The Horrific Intoxicant of Omnipossibility by Kenneth Smith   

2. Arbitrarialist Ideology

What is truly profound and axiomatic? ⁠— as the Greek axioma says, authoritative, "worthy" ("axiology," the theory of values). But also: What is merely coercively simple, amorphous, abstract, so featureless and structureless as to be nearly impossible to criticize or to derive from prior premises? ⁠— as the Greek dogma describes, derivative from the same source as "-doxy" (dokein, to seem, thus doxa or "opinion"). Only cultivated philosophical intelligence can discriminate between the axiomatic and the merely dogmatic. The Greeks assumed only a discriminating or connoisseurial mind can grasp what is axiomatic; what is dogmatic by contrast is merely a stupefying wall arresting the motion of passive, uncritical minds. Thinking inevitably manifests such individual differences in quality: Some are virtuosi at it, others not even amateurs. Also inevitably, dogmatisms or ideologies sink their roots into the quick of unthought. Quality of thinking expresses nakedly the ultimate values and subjective structures that differentiate individuals.

The modern worldview was inaugurated with such a simplist premise, a facile feel-good dogma whose further development has made philosophical comprehension and critical insight nearly impossible for those under the sway of its exhilarating new vision of human life. It has relieved moderns of any moral necessity to discipline their superficialist opinionizing (what the ancients despised as doxa): Thinking now merely shoots from the hip, bothering neither to draw, nor to aim or practice. A culture is an organic whole: If the normative formula for modern mentality is extremely simple, that is because the culture is designed to make people that simple, inept to transcend the "obvious," "self-evident" truths that immure them within that mentality.

We want to explore that opaque dogma, the concept of arbitrary will. Modernity premises that we are protean beings, infinitely mutable under the action of our wills, as first proposed by Pico della Mirandola: Nothing is essential to us but arbitrary will; no form of values or authority can conceivably rank higher than our own willful choice; and no practical or political obstruction to the exercise of that self-will can ultimately withstand the imperial logic of amoral and anarchic arbitrarialism. This expansionary cultural imperative cannot permit its true believers to see its quintessential false consciousness, vitiating the competence of judgment and conscience; modern history is a prolonged experiment in ever-compounding nihilism that has kept its patients oblivious to its actual character. Ostensibly a "critical" culture, it is actually a highly refined duplicity and rhetoric, still, after two and a half millennia, preeminently "the art of flattery" encouraging emotionalists to congratulate themselves for believing what ever they are already predisposed to believe. Modern politics has superior sciences of persuasion to detail the subjective liabilities of specific demo-psychographic groups, and mass-media to promulgate a nationwide carpet of lies like an instantaneous delivery service for rumors-on-demand. In modernity the culture of sophism has been refined into the highest-paid form of licit criminality short of the venality in high public office. That is the supreme practical logic of arbitrarialism, feeding the audacity of those who do what they will: By what right may anyone reprimand superlatively professional, profitable sophists?

If we are infinitely mutable, then we have no constraining nature, no inherent potential, direction, teleology, or limitations. But without objectively valid moral truths this setting bounds for our wills, how can we tell what is true or illusory? Is the gospel of arbitrarialism itself "true," or merely something we desperately want to believe, a compulsory, even a narcotic delusion? If we are infinitely adaptable or elastic, utterly victims of our own or others' unbridled hyperactivity, does that mean we are radically active or radically passive beings? Can we then do anything; or can anything be done to us? Have we criteria to distinguish the two? In "adapting" to virtually any circumstances, we may transgress against our own profound needs, violating what is good or right for our essential self; that is as true morally as it is medically. To presume our radical malleability is at one stroke to abolish ⁠— to veto ⁠— not just the traditional concept of human nature but also the Hellenic philosophical ethos that demands we must "know ourselves," Gnothi seauton. This arbitrarialist concept certifies we are pure process, a Faustian (i.e. Mephistophelean) being of pure energy or action: Metamorphic, transformable on a whimsy, and thus futile to attempt to fix by any definitive knowing.

Modern rhetoric casts all issues in the sanguine lights of a "freedom from" authority, from nature, human nature and tradition, and even from values and judgmental competence; a freedom moderns are culturally and constitutionally unfit to recognize as ultimately pathological. For moderns ex hypothesi there can be no obligatory issues to deal with, no imperative existential or essential topics to comprehend, no recognized standards of competence. Moderns were born to wallow in a pigsty of anomie, a chaotized slurry of opinions about just the most significant issues. So disburdened of principles, values, and traditional intelligence as to suspect or resist nothing that might be done with his mind and life, the American Yahoo was, among all peoples, the rat par excellence for the modernizing experiment. In exchange for his birthright of freedom, integrity of personality, and intellectual/conscientious sanity, he got what all simians delight in, a shiny mess of pottage ⁠— or cyberculture's pot of message. Moderns have no more right to complain or wits to recognize how their health, sanity, intelligence, acuity, culture, etc. have been atrophied by the modern system than did the ancient slaves; moderns cannot grasp or voice what is being done to them as megalopolitan guinea pigs; but their ideology insists they possess arbitrary freedom, consumer-choice, voter-selectivity, in all things.

