Thermidorian Society: Why Complex Organizations Come Apart in Modern Times

By Leslie Herzberger

The history of the United States in the last thirty years, its preoccupation with the Vietnam War and the devastating affects of that war on the psyche of this nation is evidence of a foreign policy tragedy. Foreign policy tragedy brings domestic tragedy in its wake. The purpose of this study is to work out why the approaches to social revolution--and that is what the Vietnam War was about--have been wrong on both sides of the ideological spectrum the last thirty years in the U.S., point out why they were wrong, point to where they were wrong, and point to the consequences of acting in a society when the perceptions are in certain respects wrong.

Let me sum up my perception on what went wrong in Vietnam. It was a Right wing war fought on Left wing premises. It was a war that could not have been won because those who designed it would not or could not win it--but were also afraid of losing it. It was a war that was wrongly perceived by both sides of the ideological spectrum.



The Liberal argument was that America tried everything and still lost it!

The Conservative argument was that it could have been won if the opposition had not tied their hands, keeping them from an all out effort that would have been required to win it.

The war was started in earnest by the Liberals under Kennedy. The strategy was to roll up the enemy by hitting on the peasant and through it, cut off the leaders. Pacification, education, re-education, indoctrination, and the introduction of self-defense techniques to the South Vietnamese peasants was meant to stop the revolution exported from the North in its tracks. The U.S. policy was predicated on the assumption that the peasants really had something to do with the ruling functions of the North Vietnamese revolution after Thermidor; that after the onset of Thermidor--after the institutionalization of the revolution--in Hanoi, the revolution was still revolution.



The Liberal approach has believed that revolution is tantamount to Maos view of it in China--peasants all immersed in the revolutionary process as fish in the sea. And so you would have to drain the very ocean itself to stop it. Our approach to the post revolutionary process is that after the onset of Thermidor in a society, revolution is a bunch of terror informed super bureaucrats at the center of a society increasingly cut off from the periphery.

In a post revolutionary society, it is the leaders that matter--not the fish in the sea. So bombing the small fish into fish soup hell in response--as did the West in Vietnam in that war--every tree, every outhouse, every shack, and every village, until they drop so much ordinance that the entire region is brain dead from defoliants and pockmarks and natural calamities, while leaving the center untouched, would seem insane. Yet that was the policy in Vietnam of America. And then nothing happened! Nothing happened week after week, year after year except that America itself was being driven mad doing the same thing, and expecting it to come out different. That, as the President-elect said in 1993, was and is insanity.


But what choice did they all have? The pro-war liberal American leadership that designed the war in Vietnam did not dare bomb Hanoi, the capitol of North Vietnam, for fear of triggering World War III with Red China and with Soviet Russia--both of whose client North Vietnam was. So they tied their own hands, figuring that by coming through the back door, fish in the sea style, piece by piece, nobody will notice in China and Russia; ergo no World War III. So they took a strategy that was insane, and made a virtue out of its necessity. They tied their own hand! And then they blamed the opposition for forcing them to fight with their hands tied behind their backs. On the other h

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Dec 27, 2006
• ISBN: 9781465334435

Leslie Herzberger

The author was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1946. He served in the U.S. Army, then attended Columbia University School of International Affairs, and the Ph.D. Program in History at New York University. This book is part of the follow-up of the PH.D. Thesis Proposal that the author presented to New York University on December 24, 1980, and worked out as a private scholar the next 20 years. The work that went into the book spanned a period of around thirty years overall.

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Copyright © 2006 by Leslie Herzberger.

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Contents

FOREWORD

Book I

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Book II

Chapter I

Part I

Chapter II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

Chapter VI

CHAPTER VII

Part II

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

Part III

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

Book III

Part I

Chapter I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

Part II

CHAPTER I

I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

II

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

Part III

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

Part IV

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

Afterword

What is a fanatic? How can we recognize him? There is a tendency today, when genuine conviction has become so rare, to call fanatic anyone who has a deep faith in a spiritual or scientific conviction that differs radically from the opinions of others and has not yet been proven. If this were so, then indeed, the greatest and most courageous men—Buddha, Isaiah, Socrates, Jesus, Galileo, Darwin, Marx, Freud, and Einstein—would all have been fanatics.

