Heads, Collectivism — Tails, Collectivism
The most successful form of control is one that confines argument to questions of management. A society that has reached this condition has solved the hardest problem of political rule: it has persuaded its members that the dispute permitted to them is the dispute that matters. They may argue fiercely over who should administer the apparatus, which faction should command it, and which reforms might make it more humane, efficient, or responsive. What they are no longer invited to ask is whether the apparatus itself should exist, whether its reach should expand or recede, or whether certain questions belong in its hands at all. Such inquiry has not been suppressed by censorship. It has been made to seem eccentric, impractical, almost unintelligible. Habit has accomplished what prohibition rarely can.
The mechanism was described, almost clinically, by a fictional newspaper critic in an American novel of the 1940s. His name was Ellsworth Toohey. Readers have commonly dismissed him as a villain, which he plainly was; as a caricature, which is less certain; and as a figure confined to his author’s century, a judgment that now seems the least defensible of all.
Toohey is a character in The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand’s 1943 novel of architecture and ambition. He is an architecture critic for a mass-circulation daily: small, soft, self-deprecating, and universally beloved. He writes in the manner of a kindly uncle while arranging, from behind that curtain, the demolition of every architect, artist, and thinker in the novel whose work bears the marks of an independent mind. He raises mediocrities into positions they cannot naturally inhabit and cultivates movements whose aims he does not share. Over the course of a career, he assembles a network of debts, dependencies, favors, resentments, and moral obligations whose members never quite know they belong to a network at all.
He is a critic in title only. His true occupation is the management of other people’s estimates of themselves.
Near the end of the book, cornered by a protégé who has at last begun to suspect him, Toohey drops the facade. The speech runs for several pages and has the satisfaction of a professional confession. “My technique, Peter,” he tells the younger man, “Offers poison as food and poison as antidote.” It is the moment in the novel when he ceases, however briefly, to operate and begins to describe the operation.
What strikes me is how little Toohey cares about the substance of the creed he advances. Socialism, moralism, criticism: these are instruments rather than convictions. He is a technician of dependence. His true subject is the interior chamber in which a person decides what he thinks of himself, and his ambition is to place a lock upon that chamber to which only he possesses the key. The political program is incidental.
Most readers remember Toohey as the collectivist villain, and the memory is accurate only as far as it goes. But a true collectivist villain would have a favored collectivism. He would argue for one arrangement against another and could be recognized by the choice of his allegiance. Toohey has no such allegiance. He is indifferent. What he requires is a condition: that the individual surrender his standing as the final witness to his own soul. Red, blue, cross, flag, flowchart: any of them will serve.
Eighty-three years later Toohey, surprisingly, does not sound dated. His ideological century has passed, yet the conditions in which he flourishes have ripened beyond anything available to him in Rand’s imagination. The machinery he had to assemble by hand, the apparatus by which a person’s opinion of himself is formed somewhere outside himself, now stands ready in a screen. He would not need to proselytize. He would need only to recognize the arrangement and let it blossom.
A caution is necessary, since this argument can too easily be mistaken for a familiar one. I do not mean that the two American parties are secretly identical, or that the quarrel between them is staged, or that some superior wisdom consists in refusing both. The parties differ, often bitterly and sometimes consequentially, over the allocation of public power, the interests toward which it should be directed, and the authority in whose name it should be exercised. These disagreements are real and citizens who care about the results of political life are right to attend to them.
The matter lies one story below this. It concerns what the coalitions tacitly accept in the very act of opposing one another. Their disagreements are quarrels over the allocation of an instrument: who may command it, toward what ends, and under what moral description. Their deeper agreement is the shared and largely unexamined premise that the instrument itself should exist, should grow, and should remain the resort of anyone wishing to remedy the situation at hand. The coalitions rarely notice this agreement, because it is not quite a position either of them holds. It is the ground on which both stand to oppose one another.
The dynamic appears most clearly in the life cycle of a crisis. A crisis arrives: financial, epidemiological, military, moral, climatic, technological. The category matters less than the reflex it awakens. Public argument quickly arranges itself around questions already narrowed by habit. Which hands should hold the emergency powers now being assumed? Toward what ends should those hands direct them? The prior question is treated as a luxury the moment cannot afford: whether such powers should be assumed at all, whether the instrument being reached for is fitted to the problem before it, and whether the crisis is truly a case for centralized authority rather than, as so often happens, a disorder centralized authority has helped to produce and will proceed to compound.
