15 Bourgeois Morality: The Social Phenomenology of Capitalism

In order to understand 3c society where it still touches upon our lives, it’s necessary to have an understanding of how 3c society works. Throughout this passage I’ll use a couple relatively straightforward, yet narrowly defined terms to discuss 3c society. These new terms in need of definition are:

• Bourgeois morality
  • “Bourgeois” refers to the qualities of 2n3c individuals. The “Bourgeoisie” is the collective body of 2n3c individuals. “Bourgeois Morality” is the way that 2n3c individuals feel that society should work.
• Liberalism
  • “Liberalism” is here employed in its classical sense— a vision of government and society founded on freedoms and principles of equality. I hold it to be a prefigurement of the 3N social order.

The fundamental unit of capitalist society is the 3c individual; for that reason, we should begin our analysis by reacquainting ourselves with the 3c disposition.

3c individuals are more properly 2n3c. They are raised through childhood with an appropriate balance of parental oversight and freedom; in adolescence, parental oversight increases to an onerous degree, and they are inculcated with a pathological tendency towards Eros. This tendency causes them to fear being condemned by the members of their group; they feel a reciprocal duty to conform to the standards of their group, to profess whatever opinions and take whatever actions the group demands of them regardless of whether they agree or disagree with them. Their greatest desire is to be validated— for the members of their group to affirm their achievements, to listen to their advice, and to grant them power over others. In order to achieve their greatest desire while avoiding their greatest fear, they seek to gain the privileges of respectability, to hold an official office or station, granted to them by their peers, which entitles them by dint of their achievement to a degree of validation.

All of the features of 3c society descend from these qualities of the 3c individual; they are an additive consequence, by which I mean that no changes occur to the nature of the adult 3c individual due to their interaction with 3c society. There are no feedback loops or emergent properties at play here.

The most foundational feature of 3c society, one of the first to emerge, is the entanglement of conformity and success. This is a difficult concept for us to wrap our heads around, given that (due to the construction of our economy) we are so embedded within this worldview that it seems to be self-evident. The easiest way to understand it is to contrast it with the feudal worldview, and I’ll discuss this at more length in a later chapter. In brief, 3cs believe that how much power, prestige, and wealth a person has should be a product of “how hard” they work; hard work is understood implicitly to consist of conforming to the expectations of other people, be they customers or superiors. Conformity is seen as the root of hard work because it is internalized through 3c inculcation as their duty, a thing which must be done by default, rendered valueless and repugnant by its abundance. Feudal mores offer contrast; to a feudal lord, hard work was to be shunned utterly, the domain of the lowly villein. One’s position in feudal society was not the product of effort, but was guaranteed by birth. This was, it’s essential to understand, how feudal people actually wanted society to work; it wasn’t an accidental slavery the peasantry wandered into.

The specialization of labor was a potent driver of the adoption of conformity as a virtue, because to adopt a specialized role is to be very good at doing something other people want you to do. The adoption of such a role occurs on 3c timescales (months to years) and as such the notion of having a career carries a great deal of weight among 3c people. Those who are able to specialize their labor to the extent that their skillset is valuable demonstrate an admirable willingness to conform; generalists, who know a bit of everything, are seen as less useful, and more precocious.

The 3c individual craves hard work, because hard work is a means of showcasing their willingness to conform; however, hard work which goes unrecognized is wasted— the duty of conformity is a means of achieving the privilege of recognition which rewards the good of validation. Three institutions were therefore constructed in order to ensure that individuals were rewarded for their labor: the corporation, the housewife, and racial hierarchy.

