Vassalage to patrimonialism

The choice is nigh. Choose wisely – Pic by Shehan Gunasekara

Wednesday, 1 July 2020


Patrimonialism: “A form of governance in which all power flows directly from a leader. These regimes are autocratic or oligarchic and exclude the lower, middle and upper classes from power.”

If you can’t understand how someone like Trump can garner so much support, you probably have some misconceptions about how political salesmanship works.  Let us take a look at political rhetoric from the perspectives of two giants of the Western intellectual tradition, Socrates and Sigmund Freud.

Socrates likens political rhetoric to junk food.  Politicians, he claims, are more like pastry chefs than they are like physicians. They cook up sweet illusions rather than serving the public good.

“Pastry baking has put on the mask of medicine,” he remarks, “and pretends to know the foods that are best for the body, so that if a pastry baker and a doctor had to compete in front of children, or in front of men just as foolish as children, to determine which of the two had expert knowledge of good food and bad, it is a known fact that the doctor would die of starvation.

So what is the criterion that we should use to elect people to the Legislature?

The general consensus is that more intelligent people are thought to be moderate or centrist in their political views; and dogmatism and rigidity, are more appealing to less intelligent people.

If we are under the impression that education alone is supposed to increase political knowledge and provide a better understanding of the political system and their importance of participating in the system, then we have a think coming.

Consider Martin Heidegger and Gottlob Frege, the two most influential philosophers of the twentieth century, who were among the most intelligent, highly educated, and reflective people around at the time.

Martin Heidegger, German philosopher, counted among the main exponents of existentialism. His groundbreaking work in ontology (the philosophical study of being, or existence) and Metaphysics determined the course of 20th-century philosophy on the European continent; and Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege was a German philosopher, logician, and mathematics professor at the University of Jena, and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philosophy, concentrating on the philosophy of language, logic, and mathematics.

What should be noted here is that both the celebrities were also ardent fans of Adolf Hitler—as were many other European intellectuals.  Moreover, many prominent Nazis were highly educated.  Hitler’s propaganda minister Josef Goebbels had a Ph.D. (in literature) from the University of Heidelberg, and eight of the sixteen men sitting around the table at the 1942 Wannsee Conference, where the horrific fate of Europe’s Jews was sealed, possessed doctoral degrees.

There is no dearth of such “intellectuals” in our country too.

These examples make clear, neither education nor intelligence safeguard one against the corrosive effects of political illusions.

In the remark attributed to the British Prime Minister Lord Melbourne: “What all the wise men promised has not happened, and what all the damned fools said would happen has come to pass.” Of course there are also plenty of cases where the opposite is true and informed opinion is correct and popular sentiment wrong. The point is that there is no general tendency for the opinions or decisions of the intelligent to be any better than those of the less intelligent.

Some of our politically oriented “intellectuals” are hell bent on trying to inculcate a potent moral influence in us and want us to believe that our politicians will deliver us from our own worst nightmares. The people who believe in them seem gradually to lose their individuality and to become fused into a not very intelligent but immensely powerful political monstrosity.

We are talking about politicians, government officials, semi-officials, or volunteers for political parties, about mayors, prime ministers, presidents or any ruler; they are all, supposed to have at least one thing in common: in that, they are ministers in the Latin sense of the word, which means “servants”.

They are chosen, appointed, or elected to serve the people, society, or their community. As Tony Blair said to his campaign team after he first won the UK national elections, “The people are the masters. We are the servants of the people. We will never forget that.

Does it happen? Is it what we all see? The servants suddenly become our masters.

Their reputation is very poor – The “servants” suddenly turned masters to an inadequate job of managing their reputations and they tend to focus their energies on handling the threats to their reputations that have already surfaced. This is crisis management.  They are pretentions and ostentatious; always, pretending to be something or someone he or she is not; and at the same time, delights in flaunting who they are or what they have - speaking of oneself with much pride and self-indulgence.

Studies have revealed that less-intelligent people are usually incredibly confident and more intelligent people, by contrast, aren’t at all. Self-appraisal is a specialized skill; but one that requires intelligence; if you don’t have much of it, you don’t consider yourself flawed or ignorant, because technically you don’t have the ability to do so.

So if you want an intrinsically confident person to publically represent your political party or your constituency, an intelligent person would be a bad choice in many ways. This can backfire though; studies have shown that when a confident person is shown to be wrong/lying, they are then considered far less reliable or trustworthy than an unconfident person. This may explain the negative image of politics, which is mostly a series of confident individuals making big promises and failing miserably to keep them. That sort of thing really puts people off.

In fairness, it would be foolish to assume that all politicians are idiots, although individual definition of an “idiot” may vary. If they were, the whole infrastructure would collapse.   Still, everyone assumes they’re despicable, so always assume the worst.

