TWILIGHT OF THE SELF: THE DECLINE OF THE INDIVIDUAL IN LATE CAPITALISM – a review

A recent book by professor Michael Thompson analyzes larger forces that have diminished the autonomy of the self and our ability to think critically about the structures that dominate our lives.

The Twilight of the Self, recently published by William Paterson University political scientist, Michael Thompson, was written after Donald Trump came to office. But neither Trump nor Trumpism is explicitly cited in the text. What Thompson has done is more comprehensive than an exposition of our current political condition. His thesis is devoted to explicating the foundations and structures – economic, cognitive, and psychological – which have caused the decaying of democracy and the emergence of authoritarianism at this stage of capitalist development.

At the focus of the democratic crisis is the withering of the individual and individual autonomy. Thompson's definition of autonomy is the one forged in the Enlightenment. It partakes of the understanding of autonomy as commensurate with the freedom of the individual as a rational being capable of positing her or his own purposes and ends. But most salient, he notes, is the power of the individual to stand in critical relation to the realities that frame the society of which he or she is a member.

It needs to be mentioned that Thompson does not embrace the status of the individual proffered by classic liberalism which places the individual as standing apart from society. He is clearly no libertarian. Nor does he embrace communitarianism. Rather, Thompson sees the person as embedded in society, a legatee of its values, norms, and logics, yet capable of peering beyond given horizons to enrich his own life and society more broadly. His concept of the individual and autonomy is relational.

It is this capacity, now atrophied and lost, that has desiccated the authentic self and led to the demise of democracy, predicated as it is on the active engagement of individual persons with the life of the community. Though he doesn't invoke the American sage, it is my conclusion that Thompson's views on the self and democracy are close to those of John Dewey. For Dewey, democracy is not so much invested in the processes and institutions of electoral politics as it is the lifestyle of a free people. For Dewey, the emergence of the self is a dialectical process in which the individual becomes himself or herself by directing life outward and grows through active engagement with others and the world. Its tenor and mores are pervasively humanistic. It is this reality that has become flattened by the acceptance of supervening and domineering forces of which people are barely aware.

The Twilight of the Self is an erudite and probing analysis written in a high-minded academic idiom that is rigorously researched and creatively argued. Thompson makes use of such foundational thinkers as Marx, Max Weber, Erich Fromm, Georg Lukacs, and other luminaries from the realms of political, economic, and sociological thought. His thesis takes from these thinkers while extending their applicability to the realities of the early twenty-first century.

These realities are vested in the hegemony of what Thompson defines as the cybernetic society. In Thompson's description:

“Cybernetic society is a phase of capitalism saturated by the logic of instrumental extraction and commodification – that is, where every sphere of society, polity, culture, and psyche are extruded through a uniform deep logic efficiency and profit maximization, as well as the attendant logics of control and organizational management that secure it, leading to a corrosion of psyche and culture. This is a society where these technical logics of organizational management and control have been able to socialize the self, making it the simultaneous object and subject of control and surplus extraction.”

In short, the lives and consciousness of individual selves are embedded in, and molded by,larger economic structures so that these realities have become unquestioned givens. They are internalized and felt to be natural, and persons so shaped are denuded of the capacity to critique and to think beyond them. As a result, autonomy fades and individuals are reduced to cogs in a larger system of control. But Thompson makes clear that the current reality of domination differs from earlier eras of capitalist domination in that individuals willingly comply with supervening and controlling forces that they assume to be normative and just as things are and need to be. Again, autonomy and the capacity to critique one's condition are lost.

He notes,

“Social power now becomes a function of compliance- and this compliance is more expansive and more introjected into the individual than previous modes of submitting to power. Now in the cybernetic world, compliance is a kind of coded means by which an individual component of a system performed the requisite task allotted to it. It entails a kind of rationalized submission to the broader purposes of the totality, of the system as a whole.”

A consequence is the alienation of the self, which Thompson describes as “...the shift from being a causal agent over one's own life and social world to being a mere plaything of others. It means surrendering the most potent power we have as individual agents: that of the capacity of dissent, to disobey, to refuse to build something better, something more humane, more rational.”

Situated at the upper tier of the cybernetic society are economic elites, and the values that govern it are those of the market: the commanding drive toward profit, accumulation, and mass consumption. Society and relations become commodified, evacuating all other spheres of value and meaning.

