Excavating the democratic mind

Post-Comprehension

Post-Comprehension

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Excavating the democratic mind

“Democracy can be more than two wolves and a sheep voting on who will become dinner. It can also be, through a grueling process of rotating consensus-building, become one wolf voting with the sheep against the other wolf over who will become dinner, or the sheep, worn down by constant voting, offering themselves up for dinner in the name of achieving consensus.” - The Odd Being (From the undertext that creeps below) 

We need to find democracy subconsciously to know it better consciously—to excavate its subterranean layers. What hidden beliefs lie beneath its rhetoric and clothing? What concepts are never blatantly spoken, yet are expressed indirectly through words, rituals, and institutions, passing into the mind undetected until they become evident through action?

Let us begin with a set of questions drawn from the earthly and extra-earthly limits through which democracy subconsciously maps reality: Where is the body? (corpus)—the biological and anthropological level through which we imagine the human organism and humankind as an ecosystem. Where is the land? (terra)—the geographic and sociological level through which we imagine space, boundaries, and social relations. Where is the sun? (sol)—the chronometric and thermodynamic level through which we imagine time, duration, expenditure, and finitude. And finally, where is the outside? (exter)—the occultic and esoteric level through which we imagine the wonderful and the hidden, deriving the knowledge by which we know who the Other is and where the outside is to conceal the problem from. These questions form our digging methodology. Before people consciously determine what reality ought to be, they have already made unconscious assumptions about bodies, lands, suns, and outsides.

Corpus: Human finitude — the person is limited. Anyone who professes democracy assumes, at least presently, that human beings and their relationships are finite. Bodies have limits, and those limits distinguish one body from another. Democracy takes this finitude as a condition of political reality: biology and society are presumed insufficiently complex to resolve their own problems without governance, which is backed by government. Governance is the process through which the state acts; government is the ethos through which the state understands why it acts. The essential democratic presumption is therefore not merely that humans are limited, but that human limitation must itself become a principle of rule. The limited ought to rule the limited by means of limitations.

Democracy is pro-mortality and anti-immortality; it is deathist in consequence. People who can live forever can transcend the binds of generational weights and obligations. Ancestors and offspring become choices, whereas before, they were obligations: to remember the past or continue the future, as it is required that the birthing of children happen in order to pass on knowledge. But if humans are immortal, invincible even, then when people have children, it is purely for the benefit of expanding the amount of life that will enjoy all knowledge, rather than filling in seats left empty by death. Democracy is also pro-scarcity and pro-political in consequence, as in, it sees no end in sight to the problems of resource management, construction, and cosmological conflicts. It presumes that people will either never have enough, or, if they do, that humanity will never be able to conclude its proper distribution. That humans will always need protection from themselves is essentially the idea at its heart. There is no heaven for democracy other than that of an endless meeting to keep everyone distracted from fighting.

Masses of people rule themselves and one another because their finitude provides the condition under which they can be counted, represented, assembled, divided, and governed. Democracy therefore depends upon humanity remaining sufficiently limited to be politically intelligible. If humans were sufficiently complex—biologically, socially, or otherwise—the possibility of democratic rule would itself become questionable. Democracy thus begins with death. The body is finite; the person is bounded; political life begins where one finite being can be distinguished from another.

Key summary: Democracy hinges on human biology having limitations.

Terra: Horo-humanity — the people are bounded. The demos is not simply “the people.” If we insist upon an etymological excavation, we can approach the demos through the deme: a delimited space, a boundary through which people belong and without which they are rendered homeless. The horoi—the pillars and stones used to mark boundaries in ancient Athens—make this spatial principle especially visible. Democracy therefore does not merely treat segments of land as political realities. It begins to treat those segments as persons themselves. There are consequently two forms of “the people” within democracy: bio-humans, biological organisms and the literal people; and horo-humans, delimited organisms and the boundaries made human.

