The Politics of Self-Harm

Or, The Neoliberal Endgame as Circular Firing Squad

One of the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read is Adrian Tchaikowsky’s Children of Time. It tells the story of an effort to terraform other planets for human habitation, using a genetic virus to accelerate evolution and create new sentient species who have been shaped for the newly emergent environment. Before the plan can get fully underway, however, a civil war breaks out on Earth and radical groups send a computer virus to sabotage the terraforming program. On one key planet, the uplift virus is released among spiders, who gradually become sentient. The plot alternates between following the gradual evolution of the spiders and their society—richly and very satisfyingly imagined by Tchaikowsky—and the misadventures of a human crew trying to escape the wreckage of their planet many generations after the civil war.

I enjoyed it so much that I read the entire thing in one sitting on a long plane ride, periodically leaning over to My Esteemed Partner to share the latest developments (e.g., “Oh my God, they’ve figured out how to make computers out of ants!”). The sequels have followed a familiar pattern of diminishing returns, but I have continued reading in memory of that great first experience. Hence I keep turning over in my mind the basic shape of the series’ fictional universe, with its Star Trek-like trajectory into self-destruction followed by finding salvation among the stars. When I read the first installment in 2019, one aspect of the worldbuilding that I could not quite get my head around was the idea that the people on Earth would be so purely and nihilistically destructive. The terraforming project was, if nothing else, an amazing scientific and technological achievement. No one was going to force anyone to go live on the new planets. Why would anyone destroy such a thing, seemingly out of pure spite?

That question no longer troubles me in the same way. Instead of a far-fetched science fiction scenario, it is the running theme of the daily news. From day one, the project of the Trump Administration has been one of pure destruction. Institutions and programs built up over generations have been gleefully torn apart, as government funding (and what limited state capacity remains) have been directed more and more exclusively toward violence and death. Seldom has there been a political leader so determined to cause harm, and nothing but harm—and seldom has there been a political movement so proud to declare its embrace of evil for its own sake. (And if we insist on finding a direct parallel to the Tchaikowsky novel, we could point to their willful destruction of our capacity to address climate change.)

This trend toward willful self-destruction is most severe in the US, but is far from limited to the Land of the Free. Perhaps the greatest act of willful self-destruction in the political history of humanity was Brexit, and yet despite the vast majority of the population recognizing it as a terrible mistake, the disastrous policy’s architect, Nigel Farage, seems all but certain to seize power in the next election. Throughout the West, the radical right—which promises literally nothing but empty national self-assertion through the victimization of foreigners, and closer relationships with other countries that do the same—is poised to take office at the next opportunity.

Seemingly the only political cause with any energy or future is one characterized by unapologetic nihilism. Mainstream liberals and traditional conservatives are absolutely rudderless, reluctant to even state a goal or desire. In practice, they do virtually nothing but impose austerity and pursue watered-down versions of the right’s bid to persecute immigrants and expand the military. In the few pockets where a more stridently leftist leadership has been able to take power, such as Mamdani’s New York, the options available, regardless of their good intentions, seem laughably inadequate—and are nevertheless stridently opposed. I “support” the idea of municipal grocery stores to fight food deserts and keep prices down, but seriously, that’s all? Our country is descending into fascism and the best the political left can do is a couple of grocery stores?

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In recent weeks, one of my posts on Substack Notes—a site I swore I would use as little as possible, so as not to return to my Twitter addiction—has unfortunately reached escape velocity. The text reads as follows: “One thing the rise of AI has shown me is that there are a lot of people out there who have never given any serious thought to the question of why we do anything at all.” I am referring, of course, to the mania to outsource the most human activities—intellectual understanding, artistic creativity, even the formation of interpersonal relationships. The fact that someone would rely heavily on a chatbot to help them flirt with a potential partner is more than pathetic or embarrassing, it represents a complete failure to understand what flirting or relationships are all about. As for people with an AI boyfriend or girlfriend, I am filled with a mix of pity and disgust, with the latter predominating.

