Stasis and the Infantilisation of Humanity to the Benefit of the Predator Class

Photograph Renan Lima, Pexels

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by Richard Steinhardt

Stasis is a state of stability, equilibrium, or inactivity, with meanings that vary across contexts. The word comes from the Greek stasis, meaning standing or stoppage. In medical and pathological contexts, it refers to the slowing or stoppage of bodily fluids, as in venous stasis. In biology, stasis appears in theory as an environmental equilibrium or as ecological stasis. In science fiction, stasis is suspended animation. And in social and political life, stasis describes a period of stability, or lack of change, often negatively.

Stasis is a spectrum. When it comes to time, stasis can mean a deliberate break, a sabbatical, a moment of reflection before a decision, a pause to recharge. At the other end of the spectrum, there is a paralysis of the will (catachresis) or the stasis that comes from a systems crash, or despair.

When it comes to individual or collective agency, we see an imposed stasis. Or stasis can be a form of sovereignty, the choice to ‘drop out’ and go to a retreat or to a sanctuary far away from war, competition and injustice. A negotiated stasis, or truce, is a ceasefire in a stalemate. The stasis we are forced to put up with is the doctor’s or dentist’s waiting room. The queue! An imposed stasis is a prison, or some other kind of cage; when you are locked in by illness, poverty, a controlling partner, or in a school or workplace, or you wend your way through a government institution of some kind. Stasis implies fallow ground and it can either mean regenerative rest, or it can mean abandonment and decay.

Stasis can also exist in movement. The speed limiter on a vehicle prevents acceleration. The pace of modern society can be chosen or imposed. You are stuck at a fixed pace, on the conveyor belt of your education, on a treadmill at work. You discover you are like a train on a track, unable to change course. You could choose to retire, or you might be retired, though if you have enough money you could even run for political office or run a huge company at the age of 80. Stasis in movement can be the result of wisdom, where you set your own limits to protect yourself on the long journey through life. Or the limiter on you could be a phantom. The effect is real.

At the same time, there is a natural limit to cause and effect. Things cannot change faster than their natural unfolding. The system evolves exactly as determined by the totality of factors at play. Cause and effect have a natural tempo, a thermodynamic limit to the rate of change. You cannot force a an oak to grow in a month or blow air at a cloud to make it billow. We live most of our days inside clouds of complicated cause and effect, much of which is out of our control, our individual actions have little effect, for example, on government policy, or on climate change.

We rail against the speed of healing, the pace of another person’s developing understanding, the time it takes to learn something, the slow revelation of the reality of a situation. Sometimes there is an external limiter placed on us has been internalised for so long that it feels something real. The disapproval and low expectations of others convince us not to try. Sometimes the natural pace of things is mistaken for oppression, and we waste our lives fighting physics and nature and human nature uselessly. But far more often, the final decision to act decisively is just the mind’s response to a result that is already unfolding from countless other unrelated causes: fear, comfort, lack of alternatives, unexamined beliefs, and the habits of addiction and the familiar.

To change things you must also become an observer and a gardener of the conditions that give rise to events and help the powerful to maintain the status quo, not just a little Napoleon strategising and ordering imaginary armies into battle. Understanding the current conjuncture, then, is the way we teach ourselves, and doing so guides us to action.

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Intention are often not our own but implanted in us by other people and the systems we live in. Examining the want itself is more important than choosing what to want because you may not actually intend what you think you intend. You are probably being directed by other people’s benign or malign intentions. Advertising is only one aspect of this. You are forced to make certain things your goals. You think you want something, but that want was placed there. A must have or must do or must think or must be from outside becomes a burden on the free human soul, especially when what that soul desires is out of harmony with what the servitude of capitalism requires of us from obedience in the workplace to the consumption of what is affordably on offer.

To act consciously and in an informed way, you must question your intentions, and those of your class and community entirely. And be willing to look at where your intentions come from. Your sense of agency and that of your community might not come from choosing what you think you want, but in examining the nature of the want itself. The need to buy a car. You stay on the treadmill precisely because the intention to buy a Ferrari feels like the truth. To stop would feel like a lie, when in fact understanding why you have come to want a red Ferrari carrot might be your first moment of freedom. All that intention impelling you forward into a race for nothing.

“Just decide what you really want” is terrible advice. What you really want might be so deeply buried under layers of forced intention and misapprehension that you cannot access it by an act of will. The real intention might be a whisper, a still small voice within, and the forced intention, peer pressure and the the need to survive in a capitalist society shouts you down. The capacity to notice this might itself be the beginning of something liberatory.

