GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Reactionary Future has been addressing the liberal prioritization of culture and religion over politics, as pursuant to the absolutist rejection of “bottom-up” in favor of “top-down” understandings of order. It is not that new ideas lead to a new consciousness which spreads (because they are good ideas? Because they “reflect” some new social developments that just “happened”?) throughout society, finally leading to adaptations in political institutions. The more economic understanding is that the new ideas are promoted by secessionist powers in their exploitation of unsecure power and as part of their own struggle to resecure power on their own terms. It follows that the very idea of separate spheres of life, like “culture,” “religion,” “art,” “philosophy,” is itself a product of these power struggles—more precisely, the ascendancy of liberalizing power centers that want to eliminate all mediation between the state and the individual. The very ideas of freedom of religion and free speech, while apparently protecting individuals from the state, in fact ensure the domestication of what gets marked as “religion” and “speech”—ultimately, as we can see more clearly now, making it possible for the state to define such terms according to convenience and “weigh” them against other rights and “state interests.” This reification of separate spheres advances the centralizing dynamic of state power that keeps breaking up “middleistic” formation and leaves individuals bare in their confrontation with the state. The replacement of the “thick” articulation of ritual, place of worship, ecclesiastical authority and doctrine by the “thin” gruel of “personal belief” is not just the alienation of homogenized individuals—it is a power play aimed at breaking up solidarities and power centers that interfere with the direct application of state power on each and every individual.

Among these separate spheres, though, would have to be counted “politics” and “the state” themselves. These concepts would themselves be abstractions advancing divided power by treating the institutions concerned with ruling as slots to be filled by whoever can seize power by whatever mechanisms are available. This would further mean that the sacred, the invisible, the ethical, the moral, and the political are all bound up together in more primordial categories. For the originary hypothesis, this more primordial category is the sacred center. Humanity is founded around a sacred center, an object that has inflamed such desire as to require a sign of deferral to prevent the self-immolation of the group. Everything is there: “politics” (the nascent form of authority); “art” (the oscillation between the sign pointing to the object and the desirable object itself); “philosophy,” or at least thought (following the relation between center and margins in one’s fellows); and, of course, “religion” (supplication to the “command” of the central object that prohibits appropriation). The approved myth of modernity is that all of these forms of human life, bundled together in an enslaving mass of irrational rules and authorities, all get separated out and “cleansed” of their irrational and oppressive dross. So, reactionary absolutism must rearticulate them in terms of the sacred center.

One way or another, sooner or later, one member of the community accumulates enough wealth, which also means enough trust and reciprocal obligation, so as to place him beyond the egalitarian customs of the community and (which is to say the same thing) beyond a symmetrical gift exchange with any single member of the community. His relations are now with the community as a whole, as he comes to control distribution. This Big Man now occupies the sacred center, which for the primitive community was occupied (generally) by the animal the community relied upon for food and defied and assumed a relation of mutual obligation with. Now, the sacred center is a central power, and there is not anything, to this day, which can replace or transcend central power, which is therefore a presupposition of civilized life. Everything in the community circulates through this central power which, of course, doesn’t necessarily mean that the occupant of the central position takes it upon himself to manage the daily activities of community members. It just means that everything takes place through more or less direct reference to the central power—everything is allowed or required by that power. So, far, we don’t have the separation of spheres—art, religion, thinking, politics are all bundled up in the community’s relation to the central power, an arrangement that continues even as the Big Man becomes the emperor ruling over vast territories and very different communities.

The ancient empires obviously lasted a long time—several thousand years in some cases. Whether they ever had to fall and be replaced by new civilizational forms is a moot question (we could ask the same question about the primitive communities, which lasted far longer). The very thing that sustained them for so longer is probably what made them so vulnerable to new conditions—the absolute asymmetry between the God Emperor and any other human being. Anything the emperor does that departs from the traditionally derived prescriptions governing relations between center and margin would have to be obeyed unquestioningly; but it would also have to be virtually unintelligible, immediately generating other power centers, the guardians of tradition. No initiative is possible, and no real thinking, other than studying the stars in order to predict and control future events. The two best known breaks with the imperial tradition are the monotheistic revelation in ancient Israel and the discovery of metaphysics in ancient Greece—which are, of course, eventually synthesized in Christianity. (I don’t know enough to say if perhaps a more gradual version of this break occurred with Confucianism in ancient China.)

The best way of understanding this break is as the recovery or remembering of the originary scene or, more precisely, what Eric Gans calls the “moral model” derived from the scene. The only way to renew social order once the limits of the imperial model are grasped is to imagine spaces enabling the possible co-presence of all human beings. Metaphysics imagines a space of inquiry into eternal truths in which any disinterested individual could participate; monotheism imagines the origin of all human beings from a single creator. The moral model, in my view, need mean nothing more than co-presence and reciprocal acknowledgement—we need not and, in my view, had better not, project back to the originary scene any of our own assumptions of “equality.” Once this recovery (which cannot be unrecovered) is made, the moral model is, we might say, mapped onto our model of any particular social order. The relation between the originary moral model and the existent social order poses the problems which later get taken up in terms of the relation between the “city of God” and the city of Man,” and finally, “state” and “religion.” The problem becomes more manageable if we think of it in originary terms.

