GABlog Generative Anthropology in the Public Sphere

Speech is effective, which is to say revelatory and transformative, when it points to some reparable failure of reciprocity—reciprocity that is acknowledged by he who is charged with the failure, pointed out by or on behalf of he to whom the reciprocity is owed. (When reciprocity is wholly realized, received verbal formulas are sufficient for the purposes of acknowledgement.) Such speech is marked by the asymmetry of the relation—the asymmetry in fulfillment of obligations as well as the respective roles or positions of the interlocutors. This is especially the case when an inferior speaks to a superior, but speech between peers carries its own burdens. There is an especial gravity, for example, in a private raising a grievance with a general—such an act would be disruptive of norms and forms, and dangerous for the private, which both gives greater weight to the grievance and requires that the grievance be of such weight as to merit the disruption, and be presented accordingly. Let’s take a less consequential situation—a writer who addresses a letter of complaint to an editor who has rejected his work. The complaint is not over the rejection as such, but over the editor’s failure to provide a plausible reason for it. Here, the assumption is of a reciprocity of obligations which is uncodified but embedded in the relation between two individuals presumably invested in the preservation of “letters.” The dismissiveness of the editor is a dereliction of duty, because he should be able to explain why the submission is of insufficient interest to be put before the readership served by the journal. (What is of interest to them, within the range of problems encompassed by your journal, and why? Why, for that matter, should not the submission suggest a new possible approach to the readership, and a revision of the scope of the journal? What are you doing with the attention to control?) To provide such reasons would be to render one’s responsibility to one’s interdependencies, to bring one’s power into accord with one’s accountability. There are obviously good reasons for rejecting manuscripts, just as the general might have good reasons for not satisfying the soldier’s grievance, but in both cases the question is whether the responsible individual recognizes that some kind of breach needs to be repaired and nominal and actual power brought into accord. Even a trivial complaint may expose such a breach, even if it only calls for an equally trivial, but perhaps meaningful gesture. Knowing that you will be expected to account for your decisions, and that you are not simply exercising power at your own discretion in your own private fiefdom, may lead you to make better decisions—and demand better decisions, in turn, from others.

We are always addressing our possible audiences, and through them a broader arena of our contemporaries, and, we imagine, posterity, in this way as well: we name them, assign them titles, and corresponding duties, however minimally or implicitly conceived. We insist that they accept their names and titles and act in accord with the corresponding duties; and in doing so we adopt names and titles and duties ourselves. In the process we imagine a mode of sovereignty: a mode of sovereignty wherein the sovereign’s only interest is in a saturated realm of reciprocal obligations, and who intervenes proportionally to the inability of the institution itself to restore rights and duties, and the threat posed by the breach. According to the originary hypothesis of Eric Gans, the first human word was “God”—the name given to the central object of desire the deferred appropriation of which founds the human community. Gans has further suggested that all words are names of God—as speaking beings, that’s all we do: name God. Naming God involves building institutions that commemorate the originary event by increasing the community’s distance from the violence entailed by mimetic desire (which itself intensifies with the increase in desirable objects and social roles). These institutions and their representatives are, we might say, “angelic,” in accord with the original meaning of the word, “messenger [from God]”—they continue to bring information from the originary scene regarding the relation between signs and the deferral of violence. Those institutions are staffed by those best able and most committed to preserving their function, to further guarantee the deferral of violence in whatever way that institution accomplishes it (worshipping a shared deity, laboring on shared projects of benefit to the community, engaging in some inquiry, raising children to be full members of the community, and so on), and in the order that best matches institutional traditions to individual ability. The more such institutions proliferate, and the more complex their duties, the more we need to talk about where institutional breaches occur, how we can recognize them quickly and remedy them decisively, and, then, more philosophically and theologically, about the entire order of social being, involving inquiries into what kind of world has produced such hierarchies of obligation and coordination of institutions. At this level of generality we generate models, around which disciplines and intellectual traditions are organized, and those participating in those disciplines become accountable to each other as teachers, students, colleagues and what we can call “reality checks.”

All this is to approach the question of how much “free speech” we should expect under an absolutist regime. The stock (liberal) position is that the sovereign, with absolute power, would simply forbid all expressions critical of him or even all those that bother him or that he considers unworthy or irresponsible for any reason whatsoever. In other words, our speech would hang on the whims of a man made drunk with power. In response, I would say that we can assume that a sovereign who wants a flourishing realm will welcome the kinds of speech outlined above. That would be a lot of speech, enough for very substantive discussions on all matters public and scientific. If we set aside the kind of 1^st amendment jurisprudence that shapes the thinking of (at least) Americans on these matters (a way of thinking about freedom of speech that goes back to J.S. Mill) we can easily imagine all kinds of speech that wouldn’t be welcome; indeed, that might be suppressed. Much of this speech would be suppressed in ways similar to the suppression of all kinds of discourse today, albeit now mostly by nominally private rather than state institutions—the major media outlets are quite capable, and indeed, if we go back a couple of decades, were almost omnipotent in this regard, of shaping public discourse in such a way as marginalize, drown out and discredit unwanted streams of information and opinion. This will be the case in any civilized society, because any civilized society will have elites who govern social institutions. Under absolutism, institutions and communities can be left, for the most part to set limits to public opinion (as, they once did here, prior to intrusive ACLU-inspired Supreme Court decisions and the omnipresence of mass media)—this will be done differently in a small town than in the chemistry department of a major university. Those who think such control is impossible in our connected age should consider technology like V-chips and the fact that both Google and Facebook are now working on revising their algorithms so as to keep some news further away from potential audiences. There is no reason why authorities at all levels couldn’t have access to such controls. Someone, at any rate, will be sorting through and finding ways to direct attention to one sphere of discussion, one opinion, over others, and such shaping of the infospace would be more efficient than straightforward censorship at this point anyway.