The foremost institution of 3c societal organization is the corporation, the atomic unit of 3c society. As discussed above, Capitalism is more properly Corporatism. Specialized labor was organized into units which subsumed a particular industry in a particular place; this began with the medieval guilds, which were the first bourgeois institutions to wield any degree of political power. The logic of the guild and the corporation is more or less identical. It is, essentially, a pyramid scheme. Newcomers are subject to the authority of older members by default; this relationship is modified by the skill and effort invested by each member, an index of their willingness and ability to conform to the demands of the institution. Members are thereby organized into a hierarchy, a chain of submission and domination. As a member rises along the chain, they climb the pyramid. They are rewarded for this climb financially (which is both a practical concern and a means of gaining validation), by being granted underlings (a potential source of validation, which is both owed pro forma and can be obtained through skillful leadership) and through the accretion of titles which can be leveraged for validation outside of the corporation (to be a vice president of marketing means something more than to be an assistant marketer). They are conversely, and more weakly, threatened for this climb by greater accountability; they are incited to conform ever harder as they rise, because greater responsibility entails greater consequences for failure— the most important of which, in the 3c mind, is shame.

The corporation is therefore a machine which juices an irrational amount of hard work out of 3c individuals by exploiting their (literally) limitless thirst for validation. They work harder than the financial logic of their compensation would otherwise dictate, because they desire the validation granted to them by a rise through the ranks of the company.

This system certainly has its advantages; after all, it was the engine of labor which fueled the Industrial Revolution. However, it is an indelible fact that it is built on human misery, and this fact makes it inherently unsustainable. While the difference between the theoretical material prosperity of the general public and its real prosperity was large enough, the influx of new physical comforts (plumbing, electricity, refrigeration) kept those at the bottom of the pyramid fairly amenable to the whole arrangement^[1]. However, whenever the influx of new luxuries dried up, the oppressed tiers of the pyramid were bound to rebel.

This was a danger inherent to any pyramid scheme; it was indispensable that there be more people on the bottom than the top. Being a CEO means nothing if everyone in the company commands a similar amount of respect and authority. Earning a doctorate (and universities were, essentially, corporations) means nothing if everyone has a similar title. Even being highly-paid meant little, if everyone was highly-paid (a 3c individual would go hungry for a week if they could wring some praise out of the effort; such is their compulsion). Inequality was an essential feature of the system, both by its own internal logic (the generation of validation) and the external logic of the market (the need to incentivize more skilled workers over less skilled ones).

In the 19th century, this threat was recognized by the leaders of Capitalist societies. As discussed earlier, Capitalist Corporatism consisted essentially of a large number of corporations, all pyramid schemes, daisy-chained together into an enormous, singular pyramid. At its apex sat the government, and at the apex of the government sat a single, human leader— President, Fuhrer, General Secretary.  These highly self-aware, prehensile societies arrived more or less organically at two potential solutions to the obvious contradiction imposed by the fact of the societal pyramid scheme^[2]. The first, and more successful of these solutions was the invention of the housewife as an independent social class. The second, less successful solution was the development of racism and the racial hierarchy.

The housewife was created by the systematic neglect of adolescent girls, to ensure that they developed 3o dispositions which complimented the 3c dispositions of male workingmen. That this neglect was pursued  intentionally is readily apparent, as it is often expressed in the attitudes of male authority figures of the period— both in their own words, and in the depictions of the female authors like Austen, Bronte, and Eliot who managed to avoid this conditioning.

This solution to the critical shortcomings of the Capitalist pyramid scheme was remarkably successful. Pathological compatibility and the biological logic of monogamy  ensure that the thing a 3c individual most craves is the validation of a 3o individual, and the thing that a 3o individual most craves is the support of a 3c individual. By legally and customarily restricting women from financial independence, the leaders of Capitalist society were able to augment the uncertain vicissitudes of adolescent conditioning with monetary necessity. Even women who were, for whatever reason, not inculcated 3o, would be dependent on men for their income, and would therefore be forced to gratify the egos of their male husbands and fathers.

However, it has to be emphasized that the foundation of this scheme was pathological compatibility, not financial serfdom. The home was systematically carved out as a social interiority, a patchwork of familial fiefdoms which women were granted rule over in a decidedly feudal, 3o manner. Romantic love was elevated to the centerpiece and apex of life within Capitalist societies, as the tendentious, glory-hungry bourgeoisie stumbled unwittingly into stability. Every man in bourgeois society was guaranteed a wife as an ultimate underling, a source of validation which, external to market forces, could not be lost to him by failure, but who still motivated him to hard work by her utter financial dependence.

