Tony Sopranos to the ANC and beyond - Survival and Morality in Politics

The Sopranos, a TV series about an Italian-American mobster based in New Jersey, is widely regarded as one of the most profound and subtle TV series of all time. It premiered in 1999, ran for 86 episodes over 6 seasons and finally ended in 2007.

Why should a film about a violent Mafia family win  21 Primetime Emmy Awards and five Golden Globe Awards and be the subject of innumerable critical reviews, books parodies etc?

The answer to that is that the series cuts to the core dilemma of human existence: how to balance self-interest with the collective interest and further scale-up from small collectives to national and global cooperation?

The series runs on two levels. The obvious one is the factional dynamics, violence and personal drama within the Soprano criminal organisation itself. The second, and most interesting and important, is how Tony Soprano mentally processes the two cultures: the violent, closed, extortionist mafia mob which he heads and the comparatively high-trust, rule-based wider American society within which he lives and which he exploits wherever he can.

The contrast between the two cultures that he occupies and the emotional and cognitive stresses it induces, leads Tony to seek the aid of a psychiatrist, to pretend to his children that he's just another American businessman trying to take care of his family in a tough world and to indulge in a host of rationalisations to disguise the full truth from himself and others close to him. The series brilliantly tracks the toll these conflicting demands exacts on him both emotionally and physically and the repercussions within his own family.

And its impact is all the more powerful because the audience realises it is trying to say something fundamental about human existence, about the dilemmas ordinary folk encounter every day in reconciling their own desires and behaviour with a 'higher' morality which reflect the welfare and values of the wider society within which they live.

It is a theme which runs throughout human history: the conflict between self interest and the collective interest and between the smaller collective and the larger. The universality of this issue across cultures, time and place are fundamental to our natures. We must look at this more closely.

In the 21st century such dilemmas translate into existential-scale challenges: specifically, is it possible for a uniquely intelligent, highly social species wielding unparalleled technological power not to destroy itself before the end of the century. Or, if falling short of total extinction, reduce itself from astounding abundance into catastrophic misery?

That question of course can be reduced to a host of more local questions, such as for instance, how does it relate to the role of history and the ANC in bringing South Africa close to ground zero in the middle of 2022 and what can be done about it?

Questions such as these are becoming ever more pressing across the interconnected and interdependent world we currently occupy. Partly in response to such threats, there has been a massive upswing in innovative research into the foundations of human society and human functioning. This work hardly features in the political arena, particularly in the marginal regions of the world which includes South Africa.

If we want to stave off disasters, whether global or local, we will have to acquaint ourselves with these new ideas and knowledge. It's widely recognised within the relevant scientific communities that unless the wave of innovative ideas and new research can be made operational within the messy world of everyday 'politics' it will have failed. The purpose of this column is to serve as a platform to help introduce these new research agendas and findings into political discourse.

Solutions to these collective problems will not come from one or two geniuses, though they help. They will come, if at all, from the interaction of ideas and information from many sources. The more that happens the greater our chance of finding adaptive solutions, both local and more global, and thus of climbing Mount Improbable in the apt phrase of Richard Dawkins.

Before I get to the work which I think is opening new terrain to a more appropriate and flexible politics, I want to address one objection to this approach. The history of the world has been one of misery for the vast majority of people: 'nasty, brutish and short' to paraphrase Hobbes until perhaps very recently.

Yet in the last two centuries or so, it has changed very much for the better for the vast majority; so why the angst? I can think of three good reasons.

Firstly, the change has been very unequal across the world and even within nations and regions. That inequality is getting worse. It threatens all of us as we know very well here in South Africa.

Secondly, the democratic West, which up to now has been almost entirely the source of the vast recent improvements in living standards is under serious challenge from authoritarian ideologies, states and religions especially China, Russia and their fellow travellers and allies in places like North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, the MENA region and many parts of sub-Saharan Africa.

Thirdly, and most importantly, the West, notably the USA, is undergoing a destructive crisis of confidence and deep ideological polarisation. Of the three reasons for concern listed I regard this as by far the most dangerous and difficult. For these reasons we need to take the reversal or collapse of human progress very seriously indeed.

I would like to briefly introduce at this point some of the recent trends in research which bear upon the political and related challenges which threaten to engulf us. This research has not developed in a vacuum. It reflects in part at least a response to the crises facing humanity.

1. Revolutionary advances in neuroscience over the past few decades have transformed our view of how the human brain reconstructs the world we inhabit. Much of this has been popularised around the so-called 'hard problem of Consciousness' as articulated by David Chalmers and other philosophers.

That conceptual problem is being bypassed by the recent work demonstrating that our picture of the world is in actual fact an inside-out construct resident within all human brains. To lesser and still undefined extent it is a feature of all life above a certain level of complexity.