Even more important is what kind of speech would be effective and what kind of speech would simply be irrelevant in an absolutist order. Even today, if the power to decide on issues like same-sex marriage were taken away from the Supreme Court, talk about the issue would be reduced dramatically, as advocates would focus just on those locations with a potentially sympathetic electorate or set of elites. The fewer of those to be found, the less talk. The same is true of all of our discussions of race and sex—if there was no national center ready to take up issues of civil rights there would be nothing to talk about. This is even more the case if we presuppose the elimination of divided and rotating power at the center—if we didn’t have all those elections, think of all the talk, filled with lies, false promises and character assassination, and, most importantly, blather about policies that bears no relation to the power afforded politicians to actually make decisions for which they can be held accountable, that would simply evaporate. “All” we would have to talk about are the things we owe to each other in our direct and indirect relations, which is to say the things we speak least about today because we simply have no vocabulary for them—the discourse of “rights” has completely crowded out any means of thinking together about reciprocities and responsibilities. Nor does this mean that discussions will become more provincial—things will happen in Montana or Bombay that are of great interest to someone living in Queens. The security of power and the unity of sovereignty in each country would be a concern of all, since destabilization is contagious.

This way of theorizing speech and sovereignty can guide our speech under current conditions of divided power. We can project onto actual and potential interlocutors the duties and obligations that would be taken for granted in a secured regime, and we can adopt those duties and obligations ourselves. To begin with, we can speak in terms of duties and obligations, rather than rights, demands, freedoms, oppression, conflict, etc. We can do so without stinting in our condemnations of the current order, and the various forms of opinion circulating within it—the new, proleptic, norms of speech provide the basis for the condemnation, and we can insist on our duty to speak truths without just finding ways to flip the other’s accusation back at them (“you’re the real racists,” “you’re the real fascists,” etc.). Most of all, we will point out ad nauseam that the power exercised by institutions does not correspond to the power claimed by them. (Sometimes they claim too much, sometimes too little—and sometimes just something different.) Will it be effective speech? That depends upon how good we get at articulating the obligations others acknowledge, maybe without realizing it—there are obligations that are built into our language, into our being as language users, and we can learn how to reveal them. There are some, maybe plenty, who will recognize no obligations, only grievances—but, of course, that need not be where we focus our energies.

But people will want to speak about the sovereign, won’t they? The sovereign will want people to speak about the sovereign. Will everyone live in constant fear, knowing they must have some opinion of the sovereign but never knowing whether it’s the correct one, or the consequences of it not being the correct one? Well, people live in fear now of being fired, ostracized, losing popularity, etc. Less so if you have some institutional backing—a well known and respected reporter, a tenured professor, a former statesman—or a network of readers and fellow writers. (Even less so, of course, if you mind your own business—but that may not always be as easy as it seems.) The same would be true under absolutism—the sovereign would serve as patron of the truth, of outspokenness, even parrhesia, as well as patron of many other things. Those media sources known to be close to and approved of by the sovereign would have a degree of freedom that allows them to set the tone for public discussion, to open up areas for further inquiry. For the liberal, this proposal prompts instant mockery—you expect truth from the king’s pets! Flattery and fluff is more like it! It is inconceivable for the liberal that those favorably disposed towards another might be the most likely to be frank with that other, that closeness might be a source of honesty and reciprocal revelation. That’s because the liberal freethinking journalist or intellectual knows that any organization to which he does not belong is inherently suspect, and guilty until proven innocent. Indeed, he’s just waiting for the smoking gun to show up. The discrediting of other institutions is social capital for him. A good ruler would want the truth told about him, though, and a presumption of the rightfulness of the ruler and mode of rule would encourage a less prosecutorial and more thorough, patient, and fair mode of inquiry into public events. Would there be those who insist on finding scandalous secrets behind the apparent motives of the sovereign and shouting those disclosures from the highest rooftops? Maybe—although it’s unlikely they’d be any more effective than such people are now, or at any time. The more cogent they are, the more of a risk they are taking (in any order), and the more likely it will be that they have a point, will be pointing to some breach, that the sovereign will want to look into, some slippage in sovereignty to be repaired—surely some system of soliciting and reviewing even wild charges can be incorporated into the information system of the sovereign (it may make the issuance of wild charges less appealing). He who centralizes feedback flows is sovereign.

