My parents were politcal opposites for the entire time they were married. My mother leaned left and my father leaned right. Their beliefs had something deeper in common, though: fear of tyranny. Both of them believed (as they do now) that a person is smart but people are stupid. From this it follows that institutions are zombies animated by the collective subconscious. A zombie is dependant on the magician who raises them. If such a creature is composed of more than one being, then control gets difficult for the magician (who is only one person). If the magician is subsumed by their creation, then the leviathan is bound only by the currents and eddies in the minds of its sleeping vessels.
Another way to put it:
Institutions are not evil. They are only tools. Yet there is a conflict between the ends and the means. It makes sense to want a stronger tool to do a better job. Often, institutions become more complicated as they grow stronger. The strongest institution is therefore the best tool and the hardest to grasp.
My parents had this in common because my mother was a member of the Green Party and my father was a Libertarian. Both perspectives fear the excesses of unchecked institutions. I tried to point this out to them more than once and they never agreed with me.
According to my dad, my mom made the mistake of thinking that one rogue institution can be checked by another. According to my mom, my dad made the mistake of thinking that the dream of a better world (or, let’s say, the social imagination) itself was the path to zombie institutions.
Skip a few decades and grown-up Ailix is still puzzling over this. If there is any love in America for zombie institutions…it can’t be said out loud. To say that an institution can take care of society’s every need, like the parent of a perpetual child, is to invite the accusation of authoritarianism. I agree. A modern American self-identified socialist would not (if asked) agree that social safety net institutions should be run on a non-democratic, top-down basis, as in the former Soviet Union.
My dad, in his characterisation of the left, often quoted Hilary Clinton’s “it takes a village to raise a child” statement. No matter what Hilary Clinton believes herself, she would never win another election for as long she lived if she said, out loud, that “individual autonomy is bullshit and we need institutions to run everything.” Maybe she believes that, maybe she doesn’t, but no one would vote for her again if she said so.
For another oddity, self-proclaimed Libertarians who enter American politics typically end up as doctrinaire Republicans in all but name. For all of their rugged individualism and Ayn Rand quotes, they almost always bend the knee to the right wing corporate and religious prerogative and almost always welch on matters of individual liberty that align with the left.
Libertarianism is the closest thing that exists to a national American ethic; and a societal ethic is more subtle than a political philosophy. Americans in general believe in individual autonomy. No American who wants a political career would openly deny that the thriving individual is the ground on which democracy is built. At the same time, those who espouse individualism the most treat it like a downer of a grown-up who doesn’t understand just how cool capitalist feudalism and theocracy are.
Asking a conservative about this often produces the answer that libertarianism is a perfectly good political philosophy but it can only be the letter of the law. Social conservatives believe in a separate but equally necessary spirit of the law.
Asking a liberal about this often makes them look at you like you’re crazy…while standing on the bedrock of libertarianism to resist conservative overreach. Social liberal values, like social justice, depend on a libertarian ethic. In a world where everyone is entitled to all the happiness that they can claim for themselves without disenfranchising or abusing others, there is no reason to marginalize differences simply for existing.
Like art and architypes, the gap between the American ethic of libertarianism and the realities of American politics is huge.
As someone raised by a liberal and a conservative who both internalized the libertarian ethic, I’m frustrated by the popular wisdom that the American duopoly is permanent. Many conservatives hate the RNC and many liberals hate the DNC. Many of those same conservatives and liberals also think that the Republican and Democratic parties are unstoppable and that the lesser of two evils must always be tolerated.
To paraphrase Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables: Machievelli was not an evil genius- he was only the voice of fact divorced from truth. Hugo wrote that wisdom is the reconciliation of fact with truth. That reconciliation can only come from exposure and dialogue and the conflicts that may arise from it. It depends on contact which depends on patience, compassion and intellectual curiosity.
You probably don’t need one more person telling you that social media is dividing everyone by keeping us in our echo-chambers. But withdrawal from contact ironically makes you dependant on others. An isolated group that acts on a single unquestioned perspective will function exactly like a zombie institution. The hard edges of fact are banished completely and truth is reduced to consensus. Meanwhile: “Doesn’t it just suck that we’re stranded with this duopoloy that no one wants?”
AilixChaerea 