Mob Rule

On Social Media and the Universal Experience of Poverty

Honoré Daumier, Gargantua

There’s another division on the right being revealed on social media. This time, it’s not between proponents and opponents but immigration, but it still has something of a class dimension. It’s a fight over the nature of work and employment. The relatively respectable right is suddenly discovering that we are close to full employment and suggests that the angry young men take the available, well-paying—if modest—jobs. Christopher Rufo pointed out that working as a manager at Panda Express could pay well and was nothing to be ashamed of. The angry, alienated men and their tribunes aren’t having it. That’s the same “bootstraps” bullshit they’ve heard from the liberals for all these years. They don’t believe in the empty myths of honest toil and upward mobility anymore. The American dream, as far as they are concerned is, dead. In the view of the mob, undeserving women and minorities are hoarding all the treasure and it has to be ripped away from them. Every “normal” possibility open to them is humiliating. Only the massive windfalls of gambling and speculation seem like an honorable alternative.

What we are witnessing is a faultline in the coalition the right has built up this past decade. The right is now an alliance between the remnant of the bourgeois conservatives, who still more or less believe in the old social ethic—traditional norms around work, family, personal discipline, and productive labor—and what we should call the mob.

The mob is ultimately a disposition, a relation to society as a whole, an attitude, or, a phenomenological state of being, rather than a concrete social group. Like the state of poverty, of which the mob is a possible spiritual correlate, one can fall into and get out of it, just as one can join a mob and then, on reflection leave it. Some relatively “respectable” members of society can share—and very often do—attitudes with the mob. One possible definition of “right-wing” in the present era might be based on how many mob sentiments and tendencies one shares. As we shall see, the bourgeoisie and mob are not opposed so much as mutually reinforcing. The opinion-makers and intellectuals on the center-right were so fixated on the supposed left-wing mobs of the “woke era” that they ignored that they were encouraging and cultivating their own mob, platforming its exponents with affectionate curiosity. Now that mob attacks their benefactors. But the mob also has more or less constant, dedicated denizens. Today, it encompasses—but is not limited to—the worlds of inceldom, 4chan and 8chan message board culture, porn addicts, crypto bugs, Andrew Tate fans, internet Neo-Nazis, and Groypers. The mob is the domain of would-be brownshirts—if they would only log off and go into the streets. The mob is now the dominant force on “X”—much to the growing chagrin of the bougie right—because Musk made it so and he has become a chieftain of the mob.

The mob should not be identified with the “working class” the “poor” or “the people” in general. Rich and poor can be found together in the mob. Marx wrote that it contained “the scum, offal, refuse of all classes.” Hannah Arendt wrote they are the “declassés of all classes:”

The mob is primarily a group in which the residue of all classes are represented. This makes it so easy to mistake the mob for the people, which also comprises all strata of society. While the people in all great revolutions fight for true representation, the mob always will shout for the “strong man,” the “great leader.” For the mob hates society from which it is excluded, as well as Parliament where it is not represented. Plebiscites, therefore, with which modern mob leaders have obtained such excellent results, are an old concept of politicians who rely upon the mob.

The mob's natural mode of activism is anti-political and conspiratorial:

Excluded as it is from society and political representation, the mob turns of necessity to extraparliamentary action. Moreover, it is inclined to seek the real forces of political life in those movements and influences which are hidden from view and work behind the scenes.

The mob is celebrated, encouraged, and cultivated by some as a revolutionary subject, an ersatz proletariat. Some degraded members of the bourgeoisie laud its “strength” and viciousness, its “honesty” and lack of hypocrisy. Arendt writes of “high society’s constantly growing admiration for the underworld” and “its growing taste for the anarchical cynicism of its offspring.” A section of bohemian intellectuals devises “a vehement and nihilistic philosophy of spiritual self-hatred” around the cult of the mob.

Like the proletariat, the mob is a creation of the capitalist economy or, as Hegel calls it, civil society — bürgerliche Gesellschaft — bourgeois society. Arendt wrote that the mob is bourgeois society’s “by-product” and “never “never quite separable from it.” It is not an accidental creation, but the necessary product of the accumulation of wealth and the production of commodities. The more wealth that’s produced, the greater the poverty. This is because poverty always expands the growth of wealth: in a market society, wealth is accumulated not through satisfaction but through the creation of needs. One might object that society, in general, is less poor than ever, that the problem of pauperization has been solved—more or less—but the minimum of what a member of society considers as necessary continually recedes into infinity. As Shlomo Avineri writes,

The historicity of needs and the development of civil society turn the minimum standard of living into a measure always relative to prevailing conditions. The main problem of the poor is that while they cannot attain that which is considered as the minimum in their particular society, they never­ the less have the felt need to achieve this level. Civil society thus succeeds in internalizing its norms about consumption into the consciousness of its members even while it is unable to satisfy these norms. This is exacerbated because civil society continuously over­ produces goods which the masses cannot buy because of their lack of purchasing power.

In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel writes:

When a large mass of people sinks below the level of a certain standard of living - which automatically regulates itself at the level necessary for a member of the society in question - that feeling of right, integrity and honour which comes from supporting oneself by one's own activity and work is lost. This leads to the creation of a rabble[Pöbel], which in turn makes it much easier for disproportionate wealth to be concentrated in a few hands.