What we might call the “cereal wars” has the Breitbart website pitted against the Kelloggs corporation, which has piously announced that it will no longer advertise on the honey badger website since it doesn’t “share our values.” Breitbart’s counter-attack involves both a boycott of Kelloggs (easy for me—no more Eggos, and the kids are off Frosted Flakes) and a series of exposures of Kelloggs’ donations to far left political causes like Black Lives Matters and Soros’s Tides Foundation, thereby vindicating Reactionary Future’s Moldbuggian focus on the corporate-funded foundations as the source of “social justice” style resentments. Another similarly vindicating item: John Derbyshire answers his own question, “Exactly Who in America has this Insatiable Appetite for Somali Immigration” as follows:

The appetite belongs in the first place to the refugee importers, the so-called Voluntary Agencies, who get vast grants of federal money to aid them in their efforts, and who pay their executives grand salaries; and in the second place to Midwestern meatpacking and food-processing companies wanting cheap labor.

It’s all a nice little money racket dressed up in humanitarian language.

Now, these are somewhat different rackets—Kelloggs, I would guess, like many corporations, is a victim of a kind of Stockholm Syndrome probably going back to the trustbusting of the early 20^th century  (in general, not with Kelloggs in particular) whereby the pincer movements of the labor movement, the yellow press and Progressives squeezed corporations into paying ransom in the form of charitable (and political) giving most likely to appease those governments most inclined to interfere with your business. In the end, you come to believe what you have to support in order to stay in business. The (Catholic) “Voluntary Agencies,” meanwhile worms its way into reciprocal relations with government bureaucracies, wherein the growth of each is the growth of the other. Still, while a quick look at their website yielded no enlightenment on the point, it’s reasonable to assume that the voluntary agencies are hardly bereft of private donations (perhaps even from those Midwestern meatpackers), especially with the imprimatur of the government on their activities. But, anyway, the differences are irrelevant—what matters is that if you believe that anyone who would consider deporting Somali immigrants and/or allowing no more into the country is an irredeemable, deplorable racist, or even if you find it a bit indelicate to discuss such matters, it is because very powerful public-private vectors of interest want it that way. So, the arguments over “immigration policy” and “the New Jim Crow” are a bit beside the point—if we shut down Voluntary Agencies and restricted Kelloggs to the business of producing obese children, we wouldn’t have to talk about this stuff in the first place. (it’s probably needless to say, but the examples I’ve just mentioned are the tiniest of tips on the most gigantic of icebergs.) We would, though, have to start talking about shutting down a very wide range of completely “legitimate” and even highly esteemed forms of philanthropy, which would in many ways be an even more difficult “conversation.”

In other words, the liberal democratic process is irrelevant here—no one ever voted to drastically increase the importation of Somalis, and no politician would ever publicly support doing so (although Hillary Clinton came pretty close), at least not until enough Somalis have clustered somewhere to function as a voting bloc (at which point the Republicans will be exhorted to develop minority-friendly, pro-immigration and anti-Islamophobic policies so they don’t get called racist and even win 9% of the Somali vote). And yet they keep coming. Perhaps Trump will shut down this pipeline (while he opens other, more socially beneficial ones), but for that to be more than a temporary fix he would have to “drain the swamp” even more comprehensively than he imagines (and I think he is already imagining this task on a rather grand scale), so as to take on all these joint public-private predatory cons practiced upon the American people. (A useful definition of the “right” today would be those who insist that those importing the Somalis ad dumping them on unsuspecting Midwestern towns be held responsible for the consequences of doing so—in the sense of being tried as accessories to the crimes their clients commit. If you don’t support that, aren’t you just a Commie?) It’s certainly impossible to do so on constitutional and legal terms, which means any president (and especially this incoming one) would risk impeachment before even really getting started. If such a president wanted to continue, then, he would need to justify taking on extra-constitutional and extra-legal powers, and to do that he would need a kind of private-public army within the security forces of the state, loyal to him alone. You can see where this is going, but I’ll get more specific about it soon.