I don’t know whether the emergence of monotheism and metaphysics involved the interventions of new power centers under conditions of unsecure power, as per the absolutist model. If so, they were the rare interventions that actually provided the means for securing power. Faith and philosophy have certainly caused problems for the state, because they make an a priori claim to loyalty to something higher than the state—the truth transcends the word of the ruler, and the commands of God those of the ruler. But first of all the absoluteness of the truth and the global sovereignty of God provide models for absolute sovereignty. At the same time these absolutes frame absolute sovereignty, and provide it with a mission to spread the truth and imitate God by preserving and elevating the ruled. No ruler could possibly rule in explicit defiance of the truth and God (or, more broadly, the moral model). So, the ruler obligates himself to the moral model and makes himself its guardian. This justifies absolute rule, or the occupancy of central power by the ruler, because only through the singleness of power can the singularity of the moral model become the fundamental social guide, embedded in all social practices. Any critic of the ruler would have to present himself as authorized by the ruler to help ensure the conformity of a given institution to the terms of the moral model constitutive of that institution.

So, all post-imperial institutions are predicated upon the assumption that all institutions provide for co-presence and reciprocal acknowledgement of all participants—and that sometimes this assumption does not coincide with reality, which therefore requires reform. Continual exploration of the forms of co-presence and mutual acknowledgement that transcend the particular social order is necessary if the institutions are to be examined in terms of their conformity to those forms. This exploration embraces all of culture, which thereby has its “function” in relation to the central power. All that matters to the sovereign is that this exploration, these inquiries, be conducted in such a way as to engage vigorously the traditional materials in which forms of the moral model have been inherited, to freely test the implications of those materials for existing institutions, and to suggest reforms (where necessary) of those institutions in a way that recognizes their founding in the moral model. The ultimate test of these inquiries is whether they help enhance the sovereign’s co-presence with and reciprocal acknowledgment of the people. The sovereign will be the ultimate judge of whether that’s the case, but we can assume that he will judge more favorably the more the inquiries have been transparently directed towards the edification of the realm. There may be many different faiths and rites, then, just like there may be many schools of art, types of entertainment, and modes of scientific and technological endeavor, but the tendency will be to bring them all into relation with each other as various explorations of the infinitively generative moral model—there may be an ongoing overlapping of undifferentiation, differentiation and dedifferentiation of “spheres.” And if you don’t like the phrase “moral model,” because “morality” has been one of those concepts carved out of prior unity and privatized, we can call it the “originary configuration.” We keep trying to further approximate the originary configuration, which is to say maximal co-presence and reciprocal acknowledgement, but the only way of doing so by continuing to center the center (derive information, instruction and intentions from the center) and thereby turning it into a source of information regarding how to further approximate.

It is worth noting, about a month before the election, that the central issue in this election happens to be sovereignty. All of the issues Trump really cares about—immigration, trade, wars focused on the fortunes of other countries—summed up in his “America First” slogan center on the question, in his words of whether we are going to have a country or not. In other words, will America be a sovereign nation? All of Clinton’s passions, meanwhile, are negative answers to Trump’s question: we will not have a country, because the core of that country is deplorable and needs to be undermined by the global economy, overwhelmed by immigrants, harried by violent minorities, restrained by international law and the international community, and humiliated by “anti-testosterone” sexual politics (I have not heard anyone remark that Clinton’s comments on Trump’s love of beauty pageants in the first debate was essentially a casual demonization of normal male heterosexual desire—how creepy it is to like being around beautiful women! [I can now add a note about the latest video revelation, in which we find further confirmation of Trump’s heterosexuality, and his pleasure in discussing, graphically, with other men, his attempts—in this case, failed—to bed beautiful women. Perhaps Hillary’s health care plan will include free neutering services.]). Trump’s campaign, whatever the outcome of the election, has done us the enormous service of revealing that the vast majority of American elites are inalterably hostile to American sovereignty, and filled with hatred towards anyone who would assert it. The symmetry is striking: Trump is opposed by the entire Republicrat uniparty, precisely what would need to be replaced by an absolutist restoration. Who knows what intriguing measures even the ultimately liberal Trump might be driven to in the struggle to preserve his Presidency?

In that case, Trump’s campaign should provide us with a preliminary template of the rigors, dispositions, and, of course, political decisions, that would be required in restoring sovereignty. Let’s begin with this—the restoration of sovereignty would require heroes, and Trump is a hero. I remember at the beginning of this campaign a lot of people saw his candidacy as some kind of publicity stunt meant, perhaps, to help the ratings of his reality TV show. Nobody says such things anymore because of the obvious fact that he’s far more likely to lose everything as a result of his perhaps quixotic struggle to restore American sovereignty. Does anyone doubt that if Trump loses, he will be ostracized from the business communities he has frequented, boycotted by companies and countries, probed incessantly by Hillary’s IRS, foreclosed upon by banks wishing to remain in the administration’s good graces, and so on? Even if he wins, much of this is likely to happen, along with a rising up of the entire D.C political class and perhaps a bipartisan impeachment. In other words, we have a man risking everything to save his country. When was the last time we could say that about a candidate for high public office in the US?

