The Modern Deceit: Emancipation from Social Society

Familiar scenario: on one side of the fence, merchants (“corporations”) tend to control government, while on the other side of the fence government tends to control all commerce.  At the end of the ride, on one side of the fence the market becomes the government, while on the other, the government becomes the market.  In both cases, a tendency to uniformity leading up to “the corporate government,” the authoritative market.

Taking a step back, the divide we have heard of: individualism vs. communitarianism.  But is there a real dichotomy between the individual (modern self) and its society (the society of individuals, or the Leviathan)?  Hypothesis: none at all, insofar as both terms are chimeras integral to the unfolding of a Machiavellian plan.

How could Machiavelli overturn “the old world” on the way to establishing one based on his “new ways and orders” (modi ed ordini nuovi)?  The simple answer is: by inventing a fairytale in which the self stands in conflict with a society of selves.  Given this cardinal antinomy, the self is a social atom, while its society is a “wall” made of social atoms.  The microcosmic self is compelled to sacrifice itself for the sake of a macrocosmic wall.   The wall requires the atoms as bricks.  The atom cannot help but being integrated into a wall that, alone, guarantees the atom’s “survival”.

To be sure, the wall in question is not any society, but one entailing the integration of all social atoms in the wall.  Any society that is not integrating all social atoms within itself cannot be the society in which all social atoms are compelled to integrate.  This latter society must be, with respect to all other societies, the society of the future, or of the end of “social time,” or of history.  Social atoms are to realize this consummate atomistic society and none other.

Just as the atoms of modern chemistry tend mechanically towards integration into molecular structures, cells, tissues, organs, organisms and finally a universal, overarching system (ecological or otherwise), so does the modern self tend mechanically towards integration into evermore complex alliances pointing to an Open or Great Society—the purely technological society, a society in which all selves/individuals are fully integrated, and thus a society that has solved the problem of intimacy (of interiority, of “the soul”) once and for all.  To speak in Marxist terms, capitalism tends towards communism (represented by “State control”) as its crowning achievement.  Modern liberalism seeks its triumph and glory in the abolition of anybody’s freedom.

In our Open Society, full integration defines justice itself.  All that is not integrated is unjust.  How do we assess justice?  Through a system of supervision, monitoring, surveillance, control (“digitizing”).  This is done through and in technology.  The success of control coincides with the conversion of life onto a technological platform.  By its own inner logic, the Open Society is fully realized only as a virtual society in which the self is (or finds its self-realization in) its own digital avatar.  Thus does the modern liberal society bow to its dark side, an Orwellian dystopic Regime boisterously proclaiming freedom in the act of redefining (and restricting) all freedom within private cells duly administrated and controlled by the Regime itself.

Upon its coming of age, the world of modern emancipation from “the sins of antiquity”—of “pre-scientific” societies—exposes itself as a fairytale: an illusion.  It is only in its infancy that modern liberalism upholds the atom as foundation of the modern “contractual” society.  No sooner has the atom been upheld than it is “broken” and retraced to the “subatomic” fiber of the atom’s society, or more properly of the contract (blueprint) incapsulating the modern society.  The modern self emerges as the product of the contract; not its redactor.  Descartes’ ego is invented (not found by chance) in the context of a Machiavellian plan, one involving an “evolving society,” a society that converts the old into the new—the old conservative tension between nature and convention/law into a new progressive or evolutionary tension between “the individual” and its society.  In the former case, man is the battlefield (a place) where mind (master) and body (servant/slave) challenge each other; in the latter case, the self is (supposed to be) the building block of a freedom realized as a Regime synthesizing nature and law, body and mind.  The virtue that classical man stands for is supposed to yield to the fitness of the modern self.  While classical man tends towards divine perfection, the modern individual tends towards secular uniformity, or the flattening out of all moral hierarchy (what is best, now, is what is the most integrated).  Whereas the classical hero represents a mystery transcending the conflict between body and mind, the modern “hero” represents a fusion of mind and body (and the concomitant absurdity of any transcendence).

The modern fusion of body and mind is represented, though not realized by a mere individual among others.  The realization in question is found in the super-individual that is the Open Society itself, or more precisely the structure of authority presiding over it as futuristic apotheosis of the individual.  In this respect, the modern individual is the mere formal promise of a concrete individual in the making.  To speak with Hegel, the individual of early modernity is an abstract universal to be realized historically in the rise of the consummate State.  This concrete, super individual, rather than any mere Cartesian ego, is to replace the metaphysical God that classical man seeks beyond any societal constraints and thus, too, above all ethics (insofar as ethics entails the challenge of rising from an imperfect order to a perfect order, or a perfect community, which in Platonic terms is a community of eternal ideas).

