A Dubious Sense of Security
Who wins in the war on the virus?
This photograph was taken this morning from my home’s rooftop. The mountains in the distance are in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – North Korea. Normally, the mountains are far more hazy, but thanks to heavy rain and Covid-19, I can see their craggy details more clearly than I ever have. Why thanks to Covid-19? Because the pandemic has lowered pollution levels; usually a large proportion of pollution drifts across the Yellow Sea from China to smother the peninsula.
Up north, beyond the DMZ which lies between me and those mountains, the leadership claims to have completely won the battle against the virus. Of course, we can treat this claim with skepticism. But let’s for the moment take it at face value, and put it in a broader context. This means that the most successful nation on earth at eradicating the threat of Covid-19 is also the most oppressive nation on earth.
In fact, if you think about it, the more authoritarian the nation is, the better it seems to have coped with the crisis (again, assuming the truth of the claims). This is because in these societies, the individual must routinely sacrifice what to Westerners seems like an unacceptable portion of their liberty in order to further what they are told is the common good. And which nations have fared worst in the battle against Covid-19? Those with a more individualistic culture, and especially those who have elected populist leaders, such as the United States, Brazil, and the United Kingdom, who make a point of espousing individualism at the expense of the collective.
What lessons can we learn from this striking contrast? One is that, at a deeper level of significance, this pandemic isn’t about the existential threat posed by a virus, but about how to achieve a sense of security, and about how to define ‘security’. What does ‘security’ mean, what value does it have for human beings, and how much are they willing to pay for it? After all, viruses are nothing new. They are an inherent part of human existence, and we literally live with them inside us, as well as outside. What Covid-19 has exposed is not so much our vulnerability to viruses or our dangerous unsettling of the ecosystem but the urgency of the perennial problem of existential and communal security. Or, more accurately, it has drawn attention to the urgency of the problem of how to achieve a credible sense of security, which isn’t the same thing as ‘security’ per se. Having the ‘sense’ that I am secure is a state of mind, and not necessarily a material condition or existential fact. But if I believe I am secure, then I will feel secure. There has been a lot of talk about ‘the normal’ and ‘the new normal’. What this means in this context is ‘the secure’ and the ‘new secure’.
Real, genuine, existential security can only be based on a shared unity of benevolent purpose, which has the effect of collectively shouldering awareness of the inevitability of insecurity, rather than trying to conceal it. This, alas, is totally unachievable within complex societies. But actually, one might call it generally utopian, in that it seems probable that humanity has never achieved such a refined level of social integration. But we are still capable of imagining it. In the meantime, a sense of security has become increasingly premised on another utopian dream: the irradiation of insecurity, or the perpetuity of security. Enter religion, with its offer of eternal life (read: eternal security). As I suggested in a previous post, this search for absolute security originates in childhood vulnerabilities, and fantasies of parental omnipotence. It makes us very susceptible to the rhetoric of infallibility, something that tricksters, con-artists, charismatic visionaries, and politicians, profit from. But in the context of my present argument, the key point is that the feeling of security is a state of mind, not a reality. Total security is a figment. A fantasy . But that doesn’t mean the notion of ‘security’ hasn’t got real, compelling, influence over human life. In fact, it’s what has driven us towards the endorsement of an increasing dehumanized society.
If we look at history, we can see that the sense of security is relative. Compared to today’s society, the level of rampant insecurity of a typical peasant in the Middle Ages might, objectively speaking, seem far far higher. But thanks to his religious faith, this peasant was actually likely to have had a sense of security that surpasses that of many people today. In other words, a sense of security is not linked like cause and effect, but is relative, and determined by specific priorities. The medieval peasant’s physical life is likely to have been ‘nasty, brutish, and short’, but his faith guaranteed him eternal life in heaven, and this guarantee, in turn, made his existential life feel more secure.
In this sense, security is determined by individual and societal visions of the future. A positive vision of the future will make the present feel more secure, while the absence of such affirmation, will make people more pessimistic. So a sense of personal and communal security is closely bound up with a society’s capacity to forge and maintain a credibly positive image of the future. This is precisely one of the things that the pandemic has brought to attention: the vulnerability of our image of the future. I will return to this problem in a future post, and return now to the lessons of the pandemic for our understanding of security.
