the social animal/ the animal society

“There was a time when all the body’s members/
rebelled against the belly;”

Thus begins Menenius Agrippa’s speech, in the first act of Coriolanus, Wyndham Lewis’ favorite among Shakespeare’s plays. Agrippa’s speech in praise of the belly is directed at the plebes, who are clamoring for bread, and threatening the aristocracy. Usually the aristocracy is thought of as the noble head – not the glutton’s paradise of the belly. But in Shakespeare’s time, it was the belly, distributing the wealth, rather than the head, commanding the commons, which was the tendency of the time. This gives the speech that odd twist in a play in which Coriolanus will flame out as a head, a severed, noble soldier, even though, ideologically, Coriolanus’ entire being is caught up in the most extreme version of the aristocratic ideal. Menenius Agrippa’s speech is a variant on the old notion of the chain of being – the notion that informs another speech directed at rebellion, this one given in Troilus and Cressida by Ulysses, where the point is directed against an aristocrat in revolt, much as Coriolanus was in revolt – that is, it was directed against Achilles. But in the degraded world of Troilus and Cressida, Achilles does not have the nobility that is inscribed in Coriolanus’ nature.

Thinking about the ‘extension of man’ embodied in the tool and the machine – the thesis that Hacking picks up from Canguilhem, as I was at pains to show in the last posts – connects with some notions I’ve been playing with in my research on happiness. Lately I’ve been following a radical critique of capitalism, founded ultimately on forms of alienation that recur in all spheres of capitalist social life. At the same time, the nineteenth century saw another critique of capitalism that emanated from its ideological defenders, the liberals. Where the radicals turned to alienation as the shadow that continually pursues the promise of happiness, the liberal critics turned to life. In the twentieth century, there were three phrases that became current that represented the outcome of this turn: Weber’s ‘life style’ – Wittgenstein’s ‘forms of life’ – and Scheler’s ‘life order’.

What I think I’m going to do is write a string of posts about the notion of the social animal, or the animal society, which is, I think, the locus within which the social, for liberal thinkers, dissolved into the vital. This dissolution happily divorced liberalism from its early tight bind with the rational. It rejoined a theme that one sees in Shakespeare – the theme that the social order is a more than metaphorical expression of larger orders – the division of labor is implicit in the very human body, the hierarchy of command is implicit in the revolution of the planets around the sun, etc. Of course, these ideas emerge in Plato’s Republic too. Shakespeare’s source for Coriolanus is Plutarch’s life, translated by North.

Shandian Hacking, part 2

So far, the essay as I’ve laid it out is pretty straightforwardly philosophical. But after Hacking makes the case for Canguilhem’s case for seeing tools and machines as organs, he goes off the tracks – or rather, he goes on a lot of interesting tracks that involve things like Voodoo, cyborgs and UFOs, Donna Haraway’s thesis that in the late twentieth century the line between machines and organisms have been irreparably blurred, and what kind of thing a man on a bicycle is – is he a cyborg? Actually, if one goes back to the inventor of the word, he definitely is. Cyborg’s came out of space travel – as I’m sure our friend Northanger knows.

The word cyborg was first used in print in the September 1960 issue of Astronautics. It came with the definition: for the exogenously extended organizational complex functioning as an integrated system unconsciously, we propose the name Cyborg (Clynes and Kline)

The name was made up by Manfred Clynes working with Nathan Kline. Kline was a distinguished psychiatrist, director of research at Rockland State Hospital in New York and teacher at Columbia University. His foret was psychopharmacology. Those who consult the Cyborg Handbook (Gray 1996) will learn that he won numerous awards, some internal to his profession ( the Adolph Meyer award) and some more public (a New York Newspaper Guild Page One award in Science). He was a good deal more colourful than that. He was Poap Doc Duvalier’s personal psychiatric consultant, and he also established clinics in Haiti. The favours were mutual: he had a fine private collection of Haitian, popularly known as Voodoo, preparations and herbals, with which he is said to have experimented freely. He was an advisor on psychological topics to Hollywood producer Norman Lear, so whatever psychology appears in Lear’s movies or TV scripts had Kline’s imprimatur. (this supplementary information is derived from telephone interviews with family members.”

Kline was quite the Cold War magus and eminence gris. Oh, spirit of Pynchon, be with me now!