Most obviously, restoration will involve control over the country’s borders, and rational, accountable decision making regarding who enters and who stays. Not a single decision made about immigration and naturalization in recent decades has been made in a way anyone could actually account for, other than through clichéd gestures toward “diversity” and the supposed economic benefits immigration brings. The post-1965 mass immigration has been one of the most hostile acts by a ruling elite against the people it rules in recent history, and the whole thing will have to be audited. Trump is barely scratching the surface here: if the processes and interests involved in pushing massive legal and illegal immigration on Americans were brought to light it would be necessary to review the entire enterprise, and determine how many citizenships have been obtained fraudulently in recent decades. And, of course, this might embitter relations with countries to whom we might be returning quite a few people (but if we are supposed to want them, shouldn’t those countries be eager to have them back…). The broader point is: restoration would itself be a kind of war against the crimes against the sovereignty of American that led to the summoning of the forces of restoration in the first place.

Restoration implies returning things back to the way they were before, as well as setting things right. The alt-right provides a blueprint for rolling back the victimary—and it must be rolled back all the way for sovereignty to be restored. The alt-right, on one level, is just an aggressive, uncompromising defense of normality—the normality of in-group affiliative preference, of masculinity and sexual difference, of love for country and its traditionally admired accomplishments (monuments of wealth, conquest, association, etc.), of freely observed group differences. The alt-right is what normality would be if pressed, every minute of the day, to defend its right to exist in the face of an obsessively hostile abnormality. Beyond that, just as a king leading a conquering force would have to divvy up the rewards to those who have fought alongside him, the restoration of sovereignty would have to give existing institutions—universities, the media, corporations, and so on—to those who have been marginalized under the liberal order and helped fight back. That means that Trump’s addiction to tit-for-tat responses to all attacks, even the most trivial insults, is both his greatest flaw and the most perfect embodiment of the restorer, who will have to assure all his followers that every blow will be met with a commensurate counter-blow. And that all the victorious blows will be commemorated and institutionalized in the restored state.

America First in relation to the world means the sovereign being a systematic filter between the country and the world. For starters, dual citizenship will have to be eliminated: you’re an American or you’re not. The internal market can be made much freer (no minimum wage, no unions, drastically reduced regulation, no corporate taxation) in exchange for capital repatriation—corporations, too, can be made to choose whether they want to be American or global. Tariffs will slow, but not eliminate international trade; corporations can set up shop within the US by paying for the privilege of accessing the American market, or through bilateral arrangements with peer countries. Since global media corporations like Twitter, Google and Facebook have shown themselves subservient to foreign governments and choose political leftism over fair dealing with their customers at every point, there need be no hesitation in subordinating them directly to centralized political control. Trump’s much derided threat to sue the media for lying about him adumbrates this possibility, and the breathtaking pace of change advanced by the victimocracy allows us to, take a leftist slogan, “imagine the impossible”: just as people can in an instant be expected to accept that they must allow teenage boys in their daughter’s locker room and Syrian refugees in their neighborhood, they will tomorrow accept that, of course, Google must tailor its search parameters, Twitter must undertake to slow the spread of certain tweets, and Facebook must deliver information as requested by the sovereign. The emphasis should be on suppressing lies and broadcasting truth, but questions of public safety and public morality will shape decision making as well. These companies promised so much, and betrayed it all, so few will weep when they are brought to heel.

A restored sovereign will undoubtedly be natalist—it will openly encourage and reward large families, it will promote entertainment presenting such families as the norm, and offer no protection to other “lifestyles.” Sticking to such a policy would probably be enough to neutralize the feminist and sexual diversity agendas. No-fault divorce will be eliminated, and discrimination in favor of married couples (in housing, employment, accommodation, etc.) allowed and encouraged. The implications of a restoration for schooling are obvious enough, but religion seems to me tricky. Absolutism requires transcendental support, but the sovereign can’t simply invent a religion and the existing ones are all completely unsuitable for a restored sovereign order. I think the sovereign would have to immediately make a list of clergy from all religions who are forbidden to preach and minister, because they have been complicit in the crimes of the previous regime. Then some kind of meeting must be convened including the trustworthy and penitent clergy to lay down some ground rules. Input can be encouraged, as the clergy will know best how their beliefs and doctrines can be brought into accordance with the terms of restored sovereignty. There’s also no need to be hostile to all new forms of spirituality—perhaps a renewed sovereignty and social order will release new spiritual energies. All this will be easier as more and more people realize that free speech, freedom of religion and the rule of law have become meaningless concepts, as social media, universities and corporations censor and ban right-wingers, Christianity is increasingly subordinated to various anti-discrimination and sexual deviancy agendas, and courts become shameless enforcers of elite opinion. At some point it will come down to the simple question of who will take care of us?

