Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment

by Francis Fukuyama

vetocracy—the ability of interest groups to block collective action.

With regard to character, it was hard to imagine an individual less suited to be president of the United States. The virtues that one associates with great leadership—basic honesty, reliability, sound judgment, devotion to public interest, and an underlying moral compass—were totally missing.

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.

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

According to Hegel, human history was driven by a struggle for recognition.

The rise of identity politics in modern liberal democracies is one of the chief threats that they face, and unless we can work our way back to more universal understandings of human dignity, we will doom ourselves to continuing conflict.

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

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.

This might be called the politics of resentment. 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.

A humiliated group seeking restitution of its dignity carries far more emotional weight than people simply pursuing their economic advantage.

Resentment at indignities was a powerful force in democratic countries as well.

In all cases a group, whether a great power such as Russia or China or voters in the United States or Britain, believes that it has an identity that is not being given adequate recognition—either by the outside world, in the case of a nation, or by other members of the same society.

Identity grows, in the first place, out of a distinction between one’s true inner self and an outer world of social rules and norms that does not adequately recognize that inner self’s worth or dignity.

It is not the inner self that has to be made to conform to society’s rules, but society itself that needs to change.

Finally, the inner sense of dignity seeks recognition.

Self-esteem arises out of esteem by others.

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.

Indeed, much of what we understand to be economic motivation actually reflects not a straightforward desire for wealth and resources, but the fact that money is perceived to be a marker of status and buys respect.

No one contests that human beings are capable of rational behavior, or that they are self-interested individuals who seek greater wealth and resources.

theory of the human soul.

Many practical people scorn theories and theorizing, but they act all the time upon unarticulated theories that they simply fail to acknowledge.

When incentives were changed in the late 1970s to allow peasants to keep their surplus, agricultural output doubled within four years.

The state of nature is, however, just a metaphor for human nature; that is, the most basic characteristics of human beings that exist independently of one’s particular society or culture.

“Isn’t there something in their soul bidding them to drink and something forbidding them to do so, something different that masters that which bids?”

And in many other places, don’t we … notice that, when desire forces someone contrary to the calculating part, he reproaches himself and his spirit is roused against that in him which is doing the forcing; and, just as though there were two parties at faction, such a man’s spirit becomes the ally of speech?

More than two millennia before its advent, Socrates and Adeimantus understood something unrecognized by modern economics. Desire and reason are component parts of the human psyche (soul), but a third part, thymos, acts completely independently of the first two.

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

However, many of those economic issues could have been and were in many cases resolved through new rules about property in civil unions. But a civil union would have had lower status than a marriage: society would be saying that gay people could be together legally, but their bond would be different from that between a man and a woman. This outcome was unacceptable to millions of people who wanted their political systems to explicitly recognize the equal dignity of gays and lesbians; the ability to marry was just a marker of that equal dignity.

The emotions expended over gay marriage had much more to do with assertions about dignity than they did with economics.

Aristocrats thought of themselves as better than other people and possessed what we may call megalothymia, the desire to be recognized as superior.

We can easily resent people who are recognized for the wrong things, such as exhibitionist socialites or reality-show stars who are no better than us.

So an equally powerful human drive is to be seen as “just as good” as everyone else, something we may label “isothymia.

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.

further problem with isothymia is that certain human activities will inevitably entail greater respect than others. To deny this is to deny the possibility of human excellences.

Recognition of everyone’s equal worth means a failure to recognize the worth of people who are actually superior in some sense.

So while the concept of identity is rooted in thymos, it emerged only in modern times when it was combined with a notion of an inner and an outer self, and the radical view that the inner self was more valuable than the outer one.

Individuals come to believe that they have a true or authentic identity hiding within themselves that is somehow at odds with the role they are assigned by their surrounding society.

Luther was one of the first Western thinkers to articulate and valorize the inner self over the external social being.

Faith alone can rule only in the inner man, as Romans 10[:10] says, “For man believes with his heart and so is justified,” and since faith alone justifies, it is clear that the inner man cannot be justified, freed, or saved by any outer work or action at all, and that these works, whatever their character, have nothing to do with this inner man.2

Luther himself would not be the teenager brought back to obedience by society; rather, society itself would have to adjust to the demands of the inner person.

Material conditions obviously shape people’s receptivity to certain ideas. But ideas have their own inner logic, and without the cognitive framing they provide, people will interpret their material conditions differently.

Yet Martin Luther stands far from more modern understandings of identity. He celebrated the freedom of the inner self, but that self had only one dimension: faith, and the acceptance of God’s grace. It was a binary choice: one was free to choose God, or not. One could not choose to be a Hindu or a Buddhist or decide that one’s true identity lay in coming out of the closet as gay or lesbian. Luther was not facing a “crisis of meaning,” something that would have been incomprehensible to him; while he rejected the Universal Church, he accepted completely the underlying truth of Christianity.3

In his Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, Rousseau argued that the first human being—man in the state of nature—was not sinful.

The ability to compare, and to evaluate, other human beings was the fountainhead of human unhappiness: “Men no sooner began to set a value upon each other, and know what esteem was, than each laid claim to it, and it was no longer safe for any man to refuse it to another.”

Rousseau says that private property emerged with the discovery of metallurgy and agriculture; while making humans incomparably richer, the ability to accumulate property also vastly exaggerated natural differences between individuals and raised jealousy, envy, pride, and shame to new heights.

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!

Rousseau’s sentiment of existence would one day morph into what is now called lived experience, which lies at the root of contemporary identity politics.

He disputes the assertion of Thomas Hobbes that man in the state of nature was violent, cruel, and selfish; Rousseau also disagrees with John Locke that private property was natural to early man.

He would also disagree with Socrates and Adeimantus that thymos was a constituent part of the human soul, since Rousseau asserts clearly that the emotion of pride, and hence the desire to be recognized by other people, did not exist

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