This prior question is treated as naïve, or worse, as unserious. The coalitions dispute the permitted questions with great feeling, sometimes for years. The excluded question, having been disqualified at the outset, never enters the argument. When the crisis subsides, the instrument remains, having acquired new capacities, new staff, new constituencies, and new precedents. The next crisis will find it larger and more practiced, and the coalitions will resume their quarrel over who should drive it and to where.
The pattern repeats in the moral key. A harm is identified; a population is found to be suffering and sympathy is aroused. The coalition in power proposes an intervention, and the coalition out of power objects to its particulars. The objection usually takes the form of a different intervention, larger, or administered by someone else. It almost never takes the form of a challenge to the assumption that the harm in question belongs to the class of things political instruments are competent to address.
Toohey, again, described the mechanism. “Watch the pincer movement,” he says to Keating near the end of the novel. “If you’re sick of one version, we push you into the other. We get you coming and going.” He is describing, in 1943, the political psychology of a citizen furnished with two alternatives and permitted to exhaust himself between them. The alternatives need not be false, nor need their rivalry be faked. Indeed, the rivalry must be sincere if it is to do its work. Each presents itself as the remedy for the other’s failures. Each receives the disappointed graduates of its rival and teaches them to interpret disappointment as evidence that they had chosen badly, rather than that the field of choice itself had been too narrowly drawn. The citizen, moving from one to the other in search of relief, does not notice that he has never left the premises.
Here lies the deeper sense in which Toohey’s conditions have matured.
The modern citizen need not be persuaded to enter the arrangement; he has usually been born inside it. His political imagination has been trained by alternatives that differ vividly at the surface while sharing, beneath their quarrel, a common confidence in centralized remedy. One side disappoints him, and he moves to the other. The other disappoints him, and he returns, or searches for a new faction that promises to administer the same powers with cleaner hands. In each movement he experiences himself as choosing freely, and in a narrow sense he is. Yet the range within which his choice takes place has already conceded the central question. He may change the driver, the destination, the declared purpose of the journey. What he is rarely invited to question is the vehicle, or the kind of passenger the vehicle requires him to become.
For the vehicle does not carry persons as they understand themselves. It carries administrable units. The self survives as a category in poetry and in tax law. In the administrative grammar that shapes much of contemporary life, it is closer to a rounding error. One is one’s demographic, one’s diagnosis, one’s risk profile, one’s cohort, one’s segment, or one’s role. These designations don’t need to be hostile on the surface. They are simply the terms on which large institutions can see the person at all. To insist upon the self beneath them is, from the institution’s standpoint, neither offensive nor even false.
It becomes necessary, then, to ask why the arrangement persists, given how poorly it serves the people living inside it. The usual explanation is familiar enough: elites have engineered the arrangement, powerful interests benefit from it, and ordinary citizens have been deceived into accepting what diminishes them. This account contains a portion of truth, as most simplifications do. Yet it is too flattering to the deceived, too coherent about the deceivers, and too eager to mistake for conspiracy what is often only the operation of ordinary incentives upon ordinary people.
The harder explanation implicates nearly everyone. It works along three axes, each strengthening the others.
The first axis is institutional. Centralized power compounds. Every authority acquired becomes a foundation for the next authority; every precedent becomes a premise; every emergency becomes a template. Institutions staffed by human beings of ordinary ambition will tend to grow when growth is not actively and intelligently resisted, and such resistance is costly, tedious, and rarely rewarded. Those who would have to undertake it are usually occupied with other obligations. Those who benefit from the growth are, by definition, attentive and organized. This asymmetry requires no malice, only time.
