Democracy seemed to be a mature institution, only requiring more fluidity in its decision-making levels. Here it is contested. The citizen reacts to the drastic reduction of its importance by refusing to comply with the instructions of the collective. This movement has different facets: rejection of legislation, of the general order, groupism, wokism. Philosophically it corresponds to the replacement of democracy by anarchy. The individual refuses to allow the opinion of the greatest number to impose itself on him. He wants to form his own individual regime and personally negotiate every relationship with society. The regroupment of anarchists is not a collectivism but a coalition of individuals opposed to the collective level.
Anarchism is based on a moral foundation: every individual has an inalienable importance to himself. Some say “honesty with oneself”. This fidelity cannot be undermined, in any way, by anyone other than oneself, even the whole of society. It is this last addition, in contemporary movements, that poses a problem. Society is clearly an organization of differences. Certainly an individual can assert his own importance (when he is psychologically healthy) but others do not give him credit. In this diverse humanity, a moral rule is deeply ingrained even more: we do not appreciate that another wins without the slightest effort something that we have struggled to achieve.
The egalitarianism of anarchy can only work between individuals with similar ambitions and means. The first Greek democracies were successful anarchisms… by concealing a division of the population between citizens, slaves, barbarians. Since anarchism postulates equality in a group, the group must first restrict itself to equal people. Or it doesn’t work. So can we make anarchism a national or even global regime? Bewilderment. It would make each individual the unbeatable monarch of his small piece of territory. Exciting vision for survivalists. But what happens when you put your nose out of your mouse hole? Should we already plan to live in the rubble of a society that we have helped to destroy?
Anarchy finds its interest in small circles. First candidate: the couple. A companionship attributes the same capital of importance to its members. Social taboos are weakening. Put what you like in “companionship” in terms of gender and number. The circle will work as long as each keeps its capital of importance with the other (s). Fragile organization for the same reason. Everyone must keep the circle alive. In this emergence based on related elements, the alteration of a single link (they are bidirectional) makes it disappear. Other couples are more stable because they are based on subjection. It is no longer a dynamic but a hierarchy. A dynamic system is unstable, likely to make the torque disappear at any time. Only the awareness of this state can maintain it (already appears a hierarchy of observation). A hierarchical system is stable. There is a higher interest that orders relationships. The elements of the couple submit to it. The excellent compromise that companions can find is that each occupies both levels of the hierarchy, participates in the best interest, by the specific talents he possesses.
Anarchism works in a small circle but we see that it already builds a hierarchy. It is concretized in this higher interest that appears with the simple fact of living in society. Exchanges, sharing, cooperation, distribution, make it possible to smooth the vagaries of life and improve it by taking advantage of specific skills in others. Can we manage the higher organization alone? Contemporary anarchists are happy to persuade themselves of this. What an illusion! One must have always lived in a society producing the necessary and more to think that this is the natural state of the world. Anarchists have a very vague idea of the complexity underlying this production. Even they tend to think that management is a ball for production. Not. History has shown otherwise. Artisanal productions without collective management do not take off from the local market. The general impliesstrangeness. The world of exchanges is itself an immense hierarchy whose floors must be climbed to see a product spread, whatever its intrinsic quality.
An anarchist can directly manage a local organization, restricted to locally produced goods, food and services. However, isolated, it is not immune to a difficult year. Other goods will remain inaccessible, unless they enter this world of trade called economics. But here, things get complicated for the anarchist. Refusing the control of willingly heavy and multiple organizations, he tends to flatten all these constraints in a single screed weighing down his life: the cartel of administrations, bosses, rentiers, policemen, judges, bankers, etc. Kind of a big club of freedom-sucking vampires that it is forbidden to hunt. Their leader is of course the president of the nation. No need to get excited against the underlings, you might as well crack the pack leader. For the anarchist all belong to a mixed level of management. The huge structure that separates him from the president has been steamrollered. How can we be surprised that all sincere dialogue has collapsed in politics, and that the presidential office has become a theater where everyone plays his little popular fiction?
