The Metaphysics of Humiliation
Relations of domination and humiliation are at the heart of reactionary politics; metaphysics explains further.
Preliminary personal note: Posts here will be a bit fewer and further between for the next couple of months, because I'm moving from DC to the Big Hotdog—Chicago! Exciting, but very time-consuming. Still, I'm working on a big juicy post, one that will be less directly political and more science-y. It will be on cognitive science and its relation to deeper worldviews about the kinds of things-in-general that constitute existence: separate, determinate entities or substances (map-metaphysics) versus relational processes (how reality's terrain actually works). Fun, right? In the meantime, I wanted to briefly riff on an insightful recent piece by British-American political philosopher Toby Buckle.
Toby Buckle
Featured image is "Engraving of a scold's bridle and New England street scene," Joel Dorman Steele and Esther Baker Steele 1885
Why Does Humiliation Matter Politically?
In "The Politics of Humiliation," Buckle defines humiliation as a destruction of status and dignity, or more precisely, a forced or non-consensual recognition of a power relation of domination. Humiliation functions parasitically to extract someone's standing and self-respect to benefit another. It's always a net-negative, worse than zero-sum, because the boost to the humiliator is never as serious as the hit to the humiliated: the tree remembers what the axe forgets.
Not all status differences or power relations are humiliating. However, any relationship where one person has unaccountable and thus potentially arbitrary power over another has the potential for domination and humiliation. Our society increasingly encourages an abundance of such relations, from the authoritarian government and police state, to the at-will employer, to the protected slur-hurling bigot.
Humiliation, then, is a key factor in politics. "Why is Trump so willing to cause massive harm with tariffs just to have world leaders say fawning things about him? Why was there so much glee in Elon Musk's firing of government workers? Why were Trump's victories greeted with an increase in yelling abuse at service workers, and why did the perpetrators so often reference Trump when doing so?" Humiliating others is like an addiction which the competitively (relatively) powerful will often pursue to the point of self-destruction. It's not just present-day politics, of course; Buckle gives examples from ancient Rome, Machiavelli, and slavery, and one might also add a few others like the Maoist Cultural Revolution. But it's certainly a hot trend.
The sadistic desire to humiliate explains quite a lot of our present right-wing reactionary backlash. (Left-wing populism tends to be borne more of a desire to avoid humiliation, though it can unfortunately curdle into a desire to humiliate too.) Historically recent and fragile gains by marginalized groups have made their members less susceptible to domination and the forced recognition thereof. Indeed, that's basically the whole point of liberation. The prospect of unambiguous societal improvements like anti-harassment enforcement, norms against open racism, and reducing economic precarity scares and angers empty people bent on extracting status and dignity from others. Trump's core appeal to millions of Americans is that he routinely humiliates people, vicariously validating those fans' actions and aspirations. "MAGA," writes Buckle, "is a movement of parasites seeking hosts." This desire to (re)assert humiliation on different others unites the adoration-seeking ultra-wealthy with the larger assortment of dignity-parasites and wannabes. The symbolic and material empowerment of these parasites is corroding our society and making humiliation more pervasive.
There's quite a lot more to the article than I can get to here. It's beautifully written and worth reading in full. For extra credit, follow it up with a related, shorter article by Samantha Hancox-Li published today in the same publication, about how these central conservative beliefs in some people's inherent entitlement to dominate and extract from others lower on the hierarchy tie in with not just humiliation, but also sexual abuse of children: "We Need To Talk About Pedocon Theory."
Why Bring Metaphysics Into It?
Analyzing politics through the lens of humiliation and exploitation is already digging pretty deep into psychological and social structures. Why go even deeper, all the way down to metaphysical foundations? Well, it's not for popularity, that's for sure. I hesitate to even use the term metaphysics, despite its accuracy. There's no need to be intimidated by basic metaphysics, though! As I and others have noted, everyone, including me and you, is always applying a metaphysics—that is, a general framework for what kinds of things (in the broadest possible sense) constitute existence and what makes them what they are. We don't arrive at those frameworks independently; they are heavily shaped and bolstered by social, cultural, political, and economic structures. In turn, they heavily shape our more specific thinking.
