The Metamorphosis of the Polity and the Atrophy of Political Agency: On the Pathology of False Collective Identity
Aristotle, in Politics, declares unequivocally: "Any regime that looks after the common interest is correct; any regime that looks only to the interest of the rulers is deviant, a perversion of the correct regime." He further insists that the purpose of the polis is not mere survival but the pursuit of the good life (eu zēn). The common good (to koinon agathon) is the supreme end of the political community, and it must rest on the virtue and genuine flourishing of its citizens.
Applying this standard to many contemporary societies reveals a deep pathology in their so-called "collective identity." This pathology is often mistaken for a malfunction of the state apparatus; in truth, its root lies in the systematic deprivation of citizens’ political agency, which in turn gives rise to a diseased body politic.
1. Preference Falsification: The Initial Atrophy of Political Agency
A hallmark of false collective identity is that it privileges regime stability over the genuine aggregation of preferences. Consequently, citizens lose the capacity to act authentically in the public sphere.
Ask a Chinese person in private: "Do you want to go to America?" Many will honestly nod. Pose the same question in a public forum about "how the Chinese people view America," and the atmosphere instantly flips to unanimous anti-Americanism. This is not a quirk of national character; it is what economist Timur Kuran calls preference falsification.
Individually, people calculate their own and their family’s real welfare—income, education, health care, rule of law, freedom of choice. On these dimensions, America’s attractiveness is honestly reflected by the numbers of students, emigrants, and even those who risk illegal crossing. Yet once individuals are subsumed under the massive label "the Chinese people," the calculus changes: saying "America is good" carries a high cost, while saying "America is bad" carries a low cost.
Thus a person may privately envy America while publicly denouncing it. This split is not accidental; it is systematically manufactured. When citizens cannot speak truthfully in public, cannot reason together, and are reduced to low-cost "posturing contests," their core capacities as political animals—truthful expression and public deliberation—begin to atrophy.
2. The Postcolonial Paradox: Hiding Communal Failure Behind Abstract Sovereignty
The same mechanism of false collective identity appears widely in many formerly colonized nations, producing a striking cognitive dissonance.
We observe a common pattern: former colonies’ citizens constantly complain about dire security, corruption, and poverty at home, dreaming of emigrating to the former metropole; yet whenever the topics of "national independence" or "national dignity" arise, they instantly become "proud," as if they had forgotten the very country they are desperately trying to leave. They refuse to entertain the counterfactual: "Had independence never occurred, I might now be a citizen of the mother state, enjoying its rule-of-law and welfare benefits."
The root of this split lies in the ruling elite’s sacralization of "independence" as a moral high ground that obscures governance failures. Following Frantz Fanon’s prediction, many post-independence states merely swapped one set of oppressors for another: local elites seized power but failed to build a public order where citizens could share in both governance and benefits. In this setting, false collective identity replaces concrete lived experience with abstract symbols—flags, slogans, grand narratives—demanding that citizens sacrifice their real welfare for the worship of an empty signifier. Consider, by contrast, a territory that chose not to seize independence but remained within the metropole’s framework: Puerto Rico. Puerto Ricans hold U.S. passports, use the U.S. dollar, receive federal Social Security and Medicare, and enjoy full electoral rights, freedom of association, and judicial protection at the local level. They can elect their own governor and legislature, freely organize labor unions and civic groups, and hold officials accountable through a robust rule-of-law system. Most importantly, they possess "foot-voting" freedom: without a visa they can move to the U.S. mainland and instantly become full citizens with presidential and congressional voting rights.
Puerto Rico’s governance is far from perfect, yet compared with the patronage-driven, kleptocratic, public-service-collapsed trajectories of many independent former colonies, its residents enjoy markedly greater material security and political agency. Ironically, Puerto Rican separatists seek precisely to relinquish these substantive safeguards in exchange for a nominal "full sovereignty"—chiefly the largely symbolic powers of foreign affairs and defense that have little impact on daily life. This is an almost perfect mirror image of the pattern: instead of gaining concrete capabilities through independence, they sacrifice existing concrete capabilities for the sake of an abstract sovereignty symbol.
