Meta-Politics

For a couple of years, I've been mulling over ways to better map and describe the "power centers", that is the actual political structure of society, rather than its public face: the kabuki theater we see in partisan politics and elections around the country.

If you read The Federalist Papers you'll see a the US government wasn't designed to function efficiently, rather, it is a damper or an energy absorber. It's a mechanism that's meant to drain energy or to transform political energy into heat waste--like brakes on a car turn kinetic energy into heat. The authors of the Federalist were focused on the problem of faction, that is, how to keep a society from breaking down from internal strife. Hence, by its design, the seats of real power in the US are outside the government bureaucracy and its legal mechanisms, but most of the time their conflicts are settled by bureaucrats and lawyers rather than naked violence. This design is meant to keep the people free, that is, unmolested by the quarrels of the powerful.

My belief is this design broke down some time ago. The US has transformed into yet another corrupt empire with centers of power geographically based in NYC and DC. The interest of the imperial centers and the rest of the people are wildly divergent and consequently the people, that is, the great mass of people are disenfranchised in every way. Really, war has been waged on them on every front for generations and they barely know it. While the system generally protects people from physical violation and predation, it now exposes them to a type of parasite that takes advantage of the government's structure.

No political candidate is going to save the nation from this thing. Certainly no hyper-corrupt political party is going to save you or even mildly improve your life. To make a fresh start requires a return to the wellspring of creativity. This has happened time and again in the western world. Somehow poetry, and metaphysics finds an expression in meta-politics and that in turn reshapes the modes and orders people live by.

In the past, this happened as new ideas dripped into groups of thinkers who were associated with the wealthy and the powerful, for example, the Medici in Florence in the Renaissance, or the Tudors in England. In many ways, our society represents the triumph of those groups and their benefactors. It's quite possible that the money and power centers that influence the world today are merely iterations on those core, centuries old factions.

This time calls for decentralization and the triumph of the local and particular over the universal and global. This time calls for the personal rather than the institutional. I'll meditate on that until the next post.