Can the victimocracy stabilize itself in some way, or must it continue to generate more chaos until social collapse? While that latter possibility is not to be dismissed, and might even be preferable as it would make the case for the needed state of emergency, I believe that some kind of stabilization is possible. Of course, liberalism has been destabilizing from the beginning, since Locke and even earlier, but it took a long time for liberalism to not only upset but undertake to systematically interfere in and organize all aspects of life, from the most minute and intimate to the most public. Right now a boy taking a girl on a date has no idea what might land him in jail, or make it impossible for him to acquire a college diploma, or lead him to be banned from going within 50 yards of a school for the rest of his life. This situation (which can be multiplied for the categories of race, transgenderism, in some places one’s views of global warming, and who knows what else as we go forward), I think, is genuinely new, an exponential rate of increase in destabilization, and will soon be felt to be intolerable. The form of stabilization has been building for half a century, and has been discussed at length by Philip Rieff, Christopher Lasch, and others—the “therapeutic society.” The tendency to define all unacceptable attitudes as “phobias,” and as indicating a (reactionary, authoritarian) personality out of touch with “reality,” provide the vocabulary for a sustained “intervention” that all the “helping” and medical professions are geared up to provide. Why wait until racism, an inclination to distinguish between the sexes, insufficient sensitivity to the environment, and so on, actually manifest themselves, when we can surely identify behaviors and traits that predispose one to such tendencies and curtail their expression in advance. Such intervention can readily be built into the school systems from the earliest years, and the duties of the courts and social services can be revised so as to include determining the fitness of parents in terms of their attunement with these attitudes. And, no doubt, the various foundations will stand ready to infuse billions of dollars in grants to ensure the success of the whole enterprise. There can be competition over whether to extend some new form of therapeutic discipline in this direction or that, but all within the same framework. There is something paradoxical in the therapeutic order: one has to believe in a pre-social, naturalized form of “health” that has, nevertheless, been so thoroughly distorted by “society” that it has to be remade from top to bottom according to a model that, due to ever increasing scientific knowledge of human physiology, psychology and sociology, is in a sense more natural than humans ever were in the first place. Stabilization would be relative, for sure, since this can’t really be done in a coherent way (but that itself can be good for business)—but all of these initiatives could at least be brought under a single form of authority. The only problem, but it is a fatal one, is that such an order will be completely incapacitated in dealing with any non-therapeutic order, and will exacerbate any conflicts with such orders by treating them as if these other orders were, in fact, under therapeutic authority. (Much like European countries presently try to reduce the incidence of sexual assault by Muslim migrants by treating them as if they simply don’t know the rules and codes regarding sexual harassment in the West, and just need a workshop to clear things up.) This delusional mindset is an advantage for those non-therapeutic orders, and gives reactionaries an incentive to represent the current order as a therapeutic one, regardless of how far it is along that path. It shouldn’t be hard, since the SJW left already speaks about itself as if it is in a hospital, with everyone watching each other on suicide watch.

As obvious as it must seem, I’ll repeat that electoral politics, discourses on civil and human rights, arguments about promoting economic freedom and growth, etc., i.e., the stale staples of our political diet, are completely irrelevant to these developments, and therefore to opposing them (the Supreme Court may follow the election returns, but the foundations certainly don’t). Anyone who thinks that transgenderism is a fraud or that homosexuality is malleable or who honestly studies the effects of homosexuals raising children will never get through graduate school or get accredited in psychology, nursing, social work, etc. How do you vote against that? By all means, sue on behalf of your religious rights—we’ll see if you’ll even be able to find a lawyer willing to represent you. Against the therapeutic order the new order would have to pit self-discipline, privileging the signs of self-control, continence, practice, self-abnegation, loyalty to superiors, respect for peers and protection of subordinates, a willingness to be judged by the highest independent standards, deference to the genuine capabilities and authority of others, and recruiting supporters from the professions, locations and demographic groups richest in these qualities and elevating those groups as examples for the others. (The blogger sundance at Conservative Treehouse speaks of the “white hats” holding out in within the security apparatuses that have been mostly corrupted.) The new order would be one of faith and knowledge, both of which are generated by discipline—the pseudo-knowledge of the therapeutic would have to be countered by the study of civilization, in its distinction everywhere from barbarism, savagery and decadence. The unnatural nature of the therapeutic can be shown to be nothing but a comprehensive system of, to use the vernacular, “flipping out” or being “triggered”; to use a term that has pretty much fallen into disuse, the subjects of the victimary-cum-therapeutic are nothing but malingerers. General George Patton provided a model for how to treat malingerers, and perhaps learning from that model is a way (to cite Trump) to stop the poor old general from spinning in his grave.

Reactionary Future regularly targets, more or less directly, the conservative aphorism that “politics is downstream of culture,” along with the alt-right version, “identity>culture>politics.” In both cases, the problem is the assumption of a sphere of spontaneity and individual activity that precedes and ultimately exists outside of central authority and power—and, therefore, ultimately determines that authority and power, both causally and as the repository of rights that legitimates the sovereign. All of this is diametrically opposed to absolutism, which places politics, the center, first, with all activity on the margin “always already” accounted for by the center.

At the same time, a little while back, in a couple of posts on “tradition,” RF introduced the maxim, parallel to the maxim “sovereignty is conserved,” “tradition is conserved.” Just as someone always occupies the center, however ephemerally or unstably, all human activity is wholly indebted to some tradition or traditions enabling that activity. The most fundamental of traditions is, of course, language, which no individual could have invented alone, without which no one of us could perform a single human act, and of which we, to cite Michael Polanyi, know more (far more) than we can say. All tradition is like that.