Like any other apparatus, the administrative personnel that constitutes the external form of the political ruling apparatus are not just bound in their obedience to the ruling powers by the idea of legitimacy or their dedication to the country and its people. It is, in effect, bound equally by two other factors that appeal to personal interest: material reward and social prestige.

Socrates describes politicians as having a knack for flattery.

The fiefs of vassals, individuals who owe allegiance and service to a powerful authority as well as the livings granted to patrimonial officials, vis-à-vis officials exhibiting shameless vassalage to patrimonialism, the salaries of modern civil servants, the privileges of conferring state lands, the status and power hashed out to official – these are the rewards, and it is the fear of losing such privileges, advantages and immunity that cements the ultimate and decisive foundation of the solidarity that exists between the administrative personnel and the ruling powers.

The same thing holds true for charismatic leadership: glory in war and booty for the military, while the followers of the demagogue look for “spoils” – the license to exploit the ruled through the monopoly of public offices, profits to reward their political loyalty, and prizes to flatter their vanity.

General Elections and the social media landscape

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Facebook included its ad library tool to cover Sri Lanka from the last week of May. What this means is that now we can find out how much was spent on Facebook ads, the targeting details of the ads and spend. As per the details, the pages that spent the most were 

Source – Facebook 

In terms of ad reach, the Western Province appeared to overwhelmingly in the focus  

 Source – Facebook   

1 July 2020 

The ad library had been available for Sri Lanka since the November Presidential Election. The ads for which details would be available are those deemed political in content by Facebook. The issue with Sri Lanka is the thousands of gossip pages that have millions of followers. One very popular page has over two million followers. These pages can post ads veiled as posts. 
They circumvent any oversight and rely not on Facebook’s ad placement but on their gigantic user base. There will be no details available. Politically aligned social media users have used their profiles in the past to strategically post material significantly political in nature and outright fakes sometimes. We will see this happen during the next month as well. In fact, some posts have been placed already.   

· A Facebook official appearing on an online forum hosted by the Hawaii based East West Centre said a fortnight back that the platform was increasing its capacity on Sri Lanka as elections draw near. 
However, as has been Facebook’s past practice, the official declined to elaborate what those actions entail or how many moderators Facebook has employed to deal with posts in Sinhala and Tamil.   
During the November elections Facebook had a working arrangement with the Election Commission to take down posts that violated elections laws. But neither the Commission nor Facebook gave any details on the mechanism nor its impact.   

It would be interesting to see if Facebook holds public interactions with journalists and others similar to those it held during the runup to the Presidential polls. 
Those forums were conducted under restrictions imposed by Facebook that prevented any type of independent, investigative reporting. Despite at least one local facilitating organisation assuring the writer that it was ready to act as an interlocutor between Facebook and Sri Lankan journalists, no tangible reporting has been forthcoming.   
At least one organisation with a robust Sri Lankan operation distanced itself from conducting or facilitating these interactions based on the guidelines Facebook expected to be imposed.

   
Facebook has an ongoing dialogue with the Election Commission. However, sources with detailed knowledge of the EC working relationship with Facebook during the last Presidential Election says that there was no written agreement between the two entities. 
Whatever working arrangement was only verbal. Facebook officials were visible at semi-public interactions at EC during the run-up to the Presidential Polls.   
Facebook has also held at least one remote awareness building session with local election monitors, the same sources told me.   

"At least one organisation with a robust Sri Lankan operation distanced itself from conducting or facilitating these interactions based on the guidelines Facebook expected to be imposed"

After I reported on the possible phishing attempt on several Sri Lankan journalists and human rights activists, most of the WhatsApp groups made up of journalists, rights activists and similar professional have gone almost completely silent. From the raucous gossip laced grapevine, super important to those whose business it is to be ahead of the chatter, they are now limited to exchanging press releases and birthday wishes.   
Tik-Tok just got banned in India with a host of other apps. But in Sri Lanka, the app is gaining ground, especially among the youth. It is common to see political satire and spoofs on the platform. Some of the Sri Lankan posts appear to be done by private individuals, but on close examination, it is clear that at least some of these posts have the backing of semi-professional production teams and equipment. 

One such user who seems to have taken a liking to spoofing a popular female ex-member of parliament has a great deal of access to a wardrobe that mimics and imitates the MPs dress-code. He has 42,000 followers and there is not an iota of doubt where his political allegiances lie.   
The same problematic issues surrounding the gossip pages on Facebook are very much a concern here.   

The writer is a Post-grad Researcher at CQUniversity, Melbourne focusing on online journalism and trauma
Twitter - @amanthap