But all of this means nothing without reactionaries undertaking their own long march through the institutions. Of course, alternative media and social media institutions will need to be built, and schools and (far more difficult) universities and businesses. But all this pales in importance compared to the real institutions of sovereignty: the military and police forces. The tops of these institutions are already highly politicized—Obama has carried out a Stalinesque purge of the top military brass, which now parrots his moronic talking point that climate change is our main national security concern, and we can see how the FBI has been coopted by the Democrats—while the ranks themselves remain right wing. The only way restoration will ever be possible is if a large majority of those charged with defending sovereignty are prepared to do so in defiance of political orders and the orders of their own superiors. Here, we’re obviously beyond anything conceivable to Donald Trump, but addressing directly the following he has inspired, by which, of course, I mean the alt-right. When driving home from work, I switch back and forth between Michael Savage’s and Sean Hannity’s shows, respectively. Hannity is still on the endless true conservative loop, going on about taxes, regulation, smaller government, etc. Savage realizes there is a war against very specific targets—white men, masculinity, patriotism, what blogger Brett Stevens calls the “Amerikaners.” All the small government crap doesn’t matter anymore. “There’s Obama’s army” Savage exclaimed when discussing the Charlotte riots—that’s exactly right. Don’t be surprised if we start to see “necklacing” soon, or some distinctive American equivalent. And don’t be surprised to see an ex-president Obama emoting plaintively on their behalf, even while deploring the lengths this racist society has forced them to go. The only way a resistant force can be built within the armed forces is on the basis of race—the logic is not all that different than that of prison gangs. This is wasteful, because sovereignty can only tacitly acknowledge a preferred racial pattern, it can’t base its legitimacy on it—which means those movements would have to be curtailed, and we can imagine they won’t want to be curtailed. But you won’t recruit cadres ready to restore sovereignty on the basis of lower taxes and less regulation—much less brow-knitting over abortion. You will only be able to do it by drawing on people who are cornered, who understand the war against them in the most pointed way, and can discipline themselves for the long term (and the rapid and aggressive politicization of these institutions currently underway means it will take a great deal of discipline and long-term thinking). Racial thinking can bind people together in an imagined history going back hundreds or even thousands of years, and it will provide ready means of identification and shared experiences—already we can see that the alt-right has an extensive system of symbols and passwords that allow one to signal to others one’s contempt for the pre-approved BS. The truth is that the anti-white dimension of the globalist/leftist juggernaut goes far deeper than any “welfare state,” “regulatory,” or “meritocratic” issues can get at, and requires for its intellectual dismantling a more sophisticated hermeneutics that relies upon in-group tacit agreement. It need not involve enmity towards other groups, even if that’s likely—it’s a question of harvesting high levels of trust. Outsider allies should respect that when it comes to choosing sides. The more invested such high trust groups are in sovereignty, the better, even if that kind of trust cannot in itself guarantee sovereignty. At any rate, any sovereign will want to replicate, to the extent possible, such prior investments in restoration in the restored sovereignty itself. Those who entered early and contributed significantly should only be excluded from the power structure for extremely compelling reasons. A large part of the attraction of a genuine sovereign, as things are falling apart, is the promise that people will be far more likely to get what they deserve—so, the foundational sovereign acts should exemplify that promise by giving those who ensured the restoration their due.

Bertrand de Jouvenel, in his historical account of the rise and metastasization of state power, On Power, finds in the origin of absolutism the very defect of unsecure power that leads to the pathological dynamic of divided power seeking more power that absolutist theory decries. The assertion of absolute power by the earliest kings (in Europe, at least, but de Jouvenel sees the model as universally applicable) resulted from their monarchical projects being stymied by the aristocrats they relied upon, who retained their land and men and therefore power (even if it was land and power nominally owned and actually distributed by the king). The king, then, elevates the subordinates of those aristocrats, makes them subject to his authority alone, and thereby marginalizes the aristocrats. This is the high-low alliance against the middle, repeated over and over again in the career of state power, because then, of course, out of the newly elevated subjects emerges a new middle, which again becomes a threat and so must be undermined by a new levy of the “people.” In the end, you get Black Lives Matter as a battering ram against the police, local governments and the white middle class.

The point, though, is that in de Jouvenel’s account there never seems to have been a time when power was “just right”—the aristocrats were, undoubtedly, short-sighted and egotistical and less capable than the king, at least on some occasions, of understanding the interests of the national community as a whole. It is ridiculous that a single aristocrat can go on strike and thereby make addressing some crisis (e.g., a rebellion or invasion) impossible. The initial appropriation of absolute power, then, was not arbitrary and was probably even justified—and probably more likely to succeed than waging war on recalcitrant aristocrats. But this certainly creates a problem for absolutist theory: where, exactly, are we taking our model of good governance from?