In sum, Machiavelli’s plot involves two actors, namely the individual and his imperfect society.  In Marxist terms, where the individual (as businessman, or as mercantile corporation) takes over society, we have the triumph of capitalism, whereas where the society overtakes the individual, we have communism.  Yet, there is no real overtaking where the society is realized only as the glory of the individual that has become—through self-projection—the State.  The society “overcomes” the individual only where the latter projects himself into the State as authoritative form of society.  Thus is the overcoming a mere manner of speech exposing the chimeric nature of both the modern self and the modern society as long as the modern ideal of a universal State or Regime has not obscured all other regimes; for then the Regime “redeems” the illusory as real.  For the Regime calls real the lies that had led up to the consolidation of the Regime.  And where the real is “whatever the Regime defines as real,” the unreal is all that is not authoritatively objectivized.

But is it not the practice of all regimes, from the dawn of History, to legitimize themselves by “confirming” their genesis as credible, reliable, real?  The rhetorical question arises in a Machiavellian context and it is indeed a modern prejudice that sustains our habit of projecting upon pre-modern societies Machiavellian expectations—as if all pre-modern societies were “realized” through and in the consolidation of Machiavelli’s dream, or its necessary implications (the affirmation of modern freedom implying the rise of a universal State).  Have our modern institutions of instruction not taught us systematically that the “historically” real is what has led to our present universal society, or to the universal society presently coming of age?  Is our “historical truth” not a function of the rise of our Open Society?  Is the “historical” not confirmed by the authority of our scientific regime?

Rhetorical questions aside, pre-modern societies do not define the real as a function of their authority for the plain reason that their authority is not what we would call “secular,” or consciously (read, willfully) cut off from divine transcendence.

Whereas pre-modern regimes entailed “closed societies” and openness to divine perfection, the modern Regime entails an open society closed to any divine perfection, which is now supposed to be replaced by or replaceable with harmonious integration of all societies—as of all old aspirations—into the tidal wave of a universal destiny.  That is why “the real” in pre-modern societies is never “the historical,” but—as Aristotle’s Poetics stands to remind us—a philosophical problem properly revealed in poetry, rather than historically, or literally/superficially.

Today, in the wake of our unpoetic, or rather anti-poetic Regime, we are “programmed” to seek out the technological society as our destiny, programmed by the very Machiavellian set-up given which we are defined as individuals pitted against an evolving society, an imperfectly scientific society…until, that is, the evolution brings us to the doorsteps of the perfectly scientific society, the technological realization of both self and society.  Until then, “society” is a bait compelling the modern self to work towards the realization of a better world, ultimately a completely consolidated Open Society, beyond any and all injustice or discrimination; a society in which all merit is adequately rewarded.  But how can all merit be adequately rewarded if we do not define merit in terms of degrees of social integration?  Only then can the society see virtue in the thriving of the Self.  Why would society oppose the self’s own pursuits where they point directly to the perfection of the judging society?  Here the individual’s virtue coincides with the individual’s conformity to the evolutionary trend of society, a trend spilling directly into the triumph of technology as consummate society.[1]

But is this what the modern self really wants, namely his conversion into a “perfect” social machine?  Does that self really want anything?  Or does it want the nothing, the naught, the utter annihilation of anything to want?  Is the modern self not trying to exhaust all objects of want—all ideals, all idols, all fetishes, all baits?  Is it not hungry for demise and death, no matter how painful the way leading to it may be?  Is the Great Society individuals can envision anything more than the loftiest mask of the end of the individual—of the void?  Yet, what is “the void” for us if not a mind devoid of content, a “great reset,” a Cartesian “blank slate” (tabula rasa)?  The void as pure form, immaculate receptacle.  What other form could host truth, bearing it divinely, sinless, if only to carry the sins of “the World,” the stain of the past?

If modernity’s individual empties itself (dies) into a pure form/mind of which our Regime is but the mask, are we to conclude that beyond all masks, or “after all,” we are not, properly speaking, individuals?  Is the modern self a mask we use to attain to a divine mind?  Is the individual a mask allowing us to transpose ourselves into modernity’s surrogate for a biblical God?

If we are not modern selves, if the modern self is but our mask, is what the modern self wants a mask of our pre-scientific, natural ends, ends we are born, breathe, wake up for every morning?  Outside of the sphere of influence (of manipulation?) of modern discourse (indoctrination?), what do we seek?  Where does our being tend towards naturally?  Does our nature not tend towards an end aside from any compulsion it may be (is?) subjected to?  Or is our nature stale, static, aimless, as the hapless bearer of Cartesian res extensa?  Beneath the thin skin of daily flattering rhetoric—the one seducing us into fighting for our “individual rights”—are we manure begging to be “fueled and channeled” (Machiavelli) into the production of modern, “scientific” ends?  What is it that we are aside from what our Times—our textbooks, our Media, our corporate institutions, our scientific experts, our ideologues—tell us we are?  What ends are we exposed to by nature, at birth, or in sheer surviving, in our lingering?  What do we originally “linger” for?  Are we awaiting an answer that may help us formulate a question?  Are we awaiting an answer to return to as first question, a first, prototypical question mark that may sustain all other, derivative questions back to it?