“And yet there is another twist in this story that I cannot omit. It has a lot to do with the mind, though here one imagines that it is Kline speaking and not Clynes. It interest me because Rewriting the Soul (Hacking 1995) is, among other things, a very extensive study of multiple personality and dissociation. Kline was apparently stirring the dissociative soup way back in 1960
… hypnosis per se may prove to have a definite place in space travel, although there is much to be learned about the phenomena of dissociation, generalization of instructions, and abdication of executive control.

We are now working on a new preparation which may greatly enhance hypnotizability, so that pharmacological and hypnotic researches may be symbiotically combined.

Ross (1966) is a book [sic – I believe Hacking is referring to Colin Ross’ The Osiris Complex] written by a leader in the field of dissociative disorder suggesting that the epidemic of disturbed people having flashbacks of alien abduction into outer space is due to what he calls CIA experiments in hypnosis, drugs and mind control in the 1960s. The unhappy people with these memories are really recalling trance states induced by mad scientists in the employ of the United States Government. Most readers, including myself, take this as proof that Ross is himself a bit touched. But now I wonder, what was going on at Rockford State?”

Surely this is a valuable trivial pursuit fact, no? The most popular comedy shows of the seventies received their psychological input from the inventor of the cyborg and a scientist deeply interested in mind control? Ho ho ho - I come from generation fucked. Now I know who did it!

But we have only covered one of the homonymous duo, doeppelgaengers sprung into the Cold War future by way of Freud and Philip Dick. To get back to our question about the bike for a second, the first cyborg devised by this duo was simply a rat, which had some kind of osmotic pump set to a feedback pattern that would pump chemicals into it, get some appropriate responding chemical cue and modify its injections. The point eventually, our Small ones (Kleins) (“At one time the elves are small enough to creep through key-holes, and a single potato is as much as one of them can carry; at another they resemble mankind, with whom they form alliances, and to whom they hire themselves as servants; while some are even said to be above the size of mortals, gigantic hags, in whose lap mortal women are mere infants” – Superstitions of the Highlands) thought, was to make man less robotlike – once in space, Hacking points out, an astronaut was to be as free in his capsule as the homunculus was in Descarte’s brain – freer! For the homunculus didn’t carry around a feedback rat.

Well, maybe I’ll do one more post on this.

shandian Hacking

There’s nothing LI likes better than a good Shandian essay. Robert Merton used that phrase to refer to his essay concerning the origin of the phrase, “on the shoulders of giants” (as per Newton’s mock humble saying, if I have seen farther, it is only because I was standing on the shoulders of giants), and what he means by it is that the essay is the correspondent of the kind of search you might go through looking through your personal papers for one particular paper. Such searches tend to get go into odd corners – one finds oneself reading a diary entry, when you meant to be looking for your passport – that are constrained by the fact that you are going through one loosely organized jumble. The grandfather of the Shandian essay is surely Plutarch, whose inquiries into the “word ei graven over the gate to Apollo’s temple at Delphi’, or the origins of Isis, tend to swallow up vast masses of ancient learnedness on the way to solving rather trivial problems.

Given this debauched taste of mine, I was very pleased, yesterday, to stumble upon Ian Hacking’s essay, Canguilhem among the cyborgs. LI is tempted to say that Hacking is the kind of analytic philosopher that only a continental could love, but this is a bit of an exaggeration. Still, although he comes out of a mainstay analytic philosophy hub, Stanford, where he was one of Suppe’s students, I believe, like other Stanford pragmatists (Cartwright, Dupre), he has somehow absorbed a ‘tone’ that isn’t well liked in analytic philosophy, where dullness is considered a mark of truth. He is also quite trans Atlantic, very much at home in France. His essay in honor of Georges Canguilhem is about one of those French masters known mainly as a mere name in these here states. The essay makes the case that Canguilhem, much more than any of the big name muckety mucks like Wittgenstein or Heidegger, was much more radically anti-Cartesian than is usual in our philosophy. Descartes has become the philosopher one loves to blame for dualism, and one loves to use as a signpost for an old style of thinking that we have all surpassed. Of course, that’s all bullshit.

“It is commonly said, nowadays, that in philosophy we have overcome Descartes, dualism, the ego and epistemology, thanks to the work of famous men, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, or less widely known earlier figures. Deeply involved as I have been, from time to time, with the thought of Wittgenstein and some of those earlier figures, such as Pierce, Herder and Hamann, I have never been much impressed by the alleged termination of Descartes. In many respects I find more in common between Wittgenstein and Descartes than difference. You will see from my first tow epigrapsh that by highly selective quotation I can even make Descartes sound like Donna Haraway, the feminist socialist student of the sciences who delights in metaphor and the blurring of distinction.”

