It’s been nearly 20 years since Gadi Taub assailed “Badulina,” the best-selling fantasy novel-cum-self-help book by Gabi Nitzan. Writing in Haaretz, Taub, a historian and public intellectual, deplored the worldview that Nitzan was promoting, likening it to the economic approach espoused by Benjamin Netanyahu in “a society that is privatizing itself to death.” Taub bemoaned the malignant, New Age-like individualism that Nitzan was inculcating in readers of “Badulina” as an excuse for withdrawal from society and for selfishness. “When there is no politics,” Taub wrote, “there is only a free market. There are no citizens, there are consumers.”
Today, some two decades later, Taub, who took a sharp turn into right-wing populism, would not dare to denigrate Netanyahu or condemn privatization. On the other hand, little seems to have changed for Nitzan. He’s editing a new newspaper, called Bereshit – the Hebrew title of the first book of the Bible and its first word – whose theme is the “crisis of democracy”; or, as he writes on the front page of the first issue, “individual rights, human dignity and liberty and freedom of expression.” In the meantime, however, that seems to mean being occupied obsessively with exposing the “lie” about the pandemic, the masks, the vaccines, the side effects and so on.
The coronavirus crisis changed the world in a variety of ways during the past two years, but no one foresaw how widespread and popular conspiracy theories would become. Economic and social uncertainty have always acted as a petri dish for superstitions, but we needed the social media to make it possible for individuals to spread fictions fast and wholesale; and even more important, for surfers to communicate among themselves and build ecosystems of alternative facts.
Of Sheep and Lone Wolves
Conspiracy theories are a riveting social phenomenon. As a widely used formulation by Karen Douglas puts it, they grant their followers three promises. The first is a secret, a hidden charm, which is not so much information as it is a framework of meaning. The second promise is a feeling of security: The possessors of the secret are prepared for a crisis, or are part of an inner circle that has been chosen for salvation, or they are the only ones who understand that there’s nothing to worry about. The third promise is community: Those who know the secret share a treasure and constitute a social circle. The community accords warmth and positions itself against a hostile or blind world.
These promises, it’s almost needless to say, are false. Conspiracy theory advocates know less about the world, not more. They are consumed with doubts and seek constant confirmation for their beliefs. They are not safer (they’re more likely to die from COVID, for starters), and the community they have found is fragile; it does not represent true friendship necessarily, but ad hoc relations. Arguably, these attributes are easy to find among anti-vaxxers.
But the story is bigger than that. Conspiracy theories are spawned in response to a particular need. The publication of “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” at the turn of the 20th century, to take a famous and painful example, was aimed against a specific group of people, with the goal of vilifying them and relegating them to a place beyond the pale of legitimate society. Claims that the moon landing never happened or that President John F. Kennedy was not assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald offer a soothing explanation for events that many considered impossible.
In other words, like every myth or folktale, a conspiracy theory seeks to fulfill a psychological and social purpose. If we examine it and go down the sociological rabbit hole, we’ll reach the fuel that motivates it. Here we will grasp its essence, its raison d’être. And it won’t be the rule of the Illuminati.
What, then, do suspiciousness of the medical and political establishments, protests against restrictions and lockdowns, and ridiculing the public’s fear of the virus have in common? What is the joint platform for expressions of disappointment at politicians from the right and the left, parallels drawn between Israel and the Soviet Union or Nazi Germany, the “development” of alternative medicines for the coronavirus and the consolation that is found in the community of the like-minded?
Let’s let the protagonist of “Badulina” answer: “To remind [people] that their fundamental obligation in this world is not ideological or nationalistic, but personal: to be happy.”
In a word: depoliticization. The conspiracy theory espoused by the anti-vaxxers affords a global context and social legitimization for turning one’s back on the state, the establishment, scientific research and society at large. If we can’t rely on the government, the health system or our next-door neighbors, all that’s left is to withdraw into ourselves, declare that everyone is crazy (or sheep), feel special (or persecuted), and feather, as they say, our own nest. Accusing the government of engaging in a totalitarian conspiracy constitutes an ultimate excuse for withdrawing from social involvement and provides an exemption from caring about the political sphere.
The conspiracy idea comes in response to a social need, but is far from exhausting it. The overall phenomenon extends far beyond the opponents of vaccination. They are only one stream in a raging flood that seeks depoliticization, social privatization and the acceleration of individualism.
The libertarian wave that has been inundating this country for a decade is another significant symptom of the phenomenon. People who see themselves as “citizens of the world” are also partners to it, but so too are those who seek personal solutions for public problems, like those who demand that people who are in favor of taking in refugees “should first take refugees into their home.” The cryptocurrency craze is also part of it. And when Yair Asulin writes in this paper that the Russia-Ukraine conflict is not a national war and that “the heroes [of this war] are we the spectators” (Haaretz, March 25), he is engaging in the same depoliticization as Nitzan in “Badulina.”
We are in the midst of an individualist, antisocial, antinational trend, one that began in the 1960s in the United States and Europe, and reached its peak before the coronavirus crisis. In light of the mobilization that was required of various countries to act against the virus, it seemed for a brief moment that the vital role of the nation-state would again be understood and appreciated. We received lifesaving vaccinations, for free and efficiently, because we are part of a particular country and not another, and the prestige of Benjamin Netanyahu (or Berl Katznelson) rose because of the quick arrival of the vaccines and their distribution by the health maintenance organizations. Yet it was precisely against the background of the clear and present need for a state that the anti-vaccination conspiracy spread.
