What does the word Individualism mean to us as human beings living in these United States of America in the 21st century? It is a word and concept that is thrown around a lot by politicians and pundits, punks, plumbers, and proles of all sorts—but is there any content to this seemingly thoughtless verbiage? Invididual Liberty—solidified in Private Property—is the foundation of our system and the supposed guarantor of all our Rights, but this has been seriously undermined by not only modern theory but also modern practice. This is a forum to open up the discussion about what exactly this abstract idea—Individualism and its corollary Freedom—means or can mean in the context of the situation we as a people now find ourselves in.
In his brilliant account of our country, Democracy in America, Tocqueville’s favorite word for describing our citizens was “restive”: unable to keep still or silent and becoming increasingly difficult to control, especially because of impatience, dissatisfaction, or boredom.
Basically, we are all workaholics, obsessed with the idea and the possibilities of growth—both personal and societal. There is always something else wrong that can be improved upon; that can be done more efficiently or more intelligently. It doesn’t necessarily matter to us how our fore-fathers did things—especially if it is a material, scientific issue—which causes in us a lack of reverence for more traditional, i.e. Culturally-based, ways of living that could potentially ground our ambitions and restivity. For us, Reason is an instrument through which we can look out at the world, judge what is wrong, and use it to improve upon it.
This idea is now being exported to the rest of the world and is becoming a very destructive force in these still more traditional cultural settings. Most of the time this gets disparaged by calling it “Cultural Imperialism” because it so disrespectful to these old Cultures’ Values—and who is the West to say we’re right, right? But that is painting the situation with a very broad brush and the reality is a little more nuanced than that.
As Anand Giridharadas shows in his new book, India Calling: An Intimate Portrait of a Nation's Remaking, sometimes it can be a good thing for old Values to fall away and new ones to take their place. In India, one of the most conspicuous elements of the new economic forces that are taking shape there is the dissolution of the once determinate Caste System that formerly kept India immutably stratified in a culturally based social hierarchy. But now, a much more meritocratic system of fluid social mobility is rising to take its place: aka, The American Dream. (Sidenote: sometimes the loss of old values can be a very, very bad thing as well.)
These developments made the writer, Giridharadas, decide only one generation after his family’s emigration to America, to renounce the opportunities here and return to his homeland because India has now become the new “Land of Opportunity”. The Caste System had ordered society for thousands of years—at times more or less rigidly: more so since the imposition of British rule in the 1700’s—but is now coming to be seen as an antiquated relic of a superstitious, myth-based past.
The country is importing all sorts of jobs from factories to IT to call centers for companies from all over the world—NBC has even made a sitcom about it: Outsourced. They are becoming a major force in the world and are asserting themselves upon the world stage as a nation to be “taken seriously.” The Economy of India is now the eleventh largest in the world by GDP and the fourth largest by purchasing power parity. And Economists are predicting that by 2020 India will be among the leading economies in the world. (They also, by the way, now hold $41 billion in US debt.)
It will be interesting to see how this plays out—as the rest of the world plays catch up to America and the rest of the West, in the material realm. They are kind of experiencing our history—only in fast forward—but with one little exception, and possible advantage. This is what Giridharadas spoke of at the end: the “challenge of culture and spirit.” In America, our Culture is dissipating—the foundations are eroding and the dividedness of Western History between our Christian heritage and our “Enlightened” experiment are at war with one another and we are in the midst of a great Identity Crisis. The one side is receding further and further backward under the cover and comfort of fundamentalist Self-assurance, as the other side is trying its hardest to pull us in the opposite—just as dangerous and destructive—direction toward ungrounded, contentless “Freedom.”
We no longer know who we are, nor do we have an aim or purpose that is guiding us into the unknown future. Obama tried to inspire us with his so-called “Sputnik Moment” he spoke of in his State of the Union address, but the goals he set were low, paltry and all-around inadequate for the direness of the situation. Whether or not these rising countries are truly more united than us, or are just superficially so—united by a common “enemy” or competitor—will remain to be seen, but, if we are going to remain united, we need something much higher and loftier than high-speed rail and nationwide wireless internet access to reinvigorate our floundering and disunited nation.
Can America create a new national Culture out of the vast range of diversity and interests that are now contained within in it; is it even still possible to satisfy this diverse of a People at the Federal level, or must our government shrink to meet the needs of an increasingly balkanized Nation?
“There is no power on earth that can prevent the growing equality of conditions from bringing the human spirit toward searching for the useful and from disposing each citizen from shrinking within himself. One must therefore expect that individual interest will become more than ever the principal if not the unique motive of men’s actions…If in becoming equal, citizens remained ignorant and coarse, it is difficult to foresee what stupid excess their selfishness could be brought to…Enlighten them, therefore, at any price; for the century of blind devotions and instinctive virtues is already fleeing far from us, and I see the time approaching when freedom, public peace, and social order itself will not be able to do with out enlightenment.”
-Tocqueville: Democracy in America, vol. II, 1840
After the Enlightenment, Man had been stripped bare and all the loyalties that used to direct his interest had been rationalized and no longer simply compelled belief. Country, family, religion: everything had been robbed of its mystical force and all that was left was the naked Self. In the State of Nature, it was found that Man’s two most basic motivating instincts are Self-Preservation and Self-Interest and, despite all the exhortations of Moralists and Priests over the last two millennia against them, these two dirty little Passions in the end it seemed trumped all the others. An experiment was began that attempted to substitute for unrealistic Virtue a new doctrine known as Enlightened Self-Interest, or, as Tocqueville put it, Self-Interest Well Understood. The Enlighteners lowered the bar of expectations because it was thought that since it does not appear possible to make Man good, maybe we can at least make him less bad.
This idea is most simply summed up by Adam Smith’s (author of The Wealth of Nations, the Capitalistic handbook) famous dictum: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own self-interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages.” It was an attempt to build a Society on a more “natural” foundation-—based on how Men actually act, instead of how they ought to act. It was a simple appeal to Men’s Reason that stated: “I will respect your Right to do and think whatever you want, as long as you can do the same for me.”
Enlightened Self-Interest, as opposed to Self-Interest simply, is a nuanced distinction. It requires a new type of education—it is not necessarily something "natural"—and, if not properly cultivated, it will be consumed by greed and Self-indulgence. As Tocqueville points out in the passage quoted above, this new type of Society is built on the precipice of a very slippery slope, and if Enlightened Self-Interest ever degenerates into pure Self-Interest, the entire schema will fall apart. If everyone begins acting only according to their own myopic Self-Interest, then we are right back to the Hobbesian “War of All Against All”—the avoidance of which was supposedly the whole reason Man contracted into Societies in the first place.
Rousseau however, did not believe that Man could ever exercise such a thing as “Enlightened” Self-Interest, and that the Bourgeois—his name for the new type of Man created by these ideas—was a despicable being caught between two respectable extremes: Natural, Self-sufficient Man in the State of Nature; and the De-natured, Moral Citizen of the ancient republics of Greece and Rome. The Bourgeois simply fakes public benevolence in order to further his own selfish, private ends. Man’s passion for himself can never rationally be overcome.
According to Rousseau, Reason would always lead the Enlightened Man to the conclusion that, “it is useless for me to try to reconcile my interests with that of others; everything you tell me about the advantages of the social law would be excellent if, whilst I was scrupulously observing it toward others, I could ensure that they would all observe it towards me. But what assurance can you give me on this?…Either you must give me guarantees against any unjust undertaking, or you must not expect me to abstain from similar actions in my turn.” His proof of this claim is that this is “precisely how any sovereign society reasons when it is accountable for its conduct to no one but itself.”
But where does that leave us today, in this world that has now become radically rationalized and radically individualized? Rousseau asks, “where is the man who can separate himself from himself?” But we can never return to that fantastic (as in fantasy, as well as fabulous) golden age that immediately followed the State of Nature, where Man’s needs were few and his desires simple; nor to the peace of Amour de Soi and complete Self-sufficiency and independence. We are inescapably destined for the chains of “Civil” Society and the burdens of inter-dependence; for the daily interactions and the “Hell,” according to Sartre, “[that] is other people.”
Tocqueville was a big fan of Rousseau but knew that what he prescribed was limited and most likely unrealistic. Rousseau knew this as well—at least the limited part—and explained that what he was advocating could only work in very small, homogeneous communities, with strict moral codes and complete abandonment of the Individual Will to the General. In Democracy in America, Tocqueville tried to apply the insights of Rousseau to the exceptional situation (now known as American Exceptionalism) that had resulted in America and give us some advice as to how to combat the problems of Self-Interest and Radical Individualism that could be a resultant of our system.
