E Pluibus Unum: Out of Many, One

So, I’ve been thinking more and more about a comment made the other day on one of my latest posts. The comment was about the possibility of uniting the world through Metaphysical oneness as a way of over-coming our Selfish Individualized Subjectivity to bring about a more equal and just world. Everything in the world is composed of the same building blocks, therefore we are really all connected and our separate Individualities are really just an illusion, or something along those lines. I just wanted to explore this idea a little more and its recurrent manifestations throughout history and what implications it has for the present.

This is not necessarily a new idea. M-Theory may be the latest model of articulation of this concept, but it has been expressed throughout history in all parts of the known world. In Hinduism, which has been around since at least 700-800 BC, this idea is expressed by the word Brahman, in which the multiplicity of the world is really just an illusion and differs only in “name and visible appearance,” but ultimately all is united in this single unifying principle. The Chinese called it the Tao, the “Way” or “Path,” which produced harmony in the Universe. In Ancient Greece, the Pre-Socratics had as many names for it as there were philosophers who thought. Thales said it was “water;” Anaximander called it the “boundless;” and Anaximenes thought the source was “air” or “vapor.” Heraclitus called it “logos”—this “something” that was the essence of everything.

All of these things are just different names for the same thing, which of course is “God.” In the West, after the fall of Greece to Rome and the birth, death and resurrection of Christ, we were united under one of the strictest self-abnegating moral codes that had been imagined yet. We are all formed in God’s image and God is a part of all of us, i.e. we are all Brothers, thus we should “love our Neighbor [Others] as our-Selves” and “treat Others as You would like to be treated”—not that this was necessarily anything new, but the punishment that attended it was. Christ was the idealized model of love and compassion, yet, as Nietzsche put it: “There was only one true Christian, and he died on the cross.” All those that have followed him have paled in comparison and not even the threat of eternal damnation has persuaded us to act otherwise.

Then along came Machiavelli, who looked at the scene before him, saw its evident hypocrisy, and literally dared Men to forget about their Souls, forget about heaven and the afterlife and metaphysical speculation—which had resulted in naught—and to reform the here and now. He spoke admiringly about those who cared more for their Fatherland than for the salvation of their Souls. Since millennia of philosophizing about what the Soul even is had produced no results and those that pretended to know—the Priests—held power and influenced and corrupted politics, what we should therefore do is stop worrying about the things we can’t know and instead focus on those that are actually within our control. Realism over Idealism; Materialism against Idealism.

What was the cause of the Protestant Reformation, if not the corruption of the church and the debasement of the Word of Christ by those who were sworn to protect and advance it? Martin Luther was absolutely shocked by the corruption of the clergy when he visited Rome in 1510. The Pope—God’s highest representative on Earth—was selling licenses for brothels, priests who kept mistresses were simply taxed, and even Pope Alexander VI fathered seven children by at least two different women, despite priests being forbade to have sex. And, worst of all, the sale of Indulgences as a way to get absolution from sin, instead of formal penance. All these men were supposed to be Moral and Spiritual leaders and be beyond reproach, yet they were just as bad as the lowest commoner, it seemed, when it came to Self-control.

So what Machiavelli did was simply to give us—the lowly commoners—equal rights to be just as Selfish as all our supposed leaders. If Man is naturally Selfish, and apparently no amount of exhortations or threats can convince him to be otherwise, let’s re-create Society on this basis and see how that goes. Hobbes and Locke, following in his footsteps, took up this dare and recreated politics on a purely secular basis, which attempted to engage Men through their Reason, instead of through Myth—and the attendant force and fraud that goes along with it—and win Men’s consent through a new set of loyalties. Hobbes said to imagine another man holding a gun to your temple and threatening to shoot you. At that moment one is a real Self, without all the alienating opinions of State, Church, or Public Opinion and then one can really decide what counts.

So, to get back to the main point, whereas Metaphysical oneness may be true and edifying, it doesn’t seem to be effective on the human level where Man interacts on a day to day basis. Man’s mass of conflicting emotions and priorities seem to trump any sort of base interconnectedness that is so self-evidently (due to its recurrent nature throughout history, religion, and science) true and not even the threat of eternal damnation could cause us to act differently.

But where does that leave us—the children living at the End of History, forced to deal with the realization that all alternatives have failed, that there might not be such a thing as “Truth,” and what little there is does not seem very pretty?

I think, if nothing else, we can learn that the highest crime is Hypocrisy. You might be able to “fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time,” and the Truth will prevail! And when it does, the inevitable result is that which you see today: Cynicism and Apathy. You cannot found a country on the basis of Reason and then rule unreasonably—it’s gonna catch up with you eventually.

After having swept away all the other interests that could engage Men’s loyalties, the only thing left for us is to look at the world empirically—through our Senses. And right now we can see a huge disparity between the way Men talk and the way they act, and unless our leaders are willing to dabble in some of the dangerous, failed alternatives to Liberal Democracy, then they are going to have to realize this simple fact: the so-called Machiavellian method of leadership—"the employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct”—can no longer work. Unless they are willing to take away our Free Press and now the Internet and, not to mention, our power of Reason—which I would hope that we as a People would never submit to—this method of rule, simply can no longer work.

I will leave you with one more quote. A bit unrelated but just some food for thought.

“General apathy [is] the fruit of [radical] Individualism…What is important to combat is therefore much less anarchy [chaos] or despotism [dictatorship] than the apathy that can create the one or the other almost indifferently.”
—Tocqueville: Democracy in America