We could pinpoint theoretically and no doubt discover historically moments when the pre-absolutist king called upon his aristocratic loyalists, who in turn called upon their dependents—and all the calls were in fact answered. The earliest absolutisms would themselves have been modeled upon, and attempts to recreate, such events. Whatever made sovereignty reducible to the king’s will is the model for absolutism. We don’t have to assume a single miraculous moment of harmony uniting all wills and strata of society—this would have happened often, perhaps regularly. Aristocratic resistance to, say, 15% of the king’s projects might have been frustrating enough and, indeed, sometimes dangerous enough, for the king to take measures to end his dependence on the aristocrats, but that would still mean he attained 85% compliance. Even if the numbers are lower, the point would stand: unity of will was obtained, repeatedly, so we can figure out how.

It seems obvious that the king would have been most successful in mobilizing his subordinates in their hierarchical order when there was universal acknowledgement regarding the urgency of some shared threat, or potential advantage. Such acknowledgement can never be universally intense, but enthusiasm must be high enough for the skeptical to yield to that pressure rather than risking going it alone in dissent. In retrospect, it might be discovered that unanimity was attained when it was less necessary, and not attained when it was more necessary—this is what would have initiated the career of power, in de Jouvenel’s sense. In other words, if the king takes unanimity when he can get it, rather than obtaining it when he really needs it, he is not preserving the unity of sovereignty. So, we need to pinpoint our model even more precisely: what we are looking for is the king wisely “calling in his debts” when the future of his realm most depends upon it.

Absolutism, then, as political theory and method, aims at having and keeping those debts in place permanently, and acting at each moment as if the future of the realm depends upon every decision. The cost-benefit consequences of obedience or resistance must be present to all at all times—the entire social order must be permeated with signs of these consequences, which will be modulated continually: where more benefits are available, costs can be downplayed, but if benefits become limited, the costs must be highlighted. But costs and benefits must always be framed in terms of the largest cost and benefit of them all: the destruction or preservation and enhancement of the realm itself. It is easy to see why kings would have judges issuing judgments in the name of the king, merchants selling goods in the name of the king, teachers promoting students in the name of the king, and so on. Nor are these formulas any more tedious, or less given to being renewed by fresh commitments, than the clichés we live by in liberal democracies. It’s really just a way of reminding us that we must be doing what we do for the good of society, which is no vague phrase because we know where that good is located.

The idea here is less to “assert” absolute power than to simply assume the absolute power already located at the social center. There is a social center because society is founded on deferral, which assumes some central object of desire; the social center, in a civilized order premised on an upward spiral of discipline, is whatever is taken to guarantee that hierarchy of discipline. The sovereign power, then, embodies that guarantee, and the way to embody that guarantee is to issue tokens of permission and promises of protection to all the disciplines, i.e., all institutions that seek to reward discipline of whatever kind and ensure the return in kind to that form of discipline (which might be money for the merchant, recognition for the soldier, a circle of fellow inquirers and supply of students for the scholar, etc.). And then, of course, review the terms of the permission regularly and honor the promises. This is the way to govern with and through the middle, rather than against it—and this might be much easier now than it was for the original absolutist monarchs because the property and power of the disciplines are now more obviously social in character than was the land and serfs of the lord. Computer operators and doctors can’t really go it alone—they need protection and therefore permission. Of course, as de Jouvenel would also insist, all these conditions of absolute rule operate as constraints on the ruler, who, to that extent, is less than “absolute.” But no one could ever have claimed that an absolute ruler was absolute in any metaphysical sense—a massive earthquake could destroy his rule, just as much as political mistakes can. His rule is absolute in the sense that nothing in the social order is outside of that rule, and if there is something outside of it he’s not really ruling—there is a descriptive, almost axiomatic component of this formulation, but also a prescriptive one: to the sovereign, let nothing assert itself outside of your grant of permission and promise, but also grant nothing you are not prepared to guarantee; to the subject, unless you wish for disorder, assert nothing outside of that rule, but also assert and cloth yourself in the rule.

The absolutist theory of sovereignty makes it possible to solve a problem that not only has never been solved but has never even been adequately formulated, even though it was first posed during the Enlightenment. The concept of “ideology” began, of course, as a proposed discipline focused on the study of ideas, but the problem of how to liberate people’s natural reason from faith, superstition and tradition was already a pressing problem for Enlightenment thinkers—and it is this problem that ultimately became the problem of “alienation” and finally ideology in Marxist thought. Why do the mystifications of bourgeois society mystify? The activist thinker can see through them—why can’t others be made to? Noam Chomsky has taken the concept of “manufacturing consent” from Walter Lippman’s study of public opinion, and used it to the same end—why do people accept the alien perspective of their rulers? Of course, much of this can be attributed to the imbalances of power—the Marxists and Chomskyans are all well aware of who owns the media, who runs the schools, who produces mass entertainment, etc. But it is essential to any politics aiming at radical transformation to locate in the “people” some innate resistance to such machinations, whether that be natural reason (which Chomsky seems to believe in as much as any Enlightenment liberal) or some kind of class or other “consciousness.” But if that resistance was there to be activated, why does it never seem to take shape? Somehow, ideology must be penetrating the workings of that resistant consciousness and de-activating it. But by now every group and almost every individual has its own theory of ideology—something prevents the masses from seeing corporate domination, or the war on whites, or the insidious racism oozing out of all our practices, or just from seeing how astonishingly evil Hillary or Trump is. We are way past arguments over reasonable differences regarding the fitness of candidates and the justice or effectiveness of public policies—there is no one to persuade, only enemies to destroy and potential allies to be liberated from their false consciousness. The red pill/blue pill distinction so central to alt-right and neo-reactionary thinking is the latest, and far from the most easily dismissed, of these “ideology critiques.”