The epitaph from Descartes is, well, fucking beautiful:

… toutes les choses qui sont artificielles, sont… naturelles. Car, par exemple, losqu’une montre marque les heures par le moyen des roués don’t elle est faite, cela ne lui est pas moins naturel qu’il est à un arbre de produire ses fruits.

Which reminds me of Rene Char, except that it is better than Rene Char.

However, according to Hacking, Canguilhem made an observation about Descartes, and an observation about organisms and machines, that helped Canguilhem, in some slight way, surpass Descartes. LI should humbly remonstrate that the image of philosophy as a race in which figures are passed by seems to be a misunderstanding of what philosophy does. It isn’t a science in that sense. But, with that protest lodged, this is how Hacking figures that Canguilhem gets by the ever tricky Rene: Canguilhem “saw how central to Descartes was the idea that animals are machines.” And he begged to differ. Machines, to Canguilhem, are extensions of man – and that phrase, which reeks of McLuhan, is oddly unfished for resonances by Hacking, who is teaching, after all, in Toronto. But never mind that – Hacking’s point is Canguilhem points to a moment in Descartes thinking about the machine and the soul that is supposed to prove, in a sense, that animals are machines – as well, although this is sotte voce, as the human body.

“Since the body is a machine, it must in principle be possible to build a machine just like a human body. For technical reasons, we cannot do it. In principle, we could make a bird that would fly, but we are unable to make small enough springs and coils to pull the trick off. So Descartes imagines God – not man – making a perfect automaton for the body of a human being. Yet, according to Canguilhem, this is nto straightforward. The notion depends upon an idea of God the Fabricator and on there already being living creatures upon which the machine is modeled. Neither we nor God get beyond teleology. Machines are so made because we make them for a purpose, or in imitation of something already alive. Canguilhem’s fascination with the vital, with life as a precondition, is evident here.”

Now one might reply that since 1952, when the essay was written we have – in this round of cards between the organic and the machine – played some more, and the machine is currently ahead, with DNA as the machine. The molecules are the machine. And yet it isn’t so simple as that after all, for this machine doesn’t work as a machine without a code. And when it does work as a code, it only works as life. It isn’t really clear why we should call the molecules plus code – that thing which distinguishes DNA from any other crystal in the universe, as far as we know – a machine, except that we have built machines – plunging us back into the logical problem of God building the machine in Descartes’ imaginary instance.

Hacking, having led us to the man-machine breakdown in 1952, next goes on a long journey through cyborgs. Which, in my next post, I’ll write more about.

...

and, a shout out there for the GOP on this night of nights. Lovely that your president fucking broke you, as he has fucking broken everything in his reign of error. So, here it is - Death of a Party.

GIANTS!

Giants Giants Giants!
To my far flung correspondent, Tom S., to Amie, to all LI NYC readers - have fun at the parade!

A fly as big as a blue whale

“I met murder on the way
He had a mask like Castlereagh”

Saint Augustine remarked that man is born between a shit and a piss; it is the ambition of the Bush administration to die there. The shit, of course, has been amassed over eight shameful and inglorious years, that began in an act of supreme and criminal negligence – the Bushian indolence as our nineteen gremlin hijackers were able to pretty much do what they wanted (a crime so foretold that they could have put an advertisement in the fucking newspapers), followed by the shock and awe of a paniced president who came to his senses when his advisors pointed out the political advantage he could reap by not doing his simple duty to crush the very crushable al qaeda. The murder of Americans – and the numbers mount, from the incompetent war in Afghanistan to the crime of Iraq – was a small price to pay for robbing the wealth of the country and putting it in the pockets of the few and unscrupulous; as for the massive death toll inflicted on the Iraqis, the untold suffering, the four million refugees, here was a supreme Bushian performance piece indeed. While vacuous chants were intoned by our clueless President to a liberty he so dislikes in the U.S. that he has done everything in his power to strangle it, our real politics consisted of ethnic cleansing, bombing the innocent, razing cities, and arming militias. Our best friends, the Saudis, meanwhile, financed al qaeda and financed a Sunni insurgency, to which our reply was to censor this macro story from ever being told at length in any American newspaper – and certainly not on American tv, a machine that produces cretinization, 24/7.

