A root question for democracy concerns who is fit to be a democrat. Many avenues of possibility spring from pondering this. Are we pathetic wankers who need a Fuhrer, are we such docile donkeys that we can’t make the right choices because we have grown up spoiled brats or in some sectarian religion? Once one reaches a position on this, one can’t really take the position of deciding who takes part easily. This can’t be the position like that of the mad religious zealot making decisions on who is pure, or part of the chosen race.
I used to think that new needed a new form of democracy, or that what we had was an imperfect system that could self-correct. I no longer think this is a good core to any research programme for freedom. I would still fight and die for what we have in the West, against tyranny – but one has to note the worst tyranny of modern times arose in the Germany of old. In the Lakotosian sense, democracy is a decadent paradigm.
Postmodernism, before it slipped in its own bullshit, was a challenge of open deep questions on the legitimation of authority. It has failed entirely, other than in supporting a few academics. My own inclination is to view it as an inevitable end state of that wordiness that cannot contemplate fact. It’s just noise, like the political use of statistics – variations on nothing original. Learning is harder than words and playing tunes with them.
Free ‘thinking’ is a problem for consensus in the animal kingdom we are part of. The ‘hygiene’ meted out against the non-consensual is total. Argument really has little to do with what is decided, from cockroach dances on where to live, to human economic posturing. Originality, other than in puffed-up claims, is a rare as rocking horse shit, disinterestedness at a further remove. Einstein may eventually prove wrong (though is standing up to modern experimental scrutiny), and as he said, it will only take one. A key problem for democracy concerns originality and means to cherish it.
Jurgen Hanermas churned out vast tracks on consensual society, communicative action and a lot I agree with – yet there is something glaringly overdone. Human being is not based in any Reason we have invented, but in the evolution in which we are borne. The good bits may not be in man-made Reason at all. Extirpating ideology ain’t it and would be ideological anyway. I believe we are brought up to be deluded and the time has come to stop this; yet part of the delusion is Reason. The voting rituals in democracy merely elide this, however import it is to have both them, and power that will stand down.
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