Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste

by Philip Mirowski

  C) Everyday Sadism

  When a limo cruises New York City, the financial capital of the world, equipped with a massive sign painted on the side reading “Kill the Poor,” is this “irony” or is it something else altogether?65 When Ted Nugent conducts a “Trample the Weak” rock tour, what kind of person attends the concert?66 Is this intended as “entertainment” or as agitprop? Since 2008, we might want to consider whether the answer has taken on new significance. In order to shift the frame away from offhand dismissal of some trifling stunt to something a bit more profound, I would like to quote the premier philosopher of cruelty on the wellsprings of that urge:

  An equivalence is provided by the creditor’s receiving, in place of the literal compensation for injury, a recompense in the form of a kind of pleasure—the pleasure of being allowed to vent his power freely upon one who is powerless, the voluptuous pleasure de faire le mal pour le plaisir de la faire, the enjoyment of violation. This enjoyment will be the greater the lower the creditor stands in the social order.67

  Friedrich Nietzsche derived the will to punish from the world of debt obligations, and not vice versa. If one were to take this version of psychology seriously, it suggests that the exacerbated asymmetry between imperious creditors and distressed debtors that has widened since the crisis has freed up an antagonistic field of cruelty that may have festered in a more repressed state during more prosperous times. Clearly, by this late date everyone is aware of the multitudes unceremoniously turfed out of their underwater houses mortgaged beyond all rescue, the one in five children reduced to poverty in the United States, the newly disenfranchised filling the homeless shelters and Wal-Mart car parks at night, the mute beggars standing at street corners with their crude handmade cardboard signs, the sheepish families crowding the food pantries, the superannuated, the forlorn, the downwardly mobile. One way to live in this grim harsh world would be to tell yourself that all these people are just collateral damage, and that no one bears them any particular animus for it, that it is just the unfortunate result of transpersonal forces: in Rawls-speak, there but for the grace of God go I. Such would run the exculpation of the classical liberal.

  This, I would suggest, is not now the predominant mind-set in our neoliberal era. Instead, the culture of everyday neoliberalism tends to foster a set of attitudes reminiscent of Nietzsche’s creditor psychology, and has plumped for a different morality: it extends beyond a defensive schadenfreude of the Great Contraction, if only because it predates the crash. Since the 1990s, not just the rich, but almost everyone else who still has a job has been galvanized to find within themselves a kind of guilty pleasure in the thousand unkind cuts administered by the enforcers of trickle-down austerity. Since, as we argued above, the poor no longer are held to exist as a class, it is easier to hate them as individuals. They are the detritus of the market. Those wretched souls subsist at our munificence, it is hinted; therefore it is the indigent who owe us, it is implied; hence we qualify as the righteous and willing audience at the theater of cruelty. Through this guilty pleasure, people of modest means are ushered into the vicarious experience of what it feels like to be extravagantly rich in an era of decline. For a brief moment, the working class can empathize with the imperious creditor, even though they lack the assets to maintain the charade. In a sense, one might approach this phenomenon as an elaboration of Thorstein Veblen’s basic insight in his Theory of the Leisure Class: “An invidious comparison is a process of valuation of persons in respect to worth.”68 The theater of cruelty becomes an emporium of conspicuous consumption.

  But beyond a little virtual reality, the normalization of everyday sadism fulfills deeper functions as well. The “double truths” of neoliberalism outlined in the last chapter cannot be permanently confined within the ambit of the NTC, but tend to leak out as barely repressed contradictions in quotidian life—between populism and plutarchy, between freedom and control, between smug ignorance and fervent conviction, between Christian theology and norms of efficiency, between kosmos and taxis, between the enjoyment of pleasure and the deployment of pain. These contradictions could not be confronted directly by the larger populace without fomenting utter disenchantment with the promises of neoliberal order. To get around the cognitive dissonance, cultural outlets square the circle by staging little neoliberal allegories in the public sphere, directing anger away from intractable predicaments in the political sphere and toward the victims. As one analyst put it, every system of cruelty requires its own theater.69

  In the neoliberal theater of cruelty, one torments the poor or indigent precisely because they are prostrate. Everyday sadism of this sort is enshrined in every crisis-porn news story that dupes the victims into “sharing their feelings” over their eviction notices and job losses; it reared its head when the Nebraska attorney general un-­self-consciously compared recipients of unemployment benefit with “scavenging raccoons”;70 it is there in the ridiculous obligatory “upbeat” ending to every failure narrative so as not to unduly derange our complacent spectatorship. It is rampant in every suggestion that relief offered by religious charities (accompanied by the obligatory sectarian message) renders the predicament of the downtrodden and disenfranchised bearable. It underpins the argument that the poor must of necessity bear the brunt of austerity now, because it will only get worse for them later if they do not.71 As a political ploy, right-wing think tanks began their counteroffensive against a rising chorus pleading taxation of the rich in 2011 by disingenuously twisting the evocative rhetoric of “equality” in pointing out (in a fit of indignation) that a large proportion of the poor do not “pay their share” of income taxes (viz., none at all) and thus lacked “skin in the game”; this echo chamber of contempt ricocheting throughout the news media was so extravagantly over the top that it became the target of satire on many of the usual cable outlets, such as Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert.72

