Kitabı oku: «The Social Science of the Citizen Society», sayfa 3

1.1 Social sciences before their “globalization”: Idealizations of citizen societies and their state

Social science thinking before its “globalization” consists in the idealization of citizen societies and their nation state. What characterizes non-“globalized thinking” as state-idealistic thinking, i.e., thinking that attaches a raison d’être to citizen societies and their state in general as the basis of its theories, beyond nationalistic scientific thinking, i.e., thinking that adopts the self-representations of individual nation-state societies, prior to this epistemic transition to “globalized” thinking, will be illustrated by a few examples.

Thinking from the perspective of the citizens—theories as a recipe for a domesticated materialism

In addition to psychology, educationalists specialize in the social science view of citizen societies through the view of the subjects of these societies.

As social-scientific thinkers who are completely committed to Weber’s “concrete reality”2 and with the assurance of not dealing with an invented reality but with the—telling—pleonasm of a real reality, thus making the existing social concerns their own as concerns of their theorizing about it, social-scientific theorizing commits itself to this reality, by making the practical concerns of the social subjects the guideline of thinking and thus to reject as mythologically speculative theoretical concerns the concerns of a non-real reality that has nothing to do with the kind of science about the really real that is so propagated as the cognitive guide of thinking.

Theories as a reproduction of the reality that is real in them, that it takes care of its concerns and forbids itself to ask why who actually has them, formulates a kind of social science thinking in which not only the state-constructed world constitutes the object of social science thinking, but this is a thinking, which, with its programmatic of self-obligation to the given reality, i.e. its methodical affirmatism, also wants to commit itself to making the real reality, i.e. this given social reality, its analytical viewpoint, i.e. commits itself to making the view of this reality its own view through the views of this reality given in this reality for the scientific views on this reality. It is no wonder that a thinking that takes on such a self-assurance of its methodological affirmatism not only ends up in the idealism of its theorizing, which it so resolutely denies with its pleonasm to deal only with real reality—and thus expresses this reality as the concern that drives this thinking, but also introduces a concept of reality that it calls empiricism, which originates from a rather mystical concept of reality, such as that of its actual actors.

Children, students, pensioners, employees, taxpayers, unemployed, entrepreneurs, politicians, families, scientists, all these subjects are not only state-created and regulated subjects, but, by their very nature, creatures of state defining power. Even if the individual interpretation of these creatures within the framework of what they are defined as is left to the freedom of interpretation of these creatures, their freedom is simply nothing more than to interpret them and a theory formation that is committed to the perspectives of the social world by these subjects that arise from this freedom of interpretation is a theory formation that thus makes before any thinking these concerns its own viewpoint of its thinking.

And there is no need for who knows how ingenious thought, to infer from the obligation to make the realization of all life projects dependent on the disposal of money, that this obligation is not aimed at helping these life projects to become a reality. The fact that without money you get nothing does not justify the conclusion that the practical everyday mind likes to draw, which economists also like to confirm as a scientifically sound insight, that the purpose of money is to provide citizens with the necessary things for their life projects. If this were the case, one could distribute the useful things in life to people and nothing would be more superfluous than money. The same experience in dealing with money is sufficient to know that the whole running after money only ensures that money is increased where there is already more than enough—from the point of view of such life projects—and therefore the sense and purpose of such money-calibrated societies, is not the supply of money for the purpose of realizing any life projects, but the increase of this strange use-free wealth, which is measured in the increase of itself freed from any use, and not only not by what one could do with it, but uses these concerns to get to the things of life through money to increase the wealth of money itself.

It is more difficult than to deduce this from mere experience to insist, day after day, contrary to all experience, that running and working for money must be good for achieving what one intends to do in life, if only by proving this profit and loss account by limiting one’s life projects to what money is just enough for, i.e., by applying one’s knowledge in exactly the same way as the obligation to acquire money as the only permissible form of living one’s life demands. Everyone can decide for themselves whether and how they want to cheat themselves what the market economy and their political watchdogs are actually there for and what they are not for, when they are confronted with the fact that other views than mere grumbling are allowed, but forbidden as a practical alternative.

For social scientific thinking, such quite practical constraints to construct the world in the sense of what is prescribed do not apply, and scientific thinking which nevertheless wants to base its theory formation on the same views of those state creatures, which have been constructed out of the emphasis on practical blackmail by the established constraints, without being subjected to these constraints, is a thinking, which, without any compulsion before thinking about anything, imposes upon itself the obligation to orient its thinking towards what the social definitions of the state subjects determine as questions formulated in the sense of their purposes, that is, to renounce in advance with this commitment to the views born of the pursuit of these purposes views that cannot be committed to any pre-selected view of things.

