Christopher Horner, Beyonce & the Beautiful Soul

 Christopher Horner  in 3 Quarks

notes the troubling presence of a phenomenon that characterises too much of politics in and beyond the left. This is the Beautiful Soul. Let me explain.

The term occurs in Hegel, and I am going to wrench his account, without apologies, from its context in the Phenomenology of Spirit, as he  captures something that is a feature of the modern political landscape. The Beautiful Soul – let’s call it ‘BS’ – comes up when Hegel describes a certain kind of romantic sensibility.

Hegel was looking at ' The antinomy of the moral view of the world, viz. that there is a moral consciousness, and that there is none, or that the validation of duty lies beyond consciousness, and conversely, takes place in it- these contradictions were gathered up in the idea in which the non-moral consciousness has validity, its contingent knowing and willing are assumed to
have full weight, and happiness is granted to it as an act of grace. Moral self-consciousness did not accept responsibility for this self-contradictory idea, but shifted it on to a being other than itself.'

This means that Hegel is examining 'an unhappy consciousness' which feels it is subordinate to something outside itself without being able to accept, or propose, a theological grounding for such subordination or alienation. Thus, 'conscience' here is something different than it would be for a 'honest consciousness' at home in the world. This 'unhappy consciousness' is either ontologically dysphoric or else it has dynamics and therefore is dialectical and thus can potentially be reconciled to this world.

By contrast, for 'honest consciousness', the world is 'one period'. There is the right thing to do and the intention to do the right thing. Neither past nor future matter. Conscience is not something tactical or strategic. It is univocal. It may be 'natural' as in the theological idea of synderesis. The Scottish, 'common sense' philosopher, Thomas Reid, influenced F.H Jacobi whose novel 'Waldemar' influenced Hegel's notion of the 'Beautiful Soul' who must confess his error so as to be readmitted to comradeship on the common sense terms of a moral and ethical fellowship. Hegel however is a post-Kantian. He can't be happy with a Scottish type of 'honest consciousness', which may be perfectly happy with itself so long as it is undeniably utile. Rather Hegel recognises that the 'thing in itself' Reality which underlies 'common moral consciousness', is, quite justifiably, exactly what the self-reflective Beautiful Soul must consider 'evil' because it is in some sense heteronomous and involves compromise with the powers that be.

I may mention that the Jains, who have a relativist Epistemology but a 'common sense' type of atomistic ontology, would equate the 'kevalyin' (i.e. liberated and omniscient being) with the Beautiful Soul which will do no wrong and which has no other on which to act. The same can be said of the older Buddhist notion of a 'Pratyeka Buddha'.

Jains do a lot of charity, though this does not 'cancel out' negative 'aashrav' (influx of karma binding particles) and piously venerate their 'Tirthankars' though they resolutely maintain that 'substance can't act on substance.' No Grace is operative. We may imitate the enlightened till our own conception of the world accords with that Enlightenment. We have no greater cause to complain that the Enlightened aren't Enlightening us that we do that other people aren't answering calls of nature on our behalf. The Jain, or various Hindu and Buddhist or Theosophical, conceptions of the Mahatmas- who possess souls of singular Beauty which therefore become a purely aesthetic, or metaphorical, efficient cause for soteriology- are in contradistinction to notions of 'Incarnation'- which, of course, Hegel as a salaried Prussian Civil Servant, needed to give place for. However, there are Religions which reject the notion of Incarnation. Heredity is itself a type of incarnation. But, unless one is supporting a supposedly Socialist Dynasty, it is not clear why 'Left Hegelians' need to bother with the dialectic of 'the Beautiful Soul'. After all, if Incarnation is not on the Soteriological table, it doesn't matter if the 'Pratyeka Buddha' or 'Kevalyin' has become too gaseously Beautiful to remain anchored on Earth. So what if they float away into the Empyrean? Roman 'pietas' suffered no diminution when various Beautiful Bodies, lusted after by Gods, turned into rivers or birds or what have you. The 'bonus paterfamilias', descended though his 'oikos' be from some such Demi-God, nevertheless must exercise such diligent 'economia', even regarding counter-parties, that no 'culpa levis in abstracto' occurs. The Beautiful Soul may exercise itself over matters which class as 'akrebia', not 'economia', but then Beauty is not a necessary predicate of the bonus paterfamilias. This is the Scottish 'common sense' view which fired the Teutonic 'Liberalism of the Officials' and whose most notable exponent was Christian Jakob Kraus. Contra Kant, the Beamtenliberalen thought there was no need for a Frederick the Great to provide 'the hard shell' within which the seed of 'Enlightened' autonomy might develop. After that monarch died, this was the natural view of things. Yet, Kant remained popular precisely because Despots remained Despots and Enlightenment's horizon had contracted into such Dawns of Freedom as 'History on Horseback' Despotism might providentially incarnate. But this was scarcely Scottish 'Honesty' or, indeed, 'Common Sense'.