I’ve written about these themes many times before—for instance, the tendency to “save time” in ways that demonstrate you don’t know what time is for in the first place, or the “loser behavior” that aims to get some abstract credit for moral or intellectual achievements without understanding what those achievements really mean. The rise of chatbots did not cause these pathologies, nor did social media or smartphones, though all of those technological advances expose and accelerate these trends in especially clear ways.

What those pathologies point to, for me, is a profound crisis of meaning. People don’t know what life is for, what they are for. Smartphones are so addictive because we’re terrified to be bored, to have to make a decision about what to do. Social media is seductive because it gives us a legible identity (and scorecard!). Chatbots are appealing precisely because people do not use them “as a tool” but instead outsource their agency and decision-making power to its seemingly neutral authority.¹ When given the opportunity to be a pass-through for a black-box algorithm in exchange for a steady stream of seratonin hits, many people jump at the opportunity.

In short, people love these technologies because they do not want to be rational, responsible agents. And in a way, that is the tragedy of humanity. The greatest misfortune that ever befell a primate was rational self-awareness. It really is the case that no one asked for this. People have been finding ways to erase themselves or outsource their decisions as long as humans have existed. But at that level of abstraction, there is not much to say about our particular situation. Humans have presumably “always been like that,” but that doesn’t answer the question of why our hatred of our own humanity taking this particular form at this particular time.

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In a recent essay in the New Left Review’s Sidecar blog, Lorna Finlay writes about the inexorable decline of the British university. While conceding that there was no past golden age when the university lived up to its potential (much less its own hype), she does note that in previous eras, there was a greater open-endedness to research and teaching, more room for experiment and even failure. Now that has all closed down as everything becomes subordinated to a relentless drive to maximize metrics and outputs. In this respect, the university is part of a much broader trend, which she characterizes as follows:

those with power in society are deeply intolerant of any space in which exceptions are possible, in which something could happen. The drive to control and eliminate such spaces belongs to a long history of attacks on perceived inefficiency or ‘idleness’, the latter regarded not merely as a vice in itself but as dangerous because it provides the conditions under which various other vices (in particular, subversive or insubordinate behaviour) might breed – a history that runs from Victorian efforts to get children off the streets and into schools, through Thatcherite assaults on the unemployed and on a supposedly inefficient and ‘wasteful’ public sector. It’s as if there is a determination to eliminate any pocket of air in which it might be possible to draw a breath.

We all have to be kept on the treadmill of endless assessment and competition because if we had even a moment to rest, then—something might happen, and in the eyes of the powers that be, that “something” could only be negative. In a way, it’s the old strategy of “divide and rule” taken down to the atomic level, inducing all of us to compete non-stop with one another so that we can never even conceive the possibility of uniting to oppose those running the competition. But more fundamentally, it’s an attack on the very idea of human autonomy, an attempt to squelch in advance any independent assertion of agency, any positing of an unanticipated goal.

The tragedy is that this strategy really does work. They really have squeezed the life out of many, perhaps even most, people. We are all so beaten down, in fact, that we spend our spare time playing a gamified version of the assessment regime—with the twist that we get to “rate” each other. And increasingly, when we seek information or advice, we turn to the disembodied voice of “best practices,” distilled into a plagiarism slurry of everyone on the internet. Steven Poole has argued that video games are structured like the workplace, and that is even more radically true of the little status games we spend our every spare minute scrolling through.

When we play these games, we are doing the oligarchs’ work for them, actively dividing ourselves and staving off the possibility that we will have a single unanticipated thought. This sick pastime has been a disaster for society, but it has especially been a disaster for the political left, rendering us obnoxious and repulsive. The very convictions that are supposed to build solidarity and create change become fodder for a mean-spirited status game, in which one can only ever be wrong.

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All of these metrics, all this pointless and yet endless competition, stems from the quest to recreate society on the model of the market. That is to say, yes, we are still living in the aftermath of neoliberalism. The installation of the market as the final authority over life on earth was the equivalent of the spiteful anti-terraforming virus from Children of Time. The neoliberal theorists were very clear on this: the reason to make the market the center of society was to ensure that there could never be human agency or control. The benefit of market outcomes is not ultimately that they are more efficient or serve the greater good or whatever other propaganda one might derive from dorm-room libertarianism (the neoliberalism of fools). The benefit of market outcomes is that they are impersonal, inhuman. They are no individual’s responsibility, which means that no individual can ever assert their agency over them.

