humiliation

One of the things we lost when Freudianism went out of style and economics 101 became our model for human behavior is the simple fact that people with power like humiliating people without power.

This makes some bizarre behavior explicable.

This post is built from Toby Buckle’s “The Politics of Humiliation”. He, in turn, is by PETTIT, who draws a lot of his inspiration from Machiavelli’s Discourses on Livy". If you want an audio version of Buckle’s arguments, see these podcast episodes: “Humiliation and Freedom” or his Machiavelli series: one, two, three.

Machiavelli is of the opinion that power is the ability to make others act the way you want.

Domination is unconstrained (arbitrary, discretionary) power. There is no limit on what can be forced. Perhaps “no limit” is too sweeping; let’s just say the limits are far, far beyond what the dominated would want them to be.

Generally, those being dominated feel the domination is unjust. Those doing the dominated would feel the same if conditions were researched.

As an example of domination, consider that Angela Merkel is afraid of dogs because of a dog attack in her past. Putin brought a large dog to a meeting with her. He dominated her because he knew he was forcing her to sit in fear rather than say, “Get that dog out of here, you bastard!”

Putin later said that he of course wouldn’t have brought the dog if he’d known of Merkel’s phobia. I don’t think it’s outlandish to see that as another act of domination:

1. Putin knew almost no one believed him.
2. But Merkel, other government officials, and the press couldn’t say that – he had forced (constrained, if you will) their actions.

Putin is fond of domination. He famously plays hockey with professionals and scores a large number of goals. I once asked my mother-in-law (super-fan of the University of New Hampshire XXX’s) what she thought of the defense the pros were putting up against Putin’s drives (if that’s what they call them in hockey). “What defense?” she asked. Even I could see they were letting him win. They had to let him win.

Putin, it seems to me, doesn’t even try to hide his pleasure at dominating others. We have to accept that a large number of people enjoy dominating others. Many enjoy it so much that they will act against their best interests (as defined by Econ 101 or Statecraft 101) to feel that sweet rush.

But it gets worse.

Humiliation

Buckle describes a youtube video he saw:

Imagine some affluent college frat boys, coming home from a night out, encounter a homeless man begging and decide to have some fun with him. They offer him $20, nothing to them, but everything to him. Ah but wait—he’ll have to earn it. “Dance for me” they demand “act like a monkey”. He’s visibly shaken by the request, but they’re serious. So, he does.

This is an example of domination, yes, but it’s especially an example of “humiliation.” Humiliation is domination where:

1. The person being dominated knows it, and knows they have no choice.
2. The dominated knows that the dominator is enjoying this.
3. The dominator knows the dominated knows (1) and (2).
4. Bystanders can see what the dominator has done.

It might be said that (1) is true of any situation of domination, but people are good at kidding themselves. After all, if you have to do unjust thing anyway, it feels better to believe it was your idea, or that you’re making a fair trade: putting up with the boss’s temper tantrums is just part of the job.

The effect of the bystanders can be profound. Buckle quotes Frederick Douglass, ex-slave:

Human nature is so constituted that it cannot honor a helpless man, although it can pity him; and even that it cannot do long, if the signs of power do not arise.

Humiliation serves to lower the status of the humiliated and thus reduces their chance that they can recover. However, although humiliating those beneath you has practical effects, I don’t believe that’s much of the motivation. Most people who love dominating love humiliating. That’s why they do it.

Cycles

I haven’t read Discourses on Livy, so my information on it comes from Buckle, who writes:

Machiavelli […] continually uses the concepts of ‘the few’ and ‘the many’ to explain why political events happened. They are presented as in perpetual conflict that, even in a well-ordered Republic, can never be fully resolved. […] The rich elites, whether the Roman senate or the Florentine Ottimati, were motivated not just by the desire to defend their power and property, but by a contempt for the lower orders and a desire to degrade them.

[…] History for Machiavelli was an endless cycle of these forces that repeated, but never fully resolved.

One theory of revolution is that it’s helped along not just by the objective conditions of the people, but by a growing sense of shared humiliation. (If you can’t pity someone because you’re in the same position, you’re more likely to band together.)

I suspect that this is another example of a continuing pattern in society, one most catchily described by Ernest Hemingway:

“How did you go bankrupt?” Bill asked.
“Two ways,” Mike said. “Gradually and then suddenly.”
– The Sun Also Rises

My suspicion is that the total amount of humiliation in society rises until either people can’t take it any more or the humiliators (dominators) back down. However, like so many addictive behaviors, tapering off is hard to do. It’s commonly said that Roosevelt’s New Deal “saved capitalism from itself.” Many thought that either a communist or fascist revolution was inevitable. I don’t believe economics was the only reason, because to be an industrial laborer prior to government support of unions was an endless round of humiliation. The following graph (from Google’s engram viewer shows English-language mentions of “dignity of labor”. I don’t believe it’s an accident that its peak (1905), was in the middle of an especially vigorous (and vigorously resisted) period of labor strife: people weren’t only fighting for unions because of wages but also because they were tired of the humiliation.