But a lot of people would use tradition fairly synonymously with either or both “culture” and “identity,” which returns us to the question of the relation between these differing levels of human existence. Also, the “law of rebellious tools,” i.e., that all supposedly “bottom-up” political activity is really a product of insecure power, whereby one section of the elite instrumentalizes some “lumpen” element so as to undermine another section and enhance its own proximity to the center, would seem to render tradition completely malleable by outside forces—and, hence, not really “tradition” in any meaningful sense at all. There is certainly a lot of truth to this argument, as we find out regularly that supposedly deeply rooted and revered cultural traditions (like Christmas celebrations) are really very recent inventions, often attributable to advertising and publicity campaigns. But in that case, what would it mean to say that tradition is conserved, and why would we care?

For originary thinking, tradition can only be the memory and commemoration of the originary scene. As Eric Gans has shown, first of all in The Origin of Language, there is a tension between the ritual and signifying dimensions, respectively, on the originary scene and onward. Ritual involves performance, symbolic action, and the ostensive gesture. It also requires strict adherence to a rigorous “script.” Each tradition, in its own idiosyncratic way, re-enacts the originary event, where violence was deferred through the issuance of the aborted gesture of appropriation. The sign, discourse, interprets or, as I have put it previously, “anthropomorphizes” the figures on the ritual scene. The commemoration of the scene, then, accretes its own layers of reflection and modification to allow the practice to better embody the scene imagined in such reflections. It would follow that what enables the continuity of tradition is an ongoing dialectic of ritual and discourse, such that the discourse of the community is sufficiently rich in referents to the rituals, and the rituals sufficiently open to discursive accretions.

It’s not really possible to imagine performative and symbolic actions, organized around an ostensive gesture, without a sacred center. What would the ostensive gesture be gesturing toward? The irruption of the Big Man and its further enlargements into history disrupted the local, relatively egalitarian communities organized around a sacred center I think we can imagine on the model of ancestor worship. The organization of central power destroyed tradition and recuperated it through the divinity of the emperor. It may be that there is a “wound” here that has never healed and can never heal, and that there is something in tradition inimical to central power—the loss, or at least vitiation, of the bond to the venerated ancestor must be something like having one’s child torn away for service in some imperial institution. The ancient empires established traditions of their own, in which the origin story of the empire replaced ancestral human/animal/divine origin stories, but such traditions probably never struck roots in the millions of slaves and laborers subject to imperial domination, who likely always maintained more ancient rituals.

A new form of commemoration of the originary event emerged in response to the limitations of imperial traditions—as I have discussed previously, this form of commemoration establishes a scene analogous to the originary scene, but with an abstracted origin that, reduced to its essentials, does nothing more than serve as a locus guaranteeing the possibility of a scene of equal participants. Whether it is all-creating God who lovingly created human beings or a metaphysical “idea,” (or whatever the East Asian, Indian, etc., equivalents, of which I am unqualified to speak, might be), anyone willing to step outside of the ritual hierarchies of daily life can hear “news” of the originary event on such scenes. What one “hears,” in one idiom or another, is that reciprocity and central power are and must be made for each other. This message is audible because reciprocity and central power are so often at odds, so post-imperial tradition anthropomorphizes the dialectic of sovereign and subject as a search for appropriate reciprocity. Christianity is still the most fully realized embodiment of this revelation and tradition, and therefore still the most essential tradition of the West, but inherent in the possibility of a renewed revelation of the originary event is that it can take on new forms. The most abstract and in that sense the most perfect form of all would be a kind of “lingualotry,” or a worship of our miraculous capacity for language, which far transcends any one of us. That would itself be a conservation of tradition, with its own performative and symbolic dimension, directing attention to that in language whereby we say more than we can know. Gans refers to the “I Am” that speaks to Moses out of the burning bush as the God whose name is the declarative sentence—an assertion that commemorates the invisible center constitutive of every declarative sentence. If whatever we are talking about were fully present, we wouldn’t need to predicate it—and that’s true even if we are talking about something right in front of us. In speaking, hearing, writing, reading the declarative sentence, we express a shared faith in the center that doesn’t present itself, other than in our inability to ever quite talk about it. Whether a restoration of Christian order is to be achieved, or some equivalent found, establishing the proper relation between sovereign and subject will be constitutive of the project of re-centering. That makes it a good place to start.

Now, the sovereign center certainly does present itself. The sovereign restores or preserves order by exercising the power tacitly demanded by all those cognizant of their embeddedness in the hierarchy of social reciprocities. The sovereign is a constituent of post-imperial tradition. The sovereign is not like God, but post-imperial commemorations of the originary scene presuppose an emissary to align central power (which is taken as given) and the continual enhancement of reciprocities required for a civilized order. Post-imperial tradition is, then, always already informed by sovereign power, actual and imagined, and sovereign power is always already invested in tradition. How a particular sovereign will engage the ritual or, more broadly, performative, symbolic and ostensive, orders in a particular society cannot, of course, be known or determined in advance, but we can know that he will have an interest in “clothing” his power in those performative, symbolic and ostensive elements of social interaction—and, therefore, he must be interested in ensuring that those elements will “fit” the power he must wield.

