Social unconsciousness
It is common to hear the most socially active people, regardless of their ideological leanings, complain about their surrounding social environment. If we are to take their word for it, then that means that majority of society voluntarily shuts its eyes to reality and refuses to accept that the system is incapable of offering anything else and that serious changes are needed, in one direction or another.
Ipsos conducted a survey in 28 countries this year and the results tell us quite the opposite: 57% of people believe that "our society/social model is broken"; 58% that their country is in decline; 61% that the system is broken; and 67% that the economy is made for the powerful and the rich to accumulate benefits. There does not seem to exist any lack of awareness of the existence of fundamental problems that can only be resolved through structural changes.
The problem arises when the people surveyed are asked about ways we can overcome this situation and 49% declare that "a strong leader is needed to break the rules"...
The question is the jump point: how does one go from recognizing the existence of serious social problems to messianic surrender? That is, how does one go from from acquiring "socially consciousness" to denying one's own responsibility in resolving social problems while granting that responsibility, along with powers of exception to break the rules, to a third party?
The problem is not unconsciousness but rather "messianic surrender".
Dedicating oneself to social causes is not the same thing as being a good "socially conscious" person
A Leiden University study published this week, in which academics from 31 countries participated and in which 8,354 university students were interviewed, gives us some clues.
Through a series of questions, the researchers measured two concepts: SVO (Social Value Orientation) and SoMi (Social Mindfulness, mistranslated by the Spanish press as social awareness).
While SVO measures the predisposition to engage in "collaborative practices in which the material outcome is important and cooperation is always costly," SoMi measures the level of consideration for others and concern about problems of a general scope - from local politics to war and the environment.
That is, SVO approximates the willingness to commit to cooperate and thus transform reality for the better, while SoMi measures kindness towards others and a certain sensitivity and concern for the problems that affect society as a whole.
A high SVO would translate into collective actions and social organization while SoMi would translate into ecogestures, consumption patterns and "small acts of attention or kindness ".
What happens when we compare SVO and SoMi in different countries?
There are four things here that stand out:
- The SVO is significantly lower than the SoMi in all samples.
- If we compare two societies, higher SoMi does not necessarily mean higher SVO.
- SVO varies more across countries: while the lower SoMi (Indonesia) represents 64% of the higher one (Japan), the lower SVO (Hong Kong) represents only 49% of the higher one (Mexico).
- At first glance, there do not seem to be clear predictors that tell us what determines whether a country has a greater or lesser predisposition to cooperative community engagement (SVO).
Commitment to a social cause or willingness to follow the leader?
However if we compare, even if only imprecisely, the SVO results with the answers to the questions of the Ipsos global survey, we can see that countries with lower SVOs tend to affirm the need for a leader who breaks the rules.
This is logical. What this correlation would tell us is that when a significant part of society has come to the conclusion that self-organization and self-transformation through cooperation is not possible or worthwhile, the alternative that ends up imposing itself is messianic surrender, that is granting a strong leader exceptional powers and entrusting them with the collective future. What inevitably comes to mind is the rise of fascism in the 1930s.
If this is the case, and there are reasons to support this conclusion, the most effective way to face the authoritarian and messianic turn of societies that do not see a way out of the civilization crisis is none other than to confront the demoralization that hinders the capacity to build collective commitments.
A third perspective
Another study: loneliness, mobility and messianic surrender
But... How do we do it? The latest sociological studies can still give us some more clues. Just yesterday a Terram Institute study on French rural youth was published, which pointed out how...
It is surprising to note that it is the rural youth, whose daily mobility is difficult, who most set their eyes on the radical right.
The more time one spends in the car, the more likely they will cast their vote for the RN candidate [Lepen]: 34% for those who are less than 30 minutes a day in their car, 43% between 30 and 59 minutes, 42% between 1 and 2 hours and 49% for more than 2 hours.
Likewise, perceived geographic isolation plays a determining role: 36% voted for Marine Le Pen in the first round of the 2022 presidential election when they lived in a small town, 41% in a village and 46% in a hamlet.
Finally, the socio-economic criteria reinforce the effect of location. RN wins majority vote among the disadvantaged classes (57%), among CAP or BEP graduates (60%) and among private sector employees (51%).
In other words, the greater the social isolation and degree of individualization of the daily work experience -whether due to spending more time in the car, or living in a smaller area, or working with fewer colleagues- the easier it is for rage against the precariousness of life and work - all the greater the smaller the salary - to transform into attraction towards authoritarian messianism.
This is completely consistent with the studies cited above, no? After more than thirty years of atomization and the idea of "every man for himself" being normalized in a thousand series, movies, books and radio talk shows and the more the feeling of loneliness and helplessness is reinforced in the daily work experience, the more difficult it is to see a way out through cooperation with others... and the more receptive one becomes to the new authoritarian messiahs.
A general framework for understanding the divorce between social values and passivity
- Bonhomie and generic concern for global problems (the SoMi of the studies) does not protect us from authoritarian solutions, nor does it offer a path to overcoming the crisis of civilization in which we live. What makes possible the imagining of a decent future is the predisposition of a significant part of society to make the commitment to organize itself cooperatively to change things and accept its costs (the famous SOV).
- In other words, it does not matter if the social majority sympathizes with the most democratic and egalitarian values. The authoritarian turn can only be reversed if a relevant part of that social majority is willing to organize itself around those issues and form a diverse and broad fabric that directly and cooperatively confronts general problems.
- Many of the factors driving the divorce between social values and the capacity to develop social commitments are structural. Job insecurity, downscaling of teams and companies, rural depopulation, loneliness... are tendencies created by the economic system. They not only express concrete aspects of the Crisis of Civilization in which we live. They also have a demoralizing effect insofar as they are interpreted within the framework of an ideology that relentlessly denies the centrality of work in order to affirm the centrality of consumption, further promoting social atomization and the commodification of the most basic relationships. Once we passively accept being defined as consumers with identities, we can expect nothing but victimhood and impotence. By definition, the consumer is a passive subject with no capacity to influence the market and the allocation of resources, and identity defines us by being, not by doing. That is why generations marked by the identitarian discourse collapse more easily in the work environment of the "creative industries" (advertising, technology, etc.) - where identity forms parts even of the selection process while individuality is expected make a difference in the product delivered- in comparison with that of traditional services, industries and workshops, which are still defined by the trade (doing) and the team/crew (collective).
- That is why the experience of collective work is central to the spread of social cooperation. This is the Gordian knot of the current crisis. As we have seen in the last of the studies cited, work experiences, increasingly isolated and temporary, are conducive to messianic surrender, simply because they are atomizing and demoralizing.
Reflection
Many decades have passed in which collective work has been atomized and made invisible and collective action has been denied and stigmatized. All of which favor the state-market duality, a social structure to which was attributed the magical capacity of transforming social desires into realities without the need for conscious and organized action by the people.
The point is that good intentions and concerns do not automatically bring or change anything because a society, no matter how democratic it pretends to be, is not a reflection of the feelings of its members, but is rather the product of the collective actions that take place -and sometimes clash- within it.
It is therefore logical that when today a large part of society finds that these magical automatisms do not work, its response is.... to look for a new magician, not to commit itself to collaborate to change things according to the social needs it so anxiously feels.
How do we change this?
Like always: changing from below the root causes that produce it to generate social experiences that show the way forward. Key words: community, associativism, cooperativism, worker cooperatives... maximalism.