Puerto Rico’s case thus offers a negative proof of a key proposition: what determines whether a community serves the "good life" is not whether its head bears a "sovereign independence" crown, but whether its feet rest on the solid ground of citizens’ political agency. Regimes that hijack people with independence myths, and those that replace real guarantees with independence dreams, are pathologically alike—they both place abstract identity symbols above citizens’ genuine welfare.
3. Clarifying the Core Fallacy: It Is Not the "State" That Is Broken, But Citizens’ Political Agency
A common fallacy when analysing governance collapse is to treat the "state" as an autonomous entity separate from its citizens, assuming that the organism itself has malfunctioned. Yet the state is not a pre-existing monster; as Aristotle observed, the polis is the natural outgrowth of households and villages—a concrete emergence of people through political interaction. The form of the state is nothing but the aggregate of citizens’ political agency.
Therefore, the so-called "state capacity deficit"—failures to provide law-and-order, public health, infrastructure, or security—should not be blamed on an abstract malfunctioning institution. It must be traced back to a severe deficiency in the political agency of the actual individual persons.
When a society’s citizens are systematically deprived of:
1. The ability to associate and organize (they cannot form horizontal networks for mutual aid or oversight, becoming forcibly atomized);
2. The capacity to hold power to account (they lack legitimate channels to check abuse or corruption, allowing ruling elites to privatize public resources without constraint);
3. The faculty for sincere speech and deliberation (preference falsification fills the public sphere with falsehoods, preventing consensus on real problems and collective action),
then a healthy commonwealth cannot emerge. The observed "state machinery paralysis" or "public-service collapse" is merely the macroscopic manifestation of citizens’ political agency having been emasculated. People devolve from active "citizens" (with agency) into passive "subjects" or atomized consumers.
4. A Vicious Circle: How False Identity Strangles Political Agency
This creates a lethal feedback loop:
1. Political agency erodes → citizens cannot organize or oversee → public resources are looted → concrete living standards decline.
2. Legitimacy crisis ensues → the regime cannot achieve Aristotle’s "common good," eroding its right to rule.
3. Overproduction of false identity → to mask the paucity of genuine political participation, the power-structure floods the public sphere with grandiose narratives (national revival, external enemy threats), using abstract collective fervor to fill the vacuum left by depleted civic discourse.
4. Further atomization and emasculation → within this false collective identity citizens obtain cheap psychological compensation ("though I am badly off, our nation is mighty"), which further undermines any motive to restore authentic political agency and change reality.
False collective identity, therefore, is a chemical weapon wielded by power to abolish citizens’ political agency: it substitutes passive identification for active participation, and replaces the concrete dignity citizens ought to enjoy with an abstract "national dignity."
Conclusion: Returning to the Good Life and Rebuilding Citizen Capacity
The outcome is a double loss: those who wish to leave pay a high price to exit; those who remain live in a distorted public sphere. The common good is eclipsed, leaving only power’s monopoly over the definition of "we."
A society that leans on fabricated collective identity to maintain order ends up serving not the people, but the identity itself—and the elite interests that sustain it. By Aristotle’s standard, any regime that cannot accommodate genuine individual preferences nor enable citizens to pursue the good life has already abandoned the common good and degenerated into a "perverted regime."
Puerto Rico’s lesson is salient: a polity that preserves substantive citizen political agency—even if nominally non‑sovereign—allows its members to approach the good life; a polity that flies the flag of sovereignty while systematically stripping citizens of the abilities to organize, hold accountable, and speak truthfully has, in Aristotle’s sense, already perverted.
The litmus test for a regime’s degeneration is not the fervor of its grandiose narratives nor the formal completeness of its international‑law sovereignty, but whether it permits and protects concrete persons to exercise their political agency—to collectively fashion their own prosperity and dignity.
History repeatedly shows that collective illusions propped up by forced narratives and compulsory performance cannot withstand humanity’s innate yearning for freedom, dignity, and the good life. While genuine preferences may be temporarily suppressed, the drive of human beings as political animals to co‑create a flourishing life remains indelible and cannot be wholly erased.