Hegel, squaring that circle, says ' While the 'honest consciousness' always seizes merely the empty thing itself, conscience, on the other hand, wins the thing in its fullness, a fullness given to it by conscience itself. Conscience is this power because it knows the moments of consciousness as moments, dominating them as their negative essence.'

 But this is not how the word 'conscience' is ordinarily understood by 'common moral consciousness'. Hegel is describing consciousness of an acutely self-aware and critical type which we have no good reason not to think of as a histrionic, virtue signalling, nuisance. But Hegel, because of his peculiar type of Idealism, thinks Conscience must have a dialectical form. But why should it? One might say 'Spirit' demands it or 'God' ensures it or something of that sort. But why should there not be some consciousness which is transparent to that Spirit or to God? After all, there are plenty of people who say they are nothing but the humble vessel of some type of Spirit or, indeed, of the Creator of the Universe. Such 'Prophets' may serve as the 'Conscience' of Society.  Hegel, as an employee of the Prussian State, had a good reason not to worry too much about this objection. He had a job to do and he did it to the best of his ability. The 'Beamtenliberalen', 'cameralist Liberals', might retain Beautiful Souls but Hegel's thought must sport stigmata and invoke kenosis. The Geist it celebrates must accommodate Christology's Holy Ghost.

Hegel says that the 'unhappy consciousness' is only implicitly 'the notion of Reason'. The next step would be Reason reasoning with itself but what if Consciousness gets stuck in that way? To preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with actuality, and it steadfastly perseveres in its obstinate powerlessness to renounce its own self, a self which has been tapered to the final point of abstraction. It stably exists in its powerlessness to give itself substantiality, or to transform its thinking into being and to entrust itself to absolute difference. The hollow object which it generates to itself it thus now fills only with the consciousness of emptiness. It is a yearning which only loses itself as it becomes an essenceless object, and as it goes beyond this loss and then falls back on itself, it only finds itself as lost. – In this transparent purity of its moments it becomes an unhappy, so-called beautiful soul, and its burning embers gradually die out, and, as they do, the beautiful soul vanishes like a shapeless vapor dissolving into thin air.
The beautiful soul is also displaying a 'hard heart' to the other with whom it ought to be interacting. Inasmuch as the self-certain spirit as a beautiful soul does not now possess the force to relinquish itself of the self-knowing holding onto itself, it cannot arrive at an equality with the consciousness it has repulsed, and thus it cannot arrive at the intuited unity of itself in an other, and it cannot arrive at existence. Hence, the equality comes about only negatively, as a spirit-less being. The beautiful soul, lacking all actuality, caught in the contradiction between its pure self and its necessity to empty itself into being and to turn itself around into actuality, in the immediacy of this opposition to which it adheres – in an immediacy which is alone the mediating middle and the reconciliation of an opposition which has been intensively raised to the point of its pure abstraction, and which is itself pure being or empty nothingness – is thus, as the consciousness of this contradiction in its unreconciled immediacy, shattered into madness and melts into a yearning, tubercular consumption. It thereby in fact gives up its severe adherence to its being-for-itself but engenders only the spiritless unity of being.

