The Passing of Democracy

 

PASSING THOUGHTS

1

We the people is never realizable, never totalizable as we. We the People has become a non-totalizable enumeration in our politically collective consciousness. This is an error that needs correction. Politically, this we the people of ours has been managed by an oligarchy of economic and power elites as we have today in America, administered by those who call themselves Conservatives and others who name themselves Liberal, those who are known to be Democrats and the rest who we hear speaking Republican idiocies daily. We are today a land of the rich and powerful, but soon becoming a government exclusively of the rich and powerful; no democracy for the People, but then war is peace inn our rhetorical strategies, and each of us aspires to be everyone’s big brother in a naieve masquerade of the kinder, gentler nation. There is, though, another way to understand Jefferson’s We the People. This understanding requires a minor stretch in our categorical constructs, our observational provenances, our own attention to or deference to the logic of space and size.

I am We the People. I must be We the People, as you also must be We the People, as she and he too must always be We the People, if in turn the aggregate is to be significant. Yes, you heard me correctly. I am we the people; I am this unique plurality; moreover, I am this because in a re-newed sense of liberty for all, we must insist on that Liberty for each and every one of us.

In the metaphysics of this renewed birth of freedom, respecting fully the ideas that there is a free-will to counterbalance determinism, I am macrocosmic to each and every category of social or economic or political inclusion. Again, yes, I have to be We the People because if I am not We the People, than no one can be We the People, and the People as a political institution in counterbalance of the State loses its valence. We cannot be a totalizeable sum in the workings of democracy because the enumeration of populations is always on-going, populations ever increasing their numerical value. There must then be proxy relationships with this We.

If we ever came to a place where we could embrace the idea that I am We the People because you too are We the People as he is as she is, we would possess a different understanding of our Liberty and our responsibility, rather than each one of us becoming fractionalized in one to one correspondence between the total number of voters and the political institutions of government and the State–and government is only one part of the State apaaratus. Everyone is we because only then is Democracy respected and fulfilled for individuals, only then is Democracy a power other than that associated with addition and subtraction, that tethered to numerical evaluations of Power.

Each of us is macrocosmic to this we, to the nation, to our freedom–as each one of us is macrocosm to the categories of race, religion, ethnicity, economic status, level of education, gender, sexual orientation, political association, et cetera. But only this, if each and every other I in the world is also macrocosmic in these ways.

The universe has an infinite number of relative centers to the expansion of the universe; in  this way each of us is central and macrocosmic to all Politics. Irony, paradox, conundrum? Of course, but never in rebuttal.

 

2

There are millions of people now willing to work for less than what anyone in such a country as ours should work for–what does this have to do with what I am herein asserting for myself and my own political reality which is contingent to and corrective with any notion of what We the People could mean in a democracy such as yours, mine, ours; or for any democracy that comes into being. We the people is something tangible in me, but not in the minds of those who administer our livelihoods or our freedoms. We remain for the Elites only a numerical reference, every one disjointed, reduced in his or her relationships with State, with race, with ethnicity, et cetera. Every category in our social and political existence is given rhetorical supremacy over us in every argument used to support institutions over the People.

We are fast becoming a democracy of silence, without any of the attributes of Sartre’s infamous “Republic . . .” .  We’re not educated enough to understand the thesis of Sartre in “The Republic of Silence,” whereby he asserted that the French were never freer than under the Nazis occupation. Ridiculous, paradoxical, a conundrum for the ages. What do we have in our thesaurus that could help us? But the freedom he was referring to came in the guise not exactly in our American brand of choice, but in the more tactile manner of existential choosing, but then for the Existentialist, choosing is crux, not choice. We have a multiplication of choices of chicken dishes at the Chinese take-out restaurant, and we have adopted this theme in replication over and over in minute variegation as our freedom, or where our freedom resides, or what precisely our freedom is. But these multiplied choices have the side effect of paralyzing our choosing. 

3

We have been controlled by our enculturation to our contemporary notions of freedom, themselves peculiar to America, and ironically more manipulative of the individual in the expression of his Self, and less supportive in the actualization of his freedom. Going to hell in a handcart is our way of being free; hedonism being the foremost manifestation of our freedom; a reactionary ascetism in response our only alternative; both of them having been no more than exercises in futility.

We are less free than we have ever been, just at the time we assert infinite possibility for all of us, socially, economically, politically–and yet, the rich are richer, the monied more monied, the powerful more powerful and the influential more influential through a media deference to pseudo-experts as experts; in turn, each of us is more greatly suppressed in his individuality, more disjointed in her political responsibility, every one of us becoming more fully a state serving member of a Public set to displace the power and weight (density) of the People. The People gain density by the macorcosmic status each one of us has in the numerical weight we bear. If we were only fractured and separate in an over-simplified individuality, we become no more than political confetti.

Every you and I that happens to be interactive in the arena of freedom has found that that arena has no longer the spectators it once had, but remains a demonstrably prohibitive freedom to perform.  

Bureaucrats and politicians recite the hymns of state by heart, no matter how many of them rationalize to the contrary just what is happening to We the People. Too many of them enact policies that put our civil liberties in jeopardy of being taken away by the state; individualism, to the contrary, has only increased its ismistic referencing in our rhetorical strategies concerning the package of individuality over the product of individuality, and all to the detriment of the People as an eternal force to counterbalance State.  Senator Schumer, for example, is an enemy of We the People, a snake in the political garden for the satans of power and money he actually serves. He is a servant to the idea that we are a Public that must, in its turn, serve the State, all the while masquerading as a representative of the People who must make the tough compromises. He is no different than the other members of the Democratic Party who abandoned their once commitment to liberalism for the more lucrative Wall Street Whoredom they have been pimping to the Public since Clinton. But let us not imagine that Trump is an answer. Only the most horribly dis-informed, marginalized and manipulated could imagine that.

Individuality has become an abstraction on an abstraction; thus the People have become one kind of public or another depending on what the social context demands.  How can I or anyone hope to understand what individuality means when true political and social individuality is so countermanded by one pluralism after another, one determinism in assault against any or all notions of free-will, an assault backing up these pluralisms. A better understanding of the limits of free-will and determinism, how one affects the other, or how free-will stands as counterweight, counterpoint, to determinism, often times in spite of determinism.

4

Free-will (which is the power to act separately from the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one’s own discretion) versus Determinism (which is a doctrine that asserts all events, including human action, are ultimately determined by causes external to the will) remains one of the most persistently relevant philosophical questions for us to consider. We must wonder about it ontologically, but especially epistemologically as well as ethically.  A greater articulation of both of these concepts would go a long way in helping us to manage our freedom, but we fear anyone who shows an expertise in language beyond what Hollywood or Publishing can package for the purposes of making it popular.

Popularity might not be the worst of it, but popularity is really the packaging of what is made popular through the media by publicity–there is no popularity except media sponsored publicity about what is popular. This is a horribly deterministic imposition on what could be an expression of free-will, coming closer, thus, to what is at the heart of We the People . . . yes, in the horribly deterministic mind that frames too much of our discourse, freedom wanes because we have lost faith in Free-will.

I do remember that I am We the People, as you must also remember, for Freedom to survive, that you are We the People, that each of is, but not to the detriment or exclusion of this validity for all. There areas infinite number of relative centers to our freedom, in our democracy. This is how the individual remains free, exists as a respected member of the Demos.

Free-will versus Determinism is a struggle every individual is forced to engage. No one is exempt; you have to choose simply because you cannot avoid choosing. Not to choose is also choosing, a passive choosing that leaves you open to repercussions and consequences you could not have suspected in the whatever it was you did that you imagined was passing for thinking