What kind of education or ”enlightenment” can adequately combat these forces and attenuate the purely selfish potentialities inherent in Human Nature? Or conversely, if you don’t even believe there is such a thing as Human Nature (which would make education even more important), what needs to be taught in order to direct the Individual towards caring about the Common Good? In Rousseau’s book on education, the Emile, he very carefully goes through, step by step, how he would go about shaping the desires of an Individual from infancy through adulthood in order to reconcile him to Society and attenuate his purely selfish desires—which he saw as innate. He never does this, however, through appealing directly to the child’s Reason. Instead, he plays upon the desires of the child and very carefully, and unbeknownst to the child, leads him to the conclusions and the lessons that Rousseau wishes to instill in him.
Although the Emile is a work of fiction, Rousseau very convincingly shows how it would be possible to achieve this necessary goal, but, in the real world, we could never have an educational system as thorough as the one proposed by Rousseau, nor enough educators as patient and clever as the one portrayed in this novel. I believe however that it is possible to do a better job than we are now and that what we are currently teaching to children exacerbates the problem as opposed to alleviating it. Yes of course creativity and self-esteem should be encouraged in kids, but above all what needs to be instilled in them is a sense of their responsibilities and duties to others. As I have stated previously, kids don’t need to be taught to be more concerned with themselves; they naturally will be so either by Nature—Self-preservation/Self-interest—or by Nurture—they are already the center of the world that everything in their life revolves around.
What we need is a new attempt at cultivating an Enlightened Self-Interest that can make Man realize his responsibilities and duties, while appealing to his love of Self to achieve it. History has so far revealed Liberal Democracy to be the best and most stable of the alternatives that Modern Political Philosophy has come up with, but, as stated earlier, this schema is always poised at the precipice of a slippery slope. Today it is in our own Self-Interest to stand up for our-Selves and make a lot of changes to our System, but I don’t see how we can do that if we no longer even believe in the goodness of having a "System." The world currently contains 6.6 billion people and is growing daily. We are therefore inextricably bound to live within the confines of Society, so how should we go about ordering it? Is a Rousseauean complete Self-abnegation necessary, or can Man be taught to be reasonable enough to rationally realize the extent of his own Self-Interest and be capable of putting Self-imposed chains upon his desires?
“Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains on their own appetites…Society cannot exist unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more there is without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their own fetters.”—Edmund Burke
"You now have to decide what 'image' you want for your brand. Image means personality. Products, like people, have personalities, and they can make or break them in the market place."
—David Ogilvy "The Father of Advertising"
We—average, Middle Class Americans—now live in an age of what has been dubbed the “Pretty Good Problem.” When we enter the Consumer Marketplace, we now find a vast equalization in intrinsic quality of the products that we encounter there—apart from increasingly minute differences in basic functionality—which makes it more and more frustrating to choose which Company actually offers us the most for our money and makes it more and more difficult for any one product to stand out. Unless money is no object, then the range of different features a car, a stove, a razor, a cell phone, etc can really have are limited to few truly unique aspects, and therefore, as a consumer of these products, it has become increasingly hard to rationally choose which product will allow you to maximize your purchasing power.
For the first half of the 20th Century, the Consumer used to navigate a world of shoddy, unsafe products, but now, thanks to a range of Consumer Watchdog Groups and the maturation of Industrial Capitalism, this no longer seems to be a concern. And this, of course, is a very good thing as far as health and safety and value and “bang for your buck” is concerned, but it has created a two-fold problem: 1) as a Consumer, it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate the dizzying array of almost meaningless options; and 2) as a Company, it becomes harder and harder to differentiate oneself from the competition. Most products become invisible, thus necessitating a different type of approach to Marketing—one that no longer dabbles in necessary Innovation but, instead, in Novelty; that can engage people in a way that transcends the now meaningless Materialism and can capture their allegiance on a deeper, emotional level.