A sequence of thoughts about “concrete reality” that is highly ordinary for this kind of thinking may illustrate how this thinking, through its adaptation to valid existing social purposes and concerns, produces theories that reproduce the considerations of the subjects of state provenance included in these social purposes, and thus not only repeat all their false considerations as scientific knowledge about them, but with this reproduction as scientific theories of their logic of forced self-deception and subservience, attest to the consecration of well-founded insights.

“If skill requirements increase, low skilled workers will be under increasing pressure, in the industrial sector and in some service sector. Demographic evolutions could reinforce this tendency.”3

Thanks to his sympathy for the failed materialism of the typical citizen, the social science theorist reveals in his discussion of how this citizen uses his knowledge for his concerns, how social science thinking constructs its knowledge of the world of citizens as knowledge from the perspective of these citizens: By adapting to this view of the world, everything that a citizen does takes the form of coping with the state definitions of what they demand of the citizen, transformed into existing living conditions, and the theories of the science thus introduced about this ontological creature of suffering take the form of critical care for its concerns as precisely these creatures of suffering. Following this logic of caring, sharing of the concerns that these creatures have only because they have subordinated themselves to state concerns as living conditions that are no longer at issue, and about which their science, in its shared concern to get along with them, in no way wants to enlighten who, why and how these circumstances of life are established, the knowledge of these creatures becomes “competences”, a mental ability very peculiar to these state creatures, which is characterized by the fact that the owner of such “competences” only obeys the owner only in that the mental products born from this ability must promise to those whom the owner of such “competences” wants and must obey. In this, too, is found the equally strange nature of social-scientific knowledge, which, in its caring service to such civic shrewdness, never ever wants to criticize it for its stupid as well as harmful thoughts, but makes its standpoint of critical accommodation its own as the maxim of its theory formation. Thus, and only in this way, the growing abilities of this civic creature do not become better means of giving his concerns a better chance, but rather a growing pressure for this subject to make itself servant to the additional demands of foreign concerns, whose subjects and aims are thought in these theories into the unknown as natural constraints from somewhere, constraints generating circumstances, about which this caring science better does not enlighten its “low skilled workers”, but in the interest of avoiding worse in its theories advises them to better obey.

Because scientifically educated sympathizer of the “low skilled workers” knows a phenomenon, “demographic evolutions”, in which he, thanks to his state-trained eye, does not regard “age” and “aging”, i.e. harmless old age and aging, as quite natural aspects of life, but spells out old age and aging to his clients as the threat that it is from the point of view of state social security funds, a view that is obviously very clear to the social science thinker, in which the whole of life is thought of as a foreign challenge and any future at all as a threat, because here, too, nothing more makes sense to the thinker concerned with social science than the state’s views of old age as costly, useless junk, from which he derives such threatening “tendencies” that life brings with it for this kind of thinking, for which his “low skilled workers” will have to take responsibility as a matter of course—or they should just simply not to become so old, so that they could avoid such “tendencies”. Because social science thinking is the theoretical support of the practical management of citizens and produces its theories from this perspective, its idea of thinking of the population as its own threat is also not a headache for this thinking, on the basis of which such theorists who would ask themselves the question what is decidedly tendentious about their way of producing their theories, in which the nature of human life, age, is its unavoidable threat.

In short: Social science thinking, which derives its ideas from the adaptation to the viewpoint of the citizen, is able to deal with the demands of the civic life of a materialism permitted by the state—as long as it proves its usefulness for the materialism of the state and its economy—and to act as a subject for it, who strives to domesticate its materialism in such a way that it sees in the service for all requested purposes, which deny its aims in life and come to it in this thinking as if these requested purposes were the nature of all social life, the way to achieve his private aims in life, this is the view that gives birth to the theories of social scientific thinking.

It is this view of state creatures of the state-constructed social reality through the state-defined social purposes, their subjects, life programs and biographies that social science thinking does not want to analyze as state constructs, but rather presents them in their partisanship for the concerns of these subjects underhand, as if they were quasi natural conditions of life with which their subjects, who, for their part, are nothing but state creatures, have to cope as if they were natural living conditions, even though, of course, every social scientist knows very well that the state-constituted society is anything but a natural event. With this transformation of all state-constructed social subjects and their state-manufactured and cared for living conditions, in which this way of thinking unnoticed all the differences between the state’s view of social life and that of its social subjects, into the idea of natural living conditions and their constraints, this thinking underhand turns the state itself into the pure reaction to “problems”, in whose representation as constraints is erased, that it is the state that imposes these problems on them, with the beautiful result that the state itself, just as the citizens admonish it as a lever for their concerns, is constantly discussed as a service provider in solving such problems.

