Psychopolitics and authoritarianism
18
Mar
The contemporary view of authority is rooted
in the idea of the power of force, of money, of authoritarianism, of the manipulation of justice and public bodies in favor of the state, but all this authority is an authority that passes away as great empires did.
The Korean-German philosopher Byung-Chul Han, drawing on various authors: Nietzsche (Will to Power), Hegel (Principles of the Philosophy of Law), Luhmann (The Communication of Power) and his main influence, Heidegger (Being and Time), established the concept of psychopolitics.
The modern techniques of power through narratives that hide the real interests of power, mainly using the new media, is what Han called psychopolitics, which replaces and goes beyond Foucault’s concept of biopolitics.
Starting from Max Weber’s concept, quoting him: “power means the opportunity, within a social relationship, to impose one’s will even against resistance, regardless of what this opportunity is based on” (Han, 2019, p. 22, quoting Weber’s Economy and Society), this author already saw the modern trend of this psychological manipulation.
This approach replaces the concept of “domination” (we’ve already posted something about this here), which is “obedience to an order, which is sociologically ”more precise”, with the concept of a pure game of narratives that change this order according to temporal and social necessity.
The root of the idea of the modern state, different from the Greek one which was the overcoming of power as a sophism of manipulation, pure rhetoric, lies in Hegel: “in the longing for an absence of limits, for an infinitude which, however, would not be infinite power” (pg. 123), and what takes away the idea of the eternal and the transcendent, saying of its true limits is not an unlimited will for power: “Religion is fundamentally profoundly peaceful. It is goodness” (p. 124), but there are those who also see it only as a power, which is Hegelianism.
The biblical idea is the opposite of this arrogance, even if “religious” people use it, because “But it is not so among you; on the contrary, whoever wants to become great among you, let him serve you; and whoever wants to be first among you shall be servant of all” (Mark 10:43), “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled” (Matthew 5:6), there is no incitement to hatred, violence or the segregation of peoples or races in a good biblical reading.
So is the idea of the little ones, the children and the peaceful ones who are linked to the divine Kingdom.
Han, Byung-Chul. (2018) What is power? NY; Wiley. (citations is 2019 portuguese version)