Problem definition is essential, but unclear intentions obscure our efforts of problem definition. Consider the double bind. Your intention is to feel less anxious. You define the problem as your anxiety, as a malfunction to be eliminated. But the real situation is that the anxiety is a reasonable response to your indentured servitude in an inhumane capitalist society (if you are lucky enough to be employed). The intention, feeling better, obscures the problem caused by capitalist society. The problem is not efficiency; it is your hidden resentment at being used, it is a fundamental refusal inside you you do not recognise masked as procrastination. Stasis.

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The insight that there to be free of a system the ‘are no rules and laws’ can unblock stasis, but it is also the engine of criminality, and even atrocity. The great insight that unblocks stasis is the so-called illumination of psychopathy. Every Hollywood movie prefers to make a hero out of a criminal rather than an anti-capitalist revolutionary. The capitalist exploiters themselves have no genuine moral core. They are just following their own drives, and we have been playing by rules they do not even respect. Criminals steal just as capitalists steal people’s surplus labour and the resources of developing countries The ‘illumination’ of the capitalist is Darwinian: they understand there are no rules or that they create the rules. The tacit understanding by the powerful that they can do what they want to get what they want without compunction enables systemic, large-scale evil. The intentions of the psychopath and sociopathic capitalism always produces a lower order result than the gains they achieve. Gaza is to be destroyed to build luxury hotel complexes, and the same people want to build over the flora and fauna of Albania.

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The very structure of intention that operates beyond rules inherently degrades the world, because it sacrifices real, concrete human needs for profit and dominance. The SS did not just know no rules in the sense of being free from all moral constraints; they actively cultivated the transcendence of ordinary pity, compassion, and the moral law in service of ‘racial destiny’. The Aktion T4 program, the euthanasia of disabled children, was exactly this structure: the intentional infliction of death on the vulnerable, framed as a difficult but necessary for the good of the Volk.

The insight itself, that there are no transcendent rules, that morality is a human construct, that the strong can and should forge and implement values, is the engine of atrocity when married to power. The illumination of a ‘get real’ rules free world becomes a licence for the ruthless to remake the world according to their vision, unencumbered by guilt or restraint, or by the suffering of the people they crush. The intentions of the corporations gives birth to a lower hell. The powerful and rich who consider themselves to be beyond good and evil in the pursuit of their objectives sever the natural loop between action and consequence. They can blithely ignore the actual consequences for the majority of real living beings and simply act in their own benefit. Adam Smith lied!

Hollywood’s version of this illumination is toxic-sexy. The fantasy narrative is always the same: a normal person gains superhuman intelligence. And what does that intelligence look like? It is cold, detached, emotionally dead, and beyond ordinary human attachments. The message is clear: to be more intelligent is to be implacable, not to be kind. Compassion is presented as something sugary and false, in the end a limitation of the lesser mind. Empathy is a naivete. The Hollywood illuminated ‘hyper-intelligent’ being does not weep for suffering it has the imperturbable equanimity of a Buddha. The Hollywood Buddha is the big rat that eats all the other rats. But the rest of us are not rats, and the cosmos is not a cage.

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Political stasis is not an accident, it is induced. The parallels are to slavery, Roman slavery, European systems of slavery. Modern capitalism shows continuity with older forms of servitude: the unscrupulous hoard all agency, economic, political, social, moral, spiritual (and even sexual), and the masses are kept in stasis through a combination of inducements, the threat of overwhelming violence, the need to make a crust, exaggerated red herring moral sensitivities and social issues that paralyse and divide people, and through manufacturing the fear of people who are observably different. The result is that people may complain on social media and demonstrate to no avail. Millions continue to die in the USA’s wars around the world for all our marching and complaining.

The infantilisation of adulthood is everywhere: in small manufactured hot button sensitivities, in the refusal to meet violence and oppression with anything but tears and lamentation and argument. Induced stasis serves the unscrupulous who have gathered agency to themselves. The slave in Roman times, the slave in the times of the British Empire did not matter. No one cared what he or she thought. Neither do the powerful give a jot about the opinions of the masses now. Capitalist wars and exploitation claim the lives millions and people chatter on, held in a state of frozen animation.

The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.

Karl Marx

The machinery of induced stasis does not stay frozen. Cultural sensitivities become unbalanced people divide and refuse to join together in an intersectional resistance against the raw physical power of the capitalist class (even when that power can kill and imprison them, starve their children, and destroy their life chances) and fears and phantoms are cultivated by the media in the heads of the opponents of the capitalist elite class (in reality most of us).