We can bemoan the loss of public discourse aimed at persuading fellow citizens, but, in truth, that conception was conjoined at its birth with the theory of ideology, which is meant to diagnose those not amenable to persuasion. The confusions theories of ideology denounce are real, but they are confusions over who rules; moreover, these confusions do not bespeak confused minds but, rather, divided and unsecure power. If it is in reality unclear who rules, who occupies the center, all members of society have no choice but to do their best to identify the real ruler. Naturally they will do this differently, depending upon how they map the moral model of the originary scene onto whichever configuration of the center is most apparent to them, and which potential occupants of the center appear most threatening. A worker who fears losing his job will believe it is unjust that he lose his job because he has played by the rules and paid his dues to the center—a just central power would not allow this and since it appears likely to happen some unjust power has usurped the once just sovereign (or kept out of power the potentially just sovereign). That worker will want to know who that usurper is. Thus far, the worker is not at all mystified—he is right. The problem is that with multiplying power divisions, identifying the responsible party is a hit or miss game, and the answer that seems most plausible to that worker will depend upon who that worker, in a newly fragile world of shaken authorities, still attributes a knowing trustworthiness to. Perhaps his fellow union members; perhaps his friends at the bar, perhaps his neighbors, or his boss—or a radio talk show host.

Meanwhile, all those powers playing musical chairs are attributing responsibility to each other—the media blame the corporations, the corporations fund think tanks and media outlets that blame other corporate sectors, or the government bureaucracy, the political parties blame each other and each other’s constituencies; foreign powers, and of course, the Jews, get thrown into the mix. There may be more or less truth in any of these assessments, but no one is in any position to determine how much with any real certainty, in part because the precise power balances shift constantly. Ideology, then, is really the miasma of distributed powers all trying to ally themselves with some powers and oppose others, which means all share an interest in never allowing power to become settled, never allowing the center to be occupied. But the only substitute for secure occupation of the center is to mobilize as much unanimity as you can against some false pretender to that occupancy. This is how ideological narratives take shape, very much on the model of myth (the Enlighteners had a point there): the pretender (corporations, rogue spy agencies, foreign powers, rogue spy agencies of foreign powers, the ideologically suspect—once Communists, now neo-Nazis) threatens to possess the center, taking advantage of division, complacency and misguided generosity of those who have internalized the true center; finally, a heroic representative of the true center will awaken, enlighten and unify enough of the “centrists” (two or three, including a bratty child, may do) to restore an implicit center occupied by no one but internalized in the hearts of all. Such narratives can frame a news story or a history textbook as easily as a Hollywood blockbuster. In the end, the faith in centerlessness, with a true center in each and every one of us, is restored.

There is always a sense in which sovereignty ultimately resides in whoever commands the massive bodies of armed men, but it is in the nature of liberal democratic government to pass power out of its own hands like a game we used to play as kids that I perhaps misremember being called “salugee,” where the object was to keep passing a ball or some object from teammate to teammate to prevent the opposing team from wresting physical possession of the object from the carrier (whichever team had the ball or object when lunch period was over won). So, the government attributes its actions to the will of the people, or to some overriding political or legal principle, or to the need to appease the “base” of the party in power—which really means the social groupings the government attributes “peoplehood” to in order to under-legitimize some other group, or some legal authority it wants to empower to undermine some other legal authority, or the agenda of fundraisers who want cheap labor or weapons orders or agricultural patents. The tendency is always toward power that is both more centralized and more divided—more aspects of life, more norms, more social arrangements, become the object of interference in decreasingly accountable ways. To whom do you address your grievance if some district court judge appointed by a president (elevated by a particular power configuration displacing another) enamored of some legal theorist at Harvard (himself inspired by some 60s activist and recipient of grants from various foundations) decides low income housing needs to be built down the street from you? The desire to find out who is behind all this is nearly irresistible, but also futile.

