The Free Market of Desire

Hello! ;) I’m an exceptionally beautiful sporty cat with f cup real breasts and gorgeous body.. I’m looking for 100 % fun to my life, without commitments. I’m busy and I won’t even bother to maintain friendship with the man I’m looking for. The arrangement I’m looking for is sex, when I want it… I’m really insatiable when it comes to sex, actually one could say that I’m a nymphomaniac… I want sex all the time and I enjoy when the man enjoys. [...] My appearance turns heads wherever I go and I have pictures that I’ll naturally show you before we meet, so you will not be disappointed… ;)

The guy I’m looking for is really handsome, not just in his own opinion but also according to many women… I’m pleased by so called “pretty boys”… Your appearance has to be on the level of a model… I hope that you are muscular, but a normal body will do… You also have to be well equipped… I have where to choose from and I don’t want to be with everybody, so I’m only looking for the best. ;)

As the contemporary society distances human beings from their own thoughts and needs, it becomes more typical to interpret basic needs of love and appreciation as a need for sexual pleasure. This creates a “free market of desire” in the society: people upload pictures to advertise themselves in online services and social media to fulfill their need for physical intimacy and social acceptance. The sexual imagery that emerges helps to feed the imagination of less social people who have difficulties in finding partners.

Sexualization of everyday life is the act of breaking free from the traditional restraints that used to control the appearance and sexual behavior, but it also symbolizes diminished social power, or even complete disinterest in traditional social frameworks. In this process good looks and sex becomes a commodity among smartphones and plasma tv’s.

This affects traditional relationships as well, as sex becomes a tool of exchange; “If you behave well, I will reward you tonight.”

On Recuperation

All human behavior needs to be incorporated to the existing social structure on some time frame. Large-scale societies increasingly struggle with how deviant behavior and discourses can be effectively labelled. In the current bureaucratic framework criminalization is the most fundamental tool of this process; however, as the multitude of conflicting discourses have exploded, behavior such as copyright infringement has become very difficult to label sustainably as criminal.

In the context of more regular discourses such as politics and art this process can be described as recuperation in the spirit of Guy Debord:

Recuperation, in the sociological sense, is the process by which politically radical ideas and images are commodified and incorporated within a mainstream society and, thus, become interpreted through a more socially acceptable or conventional perspective. More broadly, it may refer to the appropriation of any subversive works or ideas by mainstream media or culture.

In art this takeover process takes place in music and theater reviews. Imagine a blues singer who sings about everyday racism as a black man. When the singer’s new album is released, it has to be incorporated to the existing interpretative frameworks. If the idea that “singing about racism is banal” is currently dominant, the album gets labeled “another boring lament, haven’t we all heard this before?”. On the other hand, if a theater piece describes life in the Soviet Union, it is labeled “glorifying history” if the current trend in the society in question is to reject historical review or contemplation. Studying book and art reviews and even newspaper columns can reveal much about the prevailing cultural atmosphere, as they are often the main tool of recuperation in the society of the late modernity.

Everything that is said and done needs to be integrated to the existing social order and understanding.

In politics (in the framework of social bureaucracy) recuperation occurs in using word labels that have the power to categorize, make harmless, create divide and boost our party against the other. Americans probably recall the incorporation of the Occupy Wall Street movement to the mainstream discourses in fall 2011 and labeling the movement as leftist, close to the Democratic party and “the tea party movement of the left” – trying to forcefully impose negative image was an essential part of the takeover process.

The cover of New York Post on November 3, 2011. The camp was removed on November 15.

Imagine this from another perspective. What kind of effect does it have, for example, that Jon Stewart of the Daily Show is described as a comedian rather than “sharp-sighted social critic”? What happens in the society when the text of Greg Smith, the former Goldman Sachs employee, is described like this: “Did it come to anyone as surprise that banks focus on making money?”

When you read those last two sentences, did you feel insisting that Stewart is just a comedian or Smith’s accusations “didn’t surprise anyone”? If so, then you saw recuperation at work: everything that is said and done needs to be integrated to the existing social order and understanding. The bigger the situation is (and thus, the greater the threat), the more aggressive framing is needed.

Peer-to-Peer Network as an Organization Model

I’m currently envisioning P2P as an organization model. As Wikipedia describes:

P2P is a specific form of relational dynamic, based on the assumed equipotency of its participants, organized through the free cooperation of equals in view of the performance of a common task, for the creation of a common good, with forms of decision-making and autonomy that are widely distributed throughout the network.