The sources of our insecurity come and go, and very quickly become normalized and cease to evince fear, or an active sense of insecurity. The Atomic bomb massively increased feelings of insecurity within modern society, but within a generation it had become part of what is deemed ‘normal’ - that is credibly ‘secure’ - society. Sources of insecurity function like gestalts. They rise out of the undifferentiated ground of general impermanence to become foci of attention, then slip back into the ground. Or they suddenly land in our perceptual field and become foci of attention, but then, all going well, are more or less rapidly consigned to the unnoticed background. Indeed, we could say that a sense of security is dependent on consigning sources of fear to the background or periphery, where they will be unnoticed, but have not actually disappeared. Any ‘normal’ society is therefore characterized by a process in which sources of insecurity are ferried from focal attention to unnoticed background. But they do not disappear. Rather fear is transmuted into dread and anxiety.
A vital purpose of any national leadership is to supply a sense of security. Even a despotic one must at least guarantee security for its supporters and enforcers. But, as Marx emphasized, it is also usually politic to provide or sanction an ‘opium’ for the masses, just to be on the safe side. In the modern state, democratic or not, whoever is in control must make a good proportion of the people feel secure in the face of manifest insecurity. They do this by acting as guarantors of security through deflecting attention away from intractable sources of insecurity – nuclear war, pollution, climate change, random violence - and focusing attention instead on more tractable ones – terrorism, Covid-19. They know from studying history that insofar as security is the highest human priority, that the members of the society over which they rule will sacrifice a good deal of their freedom to possess a sense of security, and will thank their leaders with compliant support.
Any ruler is in the business of delivering states of mind not existential truths, and they need to conjure up the right ones. But in truth, the best any ruler can do is to transmute a dangerously destabilizing, fear-inducing, reality into a more socially manageable anxiety-inducing reality. All human life is, as Heidegger argued, lived in an atmosphere of anxiety, which is fear that has been dematerialized or de-focused. The security we are being offered is therefore not the absence of insecurity, but rather an acceptable level of insecurity. The job of a benevolent ruler is to guarantee this level remains more or less stable, while that of a malevolent ruler is to manipulate insecurity in order to maintain and profit from the increasing opportunities for social control and domination it will provide.
So one thing the pandemic is bringing to the fore is the price people are willing to pay for maintaining their illusory sense of personal and collective security. Quite a high price, so it seems. The pandemic is forcing nation states to re-calibrate the grounds upon which to establish for their citizens a credible sense of security. They are doing this in the time honoured manner : by extending their control over their citizens. And the reason their citizens are so willingly giving up their freedoms is because they have been conditioned to believe that the state controls security, whereas what is really happening to that the ruling elite is using the primordial need for security to extend its control over their lives.
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Another lesson to be learned from the pandemic is that the form of a nation’s leadership is important in determining how a society can act collectively, but also, that whatever the ideology being espoused, the common goal is always the panacea of security. But the pandemic has starkly revealed the extent to which collective action to achieve security, when organized within a rigid and oppressive hierarchical system, is much more successful when compared to a system in which collective action is decentralized, local, and driven more by individual initiatives. By ‘successful’, I mean in relation to its capacity to effectively cultivate the belief among members of its society that they are secure.
The more totalistic a state, the more efficient it is at guaranteeing a clearly defined sense of security. This is because the totalistic state has the monopoly on security, and defines what it is, who will be granted it, and what will happen to those who do not conform to the regulations imposed to ensure the consolidation of this fabrication called ‘security’. China and North Korea claim to have successfully protected their peoples from the virus through strictly policing them. A sense of security is granted and achieved through the measures initiated by the state to ensure the limiting of the spread of the virus. But it is success gained at the price of strict conformity imposed through physical and psychological threat. The techniques used to fight the virus are, however, merely extensions of the range of routine techniques used to maintain a sense of security in ‘normal’ times in China and North Korea. In other words, security from the virus has been achieved through a concomitant heightening of awareness of the level of state induced personal insecurity that will ensue if obedience isn’t forthcoming. The state offers a sense of security by effectively monopolizing and deploying the fear that the security it establishes is ostensibly intended to allay.
The state removes security in order to guarantee security. It monopolizes security and its absence. This individual and collective conformity is ensured through the establishment of a dual regime. First, through systematic state-controlled indoctrination - ‘brain-washing’ - and second, through state-controlled surveillance. State-controlled indoctrination, or socialization, ensures a high-level of conformity, which surveillance helps to police and enforce. So the totalistic state’s monopoly on security is built on its monopoly on violence. Lock-down or else!
Ultimately, the pandemic in China and North Korea has been ‘defeated’ through the willingness and ability of the leadership to use insecurity – on the one hand in the shape of fear of the virus, and on the other in the shape of the state apparatus of control and repression – so as to ensure the continuing establishment of an illusory sense of security. The major difference between China and North Korea is that China’s regime relies on strict state controlled indoctrination supported by forms of surveillance that are increasingly accomplished, and exponentially extended and more efficient, via digital media. North Korea still relies on the old ‘analogue’ methods – that is, almost hegemonic state controlled indoctrination via the pre-digital media (print, radio, tv, cultural entertainment), combined with the old surveillance techniques of the neighbour’s spying eyes and ears, backed up by the punitive threat of a boot in the face.
