"Michéa’s views about common decency also shape his ideas about power. Michéa does not have a theory of the state or oppressive social norms. What interests him are the psychological motivations of those who seek power. He likes to refer to a character from a popular nineteenth-century play named Robert Macaire, an unscrupulous but sweet-talking egoist who ruthlessly pursued his ends. A “Robert Macaire” is that colleague who needs to hear himself talk at a department meeting, or who immediately “volunteers” to take on a leadership role in a union, club, or professional organization. In a critique of the utopian socialist Charles Fourier, Stendahl observed that the greatest obstacle to socialism was that its noble aims would inevitably be thwarted by Robert Macaires, who were fated to emerge with statistical regularity.
Such tendencies, Michéa contends, are particularly common among middle-class intellectuals. Because modern society rarely offers intellectuals a status that flatters their self-image, they are consumed with resentment that morphs into an irrepressible will to power. In 1984, Orwell observes that society is invariably divided between the High, the Middle, and the Low. The goal of the Middle “is to change places with the High,” as they “enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice,” before thrusting the low back “into their old position of servitude.” Michéa maintains that in many countries, the story of the left has played out precisely this way: middle-class intellectuals seize control of workers’ organizations and create social movements that are more concerned with fulfilling their social ambitions than with economic equality. Indeed, Michéa goes so far as to say that most intellectuals are deeply immature, saddled with a narcissistic inability to grasp the needs of others. Once again, the root problem is that the normal circuits of common decency have been disrupted."
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