They weren’t afraid of Communist central planning because it was unworkable or inefficient or unfair—they were afraid that it would work. They were terrified at the prospect of human beings taking control over the conditions of their lives and livelihoods, and they gradually built a shell around every government and institution on earth to make sure that could never happen. It was a slow and gradual process, but its result was equivalent to dropping a bomb on human autonomy.

I view this quest as destructive and obscene, yet I also see it as humanly understandable. We as human beings do hate human agency and responsibility—especially other people’s agency and responsibility. We hate the idea that someone else might make a decision we’ll be bound by almost as much as the idea that our decision might give someone else the right to complain about us. We have been seeking impersonal, “objective” decision-making mechanisms for as long as we have lived together in large-scale settlements, and we’ve been busily inventing transcendent powers to control us for longer than that. Nothing is more intolerable than the idea that it is just us, that our affairs are unavoidably collective, that other people exist, that we exist as responsible human agents.

And yet, under no circumstances does one “gotta hand it to” the neoliberal shills of the world. As understandable as their quest was—and as much as people really did want it on some level—it was impossible. People cannot be “nudged” all the way down. Human agency is ineradicable and unpredictable, and that means that the relief at being spared the need to make responsible decisions is always in danger of being overridden by the resentment at being controlled and manipulated.

People are, inevitably, going to assert their agency, including their collective agency, in some kind of way. The problem we are facing right now is that neoliberalism has created a situation in which those assertions can only be destructive, including self-destructive. In the Brexit vote, for example, the only way to assert agency or control, to claim sovereignty, was to make a hugely self-undermining move—to cut off trade, to alienate allies, to impoverish future generations and cut off untold opportunities for them. In a greater number of cases, the only way to assert control is to harm others, most popularly by expelling or excluding immigrants.

Radically absent from the agenda—with the notable exception of those grocery stores!—is the possibility of directly doing something positive. This is the case even when leaders claim they want to rebuild industry. Trump thinks that he is radically upending the neoliberal world market, and in some ways he is. But he is operating almost exclusively through tax incentives (albeit mostly negative incentives to avoid foreign imports). The motherfucker is trying to nudge American manufacturing back into existence! And even the self-styled king of the world clearly grants the S&P 500 a veto over his plans when push comes to shove.

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What does all this add up to? Not a structured argument, I realize, nor a nuanced one. But I do think that these themes go together—that the pervading sense of meaninglessness, hopelessness, even nihilism of society grows out of the fact that we have been forced, all our lives, to outsource our humanity to the impersonal mechanism of the market. It has penetrated so deeply into our sense of self that we simulate our performance review process in our free time, for fun. That regime has so thoroughly “locked down” our collective options that the only way to assert ourselves, to feel like we’re in control, is to do harm. And the more harm we do, the more harm will feel like the only option.

Search your own heart, reader! Do you imagine a Democratic regime sweeping into power in 2028 and actually legislating? Do you envision them rebuilding what Trump has destroyed, much less building anything new? Do you even care if they try? At a gut level, do you care about anything but the prospect of making Trump and his co-conspirators suffer? I don’t deny that they deserve it. I don’t deny that it would be better for the country if we broke the cycle of elite impunity. And I don’t doubt that the Democrats will set aside that possibility in favor of a vague legislative agenda that, in the spirit of fair play, they will allow their Republican Senate colleagues to feed into the woodchipper.

Even for us, then, the only real hope is harm—justified harm, necessary harm, righteous harm, but still harm. Not everyone sees it that way, of course, and there is little prospect of convincing the 40% or so of Americans who virtually worship Trump as a god that he is one of the most evil individuals ever to live. Hence the difference between our quest for justice and the Trumpian crusade for retribution would be lost on many of our fellow citizens. But everyone, everyone would be able to see a more fundamental difference between the two sides: we both want to retalitate against the other side and make them suffer, but only they deliver.

1. I refrain from using the collective “we” for chatbots because I absolutely refuse to touch them, and never have, not even as a joke, not even to see how much they suck.