Metaphysics gets us to a deeper and more useful "why." The dividing-and-ranking map-metaphysics underlying reactionaries' addiction to humiliating others is load-bearing for their worldview. The all-encompassing, rigidly hierarchical essentialism of their understanding of things is a large part of why they pursue dominating and humiliating at great cost to themselves. It's the fundamental structure of their core beliefs about reality. Their exploitative me/us-versus-them worldviews would be utterly senseless without its framing assumptions of separateness and stratified order. That makes it valuable to uncover and target for organized opposition. Their overcommitted map-metaphysics also happens to have been proven empirically inadequate over and over again (so far I've gotten to examples in physics, biology, and economics, but there's much more to come), and it's globally unpopular to boot.
Just as importantly, there's a truer-to-reality set of alternatives readily available to everyone that dismantles justifications for power relations of domination and humiliation. Those alternatives recognize that we and everything around us are all interdependent processes, mutually co-constituting ourselves and one another through our relations over time. We're never fully unchanging, never fully independent or isolatable from the complexity of our context, and always part of a larger flowing whole that we humans can choose to either regenerate or unravel. Separating, pinning down, essentializing, idealizing, and ranking along supposedly timeless ideals are what our (left hemispheres of our) brains do to assert control, but the resulting mental maps are not the territory.
The capacity for desiring to dominate, exploit, and humiliate is part of human nature, but the degree of that desire and the extent to which it can be exercised are changeable. Trumpers' own unraveling of norms is evidence of this, albeit in the wrong direction. A society can reinforce or undermine bad actors' sense of entitlement to dominate to greater or lesser degrees. Going upstream of politics to metaphysics can extend our leverage to effectuate lasting social change in the less-wrong direction of individual and collective flourishing. Granted, most devoted Trumpers' brains are overcooked soufflés at this point, 100% committed to their echo-chambered fantasy-worlds and probably unsalvageable. At the same time, I think there's a significant enough fraction of people who simply have been convinced by centuries of heavy Euro-Western/capitalist intellectual propaganda that any less domination-obsessed, more interdependence-based society is "unrealistic," which is to say incompatible with their metaphysical (mis)understanding of reality. Approaching these people with more curiosity than hostility is a prerequisite for building trust and potentially changing minds and behaviors.
We can prove to a certainty that a better, more regenerative world is not only possible but already real, partly hidden underneath their oppressive one and breaking out through its growing cracks. That's a strategy that pokes holes in self-fulfilling predictions of humans' "natural" desire to humiliate one another inevitably trumping our desire to live well and be in harmony. Leveraging metaphysical awareness might also enable evading some ego-defenses that protect more direct attacks on people's political identities, and addressing people's needs for meaning, belonging, and freedom in ways that vastly improve on attempting to extract those things from others.
Buckle references the long tradition in political philosophy of defining freedom as not being subject to domination. To be free is to not have anyone in a position to use power over you unaccountably and arbitrarily. Domination is incompatible with status claims every person has to certain inalienable minimums of dignity, agency, and belonging.
In a process-relational world with no single best perspective, liberty can only be meaningful as an active, holistic property of people and their relations collectively, including traditions, mores, and attitudes. As Fannie Lou Hamer said, nobody's free until everybody's free. Extractive, net-negative power relations of domination and humiliation can and must be more widely recognized as contrary to the functioning of our world as a whole, and of the well-being of each person within it—including the dominators themselves. Our relations with self and other must mutually reaffirm our baseline dignity and indestructible worth. That's not pie-in-the-sky idealism. It's just the cold hard reality of how things have to work.
A world with rampant humiliation isn't just unpleasant and immoral. It's cringefully unrealistic. We have all the knowledge and power we need to restructure society, starting with ourselves and going outward from there, to align with reality, rein in humiliation and promote power-with and power-to instead of only dominating power-over. I think basic metaphysical awareness illuminates useful tools to see and operationalize that through directional alignment across our differences toward a shared reality.
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