One of the major conservative objections to Donald Trump’s campaign was that his speech and action so often violated conservative “principles.” Any conservative worth his (or hers; or zir) salt can reel off an approved list of such principles: limited government, reverence for “life,” the free market, support for democratic values throughout the world, etc. Rebellions within the conservative world, like that of the Tea Party, emerge when grassroots conservatives begin to suspect that establishment conservatives don’t really “believe” in these principles—at least not enough to risk their power and privileges over (but, of course, they have a point—if conservatives lose elections, who will be there to fight for conservative principles?). In a way, the enthusiasm for Trump among many in the “grassroots” was the latest such rebellion, but with a difference: Trump himself didn’t, unlike his primary rival Ted Cruz, claim to be the truest of true conservatives, the one who really means it and will stand by conservative principles when it counts, regardless of the cost. Cruz’s campaign was the reductio ad absurdam of principled conservatism, because he was so principled that there was no way of knowing what he would do about all kinds of very specific issues and so he had to opportunistically mimic the Trump campaign on issues like immigration and trade. (It turns out that the Constitution doesn’t really tell us what to do about anything. Nor does “free speech,” or “the free market.” They all sprout exceptions, which means what matters is not the principle but who decides what counts as an exception.) All Trump did was tell us what he wanted to do, and everything he wanted to do (aside from some half-hearted additions meant to get the needed “principled conservative” support) revolved around his axiomatic, even tautological assertion: either we have a country, or we don’t. Country trumps Constitution.

We all know by now that “principles,” left or right, need to go through the grinder of lobbyists, donors, trade-offs with specific representatives, add-ins to counter inimical characterizations of one’s intent, bureaucratic machinations, and so on, before producing a result—a result which, we further know, will look little like the “principle” it started with. For analytical purposes, it’s certainly far more effective to reverse this process and start at the end, and ask, who has lost and who has won in the process—which elites have managed to elbow out which other elites in getting more direct control over some portion of the population. The elites don’t work according to principles, even if they may believe in them—the elites, we can assume, want some freedom of action not afforded them under current conditions, and leverage whatever means of levying and motivating the lower orders they have at their disposal to gain that freedom. Since it’s freedom for them, it’s easy enough for them to sincerely represent their aims as freedom in general, with some qualifier or modification—economic freedom, freedom to love, freedom of religion, etc. There has to be some ideological trickle down, because even George Soros doesn’t have enough money to get people rampaging in the streets in the name of George Soros having more money to get people rampaging in the streets.

Principles, then, are located at several removes from where the real action is, but they are still not quite merely “superstructural” (if we work with the old Marxist model, which Reactionary Future has revived for absolutist purposes recently)—they are readings and indices of shifts in sovereignty. To believe in a principle—say, “free speech”—is to imagine a mode of sovereignty. The government that grants free speech does so because it assumes that in the unrestrained discourse in which all citizens participate without coercion or intimidation the truth emerges along with a rational consensus for the government to act upon. Along with the imagined sovereignty, then, comes an anarchist fantasy—in this case, of free, rational individuals acting outside of government who choose, collaboratively, to act upon and, indeed, constitute the government. But things get interesting when the exceptions begin to sprout, as they always do: no libel, no sedition, no exposure of government secrets, no “hate speech,” etc. The exceptions enrich the sovereign imaginary (which is not at all the same as an imaginary sovereign), position the person expressing the principle somewhere along the liberal continuum, and turn the anarchistic fantasy into one resentful of its actual dependence upon order: for free individuals to communicate freely, some mode(s) of “distorted” communication which interferes with the real kind must be suppressed. To have a principle is to imagine the sovereign who will decide on the exceptions to that principle in your favor, in such a way as to shore up your anarchist fantasy.

The imagining of sovereignty and fantasy of anarchy also comes from the top down, insofar as the added margin of freedom desired by the elites must constitute, for the elite in question, the form of a comprehensive mode of sovereignty—my trade advantage will create wealth for all and so the government’s primary purpose is to protect that advantage, the increase in my relative access to the ear of the nominal (and, indeed, still largely effective) sovereign will add to public enlightenment and moderate forces of destabilization, and so on. Whether they think about it this way, as soon as these elites start to talk about their aims they must find themselves saying things like this and, then, hiring and funding the intellectuals who will give them better ways of saying these kinds of things and eventually take over saying them to others. We could then see the imaginary sovereignties and anarchistic fantasies generated in the universities, media and corporate think tanks as auditions and job interviews for one elite faction or another, just as we can see activist groups as auditioning for the role of shock troops and street fighters for those same factions. But they can all audition effectively only under the condition that they think that the show is real, that they are making history. That’s not so hard, because in a sense they are, even if as tools rather than makers. Perhaps part of the point of determinist theories like Marxism is to reconcile its agents to being tools.