  In the current climate, it seems there is almost nothing you could do to the poor that would earn you opprobrium and ostracism from polite company, (maybe) short of sexual molestation of children. Prior to the 1980s, the practice of “salary purchase,” aka “payday loans,” had been outlawed; but a concerted effort beginning at the state level progressively legalized this particular form of predatory lending. As of 2008, there were more payday lender outlets in the United States than there were McDonald’s and Burger King restaurants combined, with turnover that dwarfed casinos, the other major poverty vampire operation.73 What is astounding about such operations is that they are no longer treated as reviled bottom-feeders by both the media and politicians, but rather as exemplary of the types of legitimate businesses that provide opportunity and salvation in the current contraction. Given the vast hollowing out of the income distribution, it makes sense that the working poor constituted one of the only substantial customer segments that left any room for expansion:

  Jared Davis [CEO of Check ’n Go] . . . pulls in around $20 million a year making loans of $300 or $400 or $500 a year to the working poor but he had brought his brother into the business and it was his father’s money that had gotten him started. “I don’t consider myself wealthy,” he tells me . . . There were photos around his office of him shaking hands with George W. Bush and John McCain and behind his desk hung stylish black-and-whites of his young children blown up so large that they were distracting. I watched the YouTube videos made by former Davis employees who felt horrible about how they made their money (“I resigned because I could no longer stomach the lies, and I could no longer continue exploiting customers, making hard lives even harder,” one said), I had spent the better part of a day with a former store manager who had saved some of the crass directives she had received from management (lend “to anyone getting social security,” one read, even if a customer only had “one dime to their name”). I only got to spend two hours with him before I was shown the door—barely enough time to even get into the lawsuit his father has filed against his two sons charging them with bilking him out of money . .
. A district director who used to work for him called a press conference a few years back to talk about the company’s methods for choosing new store locations. “I have been responsible for selecting sites for new stores in D.C. and northern Virginia,” he said—and to those who claim the company doesn’t target minority communities, “I can tell you emphatically that it does.”74

  The mantra “your debt is not my problem” has permitted other bottom-feeding organizations like personal debt collection agencies to revive the once-banned practice of debtor prisons.75 As people fall behind in their debts and are often unaware of being subject to lawsuits, any arrest whatsoever now can trigger jail time, often for sums as small as five hundred dollars. Hundreds of fly-by-night firms scoured databases to find those falling behind in their mortgages, and hired offshore phone banks to endlessly call and promise false hope, only to swindle them with false stories of help with principal reductions, stealing from them fees they could ill afford. Yet no major media outlet has mustered even a scintilla of outrage for what is, at bottom, cheap illegal ways to harass and torture debtors.

  How has this theater of cruelty been made to seem so unexceptional?

  Martijn Konings has pointed out that the dark underbelly of the bright shiny neoliberal self is the daily spectacle of the public put-down.76 Not only must the truly entrepreneurial life embrace the risk and insecurity of a constantly revised self tossed hither and yon by market forces beyond our ken; the fundamental narcissism encouraged by neoliberalism demands that we participate in an active externalization of the experience of insecurity and vulnerability to revaluation. The complement to a culture of celebrity has become therefore the unabashed theater of cruelty, the public spaces where we gaze upon the half-speed car wrecks of the lives of others in the throes of failure, Nascar for the politically challenged. In one sense, this programming of everyday sadism explicitly aimed at the poor and distressed is so ubiquitous that one need hardly recite the titles: The Jerry Springer Show, Dr. Phil, The Apprentice, Shattered, Unbreakable, Big Brother, Hell’s Kitchen, Survivor, American Idol—it is hardly worth the minor effort that it takes to disparage it. A moment’s reflection reveals it is pervasive in American culture. Unremarkable people, desperate for some sort of acknowledgment and validation, yearning for some promise of escape from the stale and commonplace, offer themselves up on the altar of abject humiliation to an audience of millions; smarmy celebrities berate them to their face; and the spectacles proliferate because they are cheaper for the networks to program than either scripted fiction or news. In many instances, the audience is even encouraged to pay to “vote” for those to ostracize and banish—a clear simulacrum of the neoliberal marketplace. Game shows used to reflexively reward the poor; now pay-to-play reality TV crushes them. Computer gaming used to be about triumphs of virtuosity; now, as in Grand Theft Auto, it is all about debasement of the losers. Rather than engage in the kabuki of high dudgeon, it might be worthwhile to meditate briefly on the possibility that this genre is indicative of some relatively new lifestyle under everyday neoliberalism.

