Refuting The Enlightenment (Volume II)
Introduction
Abraham Lincoln somewhat once passionately said “Democracy is the Government of the people, by the people, for the people”. Aside from Lincoln’s strides in progress, what astounds me is the assertion that the government’s legitimacy and moral right to use its state power is justified and lawful only when consented to by the people (hence the saying). Now, it would come as no shock that this organ of Enlightenment thought is the fundamental basis of liberal democracy. It is all around us today. Look at any modern Western election with news stations and Politicians exulting the term “The Peoples Vote”. They are trying to emphasize the “freedom of the individual” voting for the government they want, yet all of this is a white lie.
Today, what will be ventured in this article is the motion of the “Consent of the Governed.” And the best way to tackle this is to talk about its roots…
Roots and Individuals
Firstly we need to understand what the “The Social Contract” is,
The Social Contract was the theory of governance and the relationship between the state and the individual the theory itself, as mentioned earlier, asserts that man gave up his state of nature (absolute individuality and separation from greater society) to enter into a civil society with law and governance. Thus, it is a Social Contract between the governed and the governing, the people respect the authority of the state and grant the state any force in which the government will defend the life, liberty, and property of the people.
The abstract idea, while agreeable to the thinkers of the Enlightenment period, one assuming everyone all agreed on the principles, in reality, was much harder than it meets the eyes. As while some thinkers were moderate in contemplation of man’s right with the state, some of them asked for the world.
Firstly you had Thomas Hobbes, one of the most influential philosophers in the formulation of social contract theory. He argues that:
Man and nature are brutal and savage, In order to avoid the Nature state of violence(Brutal and savage), Man gave power to a sovereign governing entity, In return, the state would bring Law and order. However, as man is naturally brutal the sovereign can’t guarantee rights( Which will be a major factoring difference to the next two thinkers following on).
We now have Hobbes’s English counterpart, John Locke, with the ghastly name of the father of liberalism, He had the simple thought that:
Man and Nature had Natural Rights in Society, which the state and Government were created to protect, Since people gave Authority to a Government, In Principal, be ruled only by a government they consent to.
(That would mean in a British political scheme of things, whenever a successful vote of no-confidence is trigged within the incumbent government party, and if they replace the leader of the government party, they will then need to call a general election so the people can be ruled only by a government they consented to.)
However taken to the extreme, the poster boy of the Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Rousseau’s solution to the problem of legitimate authority is his book funnily enough called The Social Contract is:
That Man and nature are inherently good(we argued against this briefly in the last volume), Since man and Nature have natural Liberty, only popular sovereignty is legitimate because man gave up his Natural Liberty to the Government. Accordingly, it is the “Collective will of the governance”.
To conclude together, what all these free-thinking men had to say is striking. They all concluded that since man gave up his “natural-born” freedom to enter into civil society, he can only be legitimately ruled by a government that he consents to. If a government infringes on the natural right of the people, they have the right to remove the government. As for a liberal democracy, it allows people to elect their government, hence giving them the case for the government.
Problem of Omission
Although Hobbes has a somewhat rather agreeable view of man and the state further giving us not such a bad concept,
These philosophers failed to recognise how power is frankly yielded within civil society. Democracy does not provide the populous with the ability to determine our power structure of which we are ruled, furthering the idea that a democratic government is governed by the consent of the populous and reflects their will is false.
So with that in mind how are the people ruled then?
In reality, it is quite simple, its power — The ability to conform to your will and punish those who don’t conform. Recognising this power can go further than the elected representatives, the power is yielded by cultural norms, religious institutions, academics, financial power etc
These organs of the system form a wider consensus of how the society is governed, these organs of influence instil what is tolerable under which the society is governed and make the, accept the terms as well as accept the structure. This is not what the populous consents to, its imposed from the top down.
Changing the structure of democracy is much harder than voting a government out and another one in. Because both exist in which the organs of a wider consensus apply the same boundaries and ideas, different policies but under the same paradigm.
The best example here is to use two nations which embody the same cultural yield yet with contrasting values, is the theocratic monarchist France and the post-Enlightenment United States of America. Firstly, look at monarchist France, it was at the time of pre-Enlightenment with Louis XIV with all his Absolutist powers at the helm — All power consecrated to the King; he had all political control of France, no one had a say, and undermining the King was treason.