As I’ve stated previously, I believe that Liberalism is rooted fundamentally in this compromise— its careful restraint of government power, the desire for freedom which defies the centralizing logic of Capitalism, sufficiently antedates the crises of the 2nd World War that the emergence of the ideology must be accounted for. Pathological individuals are capable of achieving a simulacrum of dispositional neutrality when they’re intimately involved with someone of the opposite disposition. The process of thought which is constrained by disposition amounts more or less to an internal conversation, and external conversations can make up for irrationality in these internal ones. This equanimity is imperfect, of course, because it requires the pair (in this case husband and wife) to communicate regarding whatever decision either is making; such communication will naturally occur much more slowly than the speed of thought. However, in my view, Liberalism still constitutes an obvious prefiguring of the 3n social order to come, and provides the best example as we seek forward to find its values.

At any rate, the Liberal social order was fundamentally unstable, for two reasons. The first was that it was never truly a neutral social order; a 3o interior periphery was carved out of society, but this periphery was always less than and second to the external 3c constitution of the nation-state. When the imperatives of Total War necessitated the sacrifice of this interior periphery to industrial production, that sacrifice was (however reluctantly) performed. The second was that some empirical justification for the systemic 3o inculcation of women was necessary, and none of these justifications stood up to scrutiny. The 3c disposition was naturally and necessarily held up by 3c society as a virtue, a pinnacle of human behavior. It was asserted in turn that women were unable to be held to such a standard, by virtue of their naturally submissive natures and limited powers of reasoning. High-profile female intellectuals throughout the 19th century proved that this assertion was untrue at the upper echelons of achievement; the mass employment of female factory labor during the first and second world wars proved that it was also untrue at the lower levels of the capitalist pyramid. For 3c society to admit that women needed to be inculcated 3o to compliment the pathology with which it infected men would beg the question of why it was infecting anyone with an irrational pathology in the first place— a line of questioning which would inevitably do more to destroy the Liberal-Capitalist social order than to repair it.

The second stratagem deployed to remediate the pyramidal nature of the bourgeois social order was the systematization of racial prejudice into a hierarchy. This was a fairly straightforward operation— it began with the evolution of skin color as a substitute for ethnicity during the colonial era, and culminated in Jim Crow and “separate, but equal”. The effect was to create a parallel society which operated by the same logic as the base society but occupied a permanently inferior position. Minority wage workers would work menial jobs, in which they would advance according to conformity to bourgeois ideals; but their advancement would be capped at a low level, and any job with any real prestige would be reserved for the majority population.

This system, as avidly as it was espoused, proved substantially less successful than the subjugation of women. Like the other system, it was founded on a false notion of racial inferiority; following the end of slavery, exceptions to this inferiority abounded (see: the Harlem Renaissance), and the logic of the discrimination could not be sustained in the face of this evidence.

But even when its notions were widely adhered to, the arrangement was of limited utility in providing validation to the 3c male workers of the majority. There needed to be few enough minorities that their political power (whether de jure or exercised de facto through the threat of violence) didn’t break up the unity of the nation as a whole. An underclass which furnishes few examples doesn’t mean much to individuals that don’t work with them directly. What’s more, the fact that insufficient numbers of minorities existed to work all the menial jobs necessitated by modern life ensured that a large number of poor, unskilled whites were bound to be resentful of their existence within a stratum reserved on paper for their racial inferiors. Numerous semantic efforts were made to assure poor whites of their racial superiority regardless of their station, but such efforts could only go so far before they began eroding the entanglement of hard work and social mobility, entrenching in its place a stagnant caste system. In their attempts to navigate these self contradictions, racist arguments inevitably devolved into abstruse racial metaphysics, which couldn’t have been very motivating.  Furthermore, the knowledge that minority advancement up the social pyramid was artificially capped must have robbed their deference of any savor— the competition upon which Capitalism was founded was shoddy and full of holes, but its pretenses toward honesty were essential to its motivating power.