What is meant by a nearly abstract form of freedom, devoid of context, empty of teleological or axiological intelligence, impoverished in comparative criteria and historical experience, neglecting structures of human nature? If we are "free" to "choose what we want," but not free or fit to know what may or should be wanted, or to compare what we are to think or were told we want with any other desiderata ⁠— the values in other historical and cultural forms, the life-purposes framed by the most prodigious worldviews ⁠— then indeed we are decisively unfree, ignorant and incompetent to adjudicate the question how life is most worth living. We are then mere parochials imprisoned in the gravity-trap of our ethnocentrisms, supposing that ours is the ultimate or only true religion, the only benign form of economy and culture, the only reasonable political, legal and educational systems, etc. Modern freedom seems absolute in its concept of license: In actuality the very meaning and substance of freedom are utterly volatilized by modern false consciousness, the enframing lies that insinuate forms of domination under the guise of the "free" indulgence of individual appetites. The politics of modernity is the organized illusion of freedom, a mass-mentality so readily gulled and regimented as to be frightening to anyone who sees it for what it is and recalls what such armies of morons historically have been capable of.

The modern abstractness ⁠— culture reduced to intellectualism, verbalisms, generalizations, pseudoscientific skeletal conceptual schemata ⁠— has systematically extirpated thinking as a concrete part. To know only "information," the crumbs from other's reasoning, being inept to set up premises or derived conclusions oneself, is not at all to be rational: It is intellectual poverty and slavery. To be trained into a repertory of abstractivist vocabulary means to assume orthodox interpretations and limitations of comprehension taken over bodily as results from other sources. To be oblivious of, apathetic toward, the actual metabolism of perspectives and beliefs ⁠— to dismiss or to accredit views with equal evaluative ignorance in one case and in the other ⁠— is to be played like a puppet by obscure forces. "Licentiousness" in the world of forms in actuality legislates against the authority of discriminating intelligence, vilifying it as elitist or antidemocratic; such licentiousness merely consolidates a regime of subcritical and subrational mass-controls. The many do not originate their own premises or preconceptions, and do not begin to know why they don't; they have no critical defense against whatever is suggested to them in the right form and from the right quarter. Once installed, a piece of mass-fideism perpetuates itself circularly: "Everybody knows" that "everybody knows" what "everybody knows." In a critical culture anything that "everybody knows" or "approves" would be discredited for that very reason: as Nietzsche remarked, the agreement of the Many in itself refutes the intelligence of a position. Inevitably what "everybody knows" serves someone else's purposes and merely profiles the prevailing blind spots in a culture.

"Thou shalt not utter shalt-nots": Modernity is a modally iconoclastic revolution insisting no one any longer has the right to impose a "should" or "must" on anyone else, a limit on others' sense of omnipossibility ⁠— or even on one's own sense of license. None has the right to wake another up from subjectivist delusions. Moderns feel guilty for trying to make themselves feel guilty, for holding themselves accountable to anything higher than their own supremely manipulable "wills" and preferences. As Marx, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky saw, moderns live in the subjunctive mode, a culture of possibilities which may be played this way or may be played that way: Indeed an ideal universe for sophists to play with, to steer ad libidem. Like Pilate, modern sophists wash their hands of the question, What is truth? The powers to whom they are hirelings own and operate systems of thunderous mass-marketed lies that drown out utterly any critical thinking. Nietzsche: When the truth wins out in the marketplace, we have to ask ourselves what strong lie fought for it. A little evocative allusion or vicious rhetoric, the right notes on moderns' hot buttons, and the mark is dancing to the con man's tune like frog legs to Volta's electricity or dogs salivating to Pavlov's bell; but the modern hominid supposes all the while that his most devout dreams, which are apparently an onerous load of consumer and civic indebtedness and pestilential pollution, are coming true. His vision of ideality is getting tarted up and fed back to him by experts. The "straights" or "stiffs," the "earnest" patsies who are obliged to believe whatever issues from official sources and have no clue what nihilist games power and wealth have become among us, are just ideological marionettes in their billions: Perception is reality. What is truly "real" is the power to shape perceptions en masse.

In that ideological "virtual reality," all seriousness is suspended, all gravity dissolved. Nothing in that culture should be understood or believed in a profound or ultimate sense; all is tentative, merely suggested or supposed, utterly revocable. An authoritative or aristocratic tone has become in itself culturally renegade, moral contraband from a philosophically or religiously premodern way of seeing the world: The characteristic philosophic keynote of gravity, of issues denser or more difficult than normal, makes modern hackles rise. For in a culture where otherwise anything goes, philosophizing is offensive. The culture of license has superficialized modern intelligence, castrated and dissociated philosophical-religious insight and artistic-literary and political culture. For moderns all that is obligatory is a facile tone, agreeable to mass-culture and popular mentality. This culture manifests its power in a nearly content-free form of conversation Kierkegaard and Heidegger called "chatter" or "prattle" (Rede), amusing or temporizing froth about interesting possibilities generated by intellects in the service of innocuous vacuity. Polite, considerate or entertaining talk is pointedly not philosophical; and philosophical talk is not polite, considerate or entertaining.

Modernity loathes every attempt to raise issues from a "larger perspective"; even in academia the Big Picture is reviled. Such critical interventions disillusion, they rupture the culture's envelope. Although modernity loves to congratulate itself on its singularity as a form of civilization, it dares not explