Hard to be a God
We all heard so much about infantile masses, of an ability to hide in the anonymous mass – in a word: the first association we tend to get when we think in terms of mass man is irresponsibility. However, rarely do we hear anything about equally deprived mass responsibility; rarely, of course, except on Kali Tribune.
In this podcast we’ll address the subject of the flip side of popular power – popular responsibility as exemplified by idea, prevalent among the masses, that every problem and indeed everything occurring in this world is due to man or, more precisely, average man.
To demonstrate the absurdity of this notion and some of its possible roots, we’ll employ the help Joseph de Maistre, with the special focus on ideas from his essay On the Generative Principle of Political Constitutions, most eminently his insight into impossibility of creating the a priori legislature and the inferiority of written, i.e. systematized, laws and the impossibility of sovereignty coming from below.
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Notes:
Joseph De Maistre, On Generative Principle of Political Constitutions:
http://maistre.uni.cx/generative_principle.html
On Joseph De Maistre;
Branko Malić
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Nice to hear something so fresh, señor Malić. the introduction of new thinkers and their ideas are so much of what makes Kali Tribune great. Thanks.
System requires control, foresight and the elimination of chance occurances. Insitutions and organizations need to plan the future and that requires eliminating chance to the smallest degree possible. Savoir pour pourvoir.
In essence this is how Reason bewitches mankind. The power of knowledge is the power to make predictions about the future, based on the past. It is a projection of the past into the future thus eliminating the chance of anything new occurring or people transforming. A phenomenon that all thought and reason rejects. Is it any wonder then that the age of Reason created such totalitarian systems? Totalitarian individuals?
Why must everyone have an opinion? although you don’t read French, I hope one day you can present the work of Jaques Ellul, Propaganda and the Formation of Mens’ Minds.
In this work he analises this very question to a great degree. The sociological need (craving) for propaganda ie 2nd hand information and opinions, is based on man’s very powerlessness within the mass system. With no relation to a micro community man is thrown into a great mess (sic) of which he has no agency. The only way he can participate, or feel that he has any agency at all over his own life, is to have opinions, which have been presented to him to choose based on his sensibilities or education. Indeed he is expected to have a range of opinions on topics of which he has absolutely no way of forming any opinion.
Such opinions take on an existential value as they are exactly what identifies an individual in a mass society.
Joseph D sounds like a right Taoist. Despite the title of Kali Tribune, you don’t seem to touch oriental topics. If you ever did, the Taoist Huai-Nan Tzu would be interesting as the one time Taoist sages of an age gathered together to create a political document. Joseph D may have been there.
Cheers
Very interesting perspective, but also one that will get a rise out of a great deal if people, were they to come across it.
I think that by “responsibility” you are speaking of here is in fact a certain “will to power” that people unconsciously seek to tap by grounding or connecting themselves with some sort of unifying principle or plurality as defined in the sphere of public activity. By attaching to say, an ideological movement or some kind of identity group the people can get the sense of participating in a power relation (vis a vis their perceived natural state of powerlessness) which then effectuates a observable change in the world. The problem with that of course there are other forces at play here, both of a conventional and I should say…what we would at this present point consider of an esoteric nature which largely delineate the boundary forms in which both the group and the change operate – unfold.
On the other hand, personal responsibility is an aspect for one’s being that is absolutely essential for our life. It’s about being true to yourself, which in turn is the same as being True to God. Yet a well developed sense personal responsibility is becoming increasingly rare in the modern human being, as compared to say, the power relationship between the individual and the mass that you described above. We are in a certain way responsible to what happens to us, and the world we end up living in, but not in this political sense everyone’s talking about. A person must take responsibility for his actions, otherwise he is not sovereign, and when he is not sovereign he is not free, and hence he has no power to speak of either. Acceding to such a state is essentially the same as giving consent to a very real possibility of enslavement…or perhaps more sinisterly, consumption.