Democratic Devolution
On social media.– I have never once wondered what Plato ate for lunch. Nor what Dante looked like on the beach, what Shakespeare gave his children for their birthdays, where Vivaldi spent his summer vacation, or which card game Swift played with Stella. Yet our world is now awash in the lunches, beach pictures, birthday parties, vacation diaries, and personal hobbies of a billion strangers of no accomplishment whatsoever nor any personal significance to any of us. The atemporal essence of mankind is being systematically drowned in a sea of accidental contemporaneity. It is systematic insofar as this is happening not merely due to commerce, but due to mass psychology and pragmatic politics.
The voting public.– The intelligence of any crowd is inevitably reduced to that of its dumbest ten percent. Democracy is a political system based on the desperate hope, or delusion, that “citizenry” is not just a fancy word for “crowd.” In order for this hope to become anything better than a delusion in practice, methods are required that are by nature, shall we say, supra-democratic. Particularly educational methods. Remove such methods, or rather one ought to say reverse them, and democratic politics becomes a competition for the “hearts and minds” of a citizenry reduced to its dumbest ten percent. And to state the nearly obvious, the dumbest ten percent — those who function almost entirely on tribal passion and collective whim, and for whom reason is devolved to nothing but a tool for rationalizing passions and whims, would never have found its way out of the state of nature, and will never do so now.
Survival of the fitting.– Modern political philosophy begins with the quasi-scientific premise that self-preservation (the preservation of motion) is the basic human intention, and the thoroughly scientific presupposition that the basic — that is to say, temporally initial — tendency of a thing is also the essence of that thing, and thus the standard according to which all else is, or ought to be, determined. The notion that self-preservation is the essential human concern is simply the reduction of the human species to its most unimpressive and, definitionally-speaking, least representative, instantiations, which is to say its majority. Darwin’s theory of evolution is at least as unthinkable without the antecedence of Hobbes and Locke as it is (as often noted) without Hegel’s theory of history. Hence it is to science what state-of-nature theory is to Plato’s Republic: the intellect despiritualized and limited to the lowest common denominator. Empedocles remains the evolutionist of choice for those with taste.