When “the people rule,” the bio-humans rule within and through the horo-humans. Imagine a group of bio-humans standing, walking, and running on the bodies of another layer of people underneath them, propping them up; this is where the horo-humans reside. The people may demand anything so long as they do not violate the continued existence of the boundary that constitutes their political identity. The boundary, meanwhile, acquires a quasi-human existence of its own: it determines who belongs, where they belong, and where belonging ends. Democracy therefore produces not merely a mass of flesh-and-blood humans but a mass of boundaries: districts, walls, fences, borders, jurisdictions, and lines in the sand. Its rituals do not simply demand that bio-humans become sufficiently alike to sustain common norms. They also demand that human beings internalize the boundary itself—that they learn to think and act as horo-humans. 

Democracy does not merely say, “You should be more like one another.” It also says, implicitly, “You should become more like the boundary that separates you from others.”

It is no wonder, then, that democracy, nationalism, and liberalism have so often become intertwined. Nationalism's intra-human separability and sovereign determinism correspond neatly with democracy's division of humanity into distinct territorial areas, each with its own bio-human and horo-human grouping from which people derive claims of territorial ownership. Liberalism's sameness and contractual upkeep can likewise be reinforced and better maintained through democracy, as it helps to maintain a normalization of liberal ideals when people within a state feel that they are more actively a part of its processes through constant procedures of energy expenditure.

Beneath the democratic bio-mass lies the horo-mass that gives it political form. Like Detective Thorn screaming that “Soylent Green is people!”, the democrat might be imagined as screaming: “The districts are people!” But the democrat does not scream this in terror or disdain. The declaration comes from a place of love and worship.

Key summary: “The people” within any democracy are two that act as one: the biohumans, the literal biological bodies of people, and the horohumans, the delineations of space made into imagined bodies of people through their enforcement. 

Sol: Kairoproceduralism — meaningful time is derived from the procedures of repeated social ritual. Therefore, meaningless time consists of the moments between when ritual is not happening. It is also important to note that outcomes are less meaningful to democracy than the initiation and liminal periods of the rituals themselves. Preparing and doing are praised far more than the outcomes themselves. The most praised outcomes, however, are those that lead most quickly to more rituals rather than those that provide more permanent conclusions, which typically cause the next round of rituals to take longer to start up again.

Democratic time is not merely the passage of seconds. It is the continual reproduction of the collective through meetings, assemblies, aggregations, counting, inclusion, deliberation, voting, and other procedures through which the people repeatedly gather and act upon themselves. Time is told through meetings. The collective knows that time has passed because it has assembled again, deliberated again, voted again, and renewed the procedures through which it recognizes itself. Kairoproceduralism is the telling of important time through procedure. It is the temporalization of collective political life through recurring occasions of assembly and decision.

Time is crunched and compressed as each person becomes the district, and the district's passage of time is told through a series of meetings. The collective expends its energy by repeatedly assembling itself. The democratic sun therefore does not merely illuminate the political world; it occasions its activity. The people must gather because the people must continually become the people. The election must recur because the collective must continually reproduce its authorization. The meeting must occur because political time must be made visible through collective expenditure. Thus the corpus gives democracy the finite person, the terra gives democracy the bounded people, and the sol gives democracy the procedural occasion.

Key summary: The clock of democracy is a mass of flesh upon a signpost.

Exter: Inclusive xenophobia — the Other is constituted beyond the boundary. But none of these yet tells us what lies beyond the boundary. Where is the outside? Here we enter the occultic and esoteric level: the wonderful, the hidden, the unknown, and the imagined spaces beyond ordinary political knowledge. The outside must be located before the Other can be identified. The Other must be identified before the boundary can acquire its fullest meaning. Democracy therefore does not simply establish an inside; it subconsciously produces knowledge of an outside against which that inside can understand itself. This is where the unknown becomes politically useful: what cannot be resolved within the boundary may be imagined beyond it, concealed from the collective by being placed outside its world.

This produces inclusive xenophobia: equality becomes the basis for exclusion. The people are equal within the boundary precisely because the boundary establishes who the people are. The democratic reasoning becomes: “WE BELONG HERE. WE RULE HERE. HERE RULES THE WE. THEREFORE, THE OTHER IS A THREAT TO THIS ALL.” The body establishes the limit; the land establishes the boundary; the sun establishes the occasion; the outside establishes the Other. Beneath the conscious language of democracy lies this unconscious map: a finite person, a bounded people, a repeatedly assembled collective, and an Other constituted beyond the boundary. The democratic world therefore does not merely ask who we are. It must also ask where we end—and, beyond that ending, what we conceal the problem from.