Nevertheless, social science thinking does not accommodate its theory formation to the practical views of state-defined subjects, because social science thinkers want to justify the state social order with apologetic intentions. Social science thinkers, at least those thinkers who do not yet “globalize” their theory formation, are certainly not nationalists who share and propagate the concerns of a particular state. Politically, they may be; the very basic apologetics of their theory formation, to interpret the state-made social world through the gaze of state-made subjects, is, in a certain sense, the result of a methodological apologetics of their particular way of theory formation, not the result of their political view, but arises, as it were, underhand as a result of their self-imposed way of thinking, which is justified by their scientific-theoretical gurus with their epistemological skepticism. With the commitment to reality as a measure of the objectivity of their theories, the social purposes valid in this reality become an incorporated epistemological interest in their theory formation.

Undoubtedly, social science theorists know that the subjects of a state-created social order, that citizens are a historical construct; under the hand of their methodological apologetics of subjecting their thinking to the made form of reality, all social constructs and the subjects of the social system, to which the social sciences owe their own emergence, as if they were human nature. As if it were the most natural thing in the world, social science thinkers waste no theoretical attention whatsoever on the most obvious inconsistencies of the everyday minds of those who seek to find their paths in life in the paths prescribed for them, they do not ask why, or what fore, because, for reality thinkers, this would be speculative thinking, and they reproduce not only unmoved by the view of the state creatures who try to adapt themselves to this world prescribed for them, despite all the absurdities of this view and despite all the practical failure of its practical implementation, these interpretations of their social life in their theories of social science, gained from their practical needs, but also offer them these theories as a caring service for all the “problems”, which they do not want to get to the bottom of under any circumstances in order to eliminate them, in the interest of their epistemological connection to reality, so that these problems thanks to their thus guaranteed return also provide these sciences with the material for the return of their theories of problem solving. Theories of muddling through, theoretically constructed as each one on the one hand of the other hand and presented with academically twisted insights, are the insights that these theories with their thinking committed to methodical apologetics offer to their clients, clients they never criticize for the mistakes of their thought constructs, which these clients usually not only do not understand but do not even know, because these professional scientific thinkers produce this kind of sophisticated theories, with reference to their concern for the concerns of their research objects only for themselves anyway.4

The inevitable superficiality of this thinking cannot realize that all members of these societies, with a few exceptions, have in common characteristics of their way of life, which, despite all their superficial differences, determine them to an identical as well as fundamental form of life. Whether people are civil servants, white-collar workers, middle or higher class, blue-collar workers, pensioners, housewives, students or the unemployed, all these figures of state social definitions have in common for their way of life that they are variations of a tolerated materialism, that is to say, that they are all—with the few exceptions of those who are defined in this nomenclature far less narrowly, usually more technically as investors, because they are masters of the organization of the life of the society as a whole,—for all the differences in their political definitions, all share the substantial characteristic which consists in having to establish the materialism granted to them as a service for the growth of a wealth of those exceptional people, for whom this politically granted materialism of all those ordinary people is their essential means and their greatest obstacle. The toleration of their materialism, their freedom without the means of its realization, is paid for by all these members of society, who are all the same servants of wealth, with a life consisting of the same lifelong labor for this wealth of the “investors” which they produce and do not gain their lifetime. Such essential distinctions as commonalities escape the reality-based thinking that, with its commitment to reality, gets caught up in the observational observations of society and its superficial differences.

This kind of thinking committed to—its imagined empiricism—with its peculiar superficiality of its form of theory formation, which consists in a hyper-specialized knowledge of all possible facts, numbers and data, and this “empirical world”, which, like every theory, are at first thought buildings, but which in this kind of thinking are thought buildings about a world, which only this kind of social-scientific thinking creates with its thinking through some kind of approaches from the arsenals of disciplinary theory formation, a world, which exists only in the minds of this thinking and in its thinking committed to the purposes of the existing world considers it to be the real reality, and which then confuses knowledge in this “empirical world” about the world with knowledge, this kind of thinking, in its superficiality, escapes all differences between what people and what citizens are, differences between the life plans and goals that people set for themselves and the life paths on which the life paths regulated by law domesticate these life plans in such a way that they prove themselves to be a service to their state and their economy.

In its way of thinking, this science not only fails to notice that there are some differences between people’s life plans and their legal domestications; in its equation of its phenomenological thinking, it does not cause this thinking any headaches either, to present the limitations of such life plans, which are quite noted in it, and their adjustment to the life practices required by the state via law, forced by state power, as factually required necessities of every social life and its naturalized conflicts, and thus to ennoble the state domestications of the permitted materialism of state creatures for the benefit of the materialism of their rule as an aid to the materialism of their subjects. In this way, they ultimately discover the nation-state constructed society as the natural home of man and the view that the state takes of its society as the most natural view of social science thinking of all that is social.

