Session 4(b): Control, Power and Evils

Session 4b: Control, Power and Evils
Chair: Annette Pankratz

Homo Economicus as Homo Diabolus: Don DeLillo on the Problem of Rogue Capitalism
Jerry A. Varsava
Professor of Comparative Literature and English, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada

People often seek economic gain for reasons not particularly economic. This is of course the central insight of Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905) which has it that, for Calvinists, economic success serves as a guarantor of personal salvation. More recently, Niall Ferguson suggests in his historical study, The Cash Nexus: Money and Power in the Modern World, 1700-2000 (2001), that a variety of imperatives, notably “sex, violence, and power,” are able to override the desire for simple monetary gain. In this reading, economic gain is often, rather than an end in itself, a means to an end, though a highly secular one. In recent years, malfeasance of all sorts has been manifest in the world of investment and high finance, and this most disturbing trend has not escaped the attention of one of America’s most perceptive and articulate observers of contemporary life, Don DeLillo.
In his most recent novel, Cosmopolis (2003), DeLillo delivers a chilling portrait of homo economicus as homo diabolus . Protagonist Eric Packer, a New York asset manager, and occasional billionaire, pursues financial gain for the very opposite reasons to those Weber attributed to Protestant capitalists. He seeks not some future personal salvation but rather the very immediate imposition of a diabolical will on nearly all those whom he encounters, whether directly or virtually. Packer is an incarnation of evil, a sociopath and crypto-fascist who plays out his fantasies of domination and personal hegemony in the arena of global finance. Cosmopolis is a cautionary tale that reminds us that the triumph of global capitalism should not lead to the defeat of common decency and communal goals, that the operation of the private sphere cannot always be neatly separated from the healthy operation of the public one. As a self-styled “citizen of the world,” Packer represents a model of the cosmopolitan that must be resolutely resisted.

Surprisingly, when the writings of Franz Kafka and Robert Louis Stevenson are analysed in conjunction with one another, common concerns emerge. Both writers address oligarchies, elitism, hierarchical power structures and the ways in which these combine to ensure the oppression of the masses for the benefit of the few.
Kafka and Stevenson suffered private oppression resulting from their religious and cultural heritages, ill health and troubled family relationships. Individual oppression fuelled the interest of both writers in the ways in which power operates and is perpetuated by those who wield it and those who are its victims.
This paper examines Kafka’s ‘In the Penal Colony’ and ‘The Metamorphosis’ and Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde as texts at once illustrative and critical of how hierarchical power permeates every aspect of society and individual existence. Each of these texts displays a different facet of the oppression endemic to western societies, regardless of their boasts of equality. These texts also highlight the insidious nature of hierarchical power, how it permeates all aspects of experience, private and public, and how indoctrination takes place.
Drawing on the ideas of Robert Michels, Vifredo Pareto and C. Wright Mills (theorists who investigate oppression and elitism), as well as Kate Millett’s and John Pilger’s writings on political oppression and torture in conjunction with the texts by Kafka and Stevenson, this paper explores the intersections of fact and fiction. The continued relevance of the works of Kafka and Stevenson is apparent. Both writers foreground the destructive desire for individual power, whatever the cost.

In Margaret Atwood’s dystopic novels, she describes totalitarian societies that embody evil through over-control. In the Handmaid’s Tale, the emphasis is on the evil that is created by an overly religious society that dictates the means of reproduction, thereby usurping women’s bodies and freedoms. In Ornx and Crake, the emphasis is on the evolution of an evil mastermind, Crake, who exerts overcontrol by genetically engineering a new society and exterminating the old race of humans.
While both fictional dystopias raise the question of how control for the good of society easily evolved into overcontrol for the good of the controller, they do so in different ways. In the first book, the evil is portrayed as being embedded in the fabric of society, such that the agency of evildoing is dispersed. In the second book, the evil is personified and personalized by the character of Crake.
Grounding my research in the novels, I argue that evil is often portrayed in relation to an evildoer. That is, we as a society have the tendency to attach or project the concept of evil onto a particular personality. We are more comfortable with evil as being bound by personhood, because it allows evil to have a life-form and therefore a possible means of expunging evil from society. If evil is part of a personality, rather than part of an act or part of system, then it is layered in skin. However, I argue what these novels demonstrate is that evil is a potential within human nature that is projected onto characters, often characters that are unique or extraordinary in some way. These characters serve as a nexus to contain the evil and give the rhetorical consumer a mechanism to distance themselves from evil.