Spoilt-Child Syndrome
Ortega y Gasset's insights into 'radical ingratitude' have stood the test of time
Broken Eggs by Jean-Baptiste Greuze (1756) - This file was donated to Wikimedia Commons as part of a project by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See the Image and Data Resources Open Access Policy, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=65099391
In the 2016 referendum on whether or not the United Kingdom (UK) should leave the European Union (EU), Remain beat the populist Leave option by 74% vs 26% among graduates. However, Leave won a landslide among voters without a single qualification to their name (65% vs 35%). Non-graduates out-voted graduates in general and Brexit became a reality, with a predictably messy outcome for the British economy in the years ahead.
A few months later in the United States (US), centre-left candidate Hillary Clinton thrashed hard-right populist Donald Trump among graduates by 57% vs 36%. However, Trump won by 65% vs 28% among white non-graduates and sneaked a surprise victory in the electoral college. The populist president lost to Joe Biden four years later, then led a cack-handed coup attempt in 2021. He should have gone to prison, but Biden’s team took a softly-softly approach, focusing on the foot soldiers rather than the generals; so the populist escaped scot-free to fight another day.
COVID-19 exploded onto the scene in late 2019 and early 2020 while the UK was struggling to implement Brexit and towards the end of Trump’s first term. The speedy rollout of effective vaccines against the disease has been one of the greatest triumphs of the 21st century so far, saving millions of lives around the world. However, innovative vaccines met with a fierce backlash, often powered by online conspiracy theories. Statistical research shows that the lack of a high-school education is the most significant predictor of vaccine hesitancy among Americans.
More recently, in the 2024 US Presidential election, Trump made a surprise comeback, with another populist and nativist platform. He beat Biden’s Vice President Kamala Harris by 63% vs 35% among people who never attended college. However, Harris won among graduates (53% vs 45%) and among people with advanced degrees (59% vs 38%). Trump won the popular vote and will become president for the second time within a few days of this essay.
There are clear similarities between Brexit and Trump, including nativism (first come, first served), populism (anti-pluralism) and contrarianism (opposing expert opinion). The anti-vax movement mines a similar vein of contrarianism and has points of crossover with the hard right. We can probably characterise all these movements as anti-institutionalist (uneasiness with the institutions of liberal democracy combined with a certain distrust of university-trained experts).
Many commentators (including me, at times, such as in last week’s essay on moderates) have suggested that education attainment works as a good dividing line between institutionalists and their enemies, who are often deploy poorly educated conspiracy theorists as foot soldiers. This is a good rule of thumb, but it is only approximately true.
The Catalan separatist movement provides a useful contrast. Independence was the most popular choice among holders of advanced degrees, with 46.2% backing it compared to 9% for the status quo (Catalonia is one of Spain’s 17 autonomous communities), according to research from 2017 when the movement was at its height. By contrast, among illiterate voters, the status quo was significantly more popular (48.1% vs 21.0% for the creation of a new state).
Despite the high education level of many supporters, the Catalan independence movement developed similar themes to Brexit and Trump. As a wise man once said, lobbying to leave an EU member state is roughly the same as campaigning against the EU itself. As well as being nativist and populist, the movement was clearly anti-institutionalist: the unofficial referendum was designed as the centrepiece of a self-coup by former regional premier Carles Puigdemont. Capital flight was the inevitable result of the poorly prepared coup attempt, which stopped the independence movement cold in its tracks just as its leaders were being arrested by the Spanish authorities or fleeing overseas.
If education wasn’t the fault line in Catalonia, what was? An article in Nature in 2019 said that support for Catalan independence was predicted by two main factors. The first was mother tongue, with speakers of Catalan (the region’s minority language) much more likely to support a break with Spain than speakers of Spanish (the majority language, particularly in the Catalan capital of Barcelona).
The second factor was whether people consumed Catalan-language media. In a world where tech had been disrupting the business models of newspapers for a couple of decades, the regional government had stepped in with large subsidies for media in the minority language. The channels, radio stations and newspapers that received this support consistently underplayed the risks of independence while overstating the alleged benefits that would follow. Misinformation and disinformation were the standard setting.
Catalan speakers tend to be more middle class than Spanish-speaking newcomers to the region, with higher education levels on average. Independence is hegemonic in many of the region’s universities; and the populist option enjoyed strong support among Catalan-speaking academics around the world. The school system in Barcelona and its hinterland is also based on the Catalan language, which puts up a significant obstacle in the way of working-class Spanish speakers who aspire to be the first in their families to get a university degree.
The example of illiterate people, who overwhelmingly rejected independence, is telling. They had been failed by the region’s schools. This was obviously terrible for them personally, as well as for society as a whole. However, this failure shielded them from the misinformation that was prevalent in the education system.
