The Paradox of Progress, and How Personality Types Replaced Political Ideology
We live in interesting times in which the line between personality and ideology is blurred more and more each day. The evolution of capitalism, modernity and globalization is directly proportional to the stripping of personal identity. Sociologist Niklas Luhmann, for instance, often argued that in societies marked by stratified differentiation (the middle ages, feudalism), personal identity worked through conformity to social roles¹. Between the 16th and 18th century, with the advent of capitalist modernity, society has been marked by functional differentiation, making the subject adopt a more flexible identity. According to Luhmann, in capitalist modernity, each individual must change their identity according to the context in which they are in. Pre-modern times were much more stable in that respect: if you were a peasant, you were a peasant everywhere and this affected in you in all social contexts, and same if you were a monarch or a feudal lord, etc. Functional differentiation, according to Luhmann, means that social roles change depending on context. This is the status-quo of capitalism.
Marxists scholars like Frederic Jameson and Mark Fisher adopted a similar view. For Jameson, the postmodern era is the cultural logic of late-capitalism in which the personal identity of every individual is marked by sharp and quick change². The rise of the internet and its rampant acceleration of globalization worsened this³. Jameson associates the cultural logic of late-capitalism with Jacques Lacan’s description of schizophrenia, in which the signifiers of the symbolic order float around in a disorganized fashion. Historical materialism proves right yet again considering how well this change in culture reflects the changes in the material base of society: neoliberalism and its unstable gig economy is supported by the ideological superstructure of “hustle culture”:
“The depressive human being is an animal laborans that exploits itself — and it does so voluntarily, without external constraints. It is predator and prey at once. It erupts at the moment when the achievement-subject is no longer able to be able. First and foremost, depression is creative fatigue and exhausted ability. The complaint of the depressive individual, “Nothing is possible,” can only occur in a society that thinks, “Nothing is impossible.” No-longer-being-able-to-be-able leads to destructive self-reproach and auto-aggression. The achievement-subject finds itself fighting with itself. The depressive has been wounded by internalized war. Depression is the sickness of a society that suffers from excessive positivity. It reflects a humanity waging war on itself.”⁴
The disintegration of time and context under late-capitalism has a profound effect on our personal identity. Identification, by its nature, requires stability. To have a personal identity means to be able to respond to the verb “to be”: who am I? Being itself represents stability and is opposed to change which is represented by the verb “to become”. Therefore, for an individual to have an identity, one must find a more or less constant, stable set of traits that one can put next to the phrase “I am…”. This is harder under our current social conditions, which we can call, with a bit of an exaggeration, an ADHD society. This does not only mean that there is a strict correlation between capitalism and mental health (the manipulation of big tech algorithms in the hands of the few increases the rate of ADHD in society) but also that society in itself has an “ADHD-like” structure. We went from reading books, to watching 30 minute Youtube videos, to watching 30 second TikToks. Everything is getting shorter and shorter. A short attention span has become the status quo. Sociologist Eva Illouz also documents that ever since capitalism gave us the dating market in the 18th century (whereas in feudalism arranged marriages were the norm), relationships have been getting more and more unstable through capitalism’s development in modernity⁵. Entering a relationship takes way less time than a century ago, but exiting one also takes way less time, as it can be seen by the sharp increase in divorce rates. Byung-Chul Han thus writes:
“Excessive positivity also expresses itself as an excess of stimuli, information, and impulses. It radically changes the structure and economy of attention. Perception becomes fragmented and scattered. Moreover, the mounting burden of work makes it necessary to adopt particular dispositions toward time and attention this in turn affects the structure of attention and cognition. The attitude toward time and environment known as “multitasking” does not represent civilizational progress. Culture presumes an environment in which deep attention is possible. Increasingly, such immersive reflection is being displaced by an entirely different form of attention: hyperattention. A rash change of focus between different tasks, sources of information, and processes characterizes this scattered mode of awareness. Since it also has a low tolerance for boredom, it does not admit the profound idleness that benefits the creative process.”⁶
With this in mind, it’s no wonder that we see a sharp increase in tribal identity politics, fueled by the political economy of anger inside social media echo chambers. But politics nowadays is so intrinsically linked with personality that it’s getting harder and harder to make the difference between political ideologies and personality types. The rise in popularity of the infamous ‘political compass’ is the best representation of politics as personality. Only neoliberalism could have commodified the very essence of politics to such an extent that ideologies themselves are viewed like a clothing store. The political compass balls and Wojaks on subreddits like r/politicalcompassmemes represent a shopping mall in which each of us can pick and choose our ideology like we would buy clothing to match our personality. Hence, the very way in which we talk about all of politics is in a capitalist fashion.
The Big 5 personality test closely links the personality trait of openness of the ideologies of progressivism and conservatism. Even the creators of the Big 5 test acknowledge that “social liberalism” and “social conservativism” are more of a personality trait than an actual political ideology. The very fact that this is one of the main dividing lines driving people’s votes and support for organizations marks the triumph of the ideological superstructure of capitalism (where we go “shopping for ideologies”, trying them out as clothing) over its material base. Similarly enough, the rise in intersectional identity politics on the liberal centre-left and nationalism on the alt-right marks the triumph of idealism over materialism. When our concrete, material conditions of life are in shambles, intersectional identity politics and ultranationalist identity politics both suggest that it is our thoughts and ideas that must change, not reality itself. “Woke capitalism” and liberal feminism represent the triumph of the authoritarianism of the liberal establishment, suggesting that systemic problems like sexism and racism need individual solutions like each person checking their privilege and finding their unconscious biases, instead of systemic solutions involving improving people’s material conditions. Similarly enough, nationalist parties are on the rise all over Europe, and fascism is a realistic threat. The rise in both types of identity politics and their anti-materialist philosophy is a consequence of our material conditions and it is the primary way ideology functions today: when both our economy and our public space on social media ‘go ADHD’, we all lose our personal identity.
Nonetheless, what even is conservativism and liberalism when it comes to personality? If you are low in openness, you have a “conservative personality”, which means that you dislike change and like stability. This is one of the traps we must avoid and the tricks that neoliberalism plays upon us: we must distinguish between change from the system and change within the system. Conservatives defend the status-quo out of a fear of change, but constant change and instability is the very status quo of neoliberalism. If you are a conservative (in the sense of personality), I believe that it would be in your best interests to be a progressive (in terms of actual politics). Unbridled capitalism is an unstable system, both in its cultural logic and in its economic logic. Any serious conservative personality should be a progressive, in the sense of fighting to change our current social order into a more stable one.
My analysis is dialectical here — this is the paradox of progress: if you dislike change, you should want to change to a more stable system, because the status-quo is unstable. Capitalism is the first global-economic system in which crisis is its default state.
NOTES:
1: See: Hans-Georg Moeller — “Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems”
2: See: Frederic Jameson — “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late-Capitalism”
3: See: Mark Fisher : The Slow Cancellation Of The Future, on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aCgkLICTskQ
4: Byung-Chul Han — The Burnout Society, p. 11
5: See: Eva Illouz — “The End of Love: A Sociology of Negative Relations”
6: Byung-Chul Han — The Burnout Society, p. 13