In short, we are born with a picture (set of expectations) of the outside world resident in the brains isolated in our skulls. This picture is the product of our evolved biology and the ecological niche we occupy as a member of the human species. From this primordial, essentially universal construct resident in the brains of all babies, is created over time a much more complex and varied adult view of the world by the combination of bodily inputs and signals from the external environment monitored by our senses.

Given the variability of our social and physical existence it is not surprising that the range of adult human perceptions of the world and its reactions will be extremely wide.

This is difficult to grasp at first contact but will be dealt with in succeeding columns. These transformative insights have yet to be incorporated into a systematic political theory but we have enough to go on in order to make educated guesses which are relevant to the real-life challenges we face.

2. On a separate tack but very relevant to politics, is a burst of immensely fruitful work over the past half century, and more especially, the last decade, from a host of disciplines united by a commitment to an evolutionary perspective. The research has been rigorous, backed by mathematics and statistics, and is cross-cultural and historical. Those involved are determined that their findings are related to the actual problems faced by communities around the globe.

In the ranks of this network one will find evolutionary theorists, economists, cultural anthropologists, psychologists, historians, population geneticists, archaeologists and linguists, ecologists and others, They have undertaken this work often in the face of hostility from woke and intersectional activists intent on undermining Western science as a morally legitimate form of intellectual activity as well as from others with political axes to grind in pursuit of personal and power agendas.

These reactions to their revolutionary program are part and parcel of the panoply of existential issues which they are intent on addressing and rectifying if possible.

3. Finally I want to mention in passing the physical sciences, notably communications, AI, energy and climate and, of course, weapons. I leave them to the end, not because they're unimportant but because I'm not as familiar with this branch of science and it does not directly address the issues which primarily concern me in this column. But the role of technology and its products in the widest sense is very much part of the crises which now confront us, and also part of the solution.

We started with Tony Soprano's mafia family depicted on TV. It is fitting to end with the ANC, South Africa's own consortium of criminal factions currently running the country. Whatever differing opinions may be held about the role of the ANC in South African history of the past century two things are now absolutely clear to everyone.

Firstly, it is a deeply corrupt, divided and predatory organisation feeding off the peoples of South Africa in its relentless pursuit of power and wealth. And, secondly, it is utterly incapable of effectively governing a modern state because of its criminal culture, its lack of the necessary skills and its outdated ideological commitment to a Marxist ideology coupled to a race-based African nationalism.

The question whether these ideological commitments are real or simply figleafs to disguise its corrupt and undemocratic activities is beside the point. The Constitution under which the ANC governs is fundamentally a rule-based, liberal-democratic but socially and historically sensitive model.

Clearly the ANC has done its best to ignore or undermine the institutions which sustain this model. These realities have been unequivocally demonstrated by the Zondo Commission and fully documented by numerous analysts and journalists. In any case the Constitution which governs the country is completely incompatible with the communist, post-modernist and racialist ethics which the ANC professes.

One may visualise the ANC as a South African version of the mafia families depicted in The Sopranos with one important difference. The Soprano family was an anomaly in a massive, democratic though very imperfect America. The ANC on the other hand currently governs South Africa., It is likely that the chokehold that ANC-associated factions exert over the energy supply to the country is not simply due to corruption and incompetence but is an implicit threat to the South African population if they don't toe the line.

These South African versions of predatory, extractive behaviour need to be explored more deeply than simply documenting the ANC's transgressions. We need to ask whether the ANC is reflective of the currently dominant values system of the majority of this country. In other words, is the ANC is indigenous to South Africa, springing out of the sociological, cultural and historical soil of the region, not an unfortunate phenomenon from outer space separate from the society of which it is part.

If that's the case then we need to understand this more deeply while fighting for the liberal democratic values and norms which account for the recent prosperity of Western democracies. Such values are not simply foreign imports. They have played an important role in South African history, especially over the past 75 years or so and are also indigenous to a smaller but important section of the South African kaleidoscope. They are the foundations of our Constitution.

Importantly, the wider South African population has embraced many of these values and it's a fiction to suggest they are and incompatible with the belief systems of the majority population. But for the foreseeable future the politics of even a semi-democratic South Africa is inevitably going to reflect the fluidity and contradictory range of ideologies, experiences and value systems in its political environment.

South Africa is a tough political test bed. Maybe as the country is presently constituted it is ungovernable in any truly democratic sense. All scenarios need to be considered but the more South Africans who realise what's at stake and work towards the non-violent stabilisation and improvement of our political situation the better.

This column is intended to look at the issues through a variety of lenses and this post must be seen as the opening of a more extended conversation.

Mike Berger