phantasma of Great again! – that is, the illusion of still being master in our own house. By retreating into the role of consumer, you don’t even realize that you are dealing with an intellectual embezzlement – an operation that Oscar Wilde interpreted as a form of sentimental self-deception:
A sentimentalist is simply one who desires to have the luxury of an emotion without paying for it. (Oscar Wilde)7
The uncanny is simply banished by making ourselves comfortable in our museum of local history [Heimatmuseum] —while outsourcing any feelings of inner alienation to a hostile entity, scapegoating it for our failure to pursue what we consider desirable. As such, this Worldview is fueled by resentment—shielding it from anything that might disrupt it. In this sense, Oscar Wilde’s conclusion that sentimentality is nothing more than a nihilistic Sunday-holiday-time worldview cynicism, paraphrased to drown out its own emptiness with grand words and moral virtue-signaling.8 If the world is itself a nuisance, it’s clear the deepest reason for Sociosis is to keep up appearances—in short, as a kind of identity insurance.
As tempting as it may be to classify sociopathy within the classical psychopathologies, this overlooks an essential point: Namely, that the social refers to an accepted context of communication—to what might be called a symbolic order. And in case of doubt, such an order, as totalitarian regimes have successfully demonstrated, can amount to a form of everyday life—a sham architecture demanding a daily collective confirmation of reality denial. If the inhabitants of this Potemkin village have captured the main enemies of socialism (spring, summer, fall, and winter), isn’t this an eloquent testimony showing that even madness can take on a form of everyday practicality? Here, the question becomes: how is it possible to maintain such a sociotic relationship with the World? The answer is that compliance with the symbolic order, or lip service, is linked to gratification and economic advantages, which brings us closer to today’s circumstances. There’s no doubt that what is sometimes referred to as the narrowing of the corridor of opinion isn’t due to the intervention of an autocratic regime – because there isn’t even a serious Political Philosophy capable of providing the necessary circumstances with the appropriate script. Instead, we’re now dealing with a bottom-up totalitarianism, whose basic impulse is identity assurance. And, in a way, what makes people primarily susceptible to totalitarian temptation is a feeling of powerlessness—the vague, unfocused awareness that personal identity is on shaky ground. The very concept of Identity Politics, which owes its origins to a dubious group from the 1970s (the Combahee River Collective), boils down to a contradiction, a coincidentia oppositorum – since here the moment of individual uniqueness is subordinated to the political struggle. The lesbian black activists who came together in this group—»active in the struggle against racist, sexual, heterosexual, and class-based oppression«—were particularly keen on drawing attention to the phenomenon of multiple oppression. »This focus on our own oppression,« according to the group’s manifesto, the Combahee River Collective Statement, »is expressed in the concept of Identity Politics.«
»We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else’s oppression.«
If you look closely, it becomes clear that identitarian essentialism always boils down to a fight against those who are preventing self-expression. Consequently, we are no longer dealing with a self-image, but with a Politics of Resentment— fed by the unholy alliance of victim status and politicized identity. If Identity Politics has taken over the political discourse, the only logical conclusion is that it wasn’t just the black lesbians of the Combahee River Collective who were working on it, but that the identity crisis has affected large parts of the population. When we consider the disruptions triggered by the computer world since the 1970s—which have now reached a whole new dimension with the perceived threat of artificial intelligence—it becomes clear that the basic sociotic impulse must stem from a shattering rupture in our worldview. This is strikingly evident in the shift from a Political Economy to a Moral Economy. People no longer talk about circumstances; they are obsessed with language policy – linking the naming of what is to a moral penalty. What inspires the minds here is ultimately nothing more than resentment, a technique Marshall McLuhan translates into a wonderful aperçu (and this, too, is a remark you’ll find me coming back to).
»Moral indignation is a technique used to endow the idiot with dignity.«9
In fact, Moral Economics are essentially fed by the past. »Guilt and remorse,« McLuhan continues, “are by definition retroactive and relieve the guilty party of any redemptive act of atonement or creative renewal. Guilt and remorse are forms of despair and inertia.” It is therefore not surprising that much of what passes for progressivism today is limited to language policy and lip service—that actors involved are primarily concerned with cleansing past artifacts. In iconoclasm, history is put on trial. Not only is Immanuel Kant accused of racism, but even children’s books cannot escape the inquisitorial zealots. What the English philosopher Roger Scruton called oikophobia is to be understood as a form of intellectual self-flagellation. The fact that this enjoys such great popularity stems from the way publicly displaying personal virtue confers a sense of distinction, or rather, from how economic gratification can be reckoned with in the world of NGOs. This is a form of rationality in which actors can count on receiving real benefits from successfully navigating the Moral Economy. In this sense, the quote attributed to Hegel is beautifully spot on:
«When the facts don’t fit the theory, so much the worse for the facts.«10