Both China and North Korea have discovered that the danger of a pandemic can lead profitably to an increase in the state’s power to control the lives of its citizens, and that its people will accept the further invasions of their lives if it there is the caveat that this is necessary in order to guarantee the feeling of being secure (although it has to be said that imagining where this extension of control has infiltrated North Korean society is difficult, as the state already has such a total monopoly on security).
The question then is , to what extent is North Korea exemplary? In other words, is this level of social control actually more acceptable and potentially exportable elsewhere than we imagined? George Orwell certainly thought it was.
Meanwhile, in the United States, Brazil, and the United Kingdom a different leadership model and supporting ideology exists at the apex of a more amorphous social structure. Here, it is said that the state’s obligation to achieve a sense of security for its citizens must be counterbalanced by the promotion of the idea that individual freedom is sacrosanct. This concession to individual freedom inevitably jeopardizes the ability of the state to achieve a monopoly on the sense of personal and collective security. The underlying assertion is that security must to a certain extent be sacrificed in order to protect personal freedom and ensure economic stability. This reflects the self-image of a culture within which the ideology of individualism requires that security be defined in relation to personal separateness and autonomy. Security for the individual trumps security for the group or collective.
We can see this cleavage in worldviews very clearly in relation to the farrago over face-masks. To wear or not to wear, and why? The face-mask has become a cipher for the difference between the collectivist and individualistic responses to the crisis. Those who protest that the wearing of a face-mask is an infringement of their personal freedom are essentially claiming that security is monadic, atomized, and is in opposition to every other individual’s security. By contrast, the collectivist mindset, which a one-party state like China and North Korea endorses and distorts, claims that the curtailing of personal liberty is necessary to achieve group level, rather than personal level, security.
But both are fundamentally deviations, in the sense that they both draw false conclusions from the same evidence. The individualistic solution, by assessing the problem from the false premise of a separate, localized, independent self, erroneously concludes that a sense of security is gained through emphasis on more bounded autonomy, more personal differences. The collectivistic solution, on the other hand, starts from the actually more reasonable premise that the boundaries of the self are fluid and extendable, that personal security is indivisibly connected to the security of the group of which the individual is an intrinsic part. But it transplants this insight onto the one party political system, in which the party becomes the embodiment of this extended self.
Both the individualistic and collectivistic models are superstructures built on the basic foundation of what the writer and activist Charles Eisenstein calls ontological ‘separation’, that is, on a way of being that is based on a fundamental distortion and dissimulation (1). The cognitive fluidity that allowed Homo sapiens to best other hominids, such as the Neanderthals, meant having a sense of independent and reflexive selfhood - of separateness. It allowed humans to act as if from outside the world it shares with animals, vegetables, and minerals, and as a result, placed them in what no doubt at first seemed like an enviably advantageous position which made possible the wholescale exploitation if the rest of nature, and also, when expedient, other human beings. This, as we now know, was a magical trick, and furthermore, one that is has turned out to be blatantly self-destructive in the long run.
The big difference between the collectivistic and individualistic models of human sociality is therefore that the former seeks to consolidate the assumption of ontological separation through collective means, the latter though individualistic means. Both are equally about domination of the Other. The collectivistic model has a very long history, one in which security comes through domination achieved by the hierarchical organization of society directed towards collective goals. The individualistic model has a much shorter history, which parallels the growth of Protestantism and capitalism, and where the underlying premise of separation becomes manifest and is exponentially exaggerated.
So collectivism is closer to what was probably the norm in per-agrarian hunter-gatherer societies, in that it seeks to use the primal interconnectedness that pervaded these communities, but now in the service of providing security for a particular, separate, community. The individualist model, on the other hand, while also bringing a sense of security to the community, does so by exaggerating people’s awareness of separation. To this extent, I think we can claim that individualism, while further away from an inherent sense of what Eisenstein calls ‘interbeing’, is nevertheless closer to re-connecting with such ‘interbeing’, because it makes manifest – makes explicit - what is still only latent, and therefore much further away from conscious awareness, within collectivist societies.
(1) Charles Eisenstein is a recent discovery for me, and I highly recommend his writing (and talks). This is his website: https://charleseisenstein.org/
I also draw in today’s blog on his much shared on-line essay ‘The Coronation”: https://charleseisenstein.org/essays/the-coronation/