The second axis is moral. A person who retains jurisdiction over his own estimate of himself must judge. He must hold standards and apply them to himself when no one is watching and no one will know. This is among the most taxing of human labors, and the lengths to which men will go to escape it can be seen almost everywhere, from the disciplines of religious life to the indulgences of consumer life. Systems that relieve the person of judgment therefore solve a problem their constituents feel keenly, whatever injuries they may inflict in the process. They provide the verdict and the reasoning that accompanies it; the answer and the sensation of having arrived there honestly. The individual is seldom crushed outright. He is relieved: of responsibility, of uncertainty, of the burden of choosing without a witness. Such relief is easily mistaken for freedom, and anyone proposing to withdraw it will find himself accused of cruelty.
The third axis concerns risk. A decision made on one’s own authority has the terrible property of remaining attributable to the one who made it should it go wrong. A decision made by the group, the expert class, the algorithm, or the committee diffuses this property across so many actors and instruments that the originating person can no longer be located and therefore cannot be blamed, not even by himself. This is no small advantage. Much human suffering arises not from bad outcomes alone, but from bad outcomes for which one must feel responsible, and a system that offers to shoulder that responsibility is offering something for which people will trade a great deal, often without noticing the size of the payment. Centralization is, among other things, the institutionalization of this trade. It absorbs, on its vast and undifferentiated balance sheet, the responsibility that individuals cannot bear on theirs. What it returns in exchange is the reduced moral weight of a life whose consequential decisions were always made somewhere else.
These three axes, institutional compounding, moral outsourcing, and aversion to responsibility, do not operate independently. They strengthen one another, and their reinforcement is the engine that carries the arrangement forward regardless of which coalition is nominally in charge. The institution expands because expansion is its natural direction. The citizen accepts the expansion because it relieves him of labors he did not wish to perform. The risks created by that acceptance are then absorbed by the very institution whose enlargement he has permitted, and the absorbed risk becomes the justification for further enlargement. The coalitions quarrel, bitterly and sincerely, over the direction in which the instrument should be pointed. The instrument, meanwhile, grows larger.
The line that gives this essay its title belongs to Toohey. It comes near the end of his speech, after the technique has been disclosed and the protégé has begun, at last, to understand what he has been serving. “We’ve closed the doors,” Toohey says. “We’ve fixed the coin. Heads, collectivism, and tails, collectivism.” The satisfaction in the line is almost architectural: the pleasure of an engineer indicating a finished feature of the structure to someone who had been living inside it without appreciating the design.
The coin is rigged, in Toohey’s sense and in ours, because the toss itself has become the transaction. Its faces are genuinely different, and the differences matter. Yet the citizen who agrees to call the toss has already agreed to abide by a result produced elsewhere, in a mint he does not own, under an authority whose legitimacy he has tacitly conceded by participating. Heads, his interior is administered under one dispensation. Tails, under another. The dispensations compete fiercely for the contract, and this competition is mistaken, by nearly everyone, for a choice.
Toohey understood the mechanism perfectly. Collectivism, in his reading, concerns more than the distribution of goods. It concerns the distribution of judgment. Its project is to move the verdict on a person’s life from the interior chamber where it was once rendered to an exterior chamber where it can be rendered on his behalf. Such a movement need not depend upon coercion. It requires only that the exterior chamber become more comfortable, more competent, and more relieving than the interior one, and that the interior chamber be left long enough in disrepair that its owner begins to doubt whether it was ever meant for use.
What, then, would it mean to refuse the toss? Pure individualism will not do. The culture sells that posture readily enough, and under inspection it often proves to be another uniform. Refusal would mean something smaller, lonelier, and more difficult: maintaining, against continuous pressure, a private jurisdiction over one’s own estimate of oneself. It would mean reading what one has reason to read, revising one’s mind in answer to evidence rather than atmosphere, noticing when relief arrives too easily, and asking what has been traded for it. It would mean keeping the chamber to which Toohey wanted the key, not because one is sufficient unto oneself, but because no other human being, committee, party, market, expert class, or crowd can finally perform the act of judgment in one’s place.
This is, I concede, an unglamorous liberty. It will not staff a campaign, fill a stadium, or furnish a phrase fit for circulation. It offers no immunity from error, no exemption from loneliness, no pleasing assurance that one has escaped the age. Its advantage is more modest. It remains among the few forms of freedom the parties have not yet learned to sell back to us at a markup. Heads, they claim the coin. Tails, they claim the coin. Refusal begins when a man declines the toss and keeps the coin in his own hand.