This induced stasis is a form of infantilisation; it is the systematic erosion of the capacities that make resistance possible. Infantilisation is not simply treating adults like children it is the erosion of the capacity to assess danger accurately, the inability, for example, of the peace movement to stop our mad Labour government from provoking the Russian Federation into all out war. Russia’s missiles are preparing to launch in response to the proxy war pursued by the USA and its allies in the Ukraine. Infantilisation is the inability to trust one’s own perceptions and judgement and the delegation and abdication of rational thought. It is the failure to think for yourself and act collectively, to endure discomfort for a longer good; to mitigate climate change. Infantilisation is the replacement of agency with dependency, and dependency with gratitude to the capitalist exploiter for mere survival with no opposition to him.

When a human being is infantilised, they look to authority for permission, even to live. The capitalist tormentor in the USA, the man who doesn’t even let his workers take a piss, becomes a parent figure, feared, resented, but secretly relied upon. The thought of acting without permission does not arise as a possibility. Bezos can waste millions on joy rides and the poorest will just complain and eat shit.

The moral sense of ordinary people is turned against them. Ordinary wage slaves and the unemployed are taught that anger against oppression and genocide and war is ugly, that self-defence is an unacceptable form of violence, that to resist is to become a monster. The ordinary person if they have no critical faculties internalise the capitalist tormentor’s judgment of them as unworthy, irrational, overemotional and accept shitty water and poor health services and work without ordinary security and benefits.

Ordinary unthinking (childish) people lose the skill of physical resistance. Not because their bodies are weak, but because their minds have been trained to freeze. The same mental circuits that once mobilised for fight or flight have been overridden by a chronic, low hum of there is nothing to be done. At least nothing that involves obstructing real raw power and nothing to gain real economic power. The crucified slaves hung in agony after their failure to overthrow their masters.

The infantilised adult believes the monsters in the news are real, the monster in the boss’s threat, the state in representation of imperialism clamping down on protest against genocide. And the tragedy is that the infantilised human under capitalism knows, somewhere deep inside, are being infantilised. That knowledge adds shame to their paralysis of will. We despise ourselves for not acting.

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The Alexandrine solution is to cut the knot rather than stay frozen. The Alexandrine solution means a bold, direct, unconventional, sometimes determined kinetic action to tackle a a seemingly the intractable problem of changing to a humane socialist society. When a problem like capitalism is so entrenched in every way it is constructed to be insoluble. Then we change the method. We get together collectively to break the impasse. We cut! We do not ask for permission. This means acting despite the complexity of the current conjucture. The communist machis fighting the Nazis were loving human beings, and that is what made them fight! Even the Quakers joined against fascism as ambulance drivers, most of them did not boycott the war against fascism.

We do not need to perfectly diagnose the stasis we are in before acting. We need clear, concerted collective physical, irreversible actions; to act directly against the hoarders of agency, not by persuading them, not by out-arguing them, but by making their position untenable, their wealth worthless, their power fragile.

In our thousands and our millions, we are all Palestinians. The Palestinian child grows up understanding that the Israeli kills with US bullets, bombs, shells, and missiles. The hoarding of agency, the United States, Israel, and the military-industrial complex have gathered to themselves the overwhelming agency of life and death. The Palestinian child has almost none but he has been educated into understanding and resistance. The Western citizen has a diluted, ritualised agency, voting, donating, posting, that is carefully calibrated to produce no real change. Infantilisation means the Western public is fed a diet of complexity and confusion to generate stasis. The alternative to breaking out of our frozen state is to remain in induced stasis, discussing and shouting online, while the crucifixes are planted along the Appian Way for a future slave revolt.

But instead of uniting actively to stop genocide and exploitation and war, some people, in the spirit of Voltaire’s Candide, prefer to bewail fate and voluntarily abdicate their intellectual acuity and honesty, They self blind and do nothing sensible to oppose injustice. Instead they prefer to huddle together for comfort in small and silent groups, avoid eating meat and buy fair trade products. They muddle through life while admiring the daffodils in the garden, drinking tea and eating biscuits and waiting patiently for death in the hope of a better spirit life.

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Richard Steinhardt is a committed socialist and a radical humanist and has published in the Morning Star and a variety of other communist and socialist publications. He believes that human conscience and understanding should always precede dogma and deterministic formulas posturing as ‘social science’.