Even if everyone can know that no human being ever demands the effort of work, social science thinking as the state itself, through the eyes of the authorities, present work as an offer, as a service of the authorities to their subjects, an offer to which, as this thinking finds, the state is not obliged, but always helps to ensure that this offer exists; the difference between the desire for money and the desire for means of living is not a real distinction for this thinking through the view of social life regulated by law, because the reality of this society, which is organized by the state, by law allows all its citizens to obtain food only by means of money and allows them to obtain this money only, if they sell their labor to such people who are looking for labor, that is, this service relationship of money owners and owners of work very much in accordance with the constitution as the only way to realize their life plans with money, that is, with those state-administered wealth share certificates.

Thus, for this thinking, this state stipulation that all members of this society can only get hold of the wealth produced by them if they acquire these state share certificates of wealth by selling their labor to their labor buyers, and if they accept, by this sale of their labor, that the work products of their work are owned by the buyer of their labor, for this thinking this is not a case—to put it in legal prose—of a well-coordinated hostage-taking of the society in deed unity with blackmail by the state authorities and by those few exceptional citizens, those buyers of work who, even without working themselves, have all the wealth shares as well as the products of work at their disposal, but for this thinking which is committed to reality and which is not open to any criticism, all this is the philanthropic provision of offers by the state and the economy for the realization of the individual life plans of people, without which these have-nots, who produce everything and to whom nothing of what they produce belongs, would come to nothing and thus, thanks to this provision of jobs, are be able to spend their life as a working life after all.

This realistic view of this society, for which the state is something like the embodiment of a communal organization of the supply of the food necessary for the life plans of its members, a quasi kind of communism, becomes, just like the accommodation of its thinking to the state constructions of the members of society and to their world full of all too human “problems”, including their lifetime—a “social challenge”, which here too reflects rather one-to-one the view of the state of the aging of its subjects. Longer life—a problem? For whom?

After the discovery in Europe and the USA—i.e., in the latitudes of the states dominating the world of states, in other parts of the world, lifetimes move in the opposite direction—that people live longer, it did not take more than a few weeks for the social science professional thinkers to get in line to rediscover one of their “problems” in a longer life as well. While the thinkers, completely in the sense of their sympathies for the concerns of the citizens of the citizen society, first dealt with questions about what one could do in this additional lifetime, after a few weeks of such distant thoughts, the methodical affirmatism of social science theorizing and its art of listening to reality and its purposes as the purposes of humanity had brought this thinking into line and recognized the lifetime of society as that of useful servants of wealth, who has his measure in his monetary growth and not in what these citizens need for their life plans and therefore rethinks the lifetime as a time for service to this wealth, consequently limits this to their period which is profitable in the sense of this monetary growth and with the extension of the remaining lifetime of the servants of wealth discovers the problem that they nevertheless have to get hold of money, which this has earned and which has been forcibly put aside for these useless times, now longer than before, i.e. of more money. That this pot of money grows with the growing age of the people is a problem for the administrators of these useless funds, useless because, from the point of view of its increase, it is a waste of wealth, so that since the extension of the life span, it is debated as the problem of an “aging population”, a debate that reveals already in its concept, which view of the lifetime of whom discovers what problem in this, when it is no longer a question of a longer lifetime of people and what one could do with time, but of a population living longer, that is, the state's view of the phenomenon has entered into the theorizing about a longer lasting life. It had probably taken a few months until the social science professional thinkers had brought themselves to the line of the state's view of the lifetime of its citizens, and discovered, in the usual manner, the same invented “challenges for the community” that they then, as always and everywhere, also presented to people, who have no work and, therefore, when they live longer, have more time but no money for all sorts of things, translated into the problem of costs to the community, i.e. the state, and this problem of how can the state afford people living longer who are useless now presented towards people as their real concern about living longer.

Thus, the theories that eavesdrop on the purposes of reality succeed in taking on all phenomena defined as “problems”, which they alone constantly create as “problems”, i.e. as a way of thinking adapted to the practical handling of these phenomena, according to the purposes given in these problems, because they naturalize their purposes, assume them to be unquestionable, thus, share them under the hand of their care and declare their solution to be the task of politics, and then, with the political care of the monopoly power of society, to call for solutions to all these problems, all of them problems which for this way of thinking can never have been caused by this state endowed despite of all its power, but which this state must be able to solve, so that these political powers have to listen to their professional scientists incessantly and critically, so that they can finally take care of their tasks, invented by their social scientists, which only they attach to state politics. This is annoying for the political powers on the one hand, but it helps to maintain the belief that the solution to all these problems of the citizens must be the task of politics.