We in the US are in an era where being a humiliator (a bully) is being normalized.

US Politics

Item: Donald Trump thrives on humiliating others. This is evident in all those videos where Trump is sitting, pleased, while his cabinet members praise him in the most ridiculous terms:

Your Presidency in the first 100 days has exceeded that of any other Presidency in… this… country. Ever. Ever. Never seen anything like it. Thank you. – Pam Bondi (emphasis hers)

She is forced into extravagant phrase of the sort Americans used to mock North Koreans for. “With his boundlessly noble love for the nation and with his sophisticated political skills, he has laid the groundwork for a turning point in North-South Korean relations,” said a North Korean newspaper.

Item: Bondi herself is an agent of humiliation. She runs the US Justice Department, which employs prosecutors. These prosecutors are getting quite a reputation for lying to federal judges. The rules and norms of their profession made it hard to push back. When they’ve tried – threatening to remove the presumption of regularity, “The presumption of regularity is a deference doctrine whereby courts presume that government officials act lawfully. This means judges start from the premise that the government’s stated reasons for its actions are its true reasons and that its factual representations to the court are accurate. Although the presumption is rebuttable, it is not easily displaced, and the burden of proof falls heavily on the party challenging the government’s actions.” – lawfaremedia.org or muttering darkly about possibilities of perjury or contempt of court charges – evoke in me the same feelings as does King Lear’s famous monologue:

No, you unnatural hags!
I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall- I will do such things-
What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!

As a bystander, I can but pity them – and even that I cannot do long. Federal judges aren’t noted for their humility, so this must be especially humiliating for them.

On top of that, the Supreme Court keeps reversing their opinions without even doing them the courtesy of explaining what the lower court judges got wrong – and then, just to pile on, have the gall to scold those judges for not intuiting what the unexplained decisions mean for future cases. “‘A five-alarm fire’: Federal judges are unloading grievances after Justice Gorsuch called out one of their own for defying SCOTUS”, Law&Crime. Note that the scolding was public, ensuring that lawyers everywhere knew of the humiliation – always so important to the bully.

Item: Many onlookers believe the Supreme Court is overruling lower courts that ruled against the administration to avoid the administration just ignoring them in a “how many divisions has the pope?” sort of way. Even if that’s not the reason, surely it’s humiliating that so many people assume that ignoring would happen and they couldn’t do anything about it.

Item: The administration loves to humiliate reporters. Consider the answer to the question of who chose Budapest as the site for a summit between arch-humiliators Trump and Putin. That choice was humiliating for Ukraine in two ways. First, the topic was Ukraine’s war with Russia, but Ukraine was not invited to the summit. Second, Bucharest was the site of the negotiations where Russia pinky-swore not to use military force against Ukraine in return for Ukraine giving up its nuclear arsenal. Budapest as the site for the summit is what we in America call “rubbing it [an insult] in.” I mean, the broken agreement was called the Budapest Memorandum. Ouch!

When a reporter asked who made the choice, the answer from the administration was “Your mother.” Almost everyone in US culture knows that’s an insult. “One of the most common uses of Your Mama is as a comeback or retort during an argument or verbal altercation. For example, if someone insults you, you might respond with “Your Mama” to insult their own mother. This usage of the phrase is often intended to be hurtful and demeaning, and can escalate conflicts quickly.” – fastslang.com It means the reporter isn’t worth answering and can’t do anything about it. Humiliation.

Employees

Item Back to office.

Item LLMs the average can outdo you in extruding words or code or whatever.

People who need to eat

Item refrigerator (mention that tricksterism).

It’s long been a tacit US policy (regardless of party) that people who need government assistance should pay for it in humiliation. Of course they should jump through arbitrary hoops: what else are the rest of us going to get for our money? Of course they should be trapped in a system that can pull the rug out from under them at any time for un-understandable reasons: it’s satisfying to build a system with arbitrary p

2. SNAP fits in

Popular culture

Item:

Note the commentary: “I don’t care whatcha think of Putin - That is about as thug life as it gets. 🤣😂🤣” The tweetster is vicariously happy at someone’s humiliation. That’s what humiliation is for.

Item Rap battles yeah this is minor and I’m an old, but do we really need competitive humiliatings at this point in history?