It makes a lot more sense to say that we are alienated from our proper relation to the center than from our real (or genuinely human) self or class consciousness. Our resentments speak of a center—you can’t see something as wrong, unjust, unfair or even just mistaken without imagining the possibility of remedying it (without that possibility, it’s all just things that happen). It’s a sign of maturity to realize that all things (probably most things) cannot be remedied to one’s own satisfaction, but it is, then, a sign of emergent mastery to consider which wrongs most need to be remedied, what kind of authority would have to do the remedying, what interference it would encounter, which wrongs would get neglected in the process, or might even turn out not to be wrongs at all; and, moreover, what kind of person would be able to deploy that authority, what sort of social relations and individual character would be needed to comply with and aid that authority—what you are doing, at that point, is theorizing sovereignty. In the process you will necessarily cut through the lies, the self-serving self-deceptions, the panicky confusions, because you will always want to bring the fundamental question up point blank: what hierarchy of authorities would right the most wrongs, do the most justice, lead to the greatest fairness, or, even better, prevent the most wrongs, injustice and unfairness from being committed in the first place? And not just any wrongs, injustices and unfairnesses, but the ones we see right in front of us, the ones that spark the inquiry into sovereignty in the first place. Here, there is a place for dialogue with our fellow citizens in the true spirit of openness and inquiry—indeed, we can focus the dialogue on what mode of government, what kind of occupation of the center, can best guarantee that such dialogues can be sustained? I think it must be an occupation of the center ready to be accountable for all that happens on the margins, but we can continue to discuss it.

Another dimension of absolutist theory, one that I have mostly neglected so far, can be brought into play here as well. Ultimately, for absolutism, powers that intervene in and influence events simply want their power to be more secure—they want a “decidable” sovereignty as much as anyone. Because of divided power, though, they must make an end run around other powers in order to achieve—never with complete success—such security. (It should be noted that this implies a severely divided consciousness on the part of such powers.) I will refer you to Reactionary Future’s post on the Charlotte riots, which I referenced a couple of posts back. The government, or some part of government, wants a national police force; because of divided power (federalism) that can’t be done directly; so you instigate racial and cop hatred that causes riots so that you have the “proof” of the racism and incompetence of local police forces that you need to propose nationalizing the whole shebang—in stages, of course, first by instituting “standards” whose implementation is to be overseen by the Justice Department, but which can’t really be met by the local forces without resources from the feds, etc. Of course, different powers will be doing this in different ways, often undermining each other. Still, if, as RF says in his latest post,

the best we can do is to try to deduce what actors will do in the specific position they occupy within a governmental system. We cannot dictate what they must do with a law, constitution or other such ring of Fnargl gimmicks, but must provide them with the requisite circumstances and organisation to allow them to act in accordance with their role without having to resort to such bizarre recourse as funding black rioters, anti-corn law movements or other forms of self-protesting to circumvent the republican blocks in place that stop them from acting correctly,

then we can conduct our ideology critique in a way that more directly addresses political and policy decisions. Once we have deduced what would “be in accordance with their role” without “resort to such bizarre recourse,” we can use the impossibility of fulfilling their role under current circumstances to expose the whole tangled web of “bizarre recourses” that comprise our present governmental and social order. Indeed, much of our everyday lives must be made up of such bizarre recourses, even though we often do, as must the government, get things done somehow (fulfill the roles the center as allotted us), nevertheless. (This is possible because all of us recognize at least some of the time that there is a center, and can reconstruct a version of its “instructions.”) When the center is occupied intermittently and unaccountably, everyone will busy themselves in trying to saturate the center space, and this generates the thickets of bizarre recourses (and equally bizarre explanations justifying those recourses) that we must continually cut through to bring the center—a center, I continue to insist, that we all know is there (otherwise, no rational decisions would ever make it through those bizarre recourses at all)—into view. So, the starting point of our counter-ideological dialogues can be asking what you (or anyone else) would be doing right now if a clear and secure hierarchy of authority rendered all bizarre recourse unnecessary; the question of what one should be doing will, furthermore, be of use in constructing a model of that hierarchy.

Imagine a group of ten people. Nine of them, when food is presented, rush straight towards it and grab it greedily, shoving big chunks into their mouth as fast as they can. The tenth waits a minute or so, until the furor and squabbling dies down, and calmly goes to the food that has not yet been touched and eats it at a normal pace. How impressed the nine would be with the tenth! He would be a veritable god to them—his self-control would seem magical or divinely inspired. This is charisma, in its original sense, according t Philip Rieff: divine grace perceived in a person who has transcended desires that are compulsive to others. Such an individual, through force of example, would be able to lay down the law to the nine, restructuring their eating habits so that at least a modicum of his discipline is reflected in them. Or, of course, the nine might kill him, especially if instigated by one of their number who was to point out, for example, the possibility that the new eating arrangements might not benefit all equally, might, in fact, redound in particular to the benefit of the tenth and, anyway, how was he able to restrain himself—does he possess some power he might now use on the rest of us? This instigator would recommend transgressing the better order proposed or even just implicitly embodied by the tenth, and in doing so would end up transgressing even the old order, where at least, however squalid the proceedings, everyone knew they’d get their piece. He must end up transgressing this established order because in it lie the seeds of the new, more disciplined one, and he will do so by reversing the scale of values and empowering the most piggish of the bunch. This is the modern, post-Weberian meaning of charisma: the transgression of the established, the secure, and the accepted.