I’m thinking that this organization model could be efficient especially in solving environmental and economical problems. Also the coming community is irrevocably a peer-to-peer network.

Public Deliberation Model

This model approaches all public deliberation as a process between the individual and the collective. Both of them affect each other through language, and also reality affects them when information from observation and research reaches them.

When the deliberation has continued long enough, the collective reaches common understanding (“truth”) on “what should be done”, acts and alters reality.

While Habermas approaches this as some kind of “ideal situation”, it actually is how politics has always worked. The difference is that the relationship and emphasis between individual and collective has fluctuated, and today there is lots of information, research and communication. Also social structures (such as the economy) have gotten bigger and more complex.

Thinking of the Logic of Truth

1. In language and thought, there are two types of statements: statements of truth and statements of belief.

2. Statements of belief emerge into being-in-the-language from the state of consciousness in which an individual holds a proposition or premise to be true. The opposite is true for statements of disbelief.

3. Regular language only handles statements of belief. That is, also sentences like “that is true” refer to the harmony between the statement and the individual consciousness, and “that is false” refers to the conflict between them.

4. Statements of truth emerge from the state of consciousness being in accord with reality. This requires understanding that has been reached through a dialogic process, either with reality or with other people.

5. From these follows that statements of truth are true (in accord with reality) regardless of whether they are supported by statements of belief or attacked by statements of disbelief.

This brings me to the idea that is constantly repeating in my head:

P: If Q is true, then it must be true irrespective of whether it is believed to be true or false.

Let’s say someone attacked this with some kind of argument R that said:

R: P is false because Q can only be true when it is believed by everyone to be true. Truth is a social construction.

What R actually says is that truth doesn’t exist outside the social context. This is a valid point that doesn’t really contradict the original proposition but complements it. We should also be aware of the fact that this very debate takes place inside the social context, and we’re actually discussing the truth right here and now. Also, the statement doesn’t say anything about Q actually being true; there is the structure of if-then. This structure opens the way for the social process of dialogue that seeks to find the truth. However, such common understanding can only be found when participants actively seek cognitive harmony.

On Eternal Recurrence

Behold, we know what you teach: that all things recur eternally, and we ourselves too; and that we have already existed an eternal number of times, and all things with us. You teach that there is a great year of becoming, a monster of a great year; which must, like an hourglass, turn over again and again so that it may run down and run out again; and all these years are alike in what is greatest as in what is smallest; and we ourselves are alike in every great year, in what is greatest as in what is smallest.

Now I die and vanish… the soul is as immortal as the body. But the knot of causes in which I am entangled recurs and will create me again. I myself belong to the causes of eternal recurrence. I come again, with this sun, with this earth, with this eagle, with this serpent – not to a new life or a better life or a similar life: I come back eternally to this same, selfsame life, in what is greatest as in what is smallest, to teach again the eternal recurrence of all things…

Friedrich Nietzsche: Thus Spoke Zarathustra: a Book for Everyone and No-one.

So, perhaps the best argument for anything is:

You know what, you said that very same thing last time too!

Now I ask: Does this make you feel despair and powerlessness, or quite the opposite?

Why does power corrupt?

While power in a broader sense can be understood as information flowing in the society, this doesn’t quite fit with the traditional thought of “power corrupts” where power is more coercive than deliberative, and not based on public or scientific reasoning. It seems that when it comes to bureaucracies, there still is a place for Weber’s definition of power:

The chance that an individual in a social relationship can achieve his or her own will even against the resistance of others.

This definition includes more broken communication in the relationship compared to the information view. So what can be said about the corrupting influence of power based on this definition? To investigate the idea further, we have to define what we mean by corruption. Here is a working definition:

Corruption (n.) The act of changing, or of being changed, for the worse.

Claiming something to corrupt someone or to insist something is corrupted requires a definition of the desired state. However, what we typically mean by “power corrupts” in everyday discourses is not referring to any ideal state of non-corruption. Rather, it is reflecting the conflicting roles of everyday life and the formal bureaucratic position:

The notion “power corrupts” refers to the development where reaching a formal position of considerable influence in the social bureaucracy or an organization tends to alter individuals in a manner which makes them socially less likable and more inclined to behavior that outside the context of the bureaucracy is interpreted as asocial, arrogant and uncompassionate.

