Hegel Shmegel and Voices
In 1961, Stanley Milgram performed an experiment that asked a simple yet profound question, when the stakes of human pain are high, whose voice are we going to listen to, those in pain or those in positions of authority administering the pain? The experiment was actually a kind of trick. The participants were told a lie that they were part of a study testing the relationship between punishment and learning. They would be asking questions to another participant who would be given a shock if answered wrong. Those answering the questions were actually actors that were in on the trick. There was no actual voltage being felt, but the people asking the questions did not know that. What was actually being tested was how the actual participants would respond when told to administer increasing levels of electric shock. Even though they were behind a glass window, they could see and hear the actors discomfort and screams of pain every time they gave a wrong answer, and told despite the screams that they must continue the experiment.
The results of his experiment showed that 26 of 40 people used lethal electric shocks, up to 400 volts, for answering a simple question wrong, 2 out of 3 people would kill on orders from an authority figure. The experiment produced what Milgram went on to call the agentic state theory. Agentic state theory would posit that when bound to the voice of an authority figure, people deem the authority figure to be responsible for moral harm done to others rather than themselves.
Recent interpretations of Milgrams work, as seen in this article by the British Psychological Society, takes into account his full range of experiments and finds that 58% of people actually disobeyed the authority presence, and at the first sign of visible human pain 40% of participants dropped out. Different iterations of the experiment produced different results, for example, if the experiment took place in a run down building or if the authority figures were wearing ordinary street clothes, the resistance to authority figures would increase.
Stanley Milgram was working in the wake of the holocaust at the height of U.S. power. When many psychologist were trying to make sense of the social dimension of the holocaust; how could such atrocities be perpetuated on such a massive scale? A lab coat was a symbol of real power. Science was backed by the full authority of the U.S. military which was unquestioningly dominant over the world.
If the same experiment were run today I doubt it would produce similar results. I think the amount of obedience that anyone has toward authority figures is extremely localized nowadays, confined to the context of a job, a classroom, church, or courthouse. If abstracted from the context, the authority vested in people who run such places doesn’t hold much sway. The world has become profane in a whole new way, a deeper way, essentially absent of any authoritative presence except money and guns. There is a kind of dark egalitarianism in this, a kind of falling that everyone is feeling, everyone is hustling, its just a matter of what your hustling for, your rent, or that shiny new Tesla shit box.
Today, what does the voice of authority sound like? And what does the voice of the suffering sound like? It is true that many who have a voice in public affairs are in a contestation over who is the true representative of the voiceless, of the suffering, of those who are absent from the room, of those who can not raise their own voice due to mental illness, poverty, criminalization or language barriers. These claims to authority are the true substance of political power. Donald Trump and JD Vance claim to speak to the plight of the white working class better than any other candidate, while democrats claim their voice is the outcome of a plurality of groups and stakeholders all speaking in unison. The sad truth of American politics is that the only thing that matters is the fight over whose is the true voice of the owners of business in any given moment.
There is something Hegelian about this whole affair. If you will let me do some exploring here I will try to make it worth your time. What if we approached politics in the way Hegel approaches knowledge and consciousness, i.e. that there is a notion of the American public, the public life of this country that everyone shares equally but is located outside of everyone. This is the “Thing” that Hegel explores using sense certainty, it is what truly is, what actually exist and republicans and democrats are the outcomes of two different ways of trying understand what is, this “thing,” two attempts to cognize this fact of American life, two attempts to take this thing, this knowledge and make from it absolute knowing, absolute spirit, to incorporate its being into itself.
The republicans look at this thing closely, they turn it over in their minds eye, they see its sexual chaos, its multiple, unfolding crises over its place in the world, its own diminishment, its embarrassment of riches, which must be defended against thievery and malevolence, they see danger behind every turn, they see violence everywhere, its desire for hierarchy and order, they see a glorious past that is always on the verge of being ruined by nefarious actors. What is this thing it sees? Well I would argue that this thing is by and large itself, it has taken too much of the thing into itself. The tension between knowledge and consciousness has resolved itself by simply becoming an image of consciousness. An image that speaks to deep symbols, mythologies, fears and desires that are mapped onto the white race. It has mistaken its sense certainty, its registering of the Thing at a given moment in time, its shape, smell, dimensions and mistaken it for a universal truth.
