Rather than an apocalyptic End of Democracy, the present moment seems rather to present the potential for an expansive rethinking of the nature of our involvement in the world, both individually and collectively.xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

To begin, two quotes from Hannah Arendt: the first from her book The Human Condition; the second from the collection of her shorter works published as Between Past and Future:

A hundred years after Marx we know the fallacy of [his] reasoning; the spare time of the [laborer] is never spent in anything but consumption, and the more time left to him, the greedier and more craving his appetites. That these appetites become more sophisticated, so that consumption is no longer restricted to the necessities but, on the contrary, mainly concentrates on the superfluities of life, does not change the character of this society, but harbors the grave danger that eventually no object of the world will be safe from consumption and annihilation through consumption¹.

There are a great many authors of the past who have survived centuries of oblivion and neglect, but it is still an open question whether they will be able to survive an entertaining version of what they have to say².

Where we are at: a suffocating context of labor, consumption, and 'democracy'

It's not clear today where all of the agitating and concern around 'democracy' comes from, really. A cursory look at the world should disabuse anyone from thinking a way out of the current context can ever occur primarily on the basis of the democratic will of the people. More than anything today, proponents of 'democracy' seem to cling to the last vestiges of a viable form of political power for the educated in the context of a radically alienated, fragmented and ignorant world. What kind of inspiration are we supposed to believe this will be, what kind of leaders should we expect will rise up in response to the pronouncements of those who know, and to what end could we possibly hope such people might aspire to lead us? We live today in a seemingly bottomless consumer culture where what arises in one minute is gone the next; where, what arises catalyzes a sense of belonging, but a belonging that is nothing more than that of the clique. How much further can time be divided-up when we are already at the point of political 'movements' produced from 20-second TikTok videos, Facebook posts and short-form tweets? This is the reality of 'democracy' today, and it is terrifying.

Not terrifying only because of its absolute lack of knowledge, lack of insight, lack of depth, lack of concern with anything other than self-validation; but terrifying because of what might happen if such a form of 'democracy' were to actually take full control over all institutions of authority and political structures, the legacy of which—their form—still, fortunately, persists. The truth, though, is that is precisely what is happening today as a globalized liberal clique conspires to over-turn the entire structure of society in its revolt. The merits of this might be worth serious consideration, and working-alongside, and attempting to educate or inform or guide, if it weren't already clear where this is heading and for whose benefit such 'democracy' functions and for what purpose. And that is: total and complete incorporation of every human being into a provisional existence at the bare limit of thought and action, requiring from each of us nothing more than their labor to support the revolutionary crusade of this extractive, autonomous system across the whole of the earth's populations.

It is in this way that Marxism, as an historical consciousness that seeks to compel the hand of historical determinism, now becomes the actual function of this revolutionary liberation movement to 'save the planet' and every other random thing that can be conjured up to agitate this swarm into emotional-based mobilization--what now constitutes 'action': getting a placard, standing somewhere with your phone and protesting, or cheering at a pep-rally. That is, if the cause still lies within 20-miles of the realm of reason; otherwise, expect an insane, psychotic lashing out, the image of which is totally unpredictable because its logic of performance, like that of the homeless in liberal society, is defined solely from within. Who knows what it might take for one to create a sense of having done something on that day: could be anything. Likewise for such masses: who knows, maybe they'll burn, maybe they will sit like Buddha and be rolled by the tanks of the war they instigated in their last tweet, or maybe they'll cry and weep the loss of this that or the other thing, being exemplars of victimhood of some or other oppressive regime that, not totally unjustifiably, will then subject them to precisely the thing they complain about so as to produce its own form of perverted political power and authority. One thing you can be sure about though: nothing constructive, redeeming, edifying, or spiritually sanctifying can ever come from out of a social assemblage such as this. There may be a few thoughtful leaders who find momentary solace in such crowds, but their belonging will soon be displaced or discarded for whatever pings up onto someone's phone and then goes viral, agitating the next brainless wave, probably then, against them and their stupid short-sightedness.

