Quotes about Democratism

In spite of the actuality that no one who is not extraordinarily cultured can even begin to think for himself, and Americans are not even remotely cultured personalities; and in spite of the actuality that marriages, families, religions, languages, public funds, public schools and libraries and post offices and clinics and even corporations and mass-media are all forms of “communism,” Americans take “mind control” and “communism” as the horror of all horrors (witness the cyclical crusades of Red Scares, the ever-piquant Invasion of the Body Snatchers, etc.).  But in spite of such a phobia against losing proprietary control of their “own” minds, Americans are one of the most cult-prone, mass-organized and –manipulable collectivities that has ever existed, as abject and pathos-besotted conformists down to their slavish toenails.  In the early nineteenth century De Tocqueville already observed this striking phobia among Americans against standing alone and thinking for oneself.  The bonds of subrational control over us are more potent than ever precisely because the critical culture, the “know thyself” that would make such controls accessible to conscious evaluation, has withered to nothing, eaten away by democratist fear of “elitist” critical intelligence and proprietarist neglect of and contempt for public education.

The moral and the political are twisted together in all this like a torqued Moebius-strip: we define our political duties toward others or our rights of expectation from them in terms of the highest moral values and obligations and principles conceivable to us. But these highest moral values etc. are themselves ideologically stunted things, a bonsai-ethos that has been deformed by the contraceptive culture of the democratist Many. Do human beings have a positive and universally recognizable right to be left alone as ingrown idiotes, as self-gratifying swinish consumers, as pathetic sacks of illusions and delusions? Are ultimate rights something that the least cultured and least reflective are fit to define for themselves, much less for everyone in general? Can any civilization afford to leave its most vital principles to be framed and legislated by the least philosophically aware? When a society organizes the entire thrust of its energies and institutions to mass-produce such obtuse types, and when malleable human nature makes this organized stupefaction all too easy and efficient, how can any mere exceptional individuals do anything about such a Malthusian dynamic?