This act is called Branding. It is a way to add a distinct, unique value to a product, but it is a value that has no tangible quality to it. It is an Idea that is being sold that seeks to differentiate itself, not by what concrete benefits it confers to Consumers, but, instead, by how it makes Consumers feel about a product and about them-Selves. When all products become relatively the same, there is little to no actual value that can be added to a product, so, by necessity, Marketing has been forced to become more and more ambitious and elaborate in its approach to engaging Consumers.
Companies now sell Life-styles: outward expressions of inner commitments. They sell products that help us to express our-Selves and differentiate our Self from the Others. If a Brand can position their Self—see Corporate Personhood—in the minds of Consumers as expressing certain Values and these Values can be tailored to coincide with the same ones that the Consumer values, then you can create Customer Loyalty. But these Values have to be very carefully shaped, so as to create a consistent Story or Image that people can easily recognize and relate to. And these companies now spend hundreds of millions of dollars on Consumer Research, even to the point of hiring cognitive scientists to discover how their Brand Message will affect Consumers on the unconscious level of the brain.
And its not like most Consumers don’t know this or are unaware that Marketing is complete BS, it’s just that Marketing has become so omnipresent, we have given up on trying to fight it and now—embrace it. We use this knowledge to create our own Personal Brands—a culmination of our Values that are expressed through our Life-styles—that allow us to consciously shape our Image and the way Others “position” us in their minds. It makes us feel like we are in control and have power over our identities and the Free Will to create our-Selves however we see fit. We now market our-Selves through our Facebooks and Myspaces, on our college and job applications, and on dating and hook-up websites. We have become intimately familiar with the language of Branding and far from having any moral repugnance to it, we use it to our advantage every opportunity that we get. ( See the The 48 Laws of Power) We try to create clear and consistent Brand Messages that express who we are and want we want because “knowing what makes you unique and being able to communicate that in sound bites is vital.”
In 1831, an Aristocratic Frenchmen named Alexis de Tocqueville was sent by the French government to the United States to study the prison system of our young “enlightened” Republic. His exploration lasted for two years, during which time he took some notes for a project of his own as well and in 1835 and in 1840 published a two volume series of an outsider’s look at our emerging nation, called Democracy in America. It was an in depth look—about 700 pages worth—at our Political and Social institutions that celebrated and, at the same time, warned against certain trends that he saw endemic to the American Experience. Despite his well-to-do upbringing, he ultimately sided with the “Democratic Revolution” he saw as inevitably sweeping over the Western World, not just because he saw it as inevitable, but because he knew that it was the most Just. Overall, he was most hopeful for our nation and supported this, as yet, unprecedented experiment in human governance.
One of his main concerns, however, was the loss of a certain type of Aristocratic Sentiment that could disappear in the midst of Radical Equality and Material Status-Seeking. It wasn’t the Aristocratic “Class” that he feared losing, but the taste for “Greatness” that accompanied it and helped to train and refine the aims and goals of the Citizenry. Thomas Jefferson seemed to hold this same view when he expressed that, “there is a natural aristocracy among men. The grounds of this are virtue and talents.” For a sample of some of Tocqueville’s fears, one need look no further then the titles of a few of his chapters: Why One Finds so Many Ambitious Men in the United States and so Few Great Ambitions; On the Industry of Place-Hunting in Certain Democratic Nations; How the Excessive Love of Well-Being Can Be Harmful to Well-Being.
He predicted that what may result from these new Political and Social Institutions was the “Pretty Good Problem,” only not just with Products but, even worse, with Personality. He called it a “Middling Mediocrity”—”There are no Americans who do not show that they are devoured by the desire to rise, but one sees almost none of them who appear to nourish vast hopes or to aim very high. All want constantly to acquire goods, reputation, power; few envision all these things on a grand scale…They [goods, reputation, power] compel the soul to employ all its strength in doing mediocre things—which cannot fail soon to limit its view and circumscribe its power. They could be much poorer and still be greater.”
He also asserted that all Americans were Cartesians—although none of them had ever read, the philosopher, Descartes. By this, he meant that Americans were all Rationalists—they all relied on the power of their own mind to judge for themselves what was right and wrong, hence America’s strong disdain for “Elites” across the Political Spectrum that persists to this day. Americans never read Descartes, or philosophy in general, because they are too pre-occupied with making money; they are too “restive”—always distracted by some mad pursuit to better their life, but only on the Material level. Another consequence he saw of this now Socially accepted Individual Reason is a distaste for inherited wisdom or tradition/convention. But, the only problem is that since everyone is so distracted by the pursuit of money, they do not have the time or education to really think about the issues and decide for themselves and in the end just end up following Public Opinion. And this would eventually substantiate itself as a monotony of thought and become what he called “The Tyranny of the Majority.”
