The motivation behind blogging was for me the opportunity it afforded to ‘think aloud’. It was unnecessary to be concerned about reviewers and editors. I could say what I wanted, as it were, uncensored. 400+ blogs later, I took a time-out to write my latest book on the idea of a healthy society. Now I’m returning to blogging to rediscover its freedoms.
One phenomenon that has long fascinated me is the mindsets of our ‘rulers’, the political elite, in my terminology the ‘capital monopolists’. I have advanced an ideal type based on Margaret Archer’s modes of reflexivity, defining these people as ‘focused autonomous reflexives’. But there is another aspect to their thinking that I continue to ponder. The crux of the issue is: how do these people reconcile to themselves what can only be seen as contradictory stances and views. What are the mechanisms that allow them to live with or circumvent cognitive dissonance? Okay, I should read more psychology. But in the interim, I’m taking this opportunity to make a few distinctions that at least help (me) to bring a family of puzzles into focus.
Sociologists will be familiar with Bourdieu’s notion of ‘habitus’, representing a set of dispositions to think and act that has its origins in people’s social structural and cultural backgrounds. In this sense it is not at all surprising that tranches of overwhelmingly white, male and Eton/Oxford-conditioned citizens emerge from this antiquated arena with the presumption of an ‘entitlement to rule’.
No less familiar is the notion that ruling involves formulating and propagating an ‘ideology’ that provides cover for personal vested interests. I am using ideology here in the classic sense, namely, to distinguish: (i) a fundamentally ‘false’ worldview constructed to sell an entitlement to rule to the public, and (ii) a ‘scientific’ or sociological attempt to describe how things ‘truly’ are and to explain why. Currently rentier capitalism’s post-1970s neoliberal ideology prevails and is all but ubiquitous.
Taking the salience of habitus and ideology as sociological ‘givens’, I am here concerned with the manner in which our rulers get their heads round, become reconciled to, the active pursuit of their own interests to the well-documented – undeniable – detriment of others. Nearly four million people in the UK in 2023, including nearly one million children, are now living in ‘destitution’, yet our rulers openly and brazenly lie about the statistics and no less openly and brazenly insist they care and have been, and are, addressing this. I will try and illustrate this phenomenon via a tentative and exploratory typology of mindsets.
- Cynics – cynics are reconciled not only to lying but to adopting any performative rhetoric necessary to further the vested interests of themselves and their no less ‘entitled’ and privileged peers. I recall one bangster interviewee: saying ‘what don’t people understand, we are in it to make money!’ Cynics don’t give a shit: their willingness to mislead and ‘use’ others for their own ends extends across the board to encompass non-work relations.
- Opportunists – opportunists knowingly pursue time-specific, means-ends strategies that are personally expedient, for example to gain promotion in business or politics. Unlike cynics they have ‘as yet’ retained their souls, though their overriding goals are ‘getting on’, whether measured in monetary terms or in terms of the exercise of power for its own sake or status recognition via top posts or honours.
- Charismatics – charismatics possess either personal qualities or extremes of self-belief that forcibly propel them into governing elites. Their elevation is likely to be precarious and can prove temporary, but their personalities can also carry them into the upper echelons of the ruling class. Often they are sponsored and promoted beyond any talents they might have.
- Romantics – romantics set out to achieve pivotal posts in business, finance or politics to ‘make a difference’, to be agents of or catalysts for reform. Their commitment is to what Popper called ‘piecemeal social engineering’, namely, tinkering with existing institutions in search of what are typically marginal improvements. Transformative change is no part of their agenda.
- Passives – passives conspicuously lack meaningful reflexivity. What ‘internal conversations’ they have exhort compatibility with the neoliberal status quo. This is in large part a function of their primary-to-secondary socialisation. In other words, notwithstanding any talent and intelligence they may have, their psycho-social conditioning is equivalent to an apprenticeship to rule, and they are not disposed to interrogate it.
- Marginals – marginals exist around the edges of dominant elites, either content or destined by deficits of talent, intelligence or political nous to occupy secondary or subservient roles. Typically, they are ‘on board’ but ineffectual participants in ruling regimes.
- Renegades – renegades or rebels comprise those whose personally or socially amplified reflexivity, in contradistinction to the passives, compels them to question the leadership roles for which are otherwise qualified. As a result, they find themselves outsiders afforded the social and political protection due to their privileged status.
It should be emphasised that any given individual can occupy any of these roles at different junctures of the lifecourse: opportunists can become cynics, or even, given an appropriate psychosocial trigger, romantics; romantics can become renegades; and so on. But many strategies and/or tactics represented in this preliminary typology are probably quite stable over time. The wider or maybe deeper sociological questions concern which circumstances lead to switches between which strategies/tactics in which individuals and the outcomes of any transitions over time.