The Catalan example shows that education can insulate people against contrarianism and nativism, but only does so imperfectly. We hinted at this in our essay on how people who rely on their intuition to understand the world can struggle with exponential processes. As I said in June 2023 (without italics in the original version):
Unfortunately, our brains evolved in circumstances where understanding exponential processes didn’t offer much of an advantage to our ancestors. Grasping the sophisticated maths behind exponential growth is hard for all of us. It can be done, but it takes education, concentration and practice.
Since the publication of that essay, though, we have found the limits of this model. Members of the new Silicon Valley right have thought much more about exponential growth than most of us, but still many of them, including controversial tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, have backed the second iteration of Trump’s nativist agenda. There must be something deeper going on.
Perhaps strangely, we can find an insightful observation in the work of José Ortega y Gasset, a Spanish philosopher and essayist, who was born in 1883. A defender of meritocratic liberalism, he tried his hand at politics during Spain’s Second Republic, but found the experience disappointing and retired from public life. He was exiled during the Spanish Civil War, but returned to Madrid in 1948, even though he continued to privately criticise Francisco Franco’s nationalistic dictatorship.
The Revolt of the Masses is one of Ortega y Gasset’s key works. It was written as a series of newspaper articles in 1929 and published in book form in 1930. An English translation was published two years later. The book is less well known than it should be, possibly because the essayist liked to use everyday words in a slight odd way instead of inventing his own terminology from scratch.
The heart of the book is the contrast between what Ortega y Gasset calls “nobility,” which has nothing to do with the hereditary aristocracy, and “the mass man,” which implies factory workers to most casual readers although he used it in a much wider sense. He says that true nobility is defined by obligations, not rights. It is “a life of effort, ever set on excelling itself.” It stands in contrast to the general mass of humanity, who are happy to live average lives, he argues.
Ortega y Gasset said that average people used to be scattered and isolated. The population came together through a process of urbanisation; with modern science, industrialisation and liberal democracy creating the conditions for most of us to thrive, whether or not we strive for excellence or think about our obligations to others. He says that the whole population has been empowered by the development of ideas of popular sovereignty.
For Ortega y Gasset, average people demonstrate uninhibited desires combined with “radical ingratitude towards all that has made his existence possible.” He compares this attitude to spoilt children, who think that everything is permitted and actions have no consequences. People who fall into the spoilt-child fallacy see society as a natural system rather than an organised one, he argued; and they then take actions that undermine what they take for granted.
In the disturbances caused by scarcity of food, the mob goes in search of bread, and the means it employs is generally to wreck the bakeries. This may serve as a symbol of the attitude adopted, on a greater and more complicated scale, by the masses of to-day towards the civilisation by which they are supported.
The image of a mob destroying a bakery in the name of bread is a powerful one. What would Ortega y Gasset have thought of voters opting to leave the world’s largest free-trade bloc in the name of free trade? Or people who owe their own lives to vaccines campaigning against this medical intervention for others?
Now would be a good time to look again at the artwork at the beginning of this essay. Jean-Baptiste Greuze used the image of a man breaking the eggs in a maid’s basket as a metaphor for lost virginity. However, it serves just as well for an average person voting to kneecap the economy of his or her country by adopting strange policies that go against a system that has enriched him or her; or voters supporting a coup attempt by a populist leader.
Increasing complexity
The world has become much more complex since Ortega y Gasset’s death in 1955. The next year, William Shockley, the co-inventor of the first working transistor, moved to Mountain View in California, making him the “father” of Silicon Valley. Innovations in Santa Clara Valley would go on to transform all our lives, while making society a little harder to understand. For example, this essay is written on Substack, a platform which is owned by a startup based nearby in San Francisco. What device are you reading this on? How many transistors does it contain? The latest iPhone contains 19bn transistors - an almost unthinkable number for most of us.
It is very interesting to me that Ortega y Gasset’s insights into “radical ingratitude” and spoilt-child syndrome (to paraphrase him) are just as valid now as they were a century ago when he put pen to paper. However, the contrast between “nobility” and “the mass man” seems less durable to me. Why did some well-educated members of the American tech elite, loosely based around Silicon Valley, decide to facilitate the rebellion of the masses despite striving for excellence in their own lives?
I suspect the answer lies in disruptive innovation, a term coined by business scholar called Clayton Christensen. He said that established companies try to keep their most profitable customers happy. They often ignore less-profitable segments, which creates opportunities for newcomers, who can discretely innovate at a lower price point. As the new players gain traction, they can move upmarket and take on incumbents. This tactic has become a core part of the Silicon Valley playbook.
The US tech scene embraces contrarianism as part of its enthusiasm for disruptive innovation - startups need to test a wide range of non-obvious ideas, some of which will fly some of the time. The platforms developed in Silicon Valley can also destroy the business models of gatekeepers, with newspapers being the obvious example. Although set up as businesses, independent newspapers are meant to act as (or used to act as?) one of the institutions of liberal democracy. On a side note, banks are another example of institutions that are constituted as businesses.