This transformation of the individual takes place because of the irreconcilable contradiction: everyday social life is typically self-organizing and leaderless (at least in egalitarian societies), and formal bureaucracy of leadership breaks this freedom by forcing power relations beyond the reasoning of the individual.¹

Power corrupts because we tend to judge bureaucratic relations with the same criteria that we use to evaluate everyday relations.

Bureaucracies also have functions that everyday organizations such as friendship or family do not have, such as production of economic value for shareholders or redistributing resources to poorer community members. These larger functions require power relations of coercive type, at least in the current historical phase.

So to sum up: power corrupts because we tend to judge bureaucratic relations with the same criteria that we use to evaluate everyday relations.² Self-organizing social life is fundamentally different from formal bureaucracy in that the latter is much more likely to use (insensitive) coercion to reach its goals. Such behavior in everyday life would inevitably result in social exclusion. This might be behind the general antipathy towards the state, the police or the management: they all use techniques of social control that we would never allow in our everyday relationships.

***

Here’s two other brilliant points from another viewpoint, made by Ivan Evstropov here. Here he’s responding to the claim that corruption takes place because “people are selfish, egotistical creatures by nature”:

How can we defy nature of human beings? For example if a boy was to grow up with a pack of wolves, wouldn’t his nature be the same as of a wolf – therefore, if a boy was to grow up in a pack of civilized humans who are looking to benefit the world for its greater good, wouldn’t that boy grow up to be just like them? I guess what I am trying to say is, isn’t our nature simply the factor of what we learn at a young age?

In another reply he writes:

The reason that power corrupts is [...] because the people that come to have great power are corrupt individuals and not because they are corrupt by nature.

This leads us to a sociological synthesis of nature versus nurture: the social, historical and organizational contexts that are typically referred to as “nurture” are constantly flowing and evolving, rather than being any fixed entities, and alter our “nature”. Human nature as a social construction – that is, the picture of “how people generally behave” – changes all the time and varies between societies, organizations and even families. “Nurturing” takes place in schools, workplaces and organizations for the whole lifetime; To describe something to be “fixed” in human nature only reflects the speaker’s consciousness, as he seeks to justify current social structures and practices.

• ¹Note that this description doesn’t include value judgments: reconciling freedom is increasingly difficult when the size of the community grows, as more pressure is put on effective communication.
• ²Again, this notion includes no hidden value preference. It may be so that they should be judged by the same standards (meaning leaders should show compassion and devotion), but this requires a paradigm shift in how bureaucracies are approached and how power relations are organized in them.

“I am holy, look at me”

In the core of holiness is the feeling of awe – this feeling both creates and reinforces the social structure.

When it comes to “manufacturing” holiness, religion is not that different from politics. While religion builds holiness on relics and tall buildings, politics trusts in black suits and bodyguards with a serious face.

The secular society concentrates its holiness in commodities and consuming. Can you think of anything more convenient than holiness that can be bought?

Is it time for sociology of psychiatry?

The contemporary culture is deeply in love with separation and labeling. Psychology studies the “personalities” of individuals so rigorously that it forgets that the concept of personality itself is a social construction – the inevitable product of a self-conscious mind that seeks to explain to itself and others why the person acts like he acts. The modern psychiatry studies and labels mental disorders so effectively that virtually everyone can be nowadays labeled as narcissist, antisocial or passive-aggressive.

Medicine is an agency of social control because it is concerned with identifying and regulating illness – an important form of social deviance.

In a way psychiatry itself has become manic with its goal to separate individuals from their social context and pathologize all behavior under some description of illness. The ubiquitous mental disorder discourses makes it easy for confused individuals to attach their personalities to any disorder.

Armstrong (1988) writes on the sociology of psychiatry (backup here):

Whereas sociology in psychiatry accepts the legitimacy and validity of what psychiatry is trying to do, the sociology of psychiatry wishes to examine and challenge precisely those assumptions. It is therefore inherently more critical, and has been accordingly less acceptable to many psychiatrists. Yet while certain elements of a sociology of psychiatry fit into an ‘anti-psychiatry’ framework, it is not necessarily part of that broad alliance. Three related strands can be identified.

