The willful and hypersensitive Leftists who undermine every Left organization
Historically, the Left has been riven by factionalism, and this makes it difficult to build long-lasting and powerful Left movements
Occasionally a tweet on Twitter gives me an idea for an essay, or reminds me of something that I’ve wanted to write for a long time. This discussion about alternatives to capitalism gave me a prompt for the following essay. For background context, see what I wrote in “How to build a pragmatic Communism that works intelligently and efficiently.” As I’ve said many times before:
I'm okay with a world where all of the car companies are owned by the government, but mere government ownership would not change the hierarchical nature of such a large enterprise. You would still have hundreds of different teams who are doing work that needs to be coordinated, and whoever you pick to coordinate the work is, by definition, a manager.
Davouts responded on Twitter, arguing for a populist corporation where the workers vote on every decision, demonstrating a profound misunderstanding of how a democratic corporation needs to work. For starters:
"Elitism — the masses are too ignorant to make choices in their best interest"
A worker who devotes time to research an issue will understand that issue better than a worker who has never researched the issue, and in a big business it is impossible to keep up on every issue. Again, I work 60 hours a week and still there are hundreds of decisions made every week, at the place that I work, of which I know nothing. So deferring to those who are focused on making the decisions is simply a matter of showing respect for those workers who develop specialized knowledge around a particular decision. This is not a matter of elitism.
Davouts lazy use of the word "elite" leads me to believe that Davouts analysis of the situation lacks rigor. Davouts can call anyone an elite but it does not mean they are actually elite, unless Davouts simply means that the person who is in charge is an elite by definition, in which case what Davouts said is merely a tautology.
"Autocracy (top down decision making)"
A democracy is not an autocracy, unless you are trying to invoke "the tyranny of the majority." In any of the scenarios that I've sketched, the overall control of the company is democratic, and therefore not an autocracy. But once a leader has been chosen, by democratic means, and for any level of decision making, we should respect the effort they are making to come to the correct decision. If there is a feeling that the leader is doing a bad job, then of course they should be replaced, but if they are doing a good job, then respecting their decisions is literally how the democratic process works.
"Discipline (punishment for those that break the rules imposed upon them by the elite)"
There are some people who are so hostile the concept of discipline that they treat the word as pejorative, and Davouts seems to be doing that here. However, it is impossible to run a large business, or a large government, without some means of enforcing decisions.
But Davouts disagreed when I said their use of the word “elitism” was lazy, and they responded:
So I responded to them, directly, using the word “you” to refer to them:
Some people suffer childhood trauma such that they go through life unable to trust authority. Sometimes this is because they have a parent who is an alcoholic, or a parent who abuses drugs. Other times the parent suffers depression, or some other mood disorder. Sometimes the parent is physically or sexually violent. In other cases, the parent clearly favors some other child, so that a person grows up feeling neglected and unloved, and full of hate for those who did not show them love. Less common is the only-child who grows up spoiled, and who assumes the world is supposed to cater to their whims — they reject all restraints on their will.
With such people, the distrust of authority is primordial. If the person has a high IQ and is articulate, then as an adult they often intellectualize their childhood trauma in ways that sound politically coherent: they can quote Locke and Mills and Bentham and Marx and Popper and Wollstonecraft and Bookchin — all to explain why they will not respect the leadership of whatever organizations they have joined, or whatever political party they are refusing to join.
Their profound distrust of authority draws them to Left, and yet their profound distrust of authority keeps them from contributing anything useful to the Left.
Such people are emotionally disregulated, and so they typically have an inability to submit to the will of the group when they disagree with the majority of the group. Such people will sit in meetings and argue certain points, for hours, in an attempt to simply exhaust the majority. And in the end, they either cause other people to quit the organization, or they quit the organization. In short, such people are actively harmful to every Left organization they join.
With such people, everything that is important to their politics happened back during their childhood, and so there is nothing that anyone can say during their adulthood that will help them see that they are wrong.
I don't know you (Davouts) well enough to diagnose you as this type, but based on what you've written, you sound like this type of person, a type who I've dealt with before.
This is a line that reveals a lot about you:
"Elitism, the act of thinking you or someone else are/is more worthy."
Your focus here is on whether others find you worthy. This suggests a profound insecurity, which likely began during your childhood. It is astonishing that in all that you've written on Twitter you do not mention the opposite: do you find your co-workers worthy? Do you show respect for others? Are you pushing yourself to demonstrate respect for others? Do you worry that you've failed to show that you find others worthy?
Based on what you've written, your whole focus seems to be on yourself. You are demonstrating a narrow self-interest, which implies tendencies which, in their strong form, amount to narcissism.
Democracy works to the extent that we can find each other worthy -- not in any extensive way, but in the minimal sense that we respect each other enough to respect each other's right to vote, and we respect the outcome of each vote. In particular, we must respect each other enough that we remain loyal to a group even when we lose an election, that is, even when people we disagree with win an election, and then start giving us orders. Democracy is above all this: our willingness to follow the rules and directions and orders coming from leadership that we voted against. If you are only loyal to an organization when your side wins an election, then you've no real commitment to make democracy work.
Historically, Left movements have been riven by factionalism, and Left movements tend to split apart. A persistent tension on the Left is that many of the people drawn to the Left are suspicious of authority and are unwilling to submit to leadership they disagree with. And yet any large organizations will have many factions who strongly disagree with each other. Over the last 150 years we've seen many successful Left organizations follow a philosophy similar to "democratic centralism" which is the pattern I've described for running a company democratically, whereas you've dismissed this pattern as authoritarian. You seem to disrespect those people who have the emotional maturity that is necessary to make democracy work.
But again, about this:
"Elitism, the act of thinking you or someone else are/is more worthy."
At no point did I suggest that the leadership was more worthy than you. That you managed to hallucinate this suggests a profound insecurity on your part. Those insecurities have implications for what you can build, and what you can help others build.
You also offered this definition of the same word:
"Elitism (masses too ignorant to make choices in their best interest"
From what you've written in this thread, this much is clear:
You use emotionally charged language.
You will never be able to build a successful organization while using this kind of language. Such language is divisive, and in using it you've revealed a desire to be divisive. You might be able to launch a career as a podcaster, although the market for "angry and emotional Leftist podcaster" is saturated.
But you will not build a successful organization. Nor will you help others build anything. At best, you will stay home and do nothing. At worst, you will join Left organizations and then sabotage them with your will, your emotionalism, and your hyper-sensitivity.
And (I am now speaking to a general audience) we all need to be on guard against such people, because their willfulness and their hypersensitivity does have the tendency to undermine the organizations that these people join. We should welcome such people when they join Left organizations, but we also need to impose limits on how much they can disrupt meetings, how much they can harass others, and, in general, how much harm they can do. We should not allow such people to harass or discourage or demoralize the people who are doing all of the real work.
It’s kind of mean to question the childhood or mental health of people you disagree with. While it’s possible that their childhood plays a role in their beliefs, it’s also possible that trauma works at a collective level. Many people feel that democracy is being eroded by international financial institutions and unaccountable national governments. The industrial revolution and two world wars likely contributed to the belief that the elites do more harm than good. It may be a mistake to lump in financial elitism with intellectual elitism and people who are superior in talent, but excellence is compatible with economic democracy since workers know best how to run the places they work.