The Dangerous Desire for Recognition

Our big, important job, before we can change our systems, is to figure out how to dampen dynamics that hasten humiliation or deny dignity. In other words, how do we help people keep their cool?

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The “desire for recognition” almost sounds like a strange and somewhat artificial concept, the moreso when it is said to be the primary driver of human history.
—Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man

When Fukuyama’s famous book was a national bestseller, it seemed as if liberalism—the socio-political system concerned with freedom and order in mutual constraint—was on the rise. The Berlin Wall had just fallen. A global mindset shift was underway.

Then, in 2001, a couple of airplanes crashed into very tall symbols of liberalism, which seemed to contradict Fukuyama’s thesis. Some commenters lamented that a “clash of civilizations” a la Huntington was evident.

Around thirty-five years after the publication of The End of History and the Last Man, I think we can conclude there are grains of truth to both theses, though, given current events, Huntington might well have a slight advantage. Yet look at the Iranians fighting for freedom.

In fairness to Fukuyama, he explicitly allowed for:

• Violence

• Backsliding

• Fanaticism

• Resistance

What 9/11 challenged more directly was the popularized, triumphalist reading of Fukuyama, not the philosophical core of his argument.

For now, let’s call it a draw, despite the fact that in the West, the Red Shirts (Democratic Socialists and Social Justice Fundamentalists), Brown Shirts (National Conservatives + Groypers), and Green Shirts (Islamic Extremists + Sharia Sympathizers) are vying for power as the liberal remnant sits by and takes invective from all three.

Remember, Red, Brown, and Green are three forms of ideological imperialism. Each is fueled in a dangerous arms race of indignation.

Thymos in the Zeitgeist

Props go to Plato for pointing out thymos in the Republic. It’s the idea that the “desire for recognition” is a huge driver of socio-political change, usually for the worse.

And that’s what I want to focus on here. It’s mushy, squishy, and human, which makes it difficult to measure, define, or reduce to plotpoints.

But I agree with Fukuyama that we ignore it at our peril, especially as so many of the great thinkers saw it. It turns up as vainglory in Hobbes, in Nietzsche as the “beast with red cheeks,” and in Rousseau as amour propre. We mustn’t forget Hegel.

We can also look at the work of evolutionary anthropologists who argue that the desire for status and status-signaling is baked into our genetic code as a species. Dignity is a close cousin to status.

But what on earth can we do with such insights?

This is the zillion-dollar question.

Polarizing Dynamics

While it is true that any evolved affective disposition functions at the level of the individual (individuals act), affinity groups can share those dispositions. In other words, evolution selects traits expressed by individuals, even when those traits are responsive to group cues.

As Jonathan Haidt argues, humans are 90 percent apes and 10 percent bees—where bee mode is generally episodic. Because human beings can be motivated to work in relative synchrony (like bees), members of affinity groups can experience an affront as if it were collective. In other words, an offense to us is also an offense to me.

Members can therefore have aligned emotional reactions due to:

• Shared cultural identity

• Normative signaling

• Emotional contagion

• Coordination narratives

I’ll pass over the kinds of polarizing dynamics this creates domestically. I want to click out an order of magnitude to keep it at the macro level of description.

A Tentative Theory of Social Change

Now, I want to offer a tentative theory of operationalizing these insights, but honestly, I'm having a hard time. Warning: It’s still vague. But the goal of such operationalization would be to develop an exogenous force that would help reduce the dangerous excesses of the thymic urge without top-down social engineering.

That would be the snake eating its own tail.

In other words, how can people who seek peace and freedom mute violent reactions between affinity groups without turning to politicians, activists, or police with guns and jails? What decentralized forces can help redirect thymos into non-violent, non-dominating forms without centralized coercion?

All of this seems to point to a single meta-rule:

Violence spikes when recognition is scarce, humiliation is public, escalation is rapid, and status appears zero-sum.

In such environments, thymos has nowhere to go except outward. The desire for dignity collapses into a demand for domination; the need to be seen mutates into the urge to make others disappear. What looks like ideological conflict is often better understood as a crisis of recognition under conditions that reward escalation and punish restraint.

Thus, how can we punish escalation and reward restraint?

Operationalizing this insight does not require suppressing the thymic urge—an impossible and counterproductive task—but somehow reshaping the environments in which it expresses itself. Let’s call this a healthy thymic ecology.

When recognition is plural rather than monopolized, dignity ceases to be a scarce good. When humiliation invites a social cost rather than an ingroup prestige, grievance loses its accelerant. When escalation is slowed by norms, rituals, and social friction, emotions have time to cool and be reinterpreted. And when status can be earned along multiple, non-substitutable dimensions, victory in one domain no longer demands the annihilation of rivals in all others.

I admit that when I think about forming such a thymic ecology in the context of domestic politics, I become disheartened. The Devil, after all, is in the details.

And I don’t know what to do about the clash of ideological imperialists except to suggest something like a national divorce. Until then, we have to contain the temper tantrums from factions that want to humiliate each other.

While such a theory almost certainly recommends ways that political leaders ought to comport themselves, this is not a call for top-down social engineering. To develop a thymic ecology, we must figure out how to cultivate cultural, institutional, and normative conditions that redirect competitive energy without extinguishing it. Of course, decentralization helps. The aim can’t be perfect harmony, but managed rivalry. The goal is not consensus, but containment. Agreeing to disagree without the domination games.

Of course, it might involve experimenting with niches without inviting expansionist hostiles into our midst, or inviting commisars with guns and jails to force order—both of which seem to be the state of play in today’s America. But that’s an unlikely system change, which we said will come after cultural change.

Instead, we must wager that violence can be mitigated when dignity abounds, recognition is diversified, and the race for esteem no longer feeds on the humiliation of teams by other teams wearing different-colored shirts.