The Culture of Humiliation

Did you see Monica Lewinsky’s lecture on TED? You didn’t? Find 20 minutes of calm, turn on the computer, tablet or smartphone, click this link (SEE HERE) and watch. It’s really worth it – as we used to say with Najsztub.

Monica Lewinsky is that 20 years old girl who was an intern at the White House and had a romance with President Clinton. The results of this romance were horrendous. The president mixed up his testimony and nearly lost his office. Luckily, his cadence came to an end.

Anyway he himself was not able to run again. But the scandal with Monica Lewinsky caused the vice president, Al Gore — who surely was the most intelligent, the most long-sighted American politician of the epoch, and who seemed to be an absolute shoo-in — to lose to the weak, sometimes grotesque, G.W. Bush, who believed in witchcraft, was mainly interested in football, and had a very vague understanding of the world. Bush became the president because Gore ran his campaign in the shadow of the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the president could not effectively support him, and the Democrats couldn’t efficiently confront the Republicans’ swindles because their moral capital was devastated.

The thunderstruck neoconservatives gained power along with Bush. They believed that the American centenary had begun, and the U.S. would achieve what it wanted, if only they kill the Antichrist, who descended upon the Earth. Bush ruined America by inanely deregulating the banks and by spending $3 billion on the absurd war in Iraq (the Polish billion is an American trillion, which is a 1 and 12 zeroes). He fueled global terrorism by completely destabilizing the Arab world, precipitated global warming by holding back the battle against CO2, among others, by blocking the agreement with Kyoto and by withholding the financing of research on renewable energy sources.

The world will continue to live, for a long time, in the shadow of Bush’s atrocities, which would not have happened if not for the Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton romance. Surely, in Caesar and Cleopatra’s time, romances would not have had such a big influence on human history. Surely, hundreds of thousands of people would have avoided death, the Islamic State would have never been created, the spring storks would not have arrived two weeks earlier, and Putin would be as quiet as a mouse if that intern and the president would not have had sex.

Even Shakespeare wouldn’t have known that an intimate incident could have such a political effect. To be honest, Clinton and Lewinsky also did not have a chance to foresee that: because they did not understand what a few intellectuals of the Castells and Bauman kind knew, and among politicians maybe only Al Gore knew. Namely, that in the last couple of years, the world has changed dramatically because the bonds and hierarchical structures have been replaced by the overspreading Internet.

However, not just the Net itself is a key to what has happened to the world after the most famous sex in the White House. The key is the phenomenon of Internet culture, which had exploded at that time, and immediately infected the traditional channels of mass culture: the press, radio and television. Lewinsky calls this phenomenon the “culture of humiliation.” It is necessary to see her lecture to be able to understand exactly what it is according to observations coming — as Wańkowicz used to say — “straight from the cow.”*

People always act prompted by the lowest impulses. On the individual level, the Net did to change much. We run each other down, humiliate one another, peep at each other, we reveal our secrets, have fun at somebody else’s expense, and make others laughing stocks throughout human history. For centuries, it was a significant tradition to carry convicts around cities on a gig, or to rush them along the streets in rags, and use the cat o’ nine tails for the public to have fun before they see the corpse. And most of all, these things were done in order to allow everyone to spit on the victim and throw a stone or vulgar word. The fact is that this immemorial tradition of joyful tormenting by mobs characterizes the Way of the Cross. It shows how important a role such collective experiences played in the universe of our ancestors.

This mass entertainment of the 20th century was tamed by elite control of mass culture. Especially after World War II, the elites made sure that base instinct did not enter the public sphere. In the press, radio and television, they made sure that privacy, intimacy and dignity

were intact. Tabloids did much more than other newspapers, but they were also under control, so they could not do whatever they wanted. On guard were not only courts, but also editorial associations, journalists and advertisers. The happiness lasted less than half of a century. The appearance of the Internet radically changed the situation. The elites controlling the traditional media lost control of mass communication and started to adjust to standards imposed by the libertine mob. Standards returned to the previous level, which was in force for dozens of centuries, but with a quite significant modification. The elites lost not only the directly administered regulation of the expression of the lowest instincts, but also the influence on the choice of the victim, and the way in which he is to be publicly maltreated, which is traditionally reserved for the authorities.

For centuries, the mob tormented the people indicated by the authorities. Now, it is maltreating anyone it wants. And it does it as it wants. Monica Lewinsky was the first person who experienced this in such a painful way, when the Internet and traditional media showed, for example, 20 hours of records recorded by the CIA of her intimate telephone conversations. At that time, it was a shock. Never before had somebody been completely stripped of privacy, intimacy and dignity in front of the eyes of the whole world. Certainly, Lewinsky was the first of many people who, as a result of humiliation by the Internet culture, wanted to take her life. Her mother correctly feared for her so much that she told her to take a shower with the bathroom doors open. Later on, under the pressure of similar experiences, thousands of people committed suicide.

It was then that week after week, the Internet maltreatment culture exploded, which soon was to turn out the disease called humiliation culture based on constant harassment of other, more or less accidental, victims. From the beginning of the 21st century, a person using media receives less and less information, and instead receives access to both the ritual of common harassment and takes part in a sadistic, collective maltreatment. Readers, listeners and viewers find it increasingly hard to find out what is going on today and very easy to know who is being afflicted today.

Of course, it is not about maltreating for maltreatment’s sake. There is always some excuse: the apparent fault, the ostensible meaning of some information or some invented mistake or public scandal (hypothetically, especially in Poland, there is a risk of blackmail). Nobody will just acknowledge that cruelty, humiliating others, stripping people of the veil of humanity, destroying intimacy, secrets or depriving others of dignity amuses him.

After the Lewinsky affair, humiliating people became the cheapest, most popular, and the most commonly integrated form of entertainment into society that is still being provided by mass communication channels. Trillions of viewers watched the murdering of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden, private naked pictures of celebrities, viewed stolen mails and texts, records from hidden microphones and cameras, and records made by bugs installed by the CIA. Everyone can cause each victim or any chosen person suffering with a couple of malicious words that no longer demand any explanation. The law apparently somehow controls it. Apparently, there still are verbally accepted cultural norms, which apparently condemn it, but it all has little meaning. Because in fact, only few earn millions through such methods, but many more improve their state of mind, release anger, ire or aggression. And if something bad happens, one can always, in a Lacan-style strengthening of the perverse satisfaction of the oppressors, allow them to take part in group outrage against the cruelty of the maltreating mob that they had created themselves — by clicking, reading, watching.

I know that you can’t change what has happened. But words can. Monica Lewinsky in fact destroyed the world, but also became the first spectacular victim of the new vitiation of the world. Owing to this experience, she discovered something very important that she shared with the lecture listeners. She discovered the importance of even a little empathy in the ocean of base instincts. One empathetic gesture, empathetic word, or one supporting, reaching hand can save a life. It is not about absolution, even if there is something to pardon. It is not about justification, or whether something requires it. It is about dignity, not innocence.

Even a penalty of confinement is not a dignity-depriving penalty — or at least, it should not be. All the more, the penalty for being, for some reason, interesting to the mob should not be depriving someone of their dignity: a penalty more and more people receive only to satisfy the mob. A little gesture of solidarity in oppression can change such a dramatic situation. Every one of us can do it. We need to learn to do so because there are more and more victims, and this problem probably will not change soon.

*Editor’s note: Correctly translated, this quote could not be verified.