The rabble, the mob, is not simply the condition of poverty, but a subjective experience, a disposition of mind of “inner indignation…against the rich, against society, against the government, etc.” For good reason, the member of the mob feels that the rules of society do not apply to him. What appears to respectable society as the honorable and decent possibilities afforded work and social roles is a sham and mockery of their incapacity to take on those rules, as institutionalized injustice.“[He] feels excluded and mocked by everyone, and this necessarily gives rise to an inner indignation.” The rights and duties of society spoken of in society are nonsense, just hypocrisy, and lies—as Hegel writes, it is “the non-recognition of right.” The mob does not experience their condition as merely natural but as the product of a malign and arbitrary will, direct oppression. This goes some way to explain why conspiracy thinking is the constant correlate of mob attitudes. Eventually, they do not even want to be included in society, because they reject its system of values. As Avineri writes they are “a heap of human beings utterly atomized and alienated from society, feeling no allegiance to it and no longer even wishing to be integrated into it.” Think of incels who refuse the integration back into normal sexual and romantic market relations and experience that very offer as a deeper humiliation.

Mob attitudes are not limited to the poor but are found in the rich as well, the rabble disposition also appears where there is excessive wealth and luxury: “The rich man thinks that he can buy anything because he knows himself as the power of the particularity of self-consciousness. Thus wealth can lead to the same mockery and shamelessness that we find in the poor rabble.” The rich rabble believes that it is a special breed, that its wealth proves its absolute power, and that it does not need to respect the rules of society. It is the author of those rules. It does not believe in rights, except its right to rule and accumulate. As Frank Ruda writes, “The rich rabble is marked by the ‘corruptness’ which manifests in the fact that the rabble ‘takes everything for granted for itself’ because he denies the right to any of the ethical, legal, or statist institutions…[it assumes] an economically determined state of nature, in which it can also assume the economic right of the fittest.” It also believes in conspiracy, because it experiences itself politically as a conspirator, as part of a self-interested group only working for its own ends. The rich rabble does not believe in the possibility of recognition provided by society, it only believes in envy, both in provoking it and protecting itself from it. As arrogance personified, the rich rabble experiences all efforts to control and mitigate its power as personal humiliation—as an arbitrary will being imposed upon it. It does not see the surrounding society as the positive condition for its wealth and power, but only as a hostile limitation upon the maintenance and growth of that wealth and power. They view themselves and their wealth as the only essential and real thing. Of course, the most obvious example of this is rich mob member Donald Trump, for whom conspicuous consumption, showing up the “haters,” and “bigness” is life itself.

Besides conspiracy, the mob mentality gravitates towards naturalization, a belief in the possibility of access to the direct ugly truth of human life, and true existence unmediated by dishonest and dissembling social norms. The mob, both rich and poor, is attracted to ideologies that reintroduce or find the state of nature continuing by other means within the apparent lawfulness of civil society; it is fascinated by whatever reifies inequality and domination as the natural condition of man. It valorizes vitality, violence, and power and sees society as unnatural and stifling. Not only mercy but also justice are seen as “feminine” and weak. The only universal the mob can recognize is the absence of universality: a universal experience of domination and exploitation; the only way forward in life is to make sure you’re the one on top. They find the ideological reflection of their mentality in Social Darwinism, racism, misogyny, and pseudo-historical doctrines of eternal tribal warfare. After misogyny, antisemitism is perhaps the most characteristic mob ideology and it is usually found among all those who are the most extreme and committed members of the mob, because of the way it combines naturalization and conspiracy: it creates a permanent, natural anti-mob, constantly oppressing and humiliating, denying entitled recognition. The Jew stands in for bourgeois society as a whole: the ethical and lawful Jew, the fastidious believer in universal duties and rights, is, in reality, predatory, self-dealing, and hypocritical, a money-grubber. Of course, the mob is not against money, as such: the mob is as greedy and obsessed with its pursuit as it says the Jews are, because money is the only power it recognizes. It is attracted to the same speculative and swindles it associates with Jews (usually when it comes out on the losing end), but it also searches for money without or before the reciprocal obligations of society, more “natural” and “real” forms of currency, like crypto or gold.

Hegel, not Marx, identified the real internal mechanism of civil society. Generating a revolutionary proletariat is only possible under particular historical conditions. However, the mob can be generated wherever and however capitalist productive relations exist. Under the condition of social media, pauperization, the internalization of unsatisfiable wants and needs becomes universal. We can all constantly see what we don’t have. What’s being denied to us by others. It becomes possible for more people than ever to become members of the rich rabble and flaunt luxury and wealth in front of others. And it becomes possible for the richest man in the world to become a pauper, desperate for recognition. Earlier, we quoted Hegel as noting that the creation of the mob “makes it much easier for disproportionate wealth to be concentrated in a few hands.” This has an economic and political dimension. Economically, the mob member is a dupe, a hapless consumer, who is always seeking to match or exceed the social minimum. Politically, he is indignant about his position and furious at the society that’s keeping it from him. He is easy to manipulate, to direct on imaginary enemies or to pay off for “reactionary intrigues. Social media creates a universe of angry suckers. But, as we’ve seen, the mob is quick to turn on its would-be masters and bite the hand that feeds. The mob does not believe in gratitude, it believes in deserts.