This may be what happens in certain genres of romantic poetry but what does it  have to do with Politics? After all, beauty is only interesting because it is attractive- sexually or otherwise- and we feel a resentment that the thing is being meanly held back for some neurotic, or megalomaniacal, reason.

Horner explains-

The BS is someone who relies on his or her inner feeling, conscience and sense of what they know in their heart to be right. It’s this inner sense that they consult in order to know what is right. It’s a complex world, hard to make sense of, and harder still to do the right thing. So it is difficult to criticise this impulse. But the BS wants purity in a messy world, and the purity of their convictions is the supreme thing. So they cannot accept less from the decisions they make, or from the people they meet.

This is all very well, but why would one want anything from a beautiful soul? A beautiful body- okay, sure, I get that- but a soul?  I suppose the picture which arises in our mind is of someone with a lot of money living a refined life. That fucker should hand it over to us for the cause just as someone with a beautiful body should hand it over for the sexual gratification of the comrades.

The trouble here is that not everybody who is in interested in politics wants to embezzle money from wealthy narcissists or to pimp good looking, preferably upper class, young people.

If such a thing as a BS exists, why should we care who pimps or otherwise profits from it? Politically, the thing scarcely matters precisely because it only pimping that is going on. Narcissism or stupidity are scarcely the qualities we look for in 'effective political actors'.

This leads the BS into a position in which it is difficult to be an effective political actor, since there are only two ways to go with this unconditional demand. We can imagine two Beautiful Souls, each taking one of the two routes. The first BS neither grasps the complexity of the situation nor wishes to, but thinks the purity of their commitment will carry through into their actions.

So, they potentially represent a public nuisance of a particular type. But nuisances we will always have with us. At the margin, they can be curbed by the law or some collective act of disapprobation. After all, if dog owners now pooper-scoop- leaving our pavements less strewn with turds- why should we not hope that in the fullness of time the nuisance caused by virtue signalling gobshites, or fanatical demonstrators, will similarly abate?

On the other hand, in real life there are plenty of very useful people who 'don't grasp the complexity of the situation'. Indeed, they wouldn't be useful, because their actions would not be predictable, if they pretended to understand a type of complexity which, to our knowledge, can't be fully grasped. This is because we see no examples of omniscience in our Social Life. Judges get things wrong same as Stock Brokers and Policemen and Surgeons and Ministers and Generals. Nevertheless, a professional whose understanding is as good as anyone else's, who acts with pure intentions is highly useful because at least one can predict what they will do. We want a Lawyer or an Accountant or a Doctor who will do exactly the same thing for her client regardless of 'complexity'. We don't want a Lawyer who cheerfully says 'I threw your case because from the point of view of the Universe, you ought to be in jail'. Nor do we want a baker who poisons our bread because his knowledge of complexity causes him to believe that this will prevent some greater calamity.

 The second BS goes the other way: they cannot bear to be contaminated by compromises in a corrupt world, and so they withdraw from action entirely, preserving their purity by doing nothing and condemning those who are complicit in the evil of the world.

What's wrong with that? If they are not making a nuisance of themselves, why bother with them? After all, it isn't as though there's any crying shortage of virtue signalling cretins.

This second type mainly confines their politics to the purely verbal, which in 2020 usually means making use of a keyboard.

Hey! That's what I do! Where's the harm? Nobody reads my shite. People do read Horner's shite but only because the guy is better educated than us and so we get to feel better about ourselves because we aren't as stupid and ignorant as he is.

It is easy to see that both types will have problems in being any kind of political actor.

No. The first sort will be a great big nuisance- i.e. a political actor who helps the other side. The second sort don't matter.

