A Plague of Toadies: An Other End of History

 

One of my favorite Toadies from popular culture 

There is a rather influential thesis that comes down to us from Hegel as read by Kojève and then later Francis Fukuyama and Axel Honneth. The thesis, as it has been interpreted, states quite simply that history is driven by a drive for mutual recognition. In other words, we strive to be recognized by people who we also recognize, to be an equal among equals. Built into this argument is the idea that the recognition must be reciprocal, it is not enough to be recognized by someone, to have someone see us as who we want to be seen as, the person seeing us must be someone that we could recognize in turn, someone whose perspective and criteria we respect.. As the blog "Philosophy bro" put it, no one wants to receive a compliment on their fashion sense from someone wearing cargo shorts. (apologies to anyone who likes cargo shorts, but I think that we can all fill this in with our own example of some particular aspect of taste that calls a person's judgement into question). The various interpretations might agree or disagree on whether or not we have achieved this ideal of mutual recognition, but they all agree that it is what drives history--the revolutions of democracy have made this ideal more and more of a reality. 

I suspect that one reason why this theory is popular among academics is that academia is in some sense driven by such a dynamic. The pleasures of academic life are few and far between, and increasingly dwindling, but there is nothing quite like getting a positive blurb from someone that you admire or respect, or seeing yourself cited in a great book. While interpretations of this thesis range from apologies for the existing neoliberal order after the fall of the Soviet Union to critical demands to expand the terrain of recognition, it is hard to argue against its utopian core. It is good to be recognized. 

What is most striking about this thesis now is not the question as to whether it is is conservative or revolutionary, but whether it applies at all. What we see in contemporary neo-fascism is a desire to be recognized by those one would never recognize in return. To take two cases in point, Elon Musk's drive to purchase and run twitter seems to be driven almost entirely to get the adulation of fanboys and bots, each with less than a thousand followers and avatars that suggest they have not moved out of their parents' basement. He has seemed to pursued this recognition by people he would not recognize in turn at the expense of his self-respect and his company. 

One cannot overlook Toadie in the history of popular toady figures

The second example is of course Donald Trump. There are no shortage of examples here, from his cabinet meetings in which he is regularly praised at length for his myriad accomplishments, real or imagined, to his winning the FIFA Peace Prize . Watching him accept the award, and put the little medal around his neck is just cringe inducing. How could he not see the award as such a blatant attempt to kiss his ass. Part of the common sense appeal of the ideal of mutual recognition is that we all have stories of times that we have been confronted with its distortion, from the praise of a loving, all too loving parent, who can't see why anyone would not also love us, to the criticism of a student who after receiving a failing grade tells us that we are the worst professor ever. There is a spontaneous philosophy of recognition than teaches us to bracket the praise of those who idealize us and the criticisms of those who are motivated in their contempt for us. 

Whoever designed the FIFA Peace Prize

"understood the assignment," to use the parlance of our times

It looks live five zombie hands grasping at a devastated world.

This brings us to the anthropological postulate at the heart of the struggle for recognition; such a thesis necessarily presupposes that there is something unsatisfying about such asymmetrical recognitions, of being recognized or misrecognized by someone one cannot recognize in return. It is why Kojève argues that the master, recognized by only someone he cannot recognize in return, surrounded by a toadying yes man, is an existential impasse. It is this image of the tyrant and the toadie that has come to us not just from readers of Hegel, but from popular culture. This image has two parts; the tyrant is unaware of his own abilities or limitations, and cannot see who they really are because they only have their idealized images reflected back to them, and the toadie so caught up in toadying that they have loss touch with reality. We recognize them as failures to be human, to connect. 

I could have illustrated this whole thing with Mr. Burns and Wayland Smithers

We could conclude that Trump and Musk are particularly delusional, but to focus too much on them misses the way in which we can see a general breakdown of mutual recognition throughout multiple social relations. Much of what makes up the so-called "manosphere," from pick up artists to incels, is predicated on a refusal of any relation that is predicated on anything like mutual recognition. I believe that any such thing would be considered "gay." In its place we get a fetishization of hierarchy and domination as the sine ne qua non of any relation that any self-respecting man would enter into, complete with its fantasy of tradwives. Of course it is hard for everyday ordinary people to find the toadying yes men, or, more importantly, women, to play that role. 

It is from this perspective we can understand the rise of AI, and the ideal of AI friends, girlfriends, and chatbots. They offer to democratize tyranny, to make every person with a wifi connection a master surrounded by slaves.  Musk himself made this abundantly clear when he tweeted an AI generated video of a woman saying, "I will always love you" as a demonstration of what the technology offers, revealing once again that he has retained everything from science fiction except its meaning. 

Perhaps we could conclude that we are no longer the sort of subjects that desire mutual recognition, or maybe we never were, accepting it only as a kind of compromise between our ultimate desire, to be recognized without recognizing, and our greatest fear, to live without recognition. Of course everything depends on whether or not we see this desire as some eternal aspect of being human, replacing the supposed desire for mutual recognition, as the foundation of history (this to me is the most important criticism of Kojève, that he anthropomorphizes Hegel), or as itself a product of history, a production of subjectivity. Democracy might aspire to an ideal of mutual recognition, but we live in capitalist society more than we live in a democracy, and such a society is predicated on multiplying the hierarchies, between capitalist and worker, between costumer and employee, and now, between humanity and machines that promise us everything we would want from each other (except the demand to be recognized in turn.)