Unfortunately for all of us, the contrarianism and hostility to gatekeepers found in Silicon Valley can sometimes edge into nihilism about actually existing institutions. In 2009, for example, Musk’s friend Peter Thiel (the most influential thinker of the new Silicon Valley right) announced that he no longer thought that freedom and democracy were compatible. Sadly, destroying the business models of incumbents is only a short step from seeking to radically reconfigure the time-tested institutions of liberal democracy, including the peaceful transition of power. Although Thiel condemned the assault on the Capitol on 6th January 2021, he had personally bankrolled many of the politicians who had promoted it, including Trump’s first campaign.
As an optimist about the power of tech, I obviously don’t want to suggest that we should ban disruptive innovation or offer state protection to incumbents, including newspapers. However, I do think that power corrupts just as much in the corporate world as it does in politics. Platform decay is a real thing. Entrepreneurs have to create value to build a startup, but once it is established they can then take decisions that serve their own narrow interests rather than those of their users. Musk’s X (formerly Twitter) is a fantastic example of platform decay - it now serves his own interests rather than those of regular users.
Regulators and elected officials have every right to think about ways of preventing and managing platform decay. We should be wary of tech billionaires who want to push back against this sensible oversight with a platform of radical deregulation, including Musk. Also, Keir Starmer’s government in the UK absolutely has the right to ban foreign donors for political parties, given Musk’s proposal to invest a small fortune in Reform UK, a pro-Brexit and anti-immigration party that has flirted with anti-vax narratives and conspiracy theories; as well as his irresponsible and conspiratorial messaging about scandals that he hasn’t researched properly.
Politics should create a framework for tech, rather than the other way round. Musk’s intent to put unelected tech barons in charge of society, starting in the US and with the UK next in line, is a huge threat to popular sovereignty, which is the cornerstone of liberal democracy.
It is no coincidence that many of the tech entrepreneurs who followed in Shockley’s wake chose to be based in Silicon Valley rather than in one of the world’s dictatorships. Many of the institutions of liberal democracy, including the rule of law, a free and independent press and the peaceful transition of power, are designed to put brakes on the executive branch of the government. A weakened executive can create an incentive for people in the private sector to create value for others.
Without brakes on elected officials, what is to stop government agents chucking oligarchs out of the window and stealing their wealth? Musk, Thiel and their friends might be surprised at the results if Trump succeeds in weakening liberal democracy. Russian-style gangster capitalism is probably only a short distance away from Trump’s kakistocracy (government by the worst). Ortega y Gasset’s concept of “radical ingratitude” remains box fresh in these times.
G.K. Chesterton - an English writer who was a contemporary of Ortega y Gasset - provided us with a very useful image, which we have discussed before. He asked us to imagine an institution or a law as a fence. If a reformist says we should do away with it, we should reply: “If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.”
Wise words! Chesterton’s fence should be on the radar of any tech entrepreneurs who want to dabble in politics; as well as Ortega y Gasset’s warning that the true nobility think about their obligations to others more than their own rights.
Finally, we can now return to the theme of education. It would seem that some university degrees can help people appreciate Chesterton’s fence, at least some of the time. However, the correlation isn’t perfect, as we have seen in Catalonia and Silicon Valley. Although it is outside the scope of this essay, which has mostly discussed right-wing populism, it is worth mentioning in passing that weak post-Marxist theorising in the social sciences by academics who have neglected consilience (grounding softer subjects in the findings of harder ones) can drive poor policy choices by the hard left, which also tends to have populist elements.
The comments are closed, as usual when we discuss nativist populists, who can be very annoying on the internet. If you subscribe, though, you can hit reply to the email. I might not get to it immediately, but I will reply when I get a moment or two. See you next week!
Previously on Sharpen Your Axe
Last week’s essay on moderates
Institutionalism and its enemies
Capital flight in Catalonia (part one and part two)
Catalan indoctrination (part one, part two and part three)
The dangers of the anti-vax movement
Contrarianism, nihilism and kakistocracy
The peaceful transition of power
Value creation (part one, part two and part three)
Post-Marxist theorising and consilience
Further Reading
The Revolt of the Masses by José Ortega y Gasset
This essay is released with a CC BY-NY-ND license. Please link to sharpenyouraxe.substack.com if you re-use this material.
Sharpen Your Axe is a project to develop a community who want to think critically about the media, conspiracy theories and current affairs without getting conned by gurus selling fringe views. Please subscribe to get this content in your inbox every week. Shares on social media are appreciated!
If this is the first post you have seen, I recommend starting with the fourth-anniversary post. You can also find an ultra-cheap Kindle book here. If you want to read the book on your phone, tablet or computer, you can download the Kindle software for Android, Apple or Windows for free.
Opinions expressed on Substack and Substack Notes, as well as on Bluesky and Mastodon are those of Rupert Cocke as an individual and do not reflect the opinions or views of the organization where he works or its subsidiaries.