Being a Beautiful Soul of either variety means seeing the political as essentially about morality, and about purity and corruption.

But 'common moral consciousness' sees things the same way. Politics features Agent Principal hazard. Striving for 'incentive compatible' mechanisms in political life is highly utile. We can speak of it as curbing corruption and purging impurities or pathogens from the body politic.

Therefore it tends to think in terms of individuals and their virtues, or more often, vices. But what happens when the two BS types meet each other?

Who cares? The thing is a comedy like the encounter between a Sadist and a Masochist. If no violence occurs, then the meta-masochist wins unless the other is a meta-sadist. So this is really a game of rock paper scissors. The solution is for both to play a mixed strategy so that the Masochist never knows whether the outcome was designed to frustrate her. But the same is true of the Sadist.

More generally, assuming Beautiful Souls crop up across the political spectrum, these opposite types merely cancel each other out so, by the magic of the Law of Large numbers, the Condorcet Jury theorem prevails. Democratic Social Choice conforms to what is conscionable.

Hegel stages that encounter for us in the Phenomenology.

Actually, he stages the encounter between 'common moral consciousness' and the complexity obsessed 'beautiful soul'.

Each sees the other as corrupt, possibly evil. The judgmental purist who keeps their hands clean condemns the one who acts as a hypocrite: a person claiming to have high ideals while doing filthy deals and acting in bad faith; likewise, the one who acts from the purest of motives sees the other with the clean conscience as a hypocrite for the same reason – someone who is only concerned with themselves.

This does not actually happen in the Phenomenology. Instead there is a wholly internal drama.  The breaking of the hard heart and its elevation to universality is the same movement which was expressed in the consciousness that confessed. The wounds of the spirit heal and leave no scars behind; it is not the deed which is imperishable, but rather the deed is repossessed by spirit into itself; the aspect of singular individuality, whether present in the deed as intention or as existing negativity and limitation to the deed is what immediately vanishes. However much the opposition into which conscience enters when it acts, expressing it within its innerness, still it is also at the same time the inequality directed outwards in the element of its existence, the inequality of its particular singularity vis-à-vis other singular individuals. – Its particularity consists therein, that both moments constituting its consciousness, the self and the in-itself, each count as having unequal value; that certainty of itself is the essence vis-à-vis the in-itself or vis-à-vis the universal, which only counts as a moment. Confronting this inward determination is thus the element of existence or the universal consciousness, to which universality, duty, is instead the essence; in contrast, singular individuality, which is for itself vis-à-vis the universal, only counts as a sublated moment. To this adherence to duty [the universal consciousness], the first consciousness counts as evil because it is the inequality between its inwardly-turned-being and the universal, and while the latter at the same time also pronounces its doing as equality with itself, as duty and conscientiousness, to the universal consciousness it counts as hypocrisy.
Hegel was a Prussian Civil Servant- like all Professors in Berlin. He could think of duty as univocal. In the Anglo-Saxon system, however, we think of duties as clashing with each other. They are defeasible, not sublatable. There is no higher stand point from which all conflict is resolved.
The movement of this latter opposition is initially the formal establishment of equality between what evil is within itself and what it pronounces; it must come to light that it is evil and thus that its existence is equal to its essence. The hypocrisy must be unmasked. – This return of inequality, which is present within hypocrisy, into equality is not something which has already taken place, so that hypocrisy, as people commonly say, as a result demonstrates its respect for both duty and virtue by seeming to be both of them and then using that semblance as a mask to hide itself from its own consciousness no less than from the consciousness of others, and in which recognition of the opposition would in itself contain the equality and agreement of the two. – Yet at the same time, hypocrisy is just as much beyond this verbal recognition and is reflected into itself; and in using the existent-in-itself only as a being for others, hypocrisy’s own contempt for what exists-in-itself and the exhibition of its total lack of essence is there for all to see. For what lets itself be used as an external instrument shows itself as a thing which has within itself no proper weight of its own.
 This equality is also brought about neither by the evil consciousness
in its one-sided insistence on itself nor by the judgment of the universal. –
However much the former denies itself vis-à-vis the consciousness of duty,
and however much it asserts that what the latter pronounces to be wickedness, absolute inequality with the universal, is instead as an action according to inner law and conscience, still there remains in this one-sided assurance of equality its inequality with the other, for this other neither believes his assurance nor does it give it any recognition. Or, since the one-sided insistence on one extreme dissolves itself, evil would as a result confess to being evil, but in so doing would immediately sublate itself and thus would not be hypocrisy, nor would it have unmasked itself as such hypocrisy. It in fact confesses to being evil through its assertion that it acts according to its own inner law and conscience in opposition to what is recognized as universal. If this law and conscience were not the law of its singular individuality and its own arbitrary free choice, then it would not be something inward, not be something its own, but instead be what is universally recognized. Whoever for that reason says that he acts with regard to others according to his own law and his own conscience is saying in fact that he is mistreating them. 

