On the Genesis of Populism in Late Modernity: Complexity and Psychosis

In the following set of texts, I will reflect on two seemingly contradictory explanations for the rise of populism across the world. In both theoretical routes, populism is not conceptualized as a response to one’s immediate personal experience, because this is not the driving force behind populist sentiments. Just think of the fact that many people who vote firmly against immigration often encounter little to no immigrants in their personal lives, or those railing against the ‘woke leftist elite’ in the academic world seldom actually roam the campuses they deem ideologically contaminated. This can even be extrapolated towards a general hypothesis: populists find widespread support when they claim that minority groups are the cause of society’s many ills, and yet these exact same groups are often among the most marginalized and invisible within society. So what is going on here? If the scapegoats of populist rhetoric are not the actual cause of the hatred that is aimed at them, the explanation for these sentiments must be sought elsewhere. This calls for an inquiry into the structures of our collective political unconscious and the ways in which the chaos of contemporary reality seeps directly into it.

In this text, I will lay out the first of two routes into this problem, which revolves around the idea  that the rise of populism can be attributed to the exponentially growing complexity of our world. On this view, the world has become so complex and its pace so rapid that it has become epistemologically impenetrable to people. The appeal of the populist message, then, resides in its simplicity; it provides a beacon of clarity and understanding to which people attach themselves in order to get an existential grip on reality. The populist does not complicate things by speaking in nuanced or abstract language, but identifies certain entities (immigrants, the EU, woke leftists, those holding the power in Washington/The Hague) as enemies and offers solutions accordingly (close the borders, leave the EU, throw out all corrupt politicians, etc).

I call this the ‘populist reduction’ because it reduces complexity to simplicity, chaos to order, and confusion to clarity. We might even argue that in this movement of reduction, it does not really matter which political topic is at stake. What matters is that populist talking points are rhetorical devices which serve a larger purpose, providing a sense of belonging and safety through abstraction and symbolization. They represent the attempt at finding solid ground amidst chaos. Hence, we should not only investigate the content of populist ideas, but also their form. 

When we look at populist reductionism in terms of form, we see that it is an attempt to restore the coherence and intelligibility of a world that has become so complex and elusive that it gives people an uneasy, restless feeling. Something isn’t right, but it is not entirely clear what that is. On my view, one of the reasons for this is that we are constantly surrounded by things we do not – and never will – understand. Just think of the technology we use in our daily lives. I have no clue how my phone works, yet I use it everyday. I do not know how planes fly, how cars drive, and how boats stay afloat. I do not even know how to fix my own microwave. And I think this does not just go for me.

Or take mechanisms of power. I am clueless about the inner workings of the international finance systems, just as I am about geopolitics, arms dealers, drug cartels, the military, big oil, big pharma, etc. Despite the abundance of information at my disposal, the world remains opaque to me. And yet I am also burdened with the modern imperative to have an opinion on everything, to be knowledgeable and ‘up-to-date’. This tension creates a sense of frustration and restlessness.

These examples seem trivial, but that is precisely the point. Living in a world which is epistemologically impenetrable constitutes a profound form of alienation and uneasiness in our collective political unconscious. It seems as if there is a yearning to resist it, to get a firmer grip on things. Incidentally, this could also be one of the reasons why our society idolizes geniuses so much, despite the fact that they are often difficult and sinful people. The function of the genius in our society is to ensure us that even though we don’t understand the world, there is someone out there who does. This means the world is not incomprehensible in itself, but merely for us, and that human control over reality is still possible – at least in principle. This is a soothing counterweight for our confused and messy psyche, despite the fact that none of us actually understands what the most famous physicists, mathematicians and astronomers of history did to earn their reputation. Geniuses are adored because they symbolize epistemic and existential control, rather than intellectual prowess.

But I digress, so let me return to the central point I really want to stress in this text: the genesis of populism in late modernity is rooted in an existential problem that is far more fundamental than ‘having an opinion on something’, which is what we generally take politics to be. In the remainder of this text, I will argue that populism is a specific form of world-construction, a world that has gotten lost for many people. But what precisely is world-construction? How does it work? And how can we understand the dialectical movement going from a loss of reality towards the rebuilding of reality? For this, I will shed light on the notion of the ‘passive synthesis’ of experience and the phenomenon of psychosis in which this synthesis breaks down. Ultimately, I argue that psychosis and populism share a similar existential form; they are a phantasmatic attempt at world-construction through myth and story.

Passive Synthesis and World-Construction

My starting assumption is that the world in which we live is not a ready-made totality, but something which we continuously construct. Worldliness, the sense of belonging or being ‘at home’ in the world, is made possible by the passive synthesis within experience. With this, I am referring to our fascinating ability to create meaningful experiences within consciousness, to synthesize thought, perception and affect into a coherent and intelligible whole. When we are eating a bowl of soup, we do not encounter its warmth, saltiness, spiciness, texture, colour and presentation as isolated elements. We can taste the soup, enjoy it, think about it, remember it. The soup isn’t just a liquid entity organized in space and time; it is a dish with which we – even for a very brief moment – share a relation. The French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty beautifully describes this in the preface to his Phenomenology of Perception when he writes:

"At each instant, I weave dreams around the things, I imagine objects or people whose presence here is not incompatible with the context, and yet they are not confused with the world, they are out in front of the world, on the stage of the imaginary."

