Out of Ourselves

Look inside yourself to avoid being a victim of populist anger.

An answer to “Phenomenology of populism"

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“Phenomenology of populism,” published a few days ago, advances a highly compelling identity-based interpretation of the political events of recent years. The success of populism, the author argues, stems from its aggregating power, from its ability to recombine atomized individuals into a communal “we.” The large structures that once provided belonging and identity recognition — trade unions, parties, territorial communities, shared ideological horizons — are weak, close to extinction. It is therefore precisely where the individual today fails, in finding meaning and communal belonging, that populism offers its winning formula. Identities that are as strong as they are insecure, problematic insofar as they make the construction of a chosen enemy their foundational element.

But what if the problem were even deeper? What if we were facing the slow death of the Self, rather than of the We? What if this identity malaise had instead to do with ourselves — with our own individual identities — and only then cascaded onto the collective?

The truth, perhaps, is that we have brutally colonized and clogged our mental spaces, their protected time. They were not saturated; there were voids. And it was precisely within those voids that our interiority fermented, that identity gently rose — revelation after revelation. All of this, in the end, formed our Self. Always subject to revision and changes of direction, of course, but still something alive.

Today we cannot tolerate those voids. It is only outside the technological media environment — far from screens, notifications, and continuous flows of information — that we begin to feel them again. We experience them as unease, lack, unanswered questions. And it is precisely for this reason that we compulsively fill them. Every silence saturated. Every wait monetized. Every experience transformed into content. We do not allow — we do not want to allow — the void to do its dirty, precious work.

Without realizing it, we have condemned ourselves to asking, in confusion, who we are. Forever and uselessly. Because the mental space-time in which these questions might have found their — partial and always shifting — answers has been razed to the ground by our own hands. We have made it necessary, for the sake of our identity health, to seek answers from the first populist who comes along.

Truth hurts: those who no longer have access to their own interiority cannot build an identity; they can only adopt one that is already pre-packaged. We have exiled ourselves from ourselves.

So it is not only — and not primarily — true, as the author of Phenomenology of populism rightly writes, that populism is a democratic response to a democratic demand. Populism is perhaps even more, and first and foremost, an identity shortcut offered to those who have exiled themselves from their own interiority — an apparent way back in. The illusion that, while continuing to devastate the spaces and times of our minds, we can still have an unassailable certainty about who we are. No longer asking ourselves “Who am I?” but asking the leader, “Who should I be?”

The problem of countermeasures therefore changes. “The work to be done is above all social: we must all realize that how we feel is not a specific individual case, but that we are all, in one way or another, experiencing forms of discomfort,” the author writes in the conclusion.

For the present writer, this would indeed involve undertaking a “social” effort — in the sense that both the premises (understanding the problem) and the goals (resolving it) are social in nature. Remaining solely on this level, however, may prove insufficient.

Mobilization, organization, politics: indispensable.

But if it is true — and I would like to be proven wrong — that our problem is one of interior spaces that have been occupied and violated, then the ball is primarily in our court. Because a subject who does not know themselves remains manipulable even when politically organized; fragile even when angry and determined to change things.

Without personal work on interiority, the risk is that every new collective identity — even one born of antagonistic movements sincerely hostile to the squalor of contemporary populism — will simply become yet another shortcut for pretending that we have reclaimed our Self.

We cannot do without a decolonization of our individual interiorities. We no longer have places and times — within ourselves — in which to stop, contradict ourselves, test ourselves, and build something solid.

This, today, is for the present writer the most radical political act. To return to inhabiting and constructing one’s own Self is the only way to begin living politics once again as the space in which to make proposals that reflect who we believe ourselves to be at a given moment — not as a factory of incendiary identities that, for the length of an electoral mandate, soothe our fear of feeling empty.

Out of Ourselves