Even the bubble enabled by Bush appointees was shabby, as far as bubbles go – having fixed the system so that productivity gains didn’t budge the incomes of the 80 percent of Americans who work for a living, instead of whatever it is the upper management class does, the Bushites contrive to make every house its own little casino – tap the automatic wealth that comes from selling property amongst yourselves even as you ignore the natural limit set by your declining incomes! What a great scheme, and how the Gaderene swine, peckerheads and warriors by proxy, rushed into it! The ownership society, as sponsored by Visa and Mastercard.

And now we have the brilliant budget, the last budget, the testament of the collected thinking of the man his admirers call President Backbone – a name that is too modest by half, as this is a president who not only exhibits his spinal column, but whose whole skeletal system seems to be exo- like the star of that b movie, The Fly. What a great enterprise it is – a true call to slavery in the name of freedom. Having spent trillions fighting the approximately ten to thirty thousand paramilitaries of al qaeda, with the tremendous result of swelling their ranks and giving them an untold amount of importance in both Pakistan and Iraq, the budget makes a joyful sound to the Lord of Flies by proposing a seven percent increase in the military budget. It is by these increases that President Exoskeleton retains the affections of the media – for the core of the political media, based in D.C., has been bathed in the butter of federal spending like nobody’s business for the past eight years. These fat and sassy eunuchs have never had it better, and though they believe – repressing their inner astonishment – the polls that proclaim how disgusting the mass of Americans find the leader of this country, in their heart of hearts they would follow the President to the gates of hell and back – at least by proxy. That is, they’d sternly teach us that all serious people support sending America’s army, recruited from those clueless masses outside the Gated Community, into whatever fucked up orgy of vanity and peculation the Grand Old Party wants to give. It is a party Party, and the invites long ago went out to our ersatz opposition party to join it. And join it they have, protecting hedgefunders from taxation here, giving the President a chance in Iraq there, and in general enjoying the D.C. butter as they’ve sold out their constituencies at rock bottom prices.

Ah, but let us look at what the Lord of Flies has wrought:

Bush reviewed the budget with his Cabinet. He held aloft a computer tablet that contained the budget details. ''This is a good, solid budget,'' the president said.

''It's not only an innovative budget in that it's coming to Congress over the Internet. It's a budget that's balanced -- gets to balance in 2012 and saves taxpayers money.''

The spending proposal, which shows the government spending $3 trillion in a 12-month period for the first time in history, squeezes most of government outside of national security, and also seeks $196 billion in savings over the next five years in the government's giant health care programs -- Medicare for the elderly and Medicaid for the poor.

Even with those savings, Bush projects that the deficits, which had been declining, will soar to near-record levels, hitting $410 billion this year and $407 billion in 2009. The all-time high deficit in dollar terms was $413 billion in 2004.

Hazlitt, in his life of Napoleon, wrote:

“Mr. Southey somewhere accounts for the distress of the country in 1817 (and probably at present) by the prhase of “the transition from war to peace”, and emphatically observes, that the war was a customer to the manufacturers of Birmingham and Sheffeld alone, to the amount of twenty millions a year. Be it so: but if this were all, and this were really a benefit and source of riches to the country, why not continue to be a customer to these manufacturers of steel and brass in peace as well as war; and having bought and paid for so many cannon and so much gunpowder, fire the off in the air as well as against the French?”

That was a true moment of prophecy. Except, of course, that we have learned how not to use the accursed share at all – here’s a government proclaiming that we are in WWIV in Iraq, while it spends the major portion of the military budget on non-Iraqi items. It would be as if Roosevelt had proposed a military budget in 1942 in which the major portion of it was not dedicated to the war at hand, but to … well, to futuristic wars that bloody minded peeps envision in their think tanks.

An odious end to a wholly odious administration.

It has been our constant hypothesis over the years at LI that this planet cannot forever support an unlimited number of blue whales, who have weights of up to 300,000 pound. That is, the planet cannot indefinitely support a system that requires of the human beings in it to go about using, on average, use as much energy in a year as a creature more than a thousand times their size. Long ago, evolutionary biologist J.B.S. Haldane wrote an essay entitled,On Being the Right Size. Here’s how it begins:

“The most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. In a large textbook of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is larger than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the hare, though some grudging admissions are made in the case of the mouse and the whale. But yet it is easy to show that a hare could not be as large as a hippopotamus, or a whale as small as a herring. For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a large change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form.

Let us take the most obvious of possible cases, and consider a giant man sixty feet high—about the height of Giant Pope and Giant Pagan in the illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress of my childhood. These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bone had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every time they took a step. This was doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens one’s respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer.

