I am We the People

I am we the people as you are we the people as she is as he is as anyone must be otherwise we the people becomes empty, hollow, a shell of what it can mean for us in a Democracy.  If I am not we the people then no one is we the people; I am only because everyone else can be too, and is too, each to his own central position in the universe of freedom. If I am not we then no one else is we, then our present notion of a collective we is always and perpetually being totaled. We becomes an unrealizable entity, never quite summed, never quite realized.

Access to our freedoms are easily diverted when the only reference for Jefferson’s We the People is a perpetually totalizing we that never arrives at its sum. Jefferson’s We is found in the macrocosmic relationship that each individual has with the freedoms of the Constitution. They are specifically for him because they are specifically for her and her and you and them, et cetera. The relevance of our freedoms cannot be allowed to exist only for this impossible-to-totalize-we, a we that can never be summed, thus always elusive, always distant, unreachable.  I am we must be the first rhetorical step in announcing our freedom, in being engaged democratically. The four freedoms are meaningless unless they exist for me in a macrocosmic relationship to the government, but also to the people, for it is only when the People are a sum of all the macrocosmic individual persons does the People become the force they should be in a free, democratically ruled society. This is what gives the People its true weight as an institution in society; the People who must be allowed to counterbalance the weight of the State. A People collective, that is, collectivized, are no longer a People, but a Public, and I have said this before about the differences between a People and a Public.

We must not make of them something collective; if we do, then they become subjected to the rhetoric of numbers, the ethics of arithmetic, All discussions of freedom or any dialogue on the ethics of being free will be quantitative and not qualitative. Moreover, we have already arrived at this place. The way we talk about freedom, understand freedom, confuse liberty for license, divide and sub-divide ourselves directly in line with market analyses, we give power elites all they need to become more powerful. In all matters of social ethics, we numerically verify Truth.

If we allow our ethics and law to be managed numerically, then we might as well trade the Constitution for the Ledger Book. Law and social ethics cannot be subjected to the whims of addition and subtraction. This, of course, is a bourgeois bureaucrat’s paradise, but it is a nightmare for any people wanting to live free. And I do dare to suggest that we do not live free, that the First Amendment has come under sustained attack from both the right and the left, that the United States is not a Democracy, that individuals are only considered for the weight they can add numerically in support of one or another policy of the Elite, by the Elite and for the Elite, whether monied, power or media.