Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

Thymos is the part of the soul that craves recognition of dignity; isothymia is the demand to be respected on an equal basis with other people; while megalothymia is the desire to be recognized as superior.

These wealthy, secure societies are the domain of Nietzsche’s Last Man, “men without chests” who spend their lives in the endless pursuit of consumer satisfaction, but who have nothing at their core, no higher goals or ideals for which they are willing to strive and sacrifice.

I actually mentioned Donald Trump in The End of History as an example of a fantastically ambitious individual whose desire for recognition had been safely channeled into a business (and later an entertainment) career. Little did I suspect back then that, twenty-five years on, he would not be satisfied with business success and celebrity, but would go into politics and get elected president.

So maybe market society does not satisfy megolothymia

To propel themselves forward, such figures latched onto the resentments of ordinary people who felt that their nation or religion or way of life was being disrespected. Megalothymia and isothymia thus joined hands.

Demand for recognition of one’s identity is a master concept that unifies much of what is going on in world politics today.

The period from the early 1970s through the mid-2000s witnessed what Samuel Huntington labeled the “third wave” of democratization as the number of countries that could be classified as electoral democracies increased from about 35 to more than 110.

Between 1970 and 2008, the world’s output of goods and services quadrupled and growth extended to virtually all regions of the world, while the number of people living in extreme poverty in developing countries dropped from 42 percent of the total population in 1993 to 17 percent in 2011. The percentage of children dying before their fifth birthdays declined from 22 percent in 1960 to less than 5 percent by 2016.2

Globalization

Beginning in the mid-2000s, the momentum toward an increasingly open and liberal world order began to falter, then went into reverse. This shift coincided with two financial crises, the first originating in the U.S. subprime market in 2008 that led to the subsequent Great Recession, and the second emerging over the threat to the euro and the European Union posed by Greece’s insolvency.

The democracy scholar Larry Diamond has characterized the years after the crises as ones of a “democratic recession,” in which the aggregate number of democracies fell from their peak in virtually all regions of the world.4 A number of authoritarian countries, led by China and Russia,

A number of countries that had seemed to be successful liberal democracies during the 1990s slid backward toward more authoritarian government, including Hungary, Turkey, Thailand, and Poland.

Authoritarian trend world wide

Twentieth-century politics had been organized along a left–right spectrum defined by economic issues, the left wanting more equality and the right demanding greater freedom. Progressive politics centered around workers, their trade unions, and social democratic parties that sought better social protections and economic redistribution. The right by contrast was primarily interested in reducing the size of government and promoting the private sector.

The left has focused less on broad economic equality and more on promoting the interests of a wide variety of groups perceived as being marginalized—blacks, immigrants, women, Hispanics, the LGBT community, refugees, and the like. The right, meanwhile, is redefining itself as patriots who seek to protect traditional national identity, an identity that is often explicitly connected to race, ethnicity, or religion.

Identetarians

Between 2000 and 2016, half of Americans saw no gains to their real incomes; the proportion of national output going to the top 1 percent went from 9 percent of GDP in 1974 to 24 percent in 2008.5

In a wide variety of cases, a political leader has mobilized followers around the perception that the group’s dignity had been affronted, disparaged, or otherwise disregarded. This resentment engenders demands for public recognition of the dignity of the group in question. A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more emotional weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage.

Russian president Vladimir Putin has talked about the tragedy of the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and how Europe and the United States had taken advantage of Russia’s weakness during the 1990s to drive NATO up to its borders. He despises the attitude of moral superiority of Western politicians and wants to see Russia treated not, as President Obama once said, as a weak regional player, but as a great power. Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian prime minister, stated in 2017 that his return to power in 2010 marked the point when “we Hungarians also decided that we wanted to regain our country, we wanted to regain our self-esteem, and we wanted to regain our future.”6 The Chinese government of Xi Jinping has talked at length about China’s “one hundred years of humiliation,” and how the United States, Japan, and other countries were trying to prevent its return to the great power status it had enjoyed through the past millennia of history. When the founder of al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, was fourteen, his mother found him fixated on Palestine, “tears streaming down his face as he watched TV from their home in Saudi Arabia.”

Make____Great Again.

The practitioners of the politics of resentment recognize one another.

Finally, the inner sense of dignity seeks recognition. It is not enough that I have a sense of my own worth if other people do not publicly acknowledge it or, worse yet, if they denigrate me or don’t acknowledge my existence. Self-esteem arises out of esteem by others. Because human beings naturally crave recognition, the modern sense of identity evolves quickly into identity politics, in which individuals demand public recognition of their worth.

from nationalism and Islamism to the politics on contemporary American university campuses. Indeed, the philosopher Hegel argued that the struggle for recognition was the ultimate driver of human history, a force that was key to understanding the emergence of the modern world.

Modern economics is based on one such theory, which is that human beings are “rational utility maximizers”: they are individuals who use their formidable cognitive abilities to benefit their self-interest.

Dogma that is demonstrably not true. People are not rational agents capable of determining even their own self interest accurately in most cases

To say that Mother Teresa and a Wall Street hedge fund manager are both maximizing their utility misses something important about their motivations.

In Communist China, agricultural productivity on collective farms was low because peasants were not allowed to keep any surplus they produced; they would shirk rather than work hard. A saying in the former Communist world was that “they pretend to pay us and we pretend to work.” When incentives were changed in the late 1970s to allow peasants to keep their surplus, agricultural output doubled within four years. One of the causes of the 2008 financial crisis was that investment bankers were rewarded for short-term profits and were not punished when their risky investments blew up a few years later. Fixing the problem would require changing those incentives.

Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky have attacked the model’s underlying assumptions by showing that people are not rational in practice,

They are right

Desire and reason are component parts of the human psyche (soul), but a third part, thymos, acts completely independently of the first two. Thymos is the seat of judgments of worth:

they receive that positive judgment, they feel pride, and if they do not receive it, they feel either anger (when they think they are being undervalued) or shame (when they realize that they have not lived up to other people’s standards).

This third part of the soul, thymos, is the seat of today’s identity politics.

Contemporary identity politics is driven by the quest for equal recognition by groups that have been marginalized by their societies. But that desire for equal recognition can easily slide over into a demand for recognition of the group’s superiority. This is a large part of the story of nationalism and national identity, as well as certain forms of extremist religious politics today.

Isothymia demands that we recognize the basic equal worth of our fellow human beings. In democratic societies we assert, with the American Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” Yet historically, we have disagreed on who qualifies as “all men.” At the time that the declaration was signed, this circle did not include white men without property, black slaves, indigenous Americans, or women. Moreover, since human beings are so obviously varied in their talents and capacities, we need to understand in what sense we are willing to recognize them as equal for political purposes.

The Declaration of Independence says this is “self-evident,” without giving us much guidance on how we are to understand equality.

According to Rousseau, human unhappiness begins with the discovery of society.

The ability to compare, and to evaluate, other human beings was the fountainhead of human unhappiness:

Rousseau denounces the shift from amour de soi (love of self) to amour propre (self-love or vanity); simple self-interest is transmuted into feelings of pride and the desire for social recognition.

The first person who, having enclosed some land, took it upon himself to say “This is mine,” and found people simple-minded enough to believe him, was the true founder of civil society … How many crimes, wars, murders, miseries and horrors, would that man have saved the human species, who pulling up the stakes or filling up the ditches should have cried to his fellows: Don’t listen to this imposter; you are lost, if you forget that the fruits of the earth belong equally to us all, and the earth to nobody!

Like Luther, Rousseau establishes a sharp distinction between the inner self and the outer society demanding conformity to its rules.

According to Charles Taylor, “This is part of the massive subjective turn of modern culture, a new form of inwardness, in which we come to think of ourselves as beings with inner depths.”

Rousseau’s secularization of the inner self, and the priority he gives it over social convention, is thus a critical stepping-stone to the modern idea of identity.

But Rousseau was wrong about some important things, beginning with his assertion that early humans were primordially individualistic.

We know he was wrong, first because we see no archaeological or anthropological evidence of presocial human beings, and second because we know with high confidence that the primate ancestors of modern human beings were themselves highly social.

Equality in a modern liberal democracy has always meant something more like an equality of freedom. This means both an equal negative freedom from abusive government power and an equal positive freedom to participate in self-government and economic exchange.

Unlike traditional moralists Nietzsche celebrated this fact because it enormously expanded the scope for human autonomy: human beings were free not just to accept the moral law, per Luther and Kant, but to create that law for themselves.

Christian morality wears many different clothes today, secular humanists & new atheists etc...

Modern liberal societies are heirs to the moral confusion left by the disappearance of a shared religious horizon.

Good and Evil to the assertion by U.S. Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy, in the 1992 decision Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that liberty is “the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”

The other problem with this expansive understanding of individual autonomy is that not everyone is a Nietzschean superman seeking to revalue all values. Human beings are intensely social creatures whose emotional inclinations drive them to want to conform to the norms surrounding them. When a stable, shared moral horizon disappears and is replaced by a cacophony of competing value systems, the vast majority of people do not rejoice at their newfound freedom of choice. Rather, they feel an intense insecurity and alienation because they do not know who their true self is. This crisis of identity leads in the opposite direction from expressive individualism, to the search for a common identity that will rebind the individual to a social group and reestablish a clear moral horizon. This psychological fact lays the groundwork for nationalism.

Both nationalism and Islamism—that is, political Islam—can be seen as two sides of the same coin. Both are expressions of a hidden or suppressed group identity that seeks public recognition.

Well before the rise of Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, German writers were lamenting the loss of Gemeinschaft and what they saw as the perversions of a cosmopolitan liberal society.

He spoke to the anxieties of people making the transition from agrarian village society to modern, urban industrial life, a transition that for millions of Europeans experiencing it pushed the question of identity to the forefront. This was the moment in which the personal became the political.

Uniting scattered Germans under a single Reich would become a political project over the next three generations undertaken by leaders from Bismarck to Hitler.

Hardly a single region of the world has not seen the rise of a new class of oligarchs—billionaires who use their wealth politically to protect their family interests.

Consider that the next time you give money to a homeless person, but fail to make eye contact with him or her: you are relieving the material want, but failing to acknowledge the shared humanity between the beggar and you.

Something I would never do. Always look in the eye, sometimes give money, but everyone gets the same cold stare from me.

One compares oneself not globally to some absolute standard of wealth, but relative to a local group that one deals with socially.

Pinker in Enlightenment Now, status anxiety is driven by relative status. American populists are concerned about their feelings of status, not weighing their position as part of the global elite in terms of material wealth, which they are, as they rail on "elites" from their smartphones, bc they so deprived.

A further psychological fact suggests that certain things in contemporary politics are related more to status than to resources.