The Invention of the Individual
In his visit to the young United States, the French statesman and aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville was struck by the individualism that was flowering on America’s soil. In his book, first published in 1835, he explained to his readers that this was a “novel idea,” for “our fathers were only acquainted with selfishness.” Individualism, Tocqueville explained, “is a mature and calm feeling, which disposes each member of the community to sever himself from the mass of his fellows, and to draw apart with his family and his friends; so that, after he has thus formed a little circle of his own, he willingly leaves society at large to itself.”
Leaving society to its own devices means dismantling the public sphere. Accordingly, Tocqueville posits individualism against citizenship. By distancing people from participating in the public space, in politics, the individual is the enemy of the citizen.
It is the freedom of election and of being elected, argues Tocqueville, that saves America from individualistic fragmentation. People who live under despotism develop apathy and withdraw into themselves, but in a democracy the individual can find selffulfillment not only in the family fold but in political activity as well.
The idea that Tocqueville articulated so well is not new. Aristotle saw humans as political animals. Public activity was for him, as for the majority of the citizens of the Athenian polis and afterward in the Roman republic, a supreme realization of their humanity and their freedom. Individuals are transformed into full humans in the course of social and political interaction, because for them the joint creation of society is the complete expression of their humanity.
The individualism that Tocqueville first discovered in America in 1831 spread afterward to the entire Western world. It intensified, and various nations struggled in diverse ways against its results. The fragmentation that hovered as a permanent threat was described as the malaise of modernity, an expression of alienation that would give rise to a mechanistic approach, disassembling meaning, undermining the natural order of things, and violating the unity of the people.
One of fascism’s promises was that it would act as a cure for the process of individuation, and would reconstitute the organic nation and purge it of foreign, harmful restraints that were supposedly to blame for problems. Communism, too, bore a promise of a renewed, collective and communal existence – not by a return to national purity but by changing material conditions and progressing to a society without alienation, one that would be egalitarian and rest on solidarity.
Since the 1990s, liberalism, which innately placed the individual at the center, has become the only game in town. Its advantage, like its disadvantage, lies in not purporting to relieve the distress of modernity. However, whereas in the past the distress was at least declared as such – the Western citizen sought meaning and lamented its loss – in recent decades the lack of commitment to great ideals has been celebrated.
The Individual Kills the Citizen
We live in “liquid modernity,” as the philosopher and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman termed it in the 1999 book of that name. It’s the era in which a transition is taking place from a society comprised of individuals who see themselves as pilgrims seeking redemption, to one made up of tourists looking for experiences. “Liquidity” is a metaphor for the current legitimacy of mobility, for change and even for a revolution in our life, in our values, in our worldviews and in our identity.
According to Bauman, in the liquid modern era, the danger that the public will invade the private (as with fascism or bolshevism) is much diminished, whereas now it is the private that is encroaching on the public. Instead of acting for a common good, private persons are foisting on the public space the privatized logic of individualism. The public space is becoming a screen on which people project their personal distresses. Selfishness is becoming legitimate, and what Tocqueville feared is coming to pass: The individual is killing the citizen.
“Public space is increasingly empty of public issues,” Bauman writes. “It fails to perform its past role of a meeting-and-dialogue place for private troubles and public issues. On the receiving end of the individualizing pressures, individuals are being gradually, but consistently, stripped of the protective armor of citizenship and expropriated of their citizen skills and interests. Under the circumstances, the prospect of the individual de jure ever turning into the individual de facto (that is, one which commands the resources indispensable for genuine self-determination) seems ever more remote.”
These final words are most important. Our individualism is under threat from the commonalty, but the commonalty is also a condition for its development. No person is born with language, culture or autonomy. They must be learned, and we learn them from the society in which we live. A person is a social being not only because they live in society, but because without society they do not become a person.
Beyond this, without proper infrastructures and resources, individuals are incapable of fully realizing themselves; and without institutionalized political defense of our human and civil rights, we simply have no way to enjoy them. The withdrawal into absolute individualism is subverting our full self-realization as human beings, both in principle and pragmatically.
The Most Tempting Manipulation
In the first issue of Bereshit, alongside an article by TV-news anchor Oshrat Kotler applauding citizens who are protesting “Pfizer’s experimental treatment,” there is a photograph of a demonstrator holding a sign that reads, “To be a free people in our land” (quoting Israel’s national anthem). There is bitter irony here, for the demonstrators against vaccination or the restrictions of the green pass do not yearn to be a free people in their land, but free individuals in their homes. Their protest is not only apolitical in the political-party sense, it is antipolitical in the public sense. They want to be left alone.
“First of all, enough with that ‘we’ thing,” King Badulina says in Nitzan’s novel. “There is no ‘we.’ There’s only ‘I’ in the world, seven billion ‘I’s that keep joining together and breaking off according to various interests and external manipulations.” Well, one of the cleverest manipulations is the one that promises the individual that he knows a great secret that others don’t know, that she must resist the rule of a dastardly elite and that it is incumbent on them to disconnect from social solidarity and to withdraw into the home.
That’s a sweet and tempting manipulation. It is adept at flattering the selfishness of the individual, at legitimizing egocentricity, at blurring the need for an establishment, for a government in order conduct normal, safe life. It is skilled at forging an ethos of heroism and revolt in the face of a nonexistent dictatorship. That’s why it’s so popular. Bauman is dead-on when he asserts that the task we face today can no longer be only “the defense of private autonomy from the advancing troops of the ‘public sphere’… The task now is to defend the vanishing public realm.”
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Published in Haaretz