Meanwhile the Democrats find that oneness is actually a multiplicity. The Oneness of this thing at a given time and place collapses or rather evolves into a tapestry of this’s, this particular moment, this particular perspective, a chorus of voices rises, with a multiplicity of perspectives. The now, the here, the this of universal knowledge is actually always changing. What looks like nothing but an abyss of fear and chaos from one perspective, looks like mere silliness from another perspective. Meanwhile, if there is a register of importance and meaning that carries across many different perspectives maybe we have arrived at a universal, or what he calls a property of the thing, of American public life, the fact of tenet housing rights, for instance when viewed from the perspective of several different groups can find commonality in a given reform when discussed with the language of both rights and responsibilities.
The republican way of understanding is shown to be actually the fear of knowledge by not incorporating the multiplicity of perspectives. It strives to articulate the universal but is always communicating its opposite, its own particularity. However superior the democratic way to knowledge is, I do think that the appeal to otherness as a central organizing principle can leave one handicapped in the midst of argument when your opponent is constantly working with powerful resonances to the deep seated fears and desires of its own particularity. The opposite urge to maintain a relation to the universal that has more credence and claim to inhabiting multiple perspectives and thus a more legitimate universal has collapsed into a negation of the self, that nothing that is in consciousness itself registers as important and meaningful, that the thing of the American Public is alienated from the consciousness of liberals, it is not taken into itself, into consciousness at all. A great example of this is when Joe Biden was asked how many genders there are and he responded after some thought, “at least three.” Clearly nodding to queer gender theorist about the existence of complex relations to gender but in a way that was absent of any of the actual argument or substance of such theories and was a compromise between these arguments and his own more traditional upbringing within normative gender relations, all of which left everyone feeling confused and unsatisfied (but it was very funny!).
What does the voice of people who are in pain sound like today? The voice of people having a mental crises runs the gamut of human emotion and sensibility, at one moment tethered to reality and the next completely unintelligible. It often alternates between grave and profound to light and silly, as if they are haunted by the need to appear normal just at the moment when their life is being exposed to the human shredder of having no where to sleep, having no one to trust in the world, and no money.
Why is it at just the moment of the most horrible thing happening to someone, their voice becomes muddled, changeable, diffuse and obstinate? What is it about the nature of their crises that often keeps them from articulating the source of their pain, their fear, and their nightmares and makes others, those who might be able to offer help unlikely to do so?
I believe that one needs to put yourself in their shoes to understand. The nature of mental illness, in my argument stems from having an experience that no one believes is happening to you, which nonetheless is happening, the essential aloneness of the experience is the important piece.
A mental crises is someones very own Shakespearean level tragedy happening to them in front of a clueless audience for whom your existence is meaningless. A series of bad choices leads one down a ruinous path and all of a sudden you face a night quickly approaching with no where indoors to stay, being robed, raped and murdered are more possible than ever. Should you choose to hurl yourself into the arms of strangers you are looking madness in the eye, you are asking a stranger in an extremely cruel society to help you, inviting more pain and shame and scorn.
If your lucky enough to find a crises shelter now you must prove that you are in fact having a crises that meets the qualifications to receive care. Are you a drug addict? Are you depressed or anxious? Are you insane? What is your crises? How do you answer these questions in a way that does not mark your life with a permanent scar and yet still allows you to receive the care required? Why can’t we see that the crises is the phone call, the crises is the fact that I’m talking to you at all?
This is the point at which the mental illness starts taking shape because every message that our society intends to convey as help becomes mixed and muddled. With a mental illness there is a mental gesture that is repeated that triggers the opposite of what was intended by the message, something gets said that was intended to convey how strong the patient is, is interpreted as a sign of weakness, what is intended as hopeful is received as pure hopelessness, what was intended as help is proven to be harmful.
This repeated sending of negative energy is overtime turned into a reflex, a shape the mind assumes under many stimuli, until the shadow grows and grows and any stimuli at all becomes a stand in for the negative energy that one receives from the notion or idea that the stimuli comes to stand in for. It is a response or set of responses that have been hand crafted in the patients mind over years of training, years of conditioning to have this shame and guilt pumped directly into your mind from a legion of potential sources, the more sources that trigger this response the worse the mental illness.
The sound of a person in crises is the sound of someone who is afraid of losing their own subjectivity as a person, the sound of someone who is terrified that their I, no longer has the control, and the respect afforded to I’s everywhere, the control and respect that was the endowment of the enlightenment.
These are all voices that we are collectively navigating though this period of world history. Which voices are we going to listen to? Which voice is absent from here? I am excited to explore more of Hegel although it is getting very difficult!
Merry Christmas and to all a Happy New Year!
your friend,
Kevin