As a result, the oppression of minorities never played a significant role in maintaining the Capitalist status quo. In fact, the most thoroughly Capitalist, Fascistic nation, Germany, went so far as to begin executing and deporting all of its significant minorities at the height of its awful hysteria— clearly, they didn’t see much value in generalizing or deepening a caste-based arrangement.

Other Bourgeois Values

While Capitalism’s compromises are essential to understanding the events of history as they actually occurred, the consistently self-inconsistent logic of Capitalism as it exists under its own power is more valuable in understanding it as it persists today. The most significant element of this logic is the hysteria spiral, a concept to which I have therefore devoted a full chapter. In short— the willingness of 3c individuals to lie in order to fit in with their social groups, including corporations to which they belong, creates escalating cycles of untruth which cause capitalist societies to engage in clearly irrational behaviors where insufficient non-3c opposition can be found to oppose them.

This subordination of truth to conformity is a foundational element of the 3c disposition; as such, it carries ramifications beyond facilitating hysteria spirals. The foremost of these is bourgeois propriety.

Bourgeois propriety, put simply, is the 3c disdain for speaking truths which are inconvenient for one’s group. It is in many respects the passive analogue to hysteria’s active dishonesty. Where an outright lie would draw unwanted attention to an instance of nonconformity, oppressive silence is instead observed, silence upon which it is a violation of bourgeois norms to encroach. Developmentally disabled princesses are bundled off to St Andrews to live lives of obscurity; presidents have affairs which go unremarked on by the reporters waiting outside the hotel room. On down through every level of bourgeois society, the oppressive silence of propriety manifests itself constantly, from the most significant inconvenient truths to the most paltry. At the most immediate level, even differences of taste are expected to be downplayed—criticism of, say, a friend’s taste in television, is to be avoided where it can’t be couched in haranguing zeal for some aspect of group morality.

At a societal level, bourgeois propriety was one of the most fragile manifestations of the 3c social order. During the Liberal era of Capitalism, 3o housewives provided a ready and over-eager audience for gossip and rumor mongering, and journalistic forces were compelled to provide. It was only for the briefest span— the period directly following the 2nd World War during which housewives declined but countercultural forces had yet to materialize, during the 1950s and 1960s— that propriety truly infected every aspect of American public life. Watergate, and the recasting of journalists and artists as truth-telling defiers of consensus which accompanied it, destroyed this brief institutionalization of what was previously a grassroots manifestation of the 3c pathology. Since then, while bourgeois propriety continues to dictate the actions of individual 3cs wherever they are found, it no longer plays much of a role in public life, having been eroded long ago by 3N spoilers and the mutually assured destruction of 3c class partisans.

Another noteworthy manifestation of the bourgeois social order, their overpowering nostalgia, is a clear product of their disposition. Fondness of the memories of one’s childhood is likely a universal human trait; it manifests across such a wide range of human contexts that it certainly seems to be essential in our character. However, there’s a particular strand of saccharine, powerful, immobilizing nostalgia which has been an overwhelming feature of Capitalist society since at least the Victorian era.

The source of this nostalgia is very straightforward— the 3c individuals who compose the bourgeois social order are in fact 2n3c. In childhood, they experience a well-proportioned upbringing which adequately meets their needs and gives them the tools to meet the demands of their emotional existence. In adolescence, they are suddenly abruptly thrust into unpleasant, irrational competition, which inculcates them with an unslakable thirst for validation and permanently taints and lessens their understanding of what it means to be human. In the context of their upbringing, then, their nostalgia is understandable; if you keep an eye out for it I’m sure you’ll spot it everywhere from now on. It particularly afflicts the millennial generation^[3], and our stuck-culture of perennial reboots can be laid largely at the feet of this subconscious force.

The last element of bourgeois culture I’d like to discuss is a consequence of their headlong flight from solve— their persistent medicalization of “mental health issues”.

From lobotomy in the 1930s to the use of antidepressants today, the 3c struggle to avoid the personal self-investigation demanded by our culture has been facilitated by an egregious amount of speculative medical intervention. This is understandable; the alchemical progression from solve to unio is not an obvious one. 3c individuals frequently osmosify enough contempt for their own pathology to begin the journey through solve, but only the very intelligent are able to digest enough of our cultural resources to push all the way through it. Even those who do achieve peak solve are left woefully unequipped to perform the unio necessary to patch themselves back together into a functional human being.