Curiously, today’s circumstances can be compared to the 14th century trade in indulgences, which not coincidentally arose during a time when society faced a major upheaval of its very foundations in the form of the medieval Wheelwork Automaton. Suddenly, people had to contend with Interest, the Division of Labor, and proto-Capitalism: Time-is-Money whose necessitated individual punctuality and tact. That a thinker like Nicole Oresme redefined the dear God as a watchmaker, indeed that he based his proof of God’s existence on the rationality of creation using a mechanical clock—the very device that later mechanistic philosophers would use to argue against God’s existence—should suffice as evidence of this Identity Crisis. That economics should become the scene of such deep conflict has much to do with people’s inability of coming to terms with the logic of interest-bearing money—instead taking refuge in a moral economy: the sale of indulgences. We must remember the Purgatorium, the place where the usurer could work off his sins, had been invented during this period – that the church leaders restructured celestial geography, namely Heaven, to accommodate the acceptance of interest. A wonderful illustration of this era’s schizophrenia comes from the account of the Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach: The usurer Jutta von Frechen dies without having repented. She is laid in her coffin, but at the moment when her soul is supposed to pass into the afterlife, the devil enters her body and makes her arms and hands move as if she were counting money. The parish priest arrives to exorcise the corpse. But as soon as he stops his incantations, the corpse begins to twitch her hands and feet again. If the only way to contain the strange, Capitalist Drive is to incorporate it without submitting to it, then we understand that the essential trick is to deny reality. The sale of indulgences is a sociotic symptom insofar as its essential impulse is to downplay the significance of money. Paradoxically, this is achieved by employing a logic of one-upmanship. Consequently, the Church leaders claimed that the martyrs’ miraculous deeds provided a treasure trove of grace capable of atoning for all future sins. This spiritual Fort Knox allowed the Church to maintain its supremacy, lulling the faithful into a sense of security in their faith—offering them the prospect of forgiveness for their sins. Of course, under the table, believers were confronted with a form of psychological accounting that was impregnating them with the new capitalist regime—one which, over time, led to a creeping devaluation of Christian beliefs. Seeing this, it’s easy to understand why, just as Europe was becoming monetized, the sale of indulgences started, while flagellants roamed the cities, turning their private penance into a public performance. While we may dismiss these things as a form of mass hysteria, in all actuality, they represent a form of Sociosis.
While the Middle Ages invented the sale of indulgences to reconcile themselves with the humiliation of the Wheelwork Automaton and proto-capitalism, our contemporaries revel in a moral economy. Now, there’s many reasons to be concerned about climate change, the discrimination of minorities, or other social problems, but Joseph de Maistre’s grim remark comes to mind when people sacrifice a practical framework for action in favor of moral Supermatie:
The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
When pinkwashing, greenwashing, or whitewashing strategies are now at the heart of advertising, when moral judgments have dulled our sense of energy and economic realities, the underlying driving force is nothing other than Sociosis—the desperate attempt to at least give the outward appearance of still being in control of our own lives. If we want to understand why our contemporaries have brought laws of self-identification into the world – indeed, why they rack their brains over the gender scale (much as scholasticism struggled with the gender of angels) – the only plausible explanation is that it ensures the approval of fellow believers. And just as the sale of indulgences in the Middle Ages brought real monetary value to the Church, progressives in today’s Moral Economy can hope for a reward, whether it be an increase in their followers or monetization in the form of a state subsidy. Here, we approach the greatest mystery associated with the concept of a Moral Economy. Just as the sale of indulgences in the Middle Ages was a gigantic money-making machine, the moral economy of our day would be completely misunderstood if reduced to the realm of morals and ethics. In reality, it is an economic rationale —a social exchange system that provides those involved with monetary benefits—often highly lucrative income. If you use the right code words, you may be able to secure research funding or other grants. In this sense, the moral-economic complex that established itself at the turn of the millennium, as countless state-funded NGOs could be seen as an institution comparable to the sale of indulgences, a sociotic endeavor whose sole purpose is to maintain an outdated worldview—to avoid having to acknowledge the realities of our time.
»I would like to refer to an exemplar analyzed many years ago in which a girl in love with her brother-in-law is shaken by the thought at her sister’s deathbed: ‘Now he is free and can marry you.’ This scene is immediately forgotten, initiating the regression process that leads to hysterical pain. But it is instructive here to see how neurosis attempts to resolve the conflict. It devalues the real change by repressing the relevant instinctual demand, i.e., the love for the brother-in-law. The psychotic reaction would have been to deny the fact of the sister’s death.« Freud, S. – The Loss of Reality in Neurosis and Psychosis (1924). In: Works, Vol. 13, p. 364.
Nietzsche, F. – Beyond Good and Evil, trans. H. Zimmern, New York, 1917, p. 88.
From Die Lösung [The Solution]. See Brecht, B. – The Solution. In Poetry and Prose, edit. R. Grimm, New York, 2003 p. 119.
Festinger, L. et. al – When Prophecy Fails, Minneapolis, 1956, pp. 31-33.
Festinger, L. et. al – When Prophecy Fails, Minneapolis, 1956, pp. 25-26.
Freud, S. – Civilization and Its Discontent, London, 1930.
Wilde, O. — From De Profundis, in The Letters Of Oscar Wilde, ed. Rupert Hart-Davis, New York, 2000, p. 501.
»And remember that the sentimentalist is always a cynic at heart. Indeed sentimentality is merely the bank holiday of cynicism. And delightful as cynicism is from its intellectual side, now that it has left the Tub for the Club, it never can be more than the perfect philosophy for a man who has no soul. It has its social value, and to an artist all modes of expression are interesting, but in itself it is a poor affair, for to the true cynic nothing is ever revealed.« Ibid., p. 501.
McLuhan, M. – In Benedetti, P. and N. DeHart – Forward Through the Rearview Mirror-Reflections on and by Marshall McLuhan. MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1997, p. 167.