All activism, insofar as it aims to alter the existing social order, is a re-action to the actions of others. Every re-action, insofar as it is consciously provoked, mediates and fulfils the provocative action. Contemporary rulers aim to provoke everyone who can be provoked in order to elicit deterministic behaviour. Anyone who can be provoked by the ruling power, but is not provoked, may be provoked and thus controlled by someone else (an adversary). Everything the government does is a provocation. Everything the corporate media does is a provocation. Your re-action to every news story, law or event is the purpose of the story, law or event. Every re-action to a provocation provides a pretext for another action, another provocation. Democracy, as a process that normalises power, is no longer realised through voting, which is retained only as a self-legitimisation ritual, but by reciprocal provocations. A power that provokes can also be influenced by being provoked. Factions that comprise the ruling power can be provoked and polarised against one another. Those who provoke, gain; those who get provoked, pay. When mutual provocations (A) fail to have a predictable effect, we would have approached the state of rational discourse (B). The ultimate social challenge, in all situations of conflict, is to get from A to B.
Most people, whose conscious agency is impaired by instinctive irrationality, can be organised only on the basis of the commonality of adversarial experience. Political organisers aim to polarise ‘the masses’ into a system of identity groups in order to ‘give’ them a sense of common experience of ‘harm’ or ‘injustice’ (woman v. man, gay v. straight, white v. black, trans v. cis, left v. right), while simultaneously suppressing any commonalities with those who are designated as the cause of harm or injustice. ‘Women’ can thus be mobilised against ‘men’, and vice versa, allowing the organisers to control and economically exploit both groups by means of adversarial emotional provocations. All wars are managerial wars, including the Cold War of words between various identity groups.
Saul Alinsky, the leading advocate of social agitation and political activism ‘as an end in itself’, adequately summarises the process of social polarisation. “The organizer must become schizoid, politically, in order not to slip into becoming a true believer. Before men can act an issue must be polarized. Men will act when they are convinced that their cause is 100 per cent on the side of the angels and that the opposition are 100 per cent on the side of the devil. He knows that there can be no action until issues are polarized to this degree. […] What I am saying is that the organizer must be able to split himself into two parts—one part in the arena of action where he polarizes the issue to 100 to nothing, and helps to lead his forces into conflict, while the other part knows that when the time comes for negotiations that it really is only a 10 per cent difference—and yet both parts have to live comfortably with each other.”
It is possible to disrupt this pathological dynamic by appealing to the commonality that Wilfred Bion identified in every conflict: “A suspicion grows in my mind, until it becomes a certainty, that there is no hope whatever of expecting co-operation from this group […] No soon have I said this to myself than I realize that I am expressing my feeling, not of the group’s disharmony, but of its unity. Furthermore, I very soon become aware that […] every attempt I make to get a hearing shows that I have a united group against me. The idea that neurotics cannot co-operate has to be modified.” (Bion 1961, 52).
We all share the existentially significant experience of being polarised, of feeling antagonistic towards other identity groups, and we all cooperate and sustain the coarse identity patterns that the managerial class has defined for us. Formulating a group identity in these new terms transcribes the polarisation from ‘men v. women’, ‘black v. white’, ‘pro v. anti-whatever’, onto ‘all who are systemically polarised’ contra the managerial faction that defines and imposes the terms of polarisation. The tool of polarisation is thus turned against itself. Without disrupting the process of managed polarisation all activism reinforces the group identities imposed from above and thus fulfils the strategic expectations of the ruling power. Conversely, when those who are polarised by systemic provocations become aware of their common predicament and resolve to reciprocally provoke the managerial class, the managers are performatively included among the polarised; they are defeated as an antagonistic identity by the unified group consciousness of the polarised but simultaneously invited to join and cooperate with them.
Irrationality, insecurity and resentment are common properties of all politically opposed sides and are therefore a suitable basis for mutual understanding and cooperation, geared to resolving their common problem (of irrationality, insecurity and resentment). Nevertheless, groups that are nominally ‘united’ only by these negative qualities cannot automatically cooperate rationally and in good faith, but must first develop either through abstract analysis or though a series of stressful experiences generated by the conflict itself.
Bion discovered that the individual has two aspects: he is conscious as an individual but also expresses the unconscious proclivities of the group with which he identifies. The lowest energy state is that of total immersion in the unconscious behaviour of the group and is associated with the minimum of individual consciousness: a primitive state. This is what Bion calls a Basic Assumption group. People who identify with the group on the basis of a basic assumption experience anxiety in the absence of leadership. When their inquiry “what should I do” finds no authoritative answer, or is given only a general direction to “do whatever is right”, they experience unbearable psychological discomfort. The common reaction is to engage with the group/community solely for the purpose of selecting a substitute leader who is then expected to satisfy the individual’s need for direction. It is only through a series or failures in satisfying this need that most individuals gain the capacity to form sophisticated groups capable to constructive cooperation and tolerating disagreements. In being provoked, recognising that we are provoked and suffering the consequences of provocations we learn how not to be provoked, how not to re-act but to act intentionally. Intentional action originates, leads, it does not re-act; the degree to which a person can be provoked is the degree to which they lack the developed capacity to be free.
To become an autonomous, conscious agent requires practice at overcoming the habitual insecurity and resentment, and if a sufficient number of individuals commits to this development, their social interactions become “sophisticated”: a Work Group capable of rational discourse and intentional cooperation in the face of disagreements, immune to emotional provocations.
It is plausible that behind the explanatory inconsistencies and Machiavellian cynicism, this is what Alinsky was aiming for. “Is this manipulation? Certainly, just as a teacher manipulates, and no less, even a Socrates. As time goes on and education proceeds, the leadership becomes increasingly sophisticated. The organizer recedes from the local circle of decision-makers. His response to questions about what he thinks becomes a non-directive counterquestion, 'What do you think?' His job becomes one of weaning the group away from any dependency upon him. Then his job is done.” The task for the group is then to overcome their dependency on leaders within the group, until every member of the group matures to the point of rational deliberation and cooperation without needing leadership.
Bion, W. R. Experiences in Groups and Other Papers. London: Tavistock Publications, 1961.
Alinsky, Saul D. Rules for Radicals. New York: Vintage Books, 1971.
Quote from opening pages of Rules for radicals, Alinsky's real hero.
"Lest we forget at least an over-the-shoulder acknowledgment to the very first
radical: from all our legends, mythology, and history (and who is to know
where mythology leaves off and history begins—or which is which), the first
radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so
effectively that he at least won his own kingdom—Lucifer.
—SAUL ALINSKY"
Question is whether sophistication is ever possible. In 2020-2021 the friend enemy distinction was anti-lockdowners (me and my new "tribe") vs the establishment. Then in 2022-2023 the factions of antil-ockdowners vs the spike protein-o-phobes who could speak of nothing but the jab, or some us within the movement against the cringe, the fringe and the grifters and those who were to slow to understand the establishment was onto the next big thing to grasp the larger project