It seems that “when people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other” because that is how, essentially, Democracy works: competing Ideas enter the Marketplace and the ones that are chosen by the Majority become the ruling Ideology. Rousseau saw this in his own time as well when he noted that the same Men who were Liberals in his day, 100 years before hand would have been Absolutists. It wasn’t so much that they had become “enlightened,” but rather that they were just Conformists. It is not even necessary in Democratic Society to coerce or force people to accept Public Opinion; by its very nature, it breaks the inner Will to resist because there is no alternative source of non-conforming principles and no sense of Individual superior right when everyone is viewed as Equal.
And now, just as we have the “Pretty Good Problem” with our Consumer Products, we seem to be having the same problem with our Selves, and the response to the problem has been about the same—we paint over a seemingly bland uniformity with Personal Life-style Brands. But, just as a Corporation’s Brand Image is a facade to mask the lack of Individual distinction, so too are the carefully crafted Images we create to mask the Middling Mediocrity that has taken over our citizenry. There are now countless books and websites and blogs to help you decide “what type of Personal Brand you would like to develop” that can aid us in our attempt to “acquire goods, reputation, [and] power” but, just as Tocqueville pointed out in his day, we “are [all still] devoured by the desire to rise, but one sees almost none of [us] who appear to nourish vast hopes or to aim very high.”
The whole goal of the Sixties attack on American Bourgeois Society was to try and move beyond the overly Rational, Materialistic, “One-Dimensional” conformity that they saw inherent to our system since its founding, which became solidified in Eisenhower’s stultifying, Pleasantville Fifties. The means of this revolution was through a negation of the past, which to them was inherently flawed, replaced by the free play of Creativity that would create the utopian future of brotherly love and diversity (I know it was more complicated than that, but I’m just distilling it down to what I see as its essence). But the only problem is that they didn’t do their homework—and why would they if they saw the past as completely flawed—and didn’t realize that they were playing with fire. Once one begins a free-fall into the Abyss, there’s no guarantee that there will ever be a ground upon which to land.
There is now no legitimate reason to resist Public Opinion and no reason not to simply pursue Material wealth and fame—through our greatly watered down “Will to Power.” All the things Tocqueville tried to warn us about have come to fruition, and far from creating the utopia that the Radicals hoped for, we have descended farther down into the circles of Hell from which they were trying to extricate us. We now must attempt to deliberately create our-Selves in near isolation, apart from Tradition, Community, Society, History or even Nature and can find no greater goal than childish Self-Satisfaction and fleeting Material fulfillment that so many great Philosophers warned us against.
And this, of course, plays right into the hands of the Marketers that even the most radical of us fails to resist. Instead of our Individualities being informed by the greatest Ideas that have been thought and written down for the benefit of posterity, we simply go to the Mall and purchase our identities from the limitless buffet of Consumer Goods and Services that America is so well known for. But being an Individual is more than just make-up and clothing, piercings, tattoos and Brand Logos; it is an inner conviction in one’s own beliefs which must be supplemented by tradition, teaching, and—God forbid—imitation or else one will inevitably become a slave to Public Opinion—which is necessarily formed around the lowest common denominator. This teaching should come from our parents and grandparents; from people in our neighborhoods and communities; from our primary-schools and universities; from high culture and from high-quality pop culture. And above all, it must come with rules and duties, not just smiley faces and boundless—thus groundless—freedom.
Just as Branding for a product is simply superficial cover-up for a lack of any real differentiating quality, so too is our Personal Branding. We now exist in a vacuum. We are discontent with the present, but lack the awareness of any real Alternative to it. The old writers may not have been perfect, but right now we could use a diversity of opinions more than ever. We have lost our sense of perspective, and, in this post-Nietzschean world, we no longer have the comforting thought that history is naturally progressing to some sort of rational "end." The future now looks bleak and indefinite. It is still ours to "create" but, without some sort of guiding principles, I can promise you that it will look no better than the past that we all, apparently, have such contempt for.
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