These supervening forces work to shape the inner lives of individual persons. As Thompson notes,

“To properly understand this aspect of the decline of the individual in modern society, I again need to highlight the transformed structure of economic life under the cybernetic society. The shift from a production-based economy in the nineteenth century to a mass-consumption society in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has now morphed into an economy increasingly dominated by rent extraction, expanded working hours, decreasing wages, and highly secured internalized values for consumption as proxies for personal success and feelings of self-worth.”

As a trained psychoanalyst, Michael Thompson is concerned with how these larger economic and structural forces become internalized in the lives of adults and children.

“Pathologies of the self now take preoedipal form in terms of narcissism, relational issues, the withered ego, and a one-dimensionality resulting from efforts to imbricate the self into the seamless operations of the commodity form and the forms of life that have been erected to service it.”

As they pertain to the socialization of children, he notes what has become commonplace:

“The proliferation of television shows, portable internet devices, and videos, games, and other distractions, that saturate even the youngest child's environment, let alone the increasing overscheduling of children's time by parents, shuttling them to and from school, after school activities, and other commitments – all this crowds out the autonomy of imagination and free time so essential to childhood. Whereas earlier forms of childhood would have been ripe with the possibility for an autonomous imagination, now the psychic imagery is colonized by the external world of iPhones, YouTube, and other innumerable heteronomous and commodified forms of 'imagination.” The self's capacity for imagination gradually becomes subsumed by industrialized cultural patterns of feeling, thought, and perception; its autonomy weakened, and, in some instances, destroyed, rendering it essentially heteronomous. In adulthood, this lack of an autonomous imagination severs the individual's capacity for free thought, for criticism, for judgment. It whittles away the generative, creative capacities of the self, rendering it incapable of imagining alternative forms of life, values and norms. The self's capacity for spontaneity dries up as it becomes a cog in the machinery of the waves of conformity controlled by commodification logics.”

A psychological consequence is increased levels of anxiety which drives individuals to various forms of deleterious responses. Among them is assuredly increased loneliness and isolation, of which our society tragically abounds. But another is the prevalence of group narcissism, which takes malignant forms, as the person seeks to reattain ego strength and self-esteem. Borrowing from the thought of the social psychologist Erich Fromm, Thompson interprets malignant group narcissism as motivated by sadistic, destructive intent. “Members of the group want to vent their weakness by harming, subordinating, or applying violence (symbolic or physical) on others and groups that they see as weak and undeserving. They achieve a sense of self-satisfaction and compensate for the insecurity brought on by their own ontological anxiety through this sadism.”

While, as noted, Thompson does not explicitly apply his thesis to the extremism of current political climate, it is apparent that he is framing the foundation that is manifested in the tribalism centered on shared political positions, the xenophobia stoked by Donald Trump and appropriated by his followers and the racist violence manifested by hate groups. While Thompson's analysis pertains to society as a whole, it is not wrong to see it most clearly manifested in right-wing extremists who emerge from the white, working-class sectors and have felt marginalized and oppressed by economic, political, and intellectual elites who have left them feeling powerless and have transferred resources to others unlike themselves whom they feel are undeserving.

Though the primal causes of the loss of individual autonomy are vested in economic class structures and the pervasive power that issues from them, the solutions he suggests do not in the first instance call for revolutionary action as the starting point. Thompson is foremost a scholar and an educator. His mission is to elucidate and analyze and thereby awaken his readers to a variant of false consciousness that suffuses our understanding of society and our station in life. His mission is to awaken us from our slumbers. That mission starts with a proper understanding of the self in order for individuals to regain critical agency. This, in turn, results from an understanding of oneself as ensconced in social relations with others. As he states, “what I am is a function of what we are, and changing one requires the transformation of the other." And with this understanding, we can gain a clearer grasp of the larger realities that have diminished our individual autonomy and have worked to suppress the flourishing of all on whom our own freedom and enriched humanity depend.

Michael Thompson has written an illuminating and probing treatise in the tradition of grand theorizing. For those dedicated to the belief that we should live in a world in which the flourishing of each and all is our highest end, and achieving such a world needs to direct our best efforts, The Twilight of the Self is essential reading