In short, meaning is not found, but created within the passive synthesis of experience; through our bodies, our senses, and our thoughts. All these elements form a textured and layered sense of worldliness that is more than the sum of its parts. The world envelops around us as we navigate her in a movement of back-and-forth; it offers a sense of belonging and place.

One of the crucial things about the passive synthesis is that it is very fragile and delicate relation between consciousness and world. In some cases, it breaks down. The Belgian psychoanalyst Paul Moyaert shows that when this occurs, things can go very, very wrong. He argues that the passive synthesis of experience is rooted in a non-reflective and habitual understanding of things, a primordial way of navigating practical reality. When this level of action is disrupted, the passive synthesis start to falter and the world becomes ‘unreal’ as a result.

This all sounds rather technical, so let me illustrate it through an example which Moyaert also uses: putting on your socks and shoes. When you think about this activity, you realize that even though it unfolds in space and time, you are already done with it before you even begin. Putting on your socks and shoes is a task so mundane that it takes many of us almost no mental or physical energy to complete. It is almost entirely non-reflexive; you have done it a million times and it has become segmented in your daily life through sheer repetition. Putting on your socks and shoes constitutes a certain arch of action about which you do not think, but which you just do.

Moyaert argues that in the phase before psychosis, completing these non-reflexive tasks becomes a difficult problem. One looks down, sees socks, shoes and feet, and knows that these are all related in a certain way. They have some sort of function, but one cannot really figure out what that is. The person on the brink of psychosis slowly starts to notice that something isn’t right, but it is not entirely clear what that is. It is precisely for this reason that the pre-psychotic phase is so scary; mundane habits are the way through which the world becomes intelligible and meaningful. They are the necessary condition for the passive synthesis, because they provide a certain depth and coherence to our existence by carving out order in the dynamic flow of life. Moyaert argues that when this structure starts to break down, the world loses its veil and becomes a naked, uncanny place. One can only guess how truly frightening such an experience must be. Everything remains exactly the same, yet is fundamentally different. The world is thereby no longer inhabitable.

Moyaert’s idea is that the megalomania of psychosis and schizophrenia is a wild and uncontrolled attempt to restore the world-as-reality that is lost in the pre-psychotic phase. Invoking Spinoza’s idea of the conatus or ‘life-drive’, Moyaert shows that all beings strive to persevere in their existence. Reality is the desire of all things – living and non-living – to exist and keep on existing. In the case of psychosis, this means that the pre-psychotic phase in which the world is ‘unreal’ is overtaken by a more liveable and manageable reality; the coherence and reality of the world needs to be restored in order for the person to live. Through the sheer power of the passive synthesis, the subject manages to find herself a new position through which the world starts to make sense again: there is a newfound coherence and meaning to the world that was previously lost. Through fantasies, hallucinations, stories and myths (psychotic episodes often have strong religious themes), a life-world is constructed which allows the psychotic to re-orient herself in reality. The major problem, of course, is that this often occurs in a world that no longer aligns with the world shared by others, which creates alienation, misunderstanding, and loneliness. Psychosis is an idiosyncratic, wild and uncontrolled attempt at world-construction in which the passive synthesis goes into a form of overdrive. That is what makes it such an incredibly intense and incomprehensible experience, not just for the person going through it, but also for her surroundings.

An Affect of Understanding

When we tackle populism through the perspective of world-construction and the passive synthesis, we can see clear parallels with the attempt at restoring the world-as-reality in psychosis. In fact, their form is identical and only their content is different. Populism and psychosis respond to the same existential problem on different levels; the psychotic tries to re-find a sense of agency in the practical reality of her personal life, whereas the populist does so within the domain of community, society, politics and history. In psychosis, the subject is central; it is about her position in the world, her personal relation to things, her body, her thoughts, and perceptions. In populism, the group is central; it is about how ‘we’ are positioned over and against ‘them’. But in both cases, myths and stories (about race, origin, religion, nation, gender) are invoked to gain solid ground, to find a sense of identity and agency in a world that was previously unliveable.

This connection opens up the space to better understand populism and can ultimately serve the goals of a progressive politics. But we must be careful here. As the brilliant affect scholar and writer Eve Sedgwick argues, the task of the left is not to tell people how to feel, but to understand how they do feel, and attempt to find common ground in relation to those sentiments. Far too often, populist politicians and voters are attacked because of the supposed idiocy and lack of morality that they display. They are deemed stupid and evil. Even though populist groups certainly contain reprehensible individuals with racist, sexist and xenophobic ideas, there are far more people who are driven by existential concerns. They live in a world that they no longer understand and which they can no longer navigate. But to a certain degree, this goes for all of us. The difference between progressives and populists is one of degree, not of kind. In times of absurd realism, we all suffer from a loss of reality and find ourselves confused, frustrated and dumbfounded. Those least equipped to deal with this problem are most susceptible to populist rhetoric. But this does not make them evil. Hence, it is the task of progressive thinkers to start taking the existential problems driving populist rhetoric seriously and, ultimately, offer a different story. The fact that populism is a form of world-construction also means that is contingent, unstable and fragile. It has blind spots, gaps, and weaknesses. It is time for the left to tell a different story and construct durable, just and inclusive worlds yet unknown.