Key summary: The equality of democracy is a sinister type of imagined horizontalism that demands both a flattening inclusion and a flattening exclusion, similar to nationalism and liberalism. 

Let us define the infernal concept now that we have grasped its unconscious mind, to provide it with a better conscious shape. The single-sentence generic definition will be:

Democracy is a form of governance in which leadership is subject to the shared procedures of a collective citizenry. 

Democracy is foremost a form of governance, which is a way of processing the exertions of sovereignty that derives the formation and legitimacy of leadership through its selection from a political body made up of a grouping of citizens, with this body being shared among eligible citizens. When that eligibility is extended to all adult citizens, it is called a “full democracy,” while when that eligibility is limited to specifically adult citizens with an asset or feature, it is deemed a “semi-democracy.” Whether the shared procedures are impersonal (institutions that balance power) or personal (passions that merge powers) determines whether the democracy is liberal or illiberal. If the citizens are defined ethnically, that is, by the ancestry of a people group, then it is an ethnocracy. When citizens are defined civically, that is, by the creed of universal values, it is a cosmocracy. When citizens are defined laboriously, that is, by the hardships of their character, it is a ponocracy. Unsurprisingly, democracy has an exhaustive protean range that can stretch out into many different directions.

With the subconscious and the better conscious understanding of democracy attained, we can now approach an anarchist critique of it. Since democracy depends upon the construction of a limited people, then its procedures necessarily concern themselves with determining who belongs to that people, where its boundaries lie, and how those within them ought to collectively rule themselves. This makes democracy useful for coordinating polities such as nation-states, but deeply problematic as a basis for emancipation, since emancipation requires the dissolution of precisely those boundaries that distinguish the inside from the outside, the familiar from the strange, and the citizen from the stranger. 

Collective decision-making can be useful in organizing activities, but individual fulfillment through free production is always preferable. Creating revolutionary syndicates focused on non-territorial subjects, such as the worker, better avoids the pitfalls of democracy by embracing the strange and unknown and collecting a world of outsiders who are united by the struggle for emancipation. While creating municipal and neighborhood assemblies reinforces citizenry and nativity, it also obsesses over what is local, familiar, and inside, setting up the conditions for the disastrous consequence of oppressing the stranger for committing the “crime” of difference and unfamiliarity.

The obsession with achieving consensus is itself a peculiarity, as the purpose of procedural consensus is the endless reinforcement of a stable body politic against perpetual external ambiguity. The functions of any statist order require the reliable conformity of people to reproduce and sustain a consensus aligned with its norms and institutions; that is, the state depends upon a reliable predictability of the human form and its behaviors. By contrast, the consensus of an anarchist society is not achieved through the creation of ritualized bodies of oppression, but through freely associated individuals coming together to resist political power in pursuit of their own emancipation.

By using democracy, one unloads the burden of force onto a faceless blob that will instinctively preserve itself first and only later consider anarchist principles—if at all. This “later” always comes at the cost of abusing, distorting, and mutating those very principles, a cost anarchism cannot afford to pay. Any “anarchist” who suggests that an anarchist society has a “consensus problem” requiring the creation of external bodies of control and procedure to “properly condition the people” will not produce an anarchist society, but rather a nightmare masquerading as a paradise.

Anarchist principles, if taken seriously, should shape how anarchists organize and what they aim to achieve. Those commitments have to emerge from prefiguring the means and ends of free association through autonomous coordination, the conscious production of free producers, and not only the individual desire to belong somewhere but also the desire to leave that somewhere for somewhere else. These principles should not be deferred to majority rule or attempted to be reached through it. The human condition in an anarchist society is permanently open to and defined by a nonhuman-humanity (or human-nonhumanity), while remaining closed to attempts to rigidly standardize it toward the limits of space and time.

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