At this point, one should be able to see Kant's concept of democracy fully today: it is despotic³. Either it fortuitously works to your advantage by some stroke of luck, or you are crushed under the weight of its movement; or just left on your own, with absolutely no hope for redress as the vaunted political ideal crusades off into a new direction, for a few hours. In the same vein, all such focus on 'labor' and The Worker is likewise rendered in a new light: for what is the purpose of labor anymore but to provide the subsistence to participate in this? Subsistence that consumes food in the precise same way as it consumes politics. Subsistence becomes the totality of all things in the consumer society in which we today are living: it is the only remaining 'meaning' of life. Not through any appreciation of things themselves, but solely in the shared appearance of consuming them together, contemporaneously, before moving on; or, in the last remaining exercise of control, by wasting.

What has become of authority?

The situation our 'democracy' describes has been made possible by the total corrosion of authority. It is the hallmark of the present that any representation of authority becomes itself the impetus for a political movement to undermine it. It is as if we have begun to live in a simulacrum of appearances, where what appears is nothing more than an extraneous persistence within which something more relevant occurs. There is a near complete and total divorce between the world and that upon which attention is now focused. It is in this mode of existing that the world itself presents itself as an imposition.

It is an imposition in a broad sense, and totally; but it is also an imposition in every specific detail as well, each of which is met with critique of some kind or another. Not any kind of deep, reasoned, informed historical critique, but the same precise critique over and over, repeated endlessly with different words. Based in the clique belonging of 'democracy', the clique knows precisely what pleases its members when it comes to challenging authority: invention, pretense, masquerading in defiance. The more successful the performance, the less constrained by any kind of reality it is and the more subsumed within its simmering potential it becomes. It is blind and seeks blindness as a testament of its power. Were it to know what it was doing, where it was going, for what and why, it would need to admit defeat. And to the extent it hasn't admitted defeat, it still believes that it will eventually manage to erase the existing world and make itself the god within which a new world will—and this is the kicker—somehow, miraculously be all that is desired and provide all that is necessary.

Refusal to admit any authority means a turning-away from the world in the mode of resignation; it means an inability to work-together in structured ways. In some sense this could be viewed as the progressive degeneration of the liberal economy itself. To the extent that the liberal economy works, it supports individualized pretenses to authority because the support for one's own career is never brought into direct confrontation with the 'preferences' that define the choices of others. In a functioning liberal economy, politics is transformed into a generalized alienation that becomes of form of autonomy in which no decisions are ever actually made, rather they are refused and disavowed. Making a decision implies a recognition of a shared, objective world; inability to make decisions, on the other hand, betrays a profound lack of such a shared world. Which may be why, in the context of a declining liberal economy, the direction decisions point to can only be to one's inner world and the potential such decisions have for producing the expanse of shared sociability and tyranny of the clique.

Towards a new act of foundation based on remembrance of past political experience

For to live in a political realm with neither authority not the concomitant awareness that the source of authority transcends power and those who are in power, means to be confronted anew, without the religious trust in a sacred beginning and without the protection of tradition and therefor self-evident standards of behavior, by the elementary problems of human living-together.⁴

So, we live in a world that has fetishized 'democracy' to the point of an unbounded concept liberated within an ideology that threatens to drive our world into the abyss to satisfy its own belief in itself as the sole source of power to transform our world. And while the threat of global thermonuclear annihilation this way of thinking and acting has now produced may look critically upon a more restrictive concept of the role of democracy in our world⁵, it may be worth considering an alternative interpretation: that what may be dawning at this moment in history might rather be considered as an opportunity to think everything through again.

What we might hope to learn at this moment is not the simple message about the urgency of a turning-away from liberalism towards conservatism, which can only be a second pole in an endless oscillation between two political ideologies, the consequences of which should be clear now. Rather it is of a broader historical process in which religion⁶, tradition, and authority can be once again reconstituted as one evolving whole. The point is no longer about a perspective that attempts to predict the future, of strategizing how one might get from one point to another, by what means, by what words and speech; rather, the point is about judging that which should be part of the present: what aspects of the present are worth maintaining, what lost traditions are worth re-establishing; and in the context of what specific history are such judgments to be made so as to render them meaningful according to this whole. In such a way, we might hope to begin to express, collectively, an intuitive, shared fidelity to the past in the present, a communicative fabric of our being-together in a world, which can displace the lost abandonment to a fragmented world of technological alienation that holds no prospects for redemption.

