Can a society willingly change itself ?

SOMETIMES change comes unannounced and uninvited. There are also times when change is ‘in the air,’ so to speak. When Clinton won the 1992 elections, it came as a surprise to most observers.

After all, the Soviet Union had disappeared from history, and in Iraq there was an overwhelming military victory at very low human cost. Nobody thought the mild recession of 1991 would be so important for the median voter, and that the slogan ‘it’s the economy, stupid’ would be so successful. Nobody trying to put order to the world when G.W. Bush assumed power either; but at least something was in the making. The neo-con movement had reached its apogee by January 1998 when the movement released an open letter addressed to Clinton, claiming that they knew exactly what to do in the 21st Century. The neo-cons’ not uncontroversial victory in 2000 – Florida – has had serious consequences for the last two decades.

A ROUNDABOUT WAY OF SAYING THINGS

Bush’s tenure unveiled a dense web of interlocking influence networks and made crystal-clear even to the untutored eyes of bystanders that the American polity was developed in close conjunction with military and corporate imperatives. The American orthodoxy became more formal but less abstract, more strategically inclined yet more fascinated with algorithmic rationality and probabilistic inference, and less concerned with the fine points of diplomacy older schools of political science had cherished. The new vision had indeed become more elaborately planned, more transparently intentional, and strategically oriented, yet preferences of decision-makers became less prudent. In the end, observers finally began to grasp through an extremely oblique route, with approval or revolt, with disdain or dismay, that something was very wrong. Obama was the political wildcard in 2008, especially after Lehman, but also because Bush and co. had miserably failed in almost all respects. Trump was also a surprise. In February 2016 nobody thought he would win the primaries, let alone the presidential race. So, there can be different types of political change.

MEN AND THINGS

Capitalism is often equated with the existence of a “market economy”, whose genesis was admirably described by Karl Polanyi in his “The Great Transformation” written 76 years ago. Accordingly, a market economy is an “instituted process”, and not a naturally born order. The price system is acknowledged to lie at the heart of a market economy. There was also another strand of thought, more organic so to speak. Despite von Hayek’s effective subsequent isolation from “engineering economics”, the neoclassical orthodoxy or the cyborg predilections based on automata and computer science had mimicked his notion of “tacit knowledge” in the 1950s – attributed in true Austrian style to prices that keep and incarnate it. For an economist aspiring to be part of a more modern vein, the price system is mostly seen as a system of communication, which passes on the available information that individuals need to be able to act out of pure individual rationality. Equivalently, many a good political scientist would say that capitalism embodies a “thin theory” of individual rationality. So, men and things are equated in as much as men are conceptualized as automata.

The “price system,” on the other hand, continues to treat this “information” as something ethereal, impervious to all attempts at codification, analysis and control, and, in the final analysis, as fleetingly evanescent. The engineering economics’ –or “cyborg science’s” according to Philip Mirowski – rendering of prices (hence, of capitalism) as a flagrant example of the military “communication, command, control and information” (C3) has often turned out to be an ill-fated codification.

IS IT ALL ABOUT POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY?

Turkish capitalism doesn’t look like any of the above. For instance, after having performed the most recent vertiginous act of doing the apparently undoable, the incumbent party has again backed itself into a corner. Is it so hard to do the right – and simple – thing, and raise the policy rate? What about the command & control vertices of the C3, if not about its communication and information legs? Where are the “political prices” that are supposed to be the ornaments through which analysts are expected to indulge in “signal extraction”, itself an engineering device? What are we supposed to do, other than following the “read my lips” style, custom-made solipsism? This is what current opinion polls tell us, and they tell us nothing more. Everything seems to be in flux. Has misconstruing AKP policies become a pastime nearly as popular as guessing the odds of a currency crisis? Could it be true that the organic interdependence of some layers in the AKP and its decision-making body has been downplayed? Is it simply an inimical cul-de-sac the AKP has unwisely locked itself in, or is there something else lying behind the facade, a more dramatic kinship

with an unacceptably erring deep conservatism? Or is it true that the opposition isn’t that determined to oppose and eventually win? What is going on?

IS POLITICAL CHANGE INTENTIONAL?

In Alexander Zinoviev’s much-praised The Yawning Heights, the first law of Ibanskian life – meaning the Soviet Union of the 1970s – appears to be “the well-known rule whereby people who want to make a change never change anything, while changes are only affected by people who had no intention of doing so”. Since the set of political possibilities is empty, all changes are a fortiori by-products, and not as consequences of intentional actions. The second law states that “success achieved under any leadership must be success achieved by that leadership” and, finally, “for every disaster a guilty person outside the leadership can be found”. Now, the second and the third laws are kind of natural. Examples of such conduct and codification can be found anywhere, at anytime. But the first is not an attribute that is so ubiquitously distributed. The real thread that links them all and binds them is that nobody actually believes in anything. In Ibansk, there is no belief closure. For the Soviet Union, Timur Kuran labelled this phenomenon “true lies”. Publicly announced preferences and privately held ones are different, even contradictory. Indeed, preference falsification seems to be a pervasive and strategically manipulated phenomenon in many parts of the globe. And it would not simply wash to say, “be –or behave- yourself”, since “be yourself ” is a command that is self-defeating. As Emily Dickinson told us in her Complete Poems, “the heart cannot forget unless it contemplates what it declines”.

CAN SOCIETAL CHANGE BE WILLED?

Can a society will a complete change or consciously aim for a total political realignment? Or is this impossible, an example of willing what cannot be willed. As psychology tells us, being oneself – as in “be yourself ” – is an impossible undertaking. According to Jon Elster, who wrote about the subject in his book Political Psychology, it amounts to a confusion of internal and external negations. Being oneself – or trying to forget – is an endogenously driven project. For instance, ‘trying to forget’ requires the representation of the absence of what is to be forgotten and, thereby, the presence of it. Elster’s example goes like this: nobody would go to war in her right mind, and therefore anyone willing to combat is insane. If insane, she should have the right to be exempted on psychiatric grounds. But if she asks for exemption, then she does not want to go to war and therefore she is sane. This is perhaps a kind of Epimenides Paradox, a problem with self-reference. In fact, the exact opposite may indeed have happened during the Vietnam War, when according to the lore, volunteers were rejected because the very act of volunteering was seen as a sign of irrationality. When people face logical problems of self-referentiality, the cognitive dissonance reduction mechanism enter the picture (Leon Festinger 1957) and help them. People can behave irrationally sometimes, even to the point of showing signs of mental incapacity, but they feel the need to rationalize their behaviour ex post. Do societies display that kind of behaviour?

THE FAILURE OF IBANSKIAN LAWS

In Turkey, the first law of Ibansk has almost surely failed so far. Political actions can clearly be delineated back to motives and opportunities, and to the will and power to carry them out. Historical instances of (relatively) successful social and political engineering abound. However, not all action plans work well for those who initiate them. The gist of the matter is that all action plans work for some people, even if they do not work for those who bear the flag. It is in this sense that everything is deliberately designed and rational. This is admittedly a working hypothesis only, but it is a promising one. So, the question is: is there any significant political and economic actor who really wants change? If nobody truly wants change, what is the likelihood of this happening as a chance event?