Consensus, non-sensus . . . we can all disagree in this pseudo-democratic nation managed by power elites bent on keeping the masses semi-educated and semi-literate–but consensus in the end is the mandate. To disagree with mandated consensus is to become excommunicate and anathema, socially. If the President were Pope, I’d be excommunicate, I would have long ago become anathema. But the dogma of all Americans acting Americanly has itself reached a reinforcing consensus; after we disagree in any verbal exchange, itself only another ping ping match of monologues, we must come to some point where we all agree that everyone is partly right and partly wrong. There is no real democratic dialogue in America? Does this point to the, possibility that there is a fake democratic dialogue in America, one that masquerades as the truth of democracy in action? Of course it does. How do you not see that it does; I can see clearly that it does–do you really need me to reiterate this? Singular vision; no one really sees for everyone, for anyone, what we see–what I see I have to make clear for you to see.I can only make clear for you what I see by words, with words, through words, what fore-position is necessary for these words to have their appropriate effect?
If we had dialogue, real trenchant democratic dialogue, we would not need to scramble for consensus after extending our disagreements into tangentially drawn monologues, themselves more reminiscent of our collective psychosis in matters of reality, what is real (itself popularly drawn into another consensus managed by the media, themselves controlled by sponsors selling products we most likely do not need); yes, our sense of reality is more so this than anything resembling a healthy expression of democracy at work in a world where people see for themselves and discern for themselves more closely aligned with a Self managed by a literate thinking adult rather than an undereducated protracted adolescent who remains a semi-literate receiver of media packaged idea-bites until the day he dies. But then, democracy is rule, or law, by the people; yet, all we have in America, as far as the media or the government are concerned, is a Public–and this Public is not the People as in Jefferson’s We the People, but a people in service of the State. The people are managed as a public and not as a people because the latter are independent of the State, the former are always in the service of the State, as I have said elsewhere within this Pages section, in other essays. This has become one of my most ardent politically scientific motifs. How do any of us maintain enough focus to see clearly what we think we see clearly by what we apprehend, by what we hear, what we think, what we read, what we have been told, put in form to understand–you do remember that information is all about IN formation?
What we have instead of democracy is a Public interest, a Public good, always managed in its images by the media, whether it is broadcast, print or social; whether by Hollywood or by Government PR, or by Madison Avenue–yes, Mad Men, all. It is absurd; it is grotesque–what is? This demand for consensus we hold as one of the foremost dogmas of our social interaction, our version of the democratic process. How we must all reach consensus in the end of any discussion has been paraded before us as the foremost basic tenet of democratic action–more so, as democratic being. There is not a thread of coalition drawn up in the paradigms of these consenses, though; that would at least have some residue of democracy working.
This idea of consensus that has been permitted to take root in our mainstream idea of Democratic being has nothing to do with and mostly opposes democracy, again, rule by the People and not the State serving Public. There are appropriate places when the People are to perform services for the State, but that is only for a State that still imagines itself in service of the People, which our State is not, and has not thought itself responsible for, since Kennedy demanded that we ask not what our country can do for us, but what we can do for our country, a very sophisticated way of saying the State was no going to do anything for us, but that we had to do for the State and ourselves while the State increased its service of and for the monied and power elites.
Democratic action always benefits from more democracy; the only cure for the ills of democracy is not fascist policies or other brands of totalitarianism or dictatorship–and these latter two can be joined with capitalism. The idea that Capitalism cannot be totalitarian is a mistake. The only cure for the ills of democracy is more democracy, but the democracy practiced must maintain a loyalty to the People, Jefferson’s We the People, not We the Public. The Romans, believe it or not, understood this implicitly: the two words Populus (the people) and Publius (the public) were not synonyms in Roman Political Science.
The kind of consensus that societal norms demand is thus the kind of thinking and acting one finds in totalitarian societies. Do not imagine that it has not already happened here, this kind of totalizing that totalitarian governments enforce. We used to say that when fascism comes to America it will come as Americanism–the real horror is that it is not fascism or Nazism or Zionism or Bolshevism, but America’s brand of totalitarian rule, Americanism, a totalizing will to turn the People into a State serving, thus a Power serving and thus Money serving Public fed by crumbs from their tables. Without it being any of the former mentioned four isms, Americanism will be a new totalitarianism.
Totalitarianism is totalitarianism (truth revealed in tautology). I am not trying to be facetious, no more than a Buddhist is when he says good is good, bad is bad and both exist . . . because they do and there is no reductionism in this in the way we mean to make pejorative any attempt to streamline our focus on what the nature of political things are. America is the new Totalitarian Bourgeois Capitalist Super State in a world that once had the Soviet Union as its ironic counterbalance. I still do not get why so many people who are being reamed by power and money recoil when you say that the only thing the Power elite will understand is the guillotine, is murdering their families–I just do not get why so many people are willing to trade decency, morality, compassion and kindness and hope and happiness for complacency and peace. At what price peace, I ask again, friend Thomas. The pain we endure . . . do you need to be decent to the Devil to prove you are a good person? Why shouldn’t the People burn Satan’s legions at the stake?
The Falling Leaf Review 