Alfons López Tena: The rise of political mafias

The upheavals of global competition have torn the social fabric of traditional societies. Again Catalonia is a good proxy, where forty years of unrelenting and systematic patronage and clientelism from the plundering Catalan institutions had coalesced thus:

1. Being in power for so many years has given it the time to centralize power, monopolize the country’s media, and build up a patronage network of highly dependent and therefore very loyal local intermediaries. [It] has also created a new bourgeoisie that is characterized by pliability and a predilection for political favors instead of marketable skills. Civil service, state-owned and state-controlled institutions, and the burgeoning circle of companies winning public procurement contracts are stacked with these people. The entrenchment of local hierarchies and politically dependent elites — as well as the reinforcement of the idea that one’s fate ultimately depends on politics and connections, not personal achievements — will fundamentally influence [its] social structure for years to come. Brutally effective propaganda campaign against all enemies, foreign and domestic, with the help of seemingly unlimited public funds [and] pro-government media has shaped a parallel reality. It has not only played on historical resentment of foreign domination but has also taken advantage of people’s deepest fears. And [it] has offered them a cure: stability, security, and homogeneity. The internal logic of this system — in which political calculations trump moral considerations — provides no opportunity for self-correction.
2. A political mafia intends to get rich by running the country. This distinction is crucial simply because such a government must hide what it is really doing. When all is hidden, a collective denial of facts occurs, leading to a culture of chronic rumors. Only the most diligent can learn a thing or two about what the ruling mafia is really doing. And that’s how it has to be, since its wealth has been obtained through corruption and crime. In order to successfully hide their actions, our leaders bury the populace in lies, and in order to do so successfully, they have to undermine the state and its institutions, intimidate the media, and pay off people, which they do relentlessly. These are the weapons our leaders use to undermine critics and the opposition, and to fiercely protect the government and all its corrupt mess. Public opinion is manipulated. In a society as weak as [ours], a lie is not used for ideological seduction, but to reinforce the reliance on authoritarian government. This dependency has always been there. The current government chooses its ministers, MPs, and the editors of the pro-government media by how brutal and willing to lie they are. They have risen to power by presenting themselves as the guardians of an abandoned [people], making appeals to nationalism and patriotic selfishness.

This is how Zselyke Csaky and Vesna Pešić define authoritarian populism’s methods in Hungary and Serbia. Read from Catalonia – or Pakistan, Italy, Turkey, they sound eerily familiar. Those populist rulers parade themselves as the only ones who have the moral right to be in power, to bestow government jobs and riches on their clients in exchange for loyalty, discredit the judges who may tackle their crimes, and stifle the media that could expose them. This makes it much easier for them to steal and loot both public and private riches with impunity: anticompetitive, antimeritocratic, “invariably [replacing] all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty”, as Hannah Arendt shrewdly wrote. Decades of this diet have nourished a kakistocracy in which the best are marginalized by the worst in order to keep power, cronyism is all that dictates who is nourished and how much from the spoils of public assets there to be strip-mined, and officials offer no more than Hamilton’s “pliancy to render them the obsequious instruments of [the president’s] pleasure.”

Nothing threatens an entrenched supremacy more insidiously than a genuine meritocracy where race and gender and class cannot thwart the rise of anyone according to their talents and diligence, who thrive in a competitive, open, global world, enjoy a personally earned achieved rather than ascribed status, and fade under bigotry and protectionism. Therefore, merit itself must be derided and sacrificed, and humility and self-abasement become compulsory — lest privilege wobbles.

The system relies on two protective mechanisms: a suffocating communitarianism to keep people tightly held together, and a superiority complex to over-compensate their grim, bleak reality, which together prevent those hapless peoples from any clear-eyed deed to get anything done, improved, or achieved. Backwardness self-perpetuates. Symbolic deeds and aesthetic pantomimes are all they are capably endowed to. Where the exoskeleton provided by the state is enfeebled by its unbroken plunder by the patronage webs, which have dragged on for decades or even centuries, and especially where the state is perceived as alien, both the political-media establishment and the upstarting fringes, the whole country as well, sink in a quagmire of narcissism and cognitive dissonance where the community exerts itself on extracting compliance from their members, by sanctions if they stray, by protection if they give in; always eager to violate individual rights because the imaginary collective rights alleged to need protection outweigh the actual rights lost.

Haunted by the utmost fear of colonized –or merely power-stripped, I would add– peoples as Pankaj Mishra defines it, “the possibility of being swallowed up by the dominant alien culture in their midst,” terrified by the prospect of being degraded into a mere tourist attraction exploiting the scattered dots spread by their wreckage; their threatened and therefore unstable sense of identity, their acute awareness of its helpless vulnerability, their unrelenting anxiety of being overwhelmed by modernity and their own dependency, are overcompensated by clinging to narcissist grandiosity, from the official promotion in Modi’s India of bogus science teaching that the ancient Indians invented and used the atomic energy and flights, the Internet, and head transplants, as the Vedas demonstrate; to the more modest but not less officially promoted Catalan bogus historians who demonstrate that, from Shakespeare to Leonardo da Vinci, from Cervantes to Columbus, all were Catalan and wrote in Catalan. In both cases, a universal wicked conspiracy has deprived Indians and Catalans of their shining heirloom.

Those phenomena present themselves deeply degraded in their Catalan avatar, which is more complicated than interesting as Omar El Nayal observed. The others become instruments to be manipulated either into believers in the Catalan attitudes’ and aims’ righteousness, or into enemies to be feared and scorned at — those wicked Spaniards and their fifth column inside which poison good Catalans. A brew of bravado, contempt, and utter disregard and dismissal of thought and reason, let alone criticism, fuels a people truly convinced of its mission to offer themselves to the world as the ultimate model of goodness and moral superiority. No interest whatsoever in the real others, let alone empathy. Self-deceiving complacency rules, breeding one of  Hannah Arendt’s roots of totalitarianism: “a complete whitewash of one’s own people and a sweeping condemnation of all others.” Thinking beyond the group requires cognitive investment, whereas shortcuts provided by group thinking and its clues greatly ease the decision about whom to trust: the “us”, those who share the illusion of sharing the same values, griefs, desires, resentments, who define their identity on the boundary beyond which  the “other” marauds, especially when people feel their survival is threatened and being attached to one’s group is the most secure; when identity and belonging may easily unleash the chauvinism at their core. Wars have erupted, Daniele Giglioli recalls, “under the pretext of establishing who is the greatest victim, who first became a victim, and who has been victimized the longest.” If a war broke out between Sweden and Denmark, it might  be fought over which country is the more compassionate and places the greatest weight on individual responsibility and sacrifice for the greater good of the equally compassionate majority.