Now let us look at Post-Enlightenment USA, most laws were implemented in the values of the Enlightenment and the writing of Locke was in the US Constitution. It was a democracy where the citizens could elect members of congress. Does the United States of America have a power structure then? Yes, certainly the first amendment talks about no state religion, also known as secularism. However, the people were religious, and the nation was deeply religious, although no legal power, religion had massive cultural power.
Although not legally forced, like in Louis XIV France, People were taught Christian ideas, they were enforced through social norms to be a respected member of that nation. Vice versa for both examples, if you were a satanist running for office you would be barred from everything and the way of life. The point being even in liberal democracies, the example being the United States, you still get political cultural and economic superstructure which directs us as a society like absolute monarchies.
The Irish Nationalists, predominantly Irish Catholics, didn’t like how they were “second rate citizens”, thus removing their consent from being governed thus removing themselves from the power structure. Did the Westminster Officials allow the ensuing Rebellions to do so? Of course not. It was treachery for them, therefore both the government and the rebels fought a long bloody civil war.
No civil society that desires to survive can permit the authority to be undermined, so the main legislative branch will assert its will by force. This is an example of the state and nature of power, democracy cannot give the populous the direction where their civilization goes like the Enlightenment states.
Metapolitics drives the course of our civilization and the organ of metapolitical power wields the power if the social order and the metapolitics are in line with human nature.
Lamentable Reality
Touched upon earlier we know this “power” is “religious institutions, academics, financial power etc” yet if this can be made broader, this can be summarized as a game of “family tag”. Once you have been “tagged” you have to tag others as you have been “infected”, eventually with the aim of the game to make everyone “tagged” by trying to “tag” others who have not been infected. (Sounds familiar doesn’t it?)
A concept about this is called the “cathedral”. The cathedral, if you don’t know it, is something which you probably do know with different connotations. It is the idea that the metropolitan intellectual “powers” dominating contemporary society is a major driving factor of our life. This is a strong focal point of controlling what gets “in and out”.
Factually speaking, the government can govern by force, take dictatorships, using its authoritative power, nonetheless, the “cathedral” can govern by soft power; this decentralized force yet ideologically uniformed governing entity can put forth a societal force that can put forth a narrative of morality.
An example can be Russia, once the pressure and condemnation amount to media, economic institutions, fast food chains etc, we saw a huge spike in “anti-Russian hate”. With NPC-like condemnation of Eastern Europeans (not even Russians) in the USA
This is not the consent of the people from democracy, it’s the elites.
The point is you can vote out the politicians, but you can’t vote out the media, bankers, and education etc the group of people who hold the “power”, these factors control us more than the government.
To show you an example of a theoretical man: A young “White Male” living in a cosmopolitan city, London, annoyed at the cost of living, wages and the sense of loss of a tight community and social solidarity in London due to the influx of immigrants in the area. Our male is a socially conservative man and laments the principles in which modern society looks down upon. Likewise, he is probably fed up with the Progressive Politically Correct culture of today and the lies. So, he voted for Nigel Farage in 2019 General Elections and European Parliament Elections, now if you couldn’t tell this man couldn’t be public of his views and beliefs in any way if expresses concern of mass immigration, affirmative action, or the LGBT Movement; he would have been destroyed in a modern progressive corporation environment, deemed a heretic in the modern culture and be in modernist anathema (aka cancelled). Losing out on career opportunities, and very possibly be fired — he has no choice but to give in to it.
As we know the “people” voted to leave the European Union and we let the EU further Nigel Farage’s spin-off party. The Brexit Party (Now Reform UK) won the most English MEP seats in the Country, with that in mind:
Can this man be open about his view? Absolutely not, since Nigel Farage’s “Brexit Win”, the media have doubled down on progressivism because the authority of soft power was undermined.
That is cultural power
Concluding observations
The idea that democracy gives consent to the government and that the government is a representation of their will is far-fetched. It tricks people into believing that they control political power when the real power is on the superstructure “cathedral”, holding a false sense of legitimacy and keeping a false sense of they are in charge.
Even to an apolitical reader, this is important. Unlike in a liberal democracy, in a monarchy you know where the power lies and you are more likely to source your discontent with the power. Under a liberal democracy, we are ruled by unknown power. You can’t pin down a decentralized power — voting won’t change society.