In fact, it is easier to recognize the fanatic by some qualities in his personality rather than by the contents of his convictions. The most important—and usually unobservable—personal quality in the fanatic is a kind of cold fire, a passion which at the same time has no warmth.

The fanatic is so seductive, and hence, so dangerous politically, because he seems to feel so intensely and to be so convinced. Since we all long for certainty and passionate experience, is it surprising that the fanatic succeeds in attracting so many with his counterfeit faith and feelings?

Paranoid, projective, and fanatical political thinking processes differ from pathology in the traditional sense only by the fact that political thoughts are shared by a larger group of people and not restricted to one or two individuals.

(Erich Fromm, May Man Prevail)

Definition: Romanticism:

Romanticism is an ideology, not simply a set of aesthetic standards, closely associated with the nineteenth century, but it did not die of exhaustion or galloping chromaticism and give way to something called Modernism, as most historians would have it. Romanticism, in its truest sense, survives to this moment, because it represents an egalitarian view, that if anything, it has gained momentum in our century. Meyer asks a loaded question: Is it in mankind’s nature to be wholly innocent in the Rousseau sense—that is, to go through life free of cultivated concepts and conventions? Clearly an Apollonian classicist by training and temperament, he believes it is not. Yes, the Romantic pull of Dionysian freedom will always be there, tugging against rules and providing the tension that makes art and all life possible. But the composer’s constraints are best provided not by himself but by his culture, by intricate webs of stylistic rules and strategies, because to preclude all but immediate choice is to dehumanize the human animal.

Basic to Mr. Meyer’s analysis of style as a function of ideology is his view that Romanticism reflects an ideal of perfect freedom that has been developing in Western society since the Renaissance. Our increasingly pluralistic culture offers the artist an enormous range of styles, all of which exist simultaneously in an actively fluctuating steady state, a strenuous stasis that does not allow any single or even dominant set of constraints to rule. But, as constraints of some sort are necessary to any functioning artist, the Romantic composer, ever since Beethoven had been forced to play the hero, fearlessly chooses a personal style from among a confusing, continually shifting array of possibilities.

Out of this Byronic attitude grew the cult of the original genius, which served nineteenth-century Romanticism well. However, Mr. Meyer distinguishes between two types of originality: The first involves the invention of new rules. Whoever invented the limerick was original and creative in this sense, and Schoenberg’s invention of the twelve-tone method also involved this sort of originality. The other sort, epitomized in certain works of Bach, Handel, Haydn, Mozart, and even that pioneer of Romanticism, Beethoven, is strategic. It does not concern itself with changing the rules but is ingenious in devising new ways of moving within established rules.

(Henahan, Donald. A New Look at What’s in a Name.

In The New York Times, February 18, 1990, p. 25.)

FOREWORD

In the 1950s, a group of researchers at Berkeley came out with an extremely influential study on the nature of the political fascist. It was a massive study on a type the researchers, led by T.W. Adorno, described in its title as The Authoritarian Personality. Many of these researchers were themselves refugees from the Nazis in Germany after 1933. What these researchers sought to do was to get a handle on the Nazi-Fascist phenomenon by getting a handle on the personality type that was likely to participate in a Nazi-Fascist-type project in Nazi Germany between 1933 and 1945, or anywhere else for that matter, at any time in the modern world. It is a type that is the instinctive enemy of the democratic-constitutional-pluralistic process that has taken root in the West since the Enlightenment, under what has come to be known as modernity.

The authoritarian personality in the twentieth century, when in the political arena, had declared war on modernity and on systems that, in their political culture, in their essence, in their patterns, and in their organizational approach, faithfully embodied the idea of modernity, and the idea of the Enlightenment that was embodied in the idea of modernity as its foundation.

In this study, we took up where The Authoritarian Personality left off. Whereas the authors of that massive study sought to get a handle on the psychology of the authoritarian personality, we sought to get a handle on the psychology of the authoritarian bureaucratic patterns that are part and parcel of the authoritarian personality. These are ‘Thermidorian’ patterns.

