The People Have Lost Legitimacy

There has never been a political crisis to this extent in recorded human history.

FREE! On the 2nd November, 7.30pm, in Edinburgh, Andrew Waldie will be speaking on ‘The Money Power’ which will address banking, money and credit. Tickets are here.

In a previous post we noted that the social contract was broken; severed by the duplicity and carelessness if not outright murderous actions of the governing class. However, the inhuman ruthlessness of those at the apex of the social body aside, the apathetic, insouciance of the People, in an age of democracy, rights, citizenship and duties, has cast us all into a predicament that is completely unfamiliar in shape or scale anywhere in recorded history.

The fickleness of the Athenian citizenry, urged on by the resentful orations of Cleon to the slaughter and enslavement of conquered peoples, disillusioning the aristocrats and thinkers of the Golden Age such as Plato with the limited democratic experiment of that city state, or the languorous and submissive citizens of Ancient Rome, who permitted the institution of slavery and welfare to corrupt their ways, undermine their polity and ultimately destroy the ‘noblest society’ of human existence more thoroughly and completely than a vengeful Hannibal ever could, adumbrate our situation of a decadent, hostile elite and a morally withered populace, however, the legacy of legal rights, scientific achievement, philosophical justifications, technological advancements, widespread education and access to knowledge, skills, information we possess while, on the shadow side, the accessibility to a cornucopia of distractions, means of dissipation and the ubiquitous degeneracy of comfort: from enervating pity to widespread victimhood to voraciously demanding narcissism, accelerated by social media, that plague us, places us in a cultural terrain far beyond our predecessors.

The truth is, by any recognisable rules of contract, explicit or implicit, society has dissolved its ties of reciprocal rights and duties, and now floats adrift from the moral anchor and chain of law that keep all of us moored closely together. It is now just the current of habit and the mildness of the tide that keeps us grouped as a flotilla impersonating a sea-going community; and even then, clear distances of water are growing between our disparate hulls as issue after issue, like competing trade winds, push us separately this way and that. It is not incoherent or illicit to reasonably claim that nearly every public facing official from nurse to teacher, from police to politician is guilty either of malfeasance or misfeasance. They have unthinkingly and irresponsibly partaken in the greatest assault on human life and society ever witnessed. Ironically, the majority of them, even the sycophantic, self-justifying and witless media, are also the victims of their own miserable cynicism, self-censorship and fear.

And are the public any better than the officials that so brazenly failed to fulfil even their sworn duties - the rush to vaccinate their children being the most obvious and blatantly violation of a protective instinct every right-thinking adult should possess? Everywhere there are victims, subjected to the powers of the state, and yet with every victim there is also a collaborator, a person who is complicit in their own victimhood and, often in extension, a facilitator in the victimising of others. If the model of a questioning, outspoken public person who at least attempts to intend and act upon the virtues so necessary to a democracy as described by Aristotle, Machiavelli and Kant has some form of validity in today’s society, then the mass of men and women have fallen far short of that ideal. Our rulers have declared war on us and a significant proportion of us have aided them in their pre-emptive war. Through weakness, disinterested inattention or a peculiar hypnotic obedience; or perhaps, through a slippery, clandestine ambition, there has been a salutary exposure of the ethical limitations of what some have called Mass Man. Perhaps the banal horror of it all would not be so great if this did not include the offering-up of children, with so little concern, to ultimately the prosaic coruscating, immaturity needed to maintain a petty public identity that avoided the gossip and criticism of small-minded scolds, protected a career that was merely a paperweight on balance to the issues at stake, and conformed with alacrity to a general, nebulous, vacant mindlessness.

Mankind’s rational nature makes a mutually beneficial contract between one another and those that rule a necessary state of affairs, unless we wish for a never-ending state of upheaval, so Thomas Hobbes, the great political thinker of the English Civil War era has argued. Making clear that if the laws of peace are not present, then it is rational to assume the laws of war will execute across the commonwealth: a state of nature which makes violence, deception and gangsterism the ‘new normal’. Immanuel Kant argued that our rationality lent human beings a dignity that required us to be treated as ends in ourselves and not as means to an end. Our contracting with one another was completed through the prism of categorical imperatives that acknowledged the dignity in each person.

These arguments feel like echoes from very far away now. A century of denigrating humanity, sponsored by generational elitists, have left us in a position where we cannot contract with those that govern - that is broken. But, we cannot now contract with the majority of each other. There is a lack of honesty and trust required to make any contract meaningful. It is still the case that we do contract with one another, in a sort of zombified continuance of now dead life, nonetheless, the crumbling of the social institutions on which social intercourse and exchange relies is well underway. Can anyone trust a journalist? Only a fool would now. Can anyone trust a friend? Are there many who can even be a friend? Who do not succumb to propaganda and fear? Can anyone trust their family? Or can government draw a line through those relationships anytime it wishes? There are huge question marks over hundreds of millions of people across the Western world about their ability to fulfil the functions of family, community and society in a way that is meaningful for a rational human being that has dignity.

Since our society has evolved on this assumption as it has gained power over the human mind during the past few thousand years, then we are a bit stuck. We cannot just go on as if nothing happened; but how do we go forward without collapse? Perhaps collapse is necessary. Or do we just accept that we are irrational, aggressive consumers whose dignity is a mirage and whose reason simply masks the cultural prejudices of the time combined with self-interest?

FREE! On the 2nd November, 7.30pm, in Edinburgh, Andrew Waldie will be speaking on ‘The Money Power’ which will address banking, money and credit. Tickets are here.