To turn to zoology, suppose that a gazelle, a graceful little creature with long thin legs, is to become large, it will break its bones unless it does one of two things. It may make its legs short and thick, like the rhinoceros, so that every pound of weight has still about the same area of bone to support it. Or it can compress its body and stretch out its these two beasts because they happen to belong to the same order as the gazelle, and both are quite successful mechanically, being remarkably fast runners.

Gravity, a mere nuisance to Christian, was a terror to Pope, Pagan, and Despair. To the mouse and any smaller animal it presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.”

Now, of course, culture is a great jimmy-er of nature. We’ve found innumerable and ingenious ways to pick Nature’s locks. However, ‘we’ did this while, all unconsciously, developing a system about us, the way an oyster unconsciously extrudes a shell. We know, now, what that system is costing – and we are doing nothing about it that would save it in any way. The scattered ingenuities that created it have now become so much shit for the richest flies to land on, led by President fly, whose minions are too busy jerking off to videos of Iraqis being shot or bombed to know that they are even putting their own pretty white asses in peril. On the contrary, we are wasting money as it has never been wasted before on triviality, murder, and plunder.
What a way to spend eight years!

That high mercury Jesus

LI has pursued, as one of the subthemes of our happiness project, the notion that alienation shows up in things like, oh, alterations in the song culture of the 19th century. We came across a strange instance of song and dance yesterday, in the Acts of John. This is a Gnostic gospel. It contains a story that is also referred to in a text we couldn’t find, The voyages of the apostles, attributed to Leuce Carin by Clement of Alexandria.

The story is that Jesus, after the crumbs had been wiped from the table of the Last Supper, had his disciples hold hands and dance around him as he sang a song. The song goes like this, according to the the translation made by M.R. James – the same M.R. James who wrote the classic Edwardian ghost stories, Ghost Stories of an Antiquary.

Now before he was taken by the lawless Jews, who also were governed by (had their law from) the lawless serpent, he gathered all of us together and said: Before I am delivered up unto them let us sing an hymn to the Father, and so go forth to that which lieth before us. He bade us therefore make as it were a ring, holding one another's hands, and himself standing in the midst he said: Answer Amen unto me. He began, then, to sing an hymn and to say:
Glory be to thee, Father.
And we, going about in a ring, answered him: Amen.
Glory be to thee, Word: Glory be to thee, Grace. Amen.
Glory be to thee, Spirit: Glory be to thee, Holy One:
Glory be to thy glory. Amen.
We praise thee, O Father; we give thanks to thee, O Light, wherein darkness
dwelleth not. Amen.
95 Now whereas (or wherefore) we give thanks, I say:
I would be saved, and I would save. Amen.
I would be loosed, and I would loose. Amen.
I would be wounded, and I would wound. Amen.
I would be born, and I would bear. Amen.
I would eat, and I would be eaten. Amen.
I would hear, and I would be heard. Amen.
I would be thought, being wholly thought. Amen.
I would be washed, and I would wash. Amen.
Grace danceth. I would pipe; dance ye all. Amen.
I would mourn: lament ye all. Amen.
The number Eight (lit. one ogdoad) singeth praise with us. Amen.
The number Twelve danceth on high. Amen.
The Whole on high hath part in our dancing. Amen.
Whoso danceth not, knoweth not what cometh to pass. Amen.
I would flee, and I would stay. Amen.
I would adorn, and I would be adorned. Amen.
I would be united, and I would unite. Amen.
A house I have not, and I have houses. Amen.
A place I have not, and I have places. Amen.
A temple I have not, and I have temples. Amen.
A lamp am I to thee that beholdest me. Amen.
A mirror am I to thee that perceivest me. Amen.
A door am I to thee that knockest at me. Amen.
A way am I to thee a wayfarer. [amen].

the year of cooling the mark out

And Burn my shadow away…

Erving Goffman wrote an often referenced paper in 1952 entitled On Cooling the Mark Out. To understand this election year, LI advises our readers to read it.

The paper begins by describing the confidence game, which involves roping a mark, getting him to invest, financially, in some scheme or game, and clearing him out. At this point, the confidence gang has the option of simply leaving the mark behind. But…

“Sometimes, however, a mark is not quite prepared to accept his loss as a gain in experience and to say and do nothing about his venture. He may feel moved to complain to the police or to chase after the operators. In the terminology of the trade, the mark may squawk, beef, or come through. From the operators' point of view, this kind of behavior is bad for business. It gives the members of the mob a bad reputation with such police as have not. yet been fixed and with marks who have not yet been taken. In order to avoid this adverse publicity, an additional phase is sometimes added at the end of the play. It is called cooling the mark out After the blowoff has occurred, one of the operators stays with the mark and makes an effort to keep the anger of the mark within manageable and sensible proportions. The operator stays behind his team﷓mates in the capacity of what might be called a cooler and exercises upon the mark the art of consolation. An attempt is made to define the situation for the mark in a way that makes it easy for him to accept the inevitable and quietly go home. The mark is given instruction in the philosophy of taking a loss.”

