There will always be an untotalizable sum in the irreducible individual human being. Every person is a sum greater than his parts, a sum greater than the numerically advantaged institutions that often bear their weight metaphysically on him, that put him at a great disadvantage when this individuality is not seized and acted on, when this macrocosmic individuality is not respected. Institutions are at an advantage over individuals in numbers counted or in size measured. But with this metaphysically superior macrocosmic relationship that the individual person has, that he then can add to the weight and density of the people, the weight of the state can be displaced, set aside, not made to bear its crushing collapse on a person or the people (the latter when made to abdicate this special relationship they have with the state for another state supporting relationship the people have as the public). Whenever freedom is bureaucratically administered, arithmetically managed, it becomes an ever elusive kind of freedom, one that exists in name only.
Freedom cannot be summed or summarized; no it cannot. Freedom is non-totalizable. There is no arithmetic for accurate measuring; there is no calculus even for its quantification. In this way freedom remains apart from bureaucratic decisions; no bureaucracy anywhere in the world, inside any system of politics, can manage freedom and democracy in any way that maintains the highest ideals for freedom and democracy. Freedom is something only realizable in a metaphysics of individuality honored and respected above any collectivism.
Here in our contemporary America, though, individuality has become divisible, at least in our minds made to think about freedom and democracy. When American bureaucrats are made to manage the affairs of our freedom, democracy begins to be dismantled and freedom is easily fragmented for everybody.
In this here America of the State and by the State and for the State so help it Mammon to serve the Power and Monied elite, there is no longer any sense that I am we, or that the individual–the simple, separate person–is macrocosm to the microcosms of the people and certainly the public; macrocosm to the microcosms of religion, of politics, of definitely the state and its agents in the government. Yes, I am not only we but macrocosmic to all relationships politically and morally establishedd. All institutions are microcosms in comparison with me, with you, with another, this or that other. I am we firstly and last;y because you are we and he is we and she is we.
It is precisely because of this macrocosmic relationship to all social institutions that everyone has solely and not exclusively that one’s responsibility, politically, increases; that one’s responsibility socially remains high and obligatory. So long as I am we the people, I cannot choose apathy or delinquency in political matters that affect not only myself but others. Because I have this paradoxical metaphysical relationship to social institutions, I must act; I must be engaged, engage, as the existentialists would have said and understood.
The Falling Leaf Review 