The main side effect of solve is the disentanglement of the upper mind from the lower, the rebellion of the subconscious mind against the executive functions. Both stimulants and antidepressants strengthen the executive functions and allow the upper mind to bully the lower mind into compliance; 2n3c’s strongly prefer antidepressants, for some complicated reasons I’ll explore in a later chapter, Drugs and the Process of Becoming Whole. Within the urban areas where dwindling, doubtful 3cs pick over the corpses of rotting Capitalist institutions, antidepressant use and abuse is so endemic as to be the default; I find it difficult to blame them for it.

That medical institutions have supported this demand for narcotic relief from normal psychological processes is substantially less defensible. Of course, these institutions are corporations, composed of and oriented towards the needs of the bourgeoisie. In standard bourgeois fashion, mental health has been subject to bouts of slow-rolling hysteria. The current iteration, the brain-chemical model of depression, is as baseless a case of citogenesis as any other product of the replication crisis.

While this model of depression is falling out of fashion in the face of mounting evidence of its unreality, it’s inevitable that some other plausible justification for the use of solve-halting drugs will arise, so long as no straightforward pathway towards de-pathologization exists.

Having given an overview of the history of Capitalism as well as the moral dimensions of its current, dying configuration, let’s conclude with a discussion of why any of this matters, and where we’re headed from here.

Where We’re Headed From Here

As the historical overview in this chapter has (hopefully) substantiated, the question of pivoting from a 3c majority to a 3N one is not a question of defeating Capitalism or of staving off a return to Fascism; these goals have already been achieved, so long as our culture retains the robust expressions of 3rd level solve which have been its bread and butter since the 1960s. Star Wars and the Breakfast Club, to put it pertly, suffice to blow the dam of 3c unity wide open, where Elvis and the Beatles first cracked it.

However, our cultural victory over the worst excesses of Fascism has not sufficed to wake your average 3c individual from their solve-defying slumber. The bourgeoisie display everywhere a general incapacity to reckon with the destruction of their lifeways, which they attribute invariably to the machinations of 3c outgroups, rival poles of what should be a unipolar system. They bend themselves to outcompeting and out-conforming their rivals, making Faustian bargains with their proletarian underclasses in a hail-Mary toward the restoration of some imagined beautiful past. Those honest and intelligent enough to reckon with the semantic destruction which the last few decades have wrought on their social order tend to lay the blame at the feet of intransigent youths and underclasses, meddlers destroying a just society out of laziness or some other easily-legible social ill. Where self-doubt wriggles its way through the screen of these rationalizations, medication is there to fill the gap, antidepressant stupor alert to steer the waking dreamers along each plodding step between work, home, and grave.

The most important ramification of Capitalism’s Apotheosis in Fascism is reserved for these individuals, the self-doubting 3c who are beginning to conceive of their constraints as unhelpful limitations but cannot bring themselves to understand their values as so fundamentally wrong. What the study of history shows us is that the values of Capitalism— the entanglement of hard work and reward, the virtues of conformity, the endless lust for validation— are not indelible features of human nature, but the temporally local manifestations of a necessary, but finished epoch of social evolution. The collapse of the bourgeois social order was not a heartrending tragedy which befell an innocent society at the height of its flowering; it was a panicked, remorseful retreat away from the Fascistic reflections which the youth of the 1960s saw when they subjected their society to scrutiny.

Luckily for all of us, culture is downstream of the individual psyches of the people who compose it. The responsibility the individual bears towards the moral insufficiency of the Capitalist system is certainly not to design a superior replacement. Such a scheme may be enlightening, and it may be a potent tool of solve; but whatever system arises to replace Capitalism will emerge inevitably and organically from mass-3N inculcation. For that reason, the only demand that history makes of anyone is the same demand you should be making of yourself— that you understand your pathology, resolve your inconsistencies, and, ultimately, allow yourself to be OK.