So, when we hear talk of principles, we can hear the echoes of this entire process. Is the alternative, then, to be “unprincipled”? Yes, as long as that is understood as indifference to principles, rather than as lacking the principle in question. Each social agent should be in a hierarchical, cooperative, reciprocal relation with other social agents in accord with the social power exercised by that agent. But as soon as we say this, we ourselves imagine a winnowing process by which those social agents intrinsically resistant to such relations with other agents must be destroyed or radically transformed. Absolutists thereby imagine their own mode of sovereignty: one capable of and keenly interested in such destruction and transformation.

Absolutist sovereign imagination does not constitute, as its inverse, an anarchist fantasy—quite the contrary. Rather, it demolishes anarchist fantasies—this is the central “negative,” “critical” operation of absolutism. In the name of what? The hierarchies, modes of cooperation and reciprocities singular sovereignty relies upon in order to exist. Is there something “principled” in this? No more than a craftsman’s desire for perfection, and his search for the best materials, his work on honing his skills, on cultivating relations with co-workers, assistants and customers, his subordination of baser desires to the time and attention excellence requires, is “principled.” He is not adhering to the “principle” of good workmanship—he is just clarifying and enhancing his mode of discipline. The extraction of some “principle” out of this is derivative of the real set of relations involved. His own discipline leads him to acknowledge the need for a sovereign, so that others will not steal his materials, provide him with adulterated materials with impunity, force him violently into subservience to criminal ends, and so on. The sovereignty of the craftsman over his conditions and means entails an imagination of sovereignty: a sovereign that ensures the level of social discipline is such as to support his own practice. And the sovereign’s own discipline lies in preserving the conditions under which as many of his subjects as possible can do likewise—can meet his imagination in co-constituting the realm. The point is not to have principles but to confront anarchist fantasies with embedded, entailed and extended reciprocities. It may even be that “principles” inevitably encourage anarchistic fantasies. It might be best to request of anyone espousing principles an account, as best they can provide, for all the social activities upon which their own activity depends—acting so as to sustain those interdependencies, and to make more of them available for attention, is what accounts for one’s rectitude as a social being. (Maybe asking the principled subject to spell out in ever greater detail all the exceptions to his principles will get him there, in an indirect way—a kind of negative dialectic.)

Still, there is one genuinely meaningfully use of the term “principles”—to refer to origins. Principles are, literally, what come first and therefore make what comes after possible. That “therefore” is not obvious—a mechanistic view of the world, which is much encouraged in a society in which power fragments and reconstitutes rapidly and incoherently, would insist that there is no causal, and certainly no moral, relation between what comes first and what comes after. To be principled in this sense is to be loyal to origins—obviously, “limited government,” “the free market,” and “free speech” are not origins. In a democratic society, origins are revolutionary, which clearly interferes with making absolutism a serious topic of conversation. But once we start talking about origins, there is no way to maintain the revolution as the ultimate origin. Revolutions themselves always present themselves as the recuperation of some prior condition and the restoration of rights or obligations that have been taken or disregarded. Revolutionaries may do so fraudulently, but what matters is that they must do it. In other words, revolutions are constituted by some articulation of imagined sovereignty and anarchist fantasy. To be principled, then, is to keep turning the conversation back to a sovereignty that can be imagined free of anarchist fantasies. Remembering the arche is the key to resisting such fantasies.

The contention that absolutism means arbitrary and therefore irrational rule by the sheer will of one man can be refuted by exploring the necessary embedding of absolute sovereignty in a hierarchical, differentiated order constituted by extensive reciprocities. My previous post of sovereignty as conquest enables us to conduct such an exploration. No one carries out a conquest aimed at what Reactionary Future has proposed calling possession of the to-be-sovereign territory alone—one does so with close associates who defer to the conqueror’s authority, trusted subordinates who answer to those associates, latecomer allies who join the rolling bandwagon, the reluctant, resentful subjugated, etc. This ensemble of cohorts is certainly not arbitrary—not just anyone can become a leader of men, an organizer of invasions and defenses, the commandeering of resources, the delegation of authority and responsibility, a student and planner of military tactics and cultural organization, and so on. We need not assume a one-to-one correspondence between individual capability and self-discipline, on the one hand, and elevation within the social order, on the other, to assume that any successful order must rely on a general correspondence between the two.

As I pointed out in Sovereignty as Conquest, subsequent to conquest the sovereign settles down into the work of preservation of his rule and cultivation of the institutions that can ensure a steady source of resources and recruits. This requires and encourages the emergence of new capabilities, and individuals who might be very useful for present purposes even if they might have been useless or worse in the process of conquest. A new hierarchy of value emerges, and the problem for the sovereign is to institute that hierarchy on the new terms of preservation by means of identifying and deferring less immediately visible dangers. He will want to do so in a way as consistent and continuous with the existing hierarchy as possible, which entails abstracting from that hierarchy so as to make analogous structures possible. When, in the course of civilizing the realm, universities are constructed, they will be organized in a way analogous to military and/or ecclesiastical and/or feudal orders but distinguished by the difference required to make respect for dialogue and love of the truth stand out as values rather than military valor or exemplary piety.

