proof of socialism’s utter failure, of the failure of the attempt to legitimise socialist regimes – the term appeared at that historical moment when the only legitimising reason for socialism was the mere fact that it existed.23
Is this, however, the whole story? How does freedom actually function in liberal democracies themselves? In spite of all compromises, Obama’s healthcare reform amounted to a kind of act, at least in today’s conditions, since it was based on a rejection of the hegemonic notion of the need to curtail big government expenditure and administration – in a way, it ‘did the impossible’. No wonder, then, that it triggered such opposition – bearing witness to the material force of the ideological notion of ‘free choice’. That is to say, although the great majority of so-called ‘ordinary people’ were not properly acquainted with the reform programme, the medical lobby (twice as strong as the infamous defence lobby!) succeeded in imposing on the public the fundamental idea that, with universal healthcare, free choice (in matters concerning medicine) would be somehow threatened. Against this purely fictional reference to ‘free choice’, every appeal to the ‘hard facts’ (in Canada, healthcare is less expensive and more effective, with no less ‘free choice’, etc.) proved useless.
At the very nerve centre of liberal ideology is the idea of freedom of choice grounded in the notion of the ‘psychological’ subject endowed with potentials she strives to realise. And this holds all the more so today, in the era of the so-called ‘risk society’,24 when the ruling ideology endeavours to sell us the very insecurity caused by the dismantling of the welfare state as an opportunity for new freedoms: you have to change your job every year, relying on short-term contracts instead of a long-term stable appointment? Why not see this as a liberation from the constraints of a fixed job, as the chance to reinvent yourself again and again, to become aware of and then realise the hidden potentials of your personality? You can no longer rely on the standard healthcare and retirement plans, so you have to take out additional insurance? Why not see this as another opportunity to choose: either a better life now or long-term security? And if this predicament causes you anxiety, the postmodern ideologist will immediately accuse you of wanting to ‘escape from freedom’ by clinging mindlessly to the old stable forms.
Phenomena like these make it all the more necessary today to reassert the opposition of ‘formal’ and ‘actual’ freedom in a new, more precise, sense. What we need is a ‘Leninist’ traité de la servitude libérale, a new version of la Boetie’s Traité de la servitude volontaire that would fully justify the apparent oxymoron ‘liberal totalitarianism’. In experimental psychology, Jean-Léon Beauvois took the first step in this direction with his precise exploration of the paradoxes that arise when the freedom to choose is conferred on the subject.25 Repeated experiments established the following paradox: if, after getting two groups of volunteers to agree to participate in the experiment, one informs them that it will involve something unpleasant, against their ethical principles even, and if, at this point, one tells the first group that they are free to refuse to participate but says nothing to the other group, then in both groups the same (very high) percentage will agree to continue their participation. In other words, conferring the formal freedom of choice does not make any difference to the outcome: those given the freedom to choose will do the same thing as those (implicitly) denied it. This, however, does not mean that the reminder or bestowal of that freedom makes no difference at all: those given it will not only tend to choose the same as those denied it, on top of that they will be inclined to ‘rationalise’ their ‘free’ decision to continue to participate in the experiment: unable to endure the so-called cognitive dissonance (their awareness that they have freely acted against their interests, propensities, tastes or norms), they will tend to change their opinion about the act they were asked to accomplish. Let us say that an individual agrees to participate in an experiment that concerns changing eating habits in order to fight against famine; once in the laboratory, he is then asked to swallow a live worm, with the explicit reminder that, if he finds this repulsive, he can, of course, say no, since he has the full freedom to choose. In most cases, he will agree to do it, and then rationalise it by saying to himself something like: ‘What I am being asked to do is disgusting, but I am not a coward, I should display some courage and self-control, otherwise the scientists will see me as a weak person who pulls out at the first minor obstacle! In any case, a worm does have a lot of proteins so it could effectively be used to feed the poor – who am I to hinder such an important experiment because of my petty sensitivity? And maybe my disgust at worms is just a prejudice, maybe a worm isn’t so bad – and wouldn’t tasting it be a new and daring experience? What if it enables me to discover an unexpected, if slightly perverse, dimension of myself of which I was hitherto unaware?’
In analysing what motivates people to accomplish such an act that runs against their perceived propensities and/or interests, Beauvois identifies three distinct modes: authoritarian (the pure command ‘You should do it because I say so, without questioning it!’, sustained by a reward if the subject does it and punishment if he does not); totalitarian (with reference to some higher Cause or common Good which is greater than the subject’s perceived interest: ‘You should do it because, even if it is unpleasant, it serves our Nation, the Party, Humanity!’); and liberal (with reference to the subject’s inner nature itself: ‘What is asked of you may appear repulsive, but look deep into yourself and you will find that it’s in your true nature to do it, you will find it attractive, you will become aware of new, unexpected, dimensions of your personality!’). But Beauvois’s categorisation needs to be corrected: a direct authoritarianism is practically nonexistent – even the most oppressive regime publicly legitimises its demands with reference to some higher Good, and, ultimately, ‘you have to obey because I say so’ reverberates only as its obscene supplement discernible between the lines. If it is the specificity of standard authoritarianism to refer to some higher Good, ‘totalitarianism’, like liberalism, interpellates the subject on behalf of his own good (‘what may appear to you as an external pressure is really the expression of your objective interests, of what you really want without being aware of it!’). The difference between the two resides elsewhere: ‘totalitarianism’ imposes on the subject her own good, even if it is against her will – recall the (in)famous statement made by Charles I to the Earl of Essex: ‘If any shall be so foolishly unnatural as to oppose their king, their country and their own good, we will make them happy, by God’s blessing – even against their wills.’ Here we encounter already the later Jacobin theme of happiness as a political factor, as well as the Saint-Justian idea of forcing people to be happy. Liberalism, in contrast, tries to avoid (or rather cover up) this paradox by clinging to the fiction of the subject’s immediate free self-perception (‘I don’t claim to know better than you what you want – just look deep into yourself and decide freely!’).
Beauvois’s line of argumentation is faulty because he fails to recognise how the abyssal tautological authority (the ‘It is so because I say so!’ of the Master) does not work simply because of the sanctions (punishments or rewards) it implicitly or explicitly evokes. What, then, actually makes a subject freely choose to do something imposed on her against her interests and/or propensities? Here, the empirical inquiry into ‘pathological’ (in the Kantian sense) motivations is not sufficient: the enunciation of an injunction that imposes on its addressee a symbolic commitment evinces an inherent force of its own, so that what seduces us into obeying it is the very feature that may appear to be an obstacle – the absence of a reason ‘why’. Here, Lacan can be of some help: the Lacanian ‘Master Signifier’ designates precisely this hypnotic force of the symbolic injunction which relies only on its own act of enunciation – it is here that we encounter ‘symbolic efficacy’ at its purest. The three ways of legitimising the exercise of authority (‘authoritarian’, ‘totalitarian’, ‘liberal’) are simply three ways to cover up, to blind us to the seductive power of, the abyss of this empty call. In a way, liberalism is even the worst of the three, since it naturalises the reasons for obedience, incorporating them into the subject’s internal psychological structure. The paradox, then, is that ‘liberal’ subjects are in a way the least free: in changing their own opinion or perception of themselves,