The two modes of charisma are not, though, as easy to distinguish in real life as they are in this simple example. Those who transgress and flout traditional sexual norms do so in the name of restraining our desire to lash out at those who are “different”; while many of those who defend tradition against the corrosive dictates of political correctness can no doubt feel a transgressive thrill in breaking the rules of current discourse on race, sex and other topics. This complexity is multiplied by the diversity of virtues, each requiring its own form of discipline and capable of being manifested with either form of charisma. To be courageous is to discipline oneself to restrain feelings of fear, the most natural and powerful of all feelings, but it is also fear that keeps us in line and in accord with established values, and it might be courageous to break completely reasonable norms. To think carefully and systematically requires years of training, involving the suppression of the natural desire to make every new idea fit the ideas you already have mastered, but careful and systematic thinking can devise monstrous theories, monstrous theories that might put the author’s brilliance more on display than the intellectual output of a more traditionally minded and therefore seeming conventional but no less powerful thinker.

Indeed, if we return to our original example, the transgressive instigator of the other nine must have been at least slightly more disciplined than his brethren—otherwise, there is no way he could have extricated his mind from the sheer expanse separating the nine’s gluttony from the tenth’s restraint to resent the power the latter now deployed. Perhaps the tenth is “more” disciplined than (let’s call him) the “ninth,” but not only is “quantity” a very limited category to apply to the wide range of disciplines, but it may often turn out that the ninth is more disciplined than the tenth (which would be why they sometimes win). The difference we are looking for must be qualitative.

How do the nine of ten indulge their voraciousness while managing not to kill each other? We’re not dealing with animals, so there must be some minimal hesitation and mutual adjustment even in what would look to mannered onlookers as a disgusting food orgy. They remember enough of the originary scene to let each other know that they won’t interfere, at least not too much, with the others’ satisfaction. The tenth just has a memory of the originary scene that is both more abstract and more present. How is that possible? Compared to the tenth, the nine all seem out of control; compared to each other, though, there are definitely differences—some are, sometimes, more attuned to the danger posed to the group by the aggressiveness of others, and take measures to both limit that aggressiveness and model a more sustainable mode of sharing. It may be that these differences never settle upon specific members but, rather, emerge contingently, depending upon which of the ten (first of all) has the sharpest insight into the danger at the time. The tenth emerges when these differences settle upon an individual who is now capable of applying them a priori to any scene.

The ninth couldn’t emerge before the tenth because in that case he would just be a somewhat cleverer aggressor amongst the horde. So he comes after the tenth. The tenth separates himself from the rest by remembering the originary scene in its difference from the present scene. The memory of the originary scene induces an obligation to preserve the present scene, but to preserve it in distinction from some imminent danger, which also means to modify it—in as understated a way as possible. This involves both the addition of an increment of deferral and thwarting the most present danger. The stronger the memory of the originary scene, the more visible and imitable the deferral and the more accurately perceived the danger. The ninth exploits the hesitation induced by the tenth’s modeling of deferral, while seeking to destroy that model, which would eliminate his advantage as the only one who can choose to hesitate or not. The ninth denounces the commemoration of the originary scene as a delusion that benefits only the tenth.

So, can we apply this rather abstract model to contemporary politics, and distinguish in real time between the two charismas? The “graceful” charisma wants to bring power and accountability into ever closer identity. If someone is expected to do something, he must have the means to do it; if someone has the means to do something, he must be expected to deploy those means in a way that serves the end for which the means were provided. This extends all the way up to the sovereign, who is accountable to no one in particular but must use the means at his disposal to maintain sovereignty, because no one else will do it for him. Accountability involves retrieving the model of the originary scene: showing yourself refraining from the act most likely to break the existing truce and restart mimetic rivalry. Power means thwarting the ambitions of whoever would break ranks and rush to center. We can tell when someone wants to bring power and accountability closer together: they evince recognition, at least, of the fact that doing one thing means not doing something else. Transgressive charisma, meanwhile, wants to separate power and accountability—to have power is to be unaccountable, and to be accountable is to be accountable to power. Transgressive charisma promises power without accountability, exercises power without accountability, and seeks to strip the power of those it holds accountable. (It does take some discipline to maintain this focus and steady oneself to violate norms and normality.) I don’t think we’ll find any unmistakable examples of graceful charisma in today’s political world, but we can certainly distinguish between those at least aware of the possibility and those who want to extinguish it.

Remembering the originary scene is the ultimate tradition. It is manifested not in the construction of pacific utopian fantasies, but in a kind of attention management: noticing where some refrain from violating the perimeter surrounding the center, where some of those who refrain also stand prepared to restrain those (the other locus of attention) who exploit the hesitation of others. To be a traditionalist is to look for where discipline has been stored in existing institutions, and to add to the stock. You do this by preserving and restoring the sovereignty of the institutions by bringing power and accountability into alignment—by adhering to the original function of the institution. Well, what about bad institutions, whose original purpose was to do evil—let’s go straight to the reduction ad Hitlerum and Stalinum and say death camps and Gulags (are they not institutions?)—but it’s not clear what it would mean to add new increments of deferral to institutions explicitly and solely devoted to torment and extermination, is it? Such institutions are the end point of transgressive charisma, loading on more accountability in proportion to the stripping of all power.