However, actual conscience is not this insistence on knowing and willing which opposes itself to the universal; rather, the universal is the element of its existence, and its language pronounces its doing as recognized duty.

The empirical Anglo-Saxon tradition recognises no 'duty' as a 'universal'. There may be a Christian moral law. But it isn't universal precisely because Christianity is personal. What of the Marxist Left in Anglo-Saxon countries? Surely, it must have this Hegelian quality because Marx started off as a Young Hegelian? The answer is no. Marx migrated to England and became an English type of economist. Conscience has to do with conscientiousness in the discharge of duties allotted by the invisible hand, which however are infinitely transferable or otherwise defeasible.

The moralism that thinks in terms of evil individuals and corruption at the top tends to be impatient with systemic thinking.

So what? Evil individuals do exist. Corruption is a real problem. Impatience with both is a good thing.

Still less can it easily come to terms with others who differ, even when those differences are relatively minor, and between those on the same side.

Why? Either the guy who differs from you is evil or corrupt- in which case there will be evidence of this, of a criminal nature- or else you are a paranoid fantasist whom others should give a wide berth.

In short, they are not good at understanding what it is to be a comrade.

This may be a feature of mental illness or incorrigible antaganomia.

A comrade is someone with whom you work towards a common goal; the comrade need not be your friend and they need not be admirable or in agreement with you on a range of issues, but they are with you in the key political goals you have jointly taken on.

But a bunch of comrades get to chuck out gobshites and nutters. All that remains is cooperation of the same sort that obtains in the non-political realm.

They may be quite annoying in a number of ways. It doesn’t matter. Both share in the project of transforming the world, a project that always changes those who undertake it.

Or preventing the world being transformed into shite- a project that may also prevent your turning into a mere gobshite.

The ‘narcissism of small differences’ has often been remarked on in this context.

An English school-master came up with this term which Freud popularized. It has nothing to do with Romanticism.

The origin of it comes from a romantic notion of what it is to be political that conflates the moral judgement of individuals with the political analysis of a system that is irrational and unjust.

No. It was about how small, neighbouring, countries exaggerate their differences. But this is a feature of 'monopolistic competition'- i.e. where barriers to entry are low, 'product differentiation' occurs. The result is a lot of 'spare capacity'. This is one reason Marx's economic predictions fail.

This is intensified when politics happens not in a street or a meeting, but though a screen, with a key board.

But the key-board only matters because politics does not happen on the street or in meetings. Rather there is information and preference aggregation through things like the Media and Marketing Agencies and, ultimately, the Ballot Box.

I won’t rehearse here the well known effects of that medium on the way we engage, or often fail to engage, with others.