II

On one level, we focus on the nature of authoritarian personality types functioning in the context of societies in crisis. On a second level, parallel to the first, we focus on the nature of authoritarian bureaucratic organizational patterns as they work themselves out in a society in crisis. On a third level, we focus on how the above two patterns—the authoritarian personality in a society in crisis and the authoritarian bureaucratic patterns that seem to imperialize a society in crisis—interact and reinforce each other in a vicious cycle upwards, in which both the society as a whole, as well as the people in it, on a case-by-case basis, oftentimes lose. Only the state terrorists and their authoritarian and bureaucratic terror infrastructure come out as winners—which means that there are no winners at all.

We focus primarily on the nature of societies in post-revolutionary crisis, on how such societies survive by reinventing themselves in the revolutionary process, and how they move toward self-destruction, oftentimes through the very same process, by denying the essentially human nature of their group, by denying the fundamental pluralism inherent in their group. The societies in crisis that we describe as in Thermidor do not necessarily have a choice, just as dysfunctional individuals in their childhood and youth did not choose their dysfunctional environment, that apparently blocked their further development. But in order to unblock further development, for both the individual and for the collective, patterns of dysfunction have to be diagnosed! This is what we do in this study. Collectively, these patterns are described in this study as the structure of evil.

The structure of evil—the structure of Thermidor—that must be avoided by complex groups on pain of their disintegration in modern times consist of fundamentalism, bureaucracy, and terror. They are at the root of why post-revolutionary societies come apart. The manifest symptom of the structure of evil in a society—which is the structure of Thermidor—is the institutionalized, ongoing, state-sponsored terror, at the root of fundamentalist-bureaucratic organizational demesure in modern times.

The foundation of Thermidor—which includes fundamentalism, bureaucracy, and terror—rests on the process of centralization. So decentralization is the answer to Thermidorian degeneration in modern times. But not only there. The forced decentralization of the Jews, with the burning of the temple by the Romans along with Jerusalem two thousand years ago, forced the Jews into a Diaspora and thereby into a decentralized mode that made it possible for them to survive intact into modern times. The underlying dynamic of the Protestant Reformation was just the same—the decentralization by nationalization of Christianity into modern times. The Ottoman Empire began its disintegration when the dogmatic, centralizing fundamentalists overran it from within. And the golden age of the Arab world was when, between the ninth and the eleventh century, religion was separated from higher education at the university level, thereby decentralizing the education and the working consciousness of the elite. It came to an end when religion was reintegrated into higher education in the eleventh century.

III

In order to come to an understanding of the revolution process in modern times, we must understand the patterns that are not immediately apparent in it. The understanding, in turn, of these underlying patterns might perhaps put it all in a different, even possibly a somewhat more manageable perspective altogether, for those living under an evolutionary societal scheme of things. The aim of this study is to examine more precisely those patterns and those methods that evolutionary societies must avoid to remain healthy and sane well into the nuclear age, on pain of their very existence as pluralistic, democratic, and constitutional societies, using the process of revolutionary demesure in modern times as our cautionary tale!

Book I

THERMIDOR:

AN INTRODUCTION

Chapter I

Abstraction and Reality

A Constitution in a liberal society is set up to defend the rights of the individuals against the domination of the state. An operative normal distribution curve in a liberal society, when translated into political practice, defends the rights of the minorities on both sides of its continuum against the numerically superior majority in the middle of that continuum. The catch is that both of these principles—a working Constitution and an operative normal distribution curve—underlying as they do a liberal, democratic society, can be turned on their head, to produce the exact opposite effect. Such is the ambiguity upon which civil society is based in an enlightened modern world.

II

The rationality of the Constitution and the reality of the normal distribution curve provide together the sign posts for civil society in our time. The question left up to civil society is, how will it mix the two? Will rationality be subservient to reality, or will reality be subservient to rationality? The former mix is a Right-wing solution; the latter mix is a Left-wing solution. Under both a dominant ruling abstraction (on the Left), and a dominant reality orientation (on the Right), politics can hit the fan in that society. The deciding factor is the presence or absence of scarcity. So the task of civil society must be to get its act together, in order that the society itself can keep the fact of scarcity at arm’s length. In turn, scarcity is kept at arm’s length only by that civil society getting its act together at this late date.

