The coldest of all cold monsters

From The End of History and the Last Man by Francis Fukuyama

States impose themselves on top of peoples. In some cases, the state forms the people, as the laws of Lycurgus and Romulus were held to have formed the ethos of the people of Sparta and Rome, respectively, or as the rule of liberty and equality has shaped a democratic consciousness among the various immigrant peoples making up the United States of America. But states in many cases sit in uneasy tension with peoples, and in some instances might be said to be at war with their peoples—as when the Russian and Chinese communists sought forcibly to convert their populations to Marxist ideals. The success and the stability of liberal democracy therefore never depends simply on the mechanical application of a certain set of universal principles and laws, but requires a degree of conformity between peoples and states.

If we, following Nietzsche, define a people as a moral community sharing ideas of good and evil, then it becomes clear that peoples, and the cultures they create, originate in the thymotic part of the soul. That is to say, culture arises out of the capacity to evaluate, to say for instance that the person who defers to his elders is worthy, or that the human being who eats unclean animals like pigs is not. Thymos or the desire for recognition is thus the seat of what social scientists call “values.” It was the struggle for recognition, as we have seen, that produced the relationship of lordship and bondage in all of its various manifestations, and the moral codes that arose out of it—the deference of a subject to his monarch, the peasant to his landlord, the haughty superiority of the aristocrat, and so forth.

The desire for recognition is also the psychological seat of two extremely powerful passions—religion and nationalism. By this I do not mean that religion and nationalism can be reduced to the desire for recognition; but the rootedness of these passions in thymos is what gives them their great power. The religious believer assigns dignity to whatever his religion holds sacred—a set of moral laws, a way of life, or particular objects of worship. He grows angry when the dignity of what he holds sacred is violated. The nationalist believes in the dignity of his national or ethnic group, and therefore in his own dignity qua member of that group. He seeks “ to have this particular dignity recognized by others, and, like the religious believer, grows angry if that dignity is slighted. It was a thymotic passion, the desire for recognition on the part of the aristocratic master, that started the historical process, and it was the thymotic passions of religious fanaticism and nationalism that have propelled it along through war and conflict over the centuries. The thymotic origins of religion and nationalism explain why conflicts over “values” are potentially much more deadly than conflicts over material possessions or wealth. Unlike money, which can simply be divided, dignity is something inherently uncompromisable: either you recognize my dignity, or the dignity of that which I hold sacred, or you do not. Only thymos, searching for “justice,” is capable of true fanaticism, obsession, and hatred.

Liberal democracy in its Anglo-Saxon variant represents the emergence of a kind of cold calculation at the expense of earlier moral and cultural horizons. Rational desire must win out over the irrational desire for recognition, particularly the megalothymia of prideful masters seeking recognition of their superiority. The liberal state growing out of the tradition of Hobbes and Locke engages in a protracted struggle with its own people. It seeks to homogenize their variegated traditional cultures and to teach them to calculate instead their own long-term self-interest. In place of an organic moral community with its own language of “good and evil,” one had to learn a new set of democratic values: to be “participant,” “rational,” “secular,” “mobile,” “empathetic,” and “tolerant.” These new democratic values were initially not values at all in the sense of defining the final human virtue or good. They were conceived as having a purely instrumental function, habits that one had to acquire if one was to live successfully in a peaceful and prosperous liberal society. It was for this reason that Nietzsche called the state the “coldest of all cold monsters” that destroyed peoples and their cultures by hanging “a thousand appetites” in front of them.

For democracy to work, however, citizens of democratic states must forget the instrumental roots of their values, and develop a certain irrational thymotic pride in their political system and a way of life. That is, they must come to love democracy not because it is necessarily better than the alternatives, but because it is theirs. Moreover, they must cease to see values like “tolerance” as merely a means to an end; tolerance in democratic societies becomes the defining virtue. Development of this kind of pride in democracy, or the assimilation of democratic values into the citizen’s sense of his own self, is what is meant by the creation of a “democratic” or “civic culture.” Such a culture is critical to the long-term health and stability of democracies, since no real-world society can long survive based on rational calculation and desire alone.