Authority, in this sense, is an attunement to a continued elaboration of a whole through which an objective reality is constituted. It is about comprehending the contours of a whole in which a palpable sense of respect is shared for an historical process within which we are all implicated in one way or another. It is about learning to appreciate one's limits, and to see oneself in the absolutely unconditioned manner in which they exist together with others. Authority is not an oppressive force that inhibits and suppresses; rather, it is that which renders decisions in terms of a common, shared perspective. One no longer considers themselves as the sole author of their destiny, but rather sees their own destiny as bound-up with that of others on whom they depend. Rather than the toxic corrosion of liberal individualism, a profound respect for one-another's contributions towards the construction of a common world.

On the one hand, the problem of reconstituting authority is a philosophical problem, perhaps best accessed today through Immanuel Kant⁷. What we have lost now is an essential comprehension of contingency, of the limits of rationality, of a breakdown in faith in the world resulting from an inability to see the undeniable perspective from within which an absolutely unknowable manifests itself. Submission to this unknowability is itself recognition of an absolute authority. This is not to say that the absolute authority is determined as a specifically knowable God or entity; rather it is to say that the absolute limit of contingency, the absolute unconditioned nature of existence itself is that which delimits the sphere of human pretension and which limits human-being's own authority to determine a world. In this sense, the world human-beings create can only ever be provisional. And it is the ability to continue to act despite this provisionality that human-being expresses its belief in the fact that what he does create is a product of the divine and unknowable of which he himself is only a small part. Founding such a provisional world, and remaining committed to it, is itself a religious act: it requires an always present relationship to the original unknowable ground of that first act that expresses itself over and over again as the foundation is expanded. And since we no longer live in a world defined by the dogma of the Church, and are attempting to once again re-establish one that relies neither on the dogma of the State, it is crucial today for the salvation of a Western secular world that we once again are able to come to terms with this mode of what one might call a civic, secular religiousness⁸.

On the other hand, however, such a mode of existing can be reached and described in countless superficial ways. One world that has already been founded on such an experience and that itself belies such a willingness to erect a provisional world in the face of the absolute unconditioned nature of existence is that of our own nation, these United States of America. Never again can it be imagined that the conditions under which a group of ships anchored off the coast of a vast, uncharted and unknown continent in the 17th-century be reproduced. Never again will man once again encounter such unconditioned freedom for his action and, having been so confronted, forged the compacts necessary for delimiting his action in such a way that it would consider—absolutely—that to which was owed each man, and that to which no man could do without the other. This now nearly lost, obscure experience and political reality was the context from within which an entire political order and constitution was founded that held both freedom and absolutely necessary, contingent co-dependency as its most fundamental and sacred principles⁹. Perhaps we will once again find reason to believe in this project in the full sense of what it means, to not see it as politically partisan and, in so doing, once again establish the conditions for action in our present atrophied and declining world that not only holds out hope for the redemption of America, but also sees America once again become a conspicuous example to the world and the necessary catalyst for peace and prosperity that it fundamentally should be. Today, this burden falls largely on our leaders who must summon the conviction that in 'democracy' alone lies no salvation, but only in a return of authentically unconditioned authority in freedom.

Postscript

The return of authority, respect for tradition, united in a form of religiousness is a significant issue the resolution of which requires a certain political experience to be pervasively shared. It is hard to imagine, though, even if one can see the contours of the problem properly, that there will be any resolution to it that occurs through either education or through a newfound commitment of our leaders to set an example. Rather, what seems most likely is that America will need to experience once again the existential urgency to survive from out of which it can once again recognize its own inter-dependency amongst citizens themselves, individually, and of our nation, collectively, with other nations of the world. For now, then, it seems we are marooned between Top Gun: Maverick and Tar.

Footnotes