Are we ready to renounce all that precedes the demands of our technological society, all that this society works to eclipse behind the veneer of its symbolic calculations?  Not all of us are.  Not all of us are places of eclipse.  At least some of us expose themselves, not merely to the all-too-superficial “depths” of technologically-mediated feelings, but to the roots of all feelings.

Children ask questions and feel alive.  Adolescents dare defy authority and feel alive.  Adults seek grandeur and feel alive.  The old recount glorious days and feel alive.  What does it mean to be alive?  What does it truly mean?  What does it mean to be truly alive?  What, again, is the foundation, the prescientific source of feeling, above all, of our feeling alive, even of our dreaming of being alive?  In so dreaming, are we reminiscing?  Are we given glimmers of a “past life,” a life forgotten, a life we have forgotten to live?  What does it mean to live?  Is it to abide by dictates, or simply to resist them by way of giving evermore fully into them?  Is living a function of what it is not?    What is the living we are speaking of, the one we dream of, the one we seek in speech?  What is the best, the fullest sense of life?  The worthiest, the one really worth living?

Are we blackmailed, today, into choosing between “comfortable numbness” and anti-social questions about “the meaning of life”—between the perfectly socially acceptable and the sociopathic?  To be (to assert oneself) or not to be, which is to say to bow to the very last demands of our authorities, even when they swear and have us swear that ours is an authority-free egalitarian society?  Is it our choice as “individuals” to choose?  Or can we choose only to the extent that we leave the table where the game is fixed and where “value-free” answers are fabricated before we are allowed to ask any question?  Can choice, true choice, come to sight only where the individual dies, where we let go of it as a vain pretense and where we recover ourselves as places where choice is begotten, where dialogue blossoms, where its pathways, its crossroads, its perilous challenges bespeak—dare anyone say—who we really are?

Can there be any choice outside of dialogue, outside of any imposition on “the Other,” be this the One or the Many, the single or the collective?  Can there be any genuine choice in the imposition of expectations, accursed bearers of disappointment and resentment?  Can there be any choice that is not born of compulsion?  Any original choice?  How might we ever discover, rediscover, return to such a choice?  What obstacles might stand in the way to such a choice?  Do we stand in the way to the extent that we identify ourselves with self-imposing machines—to the extent that we abandon absolutely disinterested dialogue?

If “who chooses?” is a dispassionate, naïve question, as opposed to a veiled assertion, then dialogue is the way leading to it and away from any latent expectation, be it great or inhibited.  Electio (whence our “election”), the Latin word for “choice,” reminds us of this much: that choosing (ex-legere akin to the Greek legein) arises out of discourse, or logos.  Can there be any real choice for us outside of dialogue?  Could choice ever be an individual’s act of self-determination?  The classical alternative we are faced with is that of choice as the election of its personae, its followers, its disciples or students.  Who chooses?  It is the logos itself that chooses us in the respect that it calls us outside of our world of “masks” to discover ourselves in, through and ultimately as logos itself—the very speech that in John 15.16 states: “It is not you all who chose me, but I who chose you” (non vos me elegistis, sed ego elegi vos / οὐχ ὑμεῖς με ἐξελέξασθε, ἀλλ’ ἐγὼ ἐξελεξάμην ὑμᾶς)—out of your world (de mundo, qualifies the Gregorian) and so that you may live in the name of the logos itself (hence John’s ἐν τῷ ὀνόματί μου), the Word that chose us to live and, in living, order the theatre of this world “back” in the light the Word’s own heavenly seat.

To reach back to the first choice, the real choice, we must desire its seat, to inhabit it, to return to it as throne otherwise occupied by imposters, the false choices that distract us, that disintegrate us, that tear us apart, that plunge us daily into a horrific spiral of deceptions and bitterness, of hate and the lies allowing us to breathe—to pretend to breathe—in the midst of the toxic fumes of hatred.  Who, but ourselves, abandoned that throne of election, that first calling?  Who turned his back upon that original mandate (to retrace the personal “who” back to the heart of the impersonal “what”), if not the ones thirsting for it, for that abandoned way,[2] in the desert, wandering as if haplessly in the valley of tears that we have long been taught (compliments of our ravenous, idolatrous, anti-platonic “will to believe”) to call our home?

NOTES:

[1] The practical outcome of the modern alternative to classical rationalism (to the life of dialogue open to irreducible truth) calls for the enslavement of good men, men dedicated to the Good (desired truth), to all betrayers of truth and their Regime of betrayal.  What is the good man to do in the face of despotism?  He will not contribute to worldly “success”; he will not promote any enterprise that could or would be abused by an authoritarian government; he will remain unproductive in all disciplines and endeavors other than those that are of no practical use to any Regime of betrayal.

[2] Dante, Inferno 1.12.

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