  One rather common approach is to describe this theater of cruelty as essentially a ruse: it diverts attention from the real forces at work in the impoverishment of people, set in train by the three decades or more of increasing inequality and wage stagnation in the West. This might be construed as a somewhat kindred version of the “bait and switch” argument of Tom Frank, only now with the theater of cruelty as stand-in for the culture and religious themes he identified as weapons of mass distraction. This appears to be the position taken by Konings:

  The culture of self-help that is so crucial to neoliberal governmentality involves a dialectic of continuous affirmation and rejection, seduction and denial . . . Neoliberal governmentality involves the creation of chains of disciplinary pressures, networks composed of acts of everyday sadism and expressions of judgment that serve to distract us from the resentment provoked by our submission to authority structures we do not fully understand and experience as oppressive and constraining. This re-direction of our anger and discontent serves to . . . contort our notions of self-realization and responsible living in such a way that we end up ascribing a spiritual dimension to balancing the household budget.77

  Just as in the case of Frank, while this may sound plausible on its face, it too readily partitions the landscape into a self-regulating economy as separate from hierarchical structures and cultural epiphenomena that putatively merely surround it. The spectacle of shaming is not merely a lightning rod for burning resentment; nor is it just an inconsequential occasion for rubbernecking by people with truncated attention spans; it is also a technology for recasting economy and society. After all, what is the vast industry of “job retraining” than a government-subsidized walk of shame? The economy and the theater of cruelty have been merged into a vertically integrated conglomerate. It is a parable of the droves and the wishes. It can be deployed in a myriad of ways under a variety of circumstances; the question here is whether there is some special common denominator in the ways it has been used in a didactic sense in the last three decades. Shock jock or shock doctrine, it cannot be written off as merely a surefire expedient to divert attention. To paint it prematurely as cynical sideshow forecloses the option that everyday sadism is not just some facile prestidigitation of the hand invisible, but serves other more targeted purposes, such as teaching techniques optimized to fortify the neoliberal self.

  I expect many readers will immediately object: stylized sadism as extravaganza is nothing new, and therefore (it will be said) bears no necessary relationship to neoliberalism. Spectacles of cruelty are literally timeless. Of course, much art aestheticizes violence, as does much politics; but this line of argument tends to deflect the inquiry into areas irrelevant to neoliberalism. Perhaps the reflex dismissal of anything distinctive about the modern theater of cruelty seeks to appeal to putative distinctions between high and low culture: low-culture violence tends toward the literal, whereas high-culture violence is symbolic or allegorical, and thus subject to critical interpretation. Greek tragedy linked sadism and fate, but attempted to draw lessons from it concerning the defects of the virtues. Likewise, the highly stylized middlebrow theater and film of Lars von Trier and Neil La Bute are notorious for their fascination with evil as an abstract category, and debasement as a form of salvation, but that also ends up being beside the point. None of these constitute bona fide instances of the neoliberal theater of cruelty. Moreover, we are not talking about satire here (interestingly, mostly a non-American phenomenon, such as How to Get Rid of the Others or Un Mundo Maravilloso). Everyday sadism within the theater of cruelty in the neoliberal era has been crafted into a much more finely tuned and precisely targeted instrument, providing a necessary counterbalance to the proleptic upbeat stress on the magic of self-fashioning transformation. It is not so much that explicit portrayals of violence or aggression need to be paraded (although the entertainment values cannot be discounted), as it is that pageants of the ostracized appear to accept the dictates of the market as final, and also in the audience coming to appreciate that it is legitimate for themselves and others to take advantage of those who fail.

  The modern neoliberal theater of cruelty does not seek to plumb any deep pathologies of the human psyche, precisely because it does not endorse any solid notion of an invariant persistent self. Typically, it is uninterested in depth characterization of personality, dealing instead with the most superficial stereotypes. In this way, it departs from the anatomy of shaming inscribed in most self-conscious art. Pace the acolytes of Adam Smith, neither is it concerned with interpersonal empathy, nor evocation of the impartial spectator; it is unconcerned about any glue to bind society together. To recapitulate Nietzsche, it deals in the pleasure derived from gazing upon those reduced to helplessness by their overwhelming pecuniary obligations or failure in their quest to fashion a pleasing persona. The allure of the neoliberal theater of cruelty derives from the essential distancing of the audience fr
om the spectacle: becoming complicit with the cruelty merely by being willing spectators, deriving pleasure from the wretchedness of the scapegoat; throughout the experience, the actual onus for the pain is inevitably diverted onto faceless collectives—this is the simulacrum of capitulation to the wisdom of the market. Furthermore, the audience is guaranteed to shed any residual guilt they might feel in their enjoyment at the distress of the unsuccessful and the destitute through reification of the invisible fourth wall; the lesson reiterated is that it is fine for the audience to bear witness to distress, because the mark entered the arena “voluntarily,” and the verdict was delivered through the “wisdom of crowds,” and in the last instance, there is money to be made and gratification to be experienced at the expense of the loser. Their shame in abject failure becomes a fungible commodity, albeit one of the least rare commodities on the planet. Defeat is not stoic nobility planted on this stage; it is instead the human compost of conspicuous destitution, the fertilizer of economic growth. Losers must learn to let their defeat be turned by others into something that will, at minimum, make money for third parties. Soylent Green is people!