So we move, with anarchism, from an effective philosophy for the tribe, to willful blindness in a society of several billion people. Founded in his local circle, the anarchist’s discourse becomes peremptory and ridiculous when it tells the president what to do, even when thousands of voices unite with his own. It’s never just a “I want to be caliph instead of the caliph!” taken up by so many hot gorges. Not a reorganization. Democratic reform takes into account all citizens, not just those who shout.
How does the Democrat proceed in detail? Instead of sweeping away the existence of a necessary decision-making hierarchy, it verifies that it is working properly. The constraint attached to each level of organization, in fact, is to satisfy those it administers. Setbacks sometimes come from a donkey in the presidential chair. Citizens are then directly responsible; they are the ones who put it there. More often the hierarchical structure resists, fairs, capote, loses sight of its role and buries itself in a conservative hibernation. Some levels have incentives and checks and balances, others do not. Liberal circles lack unified retrocontrol, on the contrary, bureaucratics are so unified around regulations that they cram every idea and abandon it stifled. The right compromise is great liberalism within the organizational levels and great independence between their paradigms, ensuring stability.
Endowed by evolution with a natural positivism, we spontaneously have an excellent opinion of ourselves. “I exist” is enough to create essential importance. The others are not so lucky. They must demonstrate their qualities. “My work” does not have to prove its effectiveness, while “their work” must constantly lend itself to it. Problems can only come from “them”. Vast ensemble of which we have a very crude representation. We then extract the easiest targets, close or put nearby by the media. Today these targets can be anywhere on the planet, demonstrating that “they” have become unmanageable without organization. Should we be satisfied with the menu of celebrities that the news gives us every day to devour? How to get out of junk food information?
The anarchist is the product of this media fast food that perpetually floods the networks. “Them” has become a trash can where to dump all the unpleasant people and especially the managers. Nothing good can come out of such a bunch of. The anarchist then naturally becomes a conspiracy theorist. The most infamous rot simmers in the trash. Only a garbage collector without a state of mind can rid his planet of corruption.
The democrat, on the other hand, realizes that he occupies a place in the hierarchy, on several levels according to his recognized talents. Is it an effective cog? What can he improve at his level of responsibility? Is he irreproachable to the point of allowing himself a more extensive judgment? What training justifies this enlargement?
The most widespread form of positivism today is to attribute any expertise to oneself with disconcerting ease. Antivax become experts in epidemiology and basic research the month after a new virus erupts. GAFAM values themselves by overvaluing us. The anti-GAFAM too: they repeat that our personal data is extraordinarily valuable. Do not provide the brand of your PQ without compensation! Our importance is only growing to the point that we wonder where it is taken. Isn’t it rather the part of the collective in us that is shrinking towards insignificance?
The anarchist destroys the coherence of his society by privileging the individualist part of his personal effort, while the democrat strengthens it by increasing the collectivist part of his own. Anarchism brings contradictory ideas side by side, platist and spherist, climato-skeptic and climato-convinced. Democracy organizes them in a direction that cannot be concordant, says logic. Independent decision-making level. The consensus is that of the real experts. The important thing for others is that these experts emerge from a fluid hierarchy, permeable to new skills, balanced by checks and balances.
Prioritization is justified on the simple observation that it already exists in our minds. Very varying degrees of importance attributed to things. Great ideals built on concepts and sub-concepts. Why would we refuse the high expertise of others in levels where ours is modest? This delegation made the rise of the human species. A brain can contain an increasingly shrunken portion of ever-expanding knowledge. Our easier access to knowledge does not change that. You have to delegate because there is a growing surplus to delegate.
Recognizing the need for social hierarchy in no way prevents us from improving our own. On the contrary. It is by advancing the stratification of our ideas that we can embrace society as a whole. If the mind is a search engine, it must learn at what level to look. The networks will finally become efficient when they reproduce this staging and keep it permeable. Today there is a wall between the protected lists and a vast wasteland filled with information-rubbish as well as pretty designs. The internet is a baby spider. His parents are algorithms born in the brains of frustrated teenagers. Humanity has been looking for a dad for a long time. Was it finally a mistake to have created God for himself, when we see today the perfectly immature deities who replaced him?
Let us straighten out our mental hierarchy to become pillars of our society again.
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