There are certain rules to civil society getting its act together. There are not many ways to postindustrial paradise. Society, as much as the individual, must pass through stages of development. Erik Erikson, in Childhood and Society, wrote that the individual must pass through stages that must be successfully transcended in order to reach the next. So do societies. Successful passage is a function of successful completion. The onset of a dominant fundamentalism in a society indicates that the passage of that society is blocked to the next stage in that society—that a stage was not completed successfully, that resolution was not at hand. Fundamentalism in a society is indicative of the institutionalization of the crisis of transcendence, rather than the transcendence of the crisis in a society’s transition. The society is blocked. It then has two, perhaps three options: 1) resolve the crisis successfully, 2) mark time in place till all comes apart, 3) or go for broke. The last option has spelled disaster for those that opted for it in the twentieth century.

Chapter II

The Catch In The Process

The Constitution in the United States is an abstraction born of the minds of inventive white men in the latter part of the eighteenth century. It says that all men are created equal, in the eyes of their creator. Having posited a creator and an abstract notion of equality under it, the Constitution then grants to all the freedom of life, liberty, and the right to property. The rest will have to be worked out amongst the people themselves—as to who gets what, how, when, and why. The rest is politics.

A normal distribution curve is an observation the scientist gets from watching nature operate. It is not an abstraction; it is verifiable in nature. It is the law of nature. We can abstract from it lessons, but the law itself is immutable, physical, and real.

A constitution and a normal distribution curve are the two principles that society finds itself pursuing in a liberal, democratic state. Between the abstraction of the constitution that hypothesizes that all are created equal by a benevolent creator, and the reality of the normal distribution curve that merely says that all were created by the creator, society has to navigate.

A social contract of a liberal, democratic society must be based on both—on both rational principles and on natural principles—as opposed to a simplistic, regressive, ephemeral, end-of-the-road fundamentalism. And all fundamentalisms are regressive, end-of-the-road exercises in puffed-up futility, whether from the Left or from the Right.

Whatever the mix between them, rationality and reality both have to be in a position to inform and guide a civil society. The constitution provides the rational underpinning for a liberal, democratic society. An operative normal distribution curve provides the reality by which abstractions such as the constitution can be made to work for the people in that society—as opposed to a constitution facing the people down as alienated, alienating property. Both are necessary if a civil society is to get its act together.

II

The institutionalization of a normal distribution curve in a liberal society allows for differentiation in that society, by allowing for a distribution along a continuum which is the sum of nature’s creation. What this says is that nature is pluralistic, that it allows for differentiation in both attitudes and in lifestyles, and that all is normal under nature’s gaze. Since nature throws it up, blame nature for the apparent excesses—if excesses it may very well be in the mind’s eye of the majority on that continuum, one that is clustered toward the center of that very same continuum on the normal distribution curve. The important fact is that the majority on the normal distribution curve is definitely clustered in the middle!

If the majority clustered in the middle of the normal distribution curve then sufficiently resemble each other in their opinions to form a moderate consensus as a result—which should be the case—there is the precondition for the establishment of an Establishment in a society—whether that society has a constitution or not. In a constitutional democracy—i.e., in a society in which ‘all things are equal’—that establishment should represent the majority. For the Establishment, the threat to itself and to its moderate consensus from withing the society—if and when it comes—is from the Left and Right extremes of that very same normal distribution curve continuum. Still, by both the light of the Constitution (of the United States) and by the light of an operative normal distribution curve, the Left and Right on the continuum have a right to do their thing; each individual has the right to his or her opinion, and his or her lifestyle. This would be a situation where ‘all things are equal. When the stabilizing balance in civil society is upset, all things are not equal. And then both the Constitution and the normal distribution curve in it have the potential to belie, if not betray the very same liberal democratic process.

III

If the majority in a normal distribution curve is clustered in the middle of the continuum in a given society, the minority in it is already behind the eight ball. The normal majority faces a non-normal minority on it. Similarly, if the Constitution (in the United States) says that all individuals under that Constitution have a right to their say, and thus the majority has a right to their collective say, and if then the Establishment composed of individuals form a moderate consensus of