Labelling
In his second book, The rules of sociological method, Durkheim outlined a celebrated account of criminal behaviour. Crime is always treated as socially pathological and yet exists in all societies: therefore surely it should be regarded as a normal phenomenon. What is more, the identification and punishment of criminals has an important effect on the rest of society, purging it of guilt for the criminal act and defining the limits of social behaviour, thereby reinforcing a sense of solidarity and integrity to the social order. [...]

Social control
Psychiatrists have baulked at the sociologists’ suggestion that they are agents of social control, perhaps because of the element of coercion implied. Psychiatrists do have coercive powers, but use them only rarely; most of their work, they would claim, is therapeutic and not concerned with ‘controlling’ anyone.

What then does social control mean? First, the Durkheimian position on social control would be based on the concept of anomie, on the possibility of a failure in social regulation. If the goals and morality of the society do not pervade everyday life, then normlessness and consequent loss of direction and purpose will be the result. Various mechanisms and institutions therefore are required to regulate the core beliefs and values of the individual members of a society. Within this framework, medicine is an agency of social control because it is concerned with identifying and regulating illness – an important form of social deviance.

Psychiatry fits very well into this model of social control. As part of medicine it identifies sickness and processes it such that it no longer poses a threat to social order, nor leaves the sufferers on the deviant margins of society. But in addition, because of its
concern with mental functioning, it is even more directly concerned with the regulation of beliefs and values. From this perspective psychiatry can be seen as a beneficent social control agency of modern society. [...]

Social constructionism
Durkheim’s final major work, Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, argued that the categories of human thought have their origins and patterning in social life. Extended to medicine, this position holds that there are no diseases existing in nature (either organic or psychiatric), they only exist as artefacts of human classifications. Thus Sedgewick has pointed out that a fungus on wheat is a disease because it harms the wheat; but if we wished to cultivate the fungus rather than the wheat the ‘disease’ would disappear. In similar fashion, all human disease categories reflect some aspect of social expectation of how the body should perform and new diseases may therefore reflect new social conventions, such as the appearance of dyslexia, in literate societies or the disappearance of homosexuality in sexually tolerant ones.

On Leadership

I have seen many types of leadership in my education and working career. The bosses have been authoritative, non-authoritative, on moral high and low ground, enabling development, sometimes overly controlling on all work activity, passive in communication, creative, resorting to management-by-rumors. I think I already have some authority to wonder the question: What makes a good leader?

Leaders are always “made” by the social world.

No matter how the bad leaders want to convince you on the contrary, there are universal traits of good leadership that aren’t just a matter of opinion; I believe everyone can recognize the positive traits in the list above. The difficulty of leadership, however, is that it cannot be learned only by reading books or articles about how to be a good boss. (On the other hand, if the leader refuses to read books about leadership because “it is not learned by reading but by doing”, she is on thin ice. Neglecting feedback or proposals for development is a character of bad leadership.)

Depending only on opinions is a trait of a bad leader, if the leader has no skill to logically process them or ask what has caused those thoughts to emerge. This is the basic problem with representative democracy: it turns leadership into a show that seeks to please every “viewer”, increasingly rejecting the need for public deliberation that has the ability to change the preferences of the participants.

Leadership requires constant development of character. This is why being a good leader is not that different from being a good and moral person. A moral person is open to feedback all the time, but she doesn’t base her activity solely on the opinions of other people – she also has a vision of her own that guides her.

***

We shouldn’t think that there was some golden era of leadership at some point in history, like in the beginning of the 20th century where “everyone knew each other in a factory”. These thoughts inevitably emerge to create contrast to the current state of leadership, while the truth is much more complex. Perhaps everyone did know each other, but that’s not the whole picture; they also became depressed because of too much pressure and work under Taylorist leadership.

Maybe we can think of the evolution of leaders this way: there has always been all kinds of leadership, just as there has been all kinds of people, be it ruthless, benevolent, dictating or deliberative. The context of the organization has put the evolutionary pressure on specific characteristics of leadership and group dynamics. A group serving a violent God was more likely to be united in the ancient Middle East than the groups with peaceful God, just like a ruthless organization was more probable to prosper in the 16th century Florence.

So it’s about context, as leaders are always “made” by the social world. This means rather than complaining how the business or political leaders are narcissists, maniacs or psychopaths ad infinitum, the ones “lead” should focus on collectively transforming the context, the basis for the evolutionary pressure that made such leadership possible in the first place. This transformation process, in turn, enables better and more relevant leadership to emerge.