These new values are made to stand out by the articulation of reciprocities proper to the new institution. The emergence of modernity actually vitiates reciprocity—no one wanting to build a society rich in reciprocities would think to do so by atomizing individuals and having them interact with each other solely through contractual relations. Rather, you would study the kinds of hierarchies required in any particular shared activity and itemize and formalize the obligations that would best bind superiors, subordinates and peers together. So, in the military, the subordinate owes the superior obedience and the superior is obliged to care for the subordinate. These obligations can be spelled out in detail, with the sovereign serving to adjudicate as necessary, but the obligations would be derived from the structure and purpose of the activity, not the distribution of rights among the members. There are a range of possible capabilities and relationships than can sustain a military organization—there must be courage, loyalty, discipline and so on. In this sense sovereignty is ultimately grounded in nature, in the sense that any being, social or otherwise, has its own nature. Capacities are selected for: a beautiful singing voice is irrelevant to generalship, and a squeamishness around blood would be disqualifying (unless gotten under control).

In this case the organization of (say) a university would be grounded in the nature of the search for the truth and reciprocities would be established accordingly. Sustained focus on abstract concepts, the ability to suspend belief in cherished concepts without falling into skepticism, patience with those in need of instruction, an investment in dialectical rather than rhetorical modes of discourse and conversation, insight into under-exploited intellectual capacities of others, and so on, would all emerge within an institution dedicated to seeking the truth. Pedagogical, collegial and administrative reciprocities would be established accordingly: members might be obliged to remind one another, for example, of recurring patterns of thought that are easy to fall into but have led to a dead end in previous inquiries. Everything that everyone does within the institution is carried out (and judged) with an eye toward fulfilling, clarifying and further embedding those reciprocities. If a new form of pedagogy or mode of inquiry is introduced, it will be justified on the grounds that it better fulfills the obligation to systematize controlled attention to concepts or solicit contributions from participants whose intellect requires a new vehicle to exploit its potential. The new pedagogy or mode of inquiry is then, partly explicitly and partly tacitly, integrated into the system of reciprocities. The sovereign simply needs to make it clear that if his intervention is required, he will intervene with the aim of binding up the system of reciprocities so as to make that mode of intervention unnecessary in the future.

The relations between demographic groups and the sexes would be organized accordingly. Some sectors of the population will be better organized and more loyal and useful to the sovereign, and so they will be privileged in the process of staffing the ranks of the administration. Other sectors will be given a chance to show what they are capable of—that is, to strengthen their own system of reciprocities so as to exhibit a capacity to participate in the institutional reciprocities supported by the sovereign. Nature is involved here as well: some groups may produce more soldiers, others more scholars, and such specialization can be encouraged. No matter how civilized the society, the ultimacy of the need to defend the realm (sovereign possession) can never be superseded, so the separate communities must be given responsibility for self-defense and the defense of the order. Some kind of patriarchal and monogamous order is implicit in such an arrangement, and so a system of male-female reciprocities must be formalized consistent with it. The activities for women outside of these reciprocities must be consistent with them—single women, widows, women with enfeebled husbands will take on all kinds of responsibilities but husbands may also include and promote their talented wives within their own enterprises. Exogamous mating is obviously healthier than consanguineous marriage, but mate selection will also have to take into account the limits of exogamy and the impact marrying out of the community might have on its stability. Everything will be judged in terms of whether it can be framed analogously to (or in a way that is recognizable within) the existing network of reciprocities.

We should, then, assess all contemporary practices, norms and institutions in terms of the reciprocities they entail, and criticize them in terms of the obstacles erected to the binding up of those reciprocities. A company’s obligations to its workers, its customers, its community; the workers’ obligation to their employer—the market should be framed as a means of ensuring these reciprocities be maintained. Media organizations’ obligation to their audience and the loyalties of audiences to media outlets should frame discussions of free speech. But what if a leftist president were to appoint FCC officials who would shut down Breitbart as a “fake news site”? Those with the power to shut down Breitbart will do so one way or another—it doesn’t depend upon whether someone gives them a convenient argument for doing so—they already have the arguments they need. The point is to keep Breitbart or any other space open in the name of its relation to truth, public usefulness, and an audience loyal to sovereign power, properly understood. The denser all these systems of reciprocity become, the less the sovereign will find it necessary to exercise power directly over individuals unmediated by those institutions and communities, and the more it will establish a dense system of reciprocities with all of these systems—serving as backup to and model for them. Sovereignty is absolute insofar as it is absolute all the way down the line—if companies and workers, teachers and students, husbands and wives, general, corporals and privates, and so on, all fulfill their duties to each other the sovereign will be absolute in having nothing to do; since that will never be completely the case, what the sovereign has to do, and is more absolute the more it does it, is enforce those duties where their abandonment is most egregious and evident.