If we 'fail to engage with others'- as Socioproctological blogs must intend to do- then we have amused ourselves without causing a public nuisance. No one else cares if you take a dump on a road nobody but yourself walks down.
If we do 'engage with others' then, sure, there is a potential nuisance. But people can try not to shit on the thoroughfare simply as a matter of 'common morality'. Anyway, we can always avoid the guy who has crouched down to take a dump if the thoroughfare is broad enough or if we can hop on a bus or other such more rapid conveyance. In other words, the ranters and ravers on the internet can be bypassed by going to a conscientiously curated 'expert' site.

But it is worth recalling that this isolating effect is one that capitalism encourages.

No. As Graciella Chichilnisky's work has shown, for markets- or language, come to that- to exist, a Goldilocks condition for preference and endowment diversity must exist. Capitalism is about coordination games, involving larger and larger numbers, though because of Hedging against Uncertainty as well as 'Income effects', there are corresponding 'Discoordination' games such that 'rents' can be secured and arbitrage opportunities opened up.

A certain attitude akin to consumerism sets in: you don’t like this ideology, that view, this person? Delete it, block it, cancel them.

Nothing wrong in that. To have friends doesn't mean having to be everybody's friend. Nor does finding a sexual partner necessarily imply having to fuck all comers.

They’ve gone as surely as an unwanted item on a shopping list from the online supermarket delivery service.

Does Horner believe that people we 'block' are fulminated from the Universe? If I delete Captain Morgan in favour of Bacardi from my shopping list- does the former brand of Rum cease to exist? If I continue to refuse to sleep with Beyonce, is she doomed to virginity for the rest of her life? Sorry, that was a bad example. Beyonce is definitely a virgin. Maybe I should consider letting her sate her lust riding my micro-penis.

In a similar way to that of a brand of clothing that is supposed to express one’s ‘unique personality,’ a moralising stance expresses one’s self-branding as an identity.

No. This is 'signalling', not auto-poiesis. To 'self-brand' would involve some copyrightable intellectual property.

But what goes with this is a kind of persecutory superego-effect, a gaze that the BS feels on themselves and everyone else, and which threatens anyone who says or does the wrong thing.

Signalling can hyper-trophy, sure enough. But what Horner is describing is a type of pathology anyone- not just a solipsistic BS- can succumb to. It happens in all walks of life. One's idee fixe can turn one into a bore all too easily. I notice that people tend to edge away from me at cocktail parties the moment I bring up the topic of Beyonce. Jealousy, no doubt, but still it hurts. I like to think of myself as a charming and genial host. Sadly, my guests tend increasingly to be cats.

This can induce anxiety and depression.

Tell me about it! The cats, on the excuse of the lockdown, are no longer attending my elegant soirees.

And it takes us back to the question of how one relates to a collective when it goes wrong or seems to fail. The BS has a simple solution: if the party lets you down, you leave it. Cancel your subscription. That’ll teach them! Except it won’t: a political party isn’t like a girlfriend or boyfriend. You may get the pleasant sensation of having been cleansed of something disappointingly compromised, but leaving and sulking has no effect on it at all. Meanwhile the world rolls on.

A political party is unlike a g.f- who has since hooked up with a hunk- in that it takes money of its members. Thus it is more like a prostitute. Whores do worry if they lose clients. They may have to invest in expensive S&M equipment and go for niche marketing. This means giving up the flat in Shepherd's Bush for one in Knightsbridge where the rents are sky high. The thing is a gamble.

This pathology isn’t limited to the radical left. There are plenty of centrists for instance, liberals who mouth platitudes about free speech and liberty and do nothing that might expose them to the embarrassment of actually doing anything. Quite the contrary, as they are blind to the hierarchies of power that makes some speech freer than others. As for the right, we too often find a dehumanising intransigence about the views of others coupled with a hangman morality. Their aim is to mythologise and naturalise hierarchy and to celebrate the wonderfulness of the National Tribe while demonising an Other. This is right-wing identitarianism of a particularly toxic kind.