This pretty much describes the two cases we have before us this election year. The ruinous Bush years involved two con games that were entwined one with the other. We have the con game that keeps us in Iraq, one fully supported by the ropers in – the governing elite – and we have the con game that is now busting, the full fruit of Bush’s economic policy, which involved minimizing regulation of the financial markets while maximizing the amount of money they had to play with. In this way, credit could fill up that hole where compensation from work used to be – and so productivity gains could be appropriated at a much higher rate by the richest, while home equity could be tapped, via mortgages, for the good life by the debtors.

Goffman points out that the mark’s psychology is a tricky one. To an economist, it might just look like utility maximization. But…

“In many cases, especially in America, the mark's image of himself is built up on the belief that he is a pretty shrewd person when it comes to making deals and that he is not the sort of person who is taken in by any thing. The mark’s readiness to participate in a sure thing is based on more than avarice; it is based on a feeling that he will now be able to prove to himself that he is the sort of person who can "turn a﷓fast buck." For many, this capacity for high finance comes near to being a sign of masculinity and a test of fulfilling the male role.”

Warmonger psychology unerringly follows this primitive but powerful gender program. This army of pissants shows all the signs of having had trouble emerging from the sack of their twelve year old selves, when, apparently, the separation anxiety produced by throwing out their G.I. Joe doll became frozen in place. A smaller contingent of this army – much smaller – forms the viewing core of financial porno tv networks, like CNBC. These people actually believe that they are part of the confidence game gang, which is how they came to mouth a rote optimism that had as little relation to reality as your average automobile ad has to how you would really drive an automobile.

“A mark's participation in a play, and his investment in it, clearly commit him in his own eyes to the proposition that he is a smart man. The process by which he comes to believe that he cannot lose is also the process by which he drops the defences and compensations that previously protected him from defeats. When the blowoff comes, the mark finds that he has no defence for not being a shrewd man. He has defined himself as a shrewd man and must face the fact that he is only another easy mark. He has defined himself as possessing a certain set of qualities and then proven to himself that he is miser ably lacking in them. This is a process of self﷓destruction of the self. It is no wonder that the mark needs to be cooled out and that it is good business policy for one of the operators to stay with the mark in order to talk him into a point of view from which it is possible to accept a loss.”

Goffman’s analysis of the mark points us to the form of the presidential election – that Halloween for grownups. Whoever the candidates are, they will represent wings of an established power that has made suckers of the vast majority of the population over the last four … eight… twelve…sixteen years. An established power that has assured America that the costs of running this empire will always be paid by third parties – whether these consist of tropical countries dealing with the forces unleashed by the American appetite for junking up the atmosphere with CO2, or Middle Eastern countries struggling with the yoke of American oppression in a more direct form – the soldier in their face, the mercenary who shoots them for fun in the traffic jam. Of course, this isn’t true. Those costs will come back here. The cost of the Middle East adventure can be seen in the run up of oil prices, a very small intimation of a much larger and connected group of problems that come with running out of prestige and power in a large area of the world while at the same time maximizing the number of people who hate you. As for CO2, it will turn out that melting the glaciers in the west during the drought cycle was not a good idea. The American west, overpopulated, overdeveloped, its water overpromised, is going to learn the lesson of the Hummer, too. This isn’t just something we can sluff off on Bangladesh.

“For the mark, cooling represents a process of adjustment to an impossible situation ﷓﷓ - situation arising from having defined himself in a way which the social facts come to contradict. The mark must therefore be supplied with a new set of apologies for himself, a new framework in which to see himself and judge himself. A process of redefining the self along defensible lines must be instigated and carried along; since the mark himself is frequently in too weakened a condition to do this, the cooler must initially do it for him.

One general way of handling the problem of cooling the mark out is to give the task to someone whose status relative to the mark will serve to ease the situation in some way. In formal organizations, frequently, someone who is two or three levels above the mark in line of command will do the hatchet work, on the assumption that words of consolation and redirection will have a greater power to convince if they come from high places.”

It is going to be an excellent year for spectators.