Either these guys 'mouthing platitudes' are 'actually doing nothing' or they are doing everything. Horner must make up his mind. The fact is we all produce shit. Shit is toxic to consume. Nor should you use faeces as a body lotion for all sorts of medical and aesthetic reasons. But we don't speak of our human need to defecate as 'identitarianism of a particularly toxic kind'. No doubt, defecation on public thoroughfares is a grave nuisance and health hazard. But the thing can be curbed by municipal action.

  And then there are the comfortable who do very well out the struggles of others, and  who will tell you in the pub that they are ‘anarchists’ or ‘not political’.

Will they also tell you that Beyonce is crazy for their hot bod? I will. Buy me a pint, why don't you?

What the BS refuses to see here is that their refusal to engage with the dirty world is actually allowing them to benefit from the struggles and suffering of others.

If there is some benefit to be had from the struggles and sufferings of others then I want it. No doubt, it cost Van Gogh great suffering to produce his masterpieces. I buy cheap prints of his work on Ebay and derive an ample benefit. Is this wrong? Should only people who have cut off their ear get to look at a Van Gogh painting?

The BS refuses to act politically and leaves others to do the work for them.

If you refuse to shit in the street you are leaving others- perhaps economically disadvantaged homeless people- to do the work for you. This callousness of yours must stop! Get up out of your comfortable armchair and go into the street. Lower your trousers and at least try to squeeze out a turd or two before the cops come for you.

As Sartre saw, to abstain from action is to be an accomplice and to act is, if not to murder, at least to get one’s hands dirty.

Whereas to write shite is to go out into the street and lower your trousers and squeeze out a turd or two to the great edification of American College Students on their year abroad.

Which brings me, finally, to the second epigraph at the top of this article. Mark Fisher, in a well-known article (Exiting the Vampire Castle)  connected the unforgiving moralism and obsession with purity, to the repression of social class.

Very true. People who object to your shitting on their doorstep have an 'unforgiving moralism' and 'obsession with purity'. Just because there is a turd in the punch-bowl is no reason to leave the party.

I think he was right. To think class, to attend to the ways in which Capital actually operates, is to think systemically and politically.

Capital operates through Capital Markets. To attend to this means studying the Mathematical theory of Finance which, truth be told, is simply hilarious.

In no way should this imply that other forms of oppression – gender, sexuality, race – are not real and important.

They represent price, wage or service provision discrimination. There is a 'Law & Econ' approach which can redress these problems on a significant scale. But you actually have to be a lawyer or an economist with Statistical nous to contribute to this process of redressal. Talking worthless BS about Beautiful Souls is virtue signalling simply.

They are, and they are woven together with the way class crushes or deforms everyone. But to truly leave the ‘Vampire’s Castle’ of snark, cancellation and finger pointing is to move towards seeing what class is, and how it relates to multiple oppressions, to think systemically and positively about what can be done. And to act.

But stupid thinking leads to stupid actions. That helps nobody.

There is no future in personalising, privatising and moralising.

Yes there is. By contrast, pretending it is still the Nineteen Seventies and gassing on in a Hegelian vein is completely passe.

The rending, and self-rending that induces anxiety and depression serves only the interests of Capital.

Really? Soros is a Capitalist. Is he funding Universities for this fell reason? Come to think of it, the LSE, where Soros studied, received a large grant in its early years from the Tatas- Indian Capitalists. OMG! Look at what the Ford Foundation gets up to! The reason people like Horner have PhDs is because Capitalism is using this Hegelian bullshit to demoralize and mislead the proletariat! Only through a sustained and systematic program of Beyonce impersonation can we throw off our mind-forged manacles.

And it makes things easy for the right. I have said a lot about finger pointing on the left, but the dark web of racist and homophobic abuse that comes from the right is, by comparison, off the scale.To be political isn’t to give up having opponents, but it must lie in something more life-affirming than finger pointing, narcissism and sulk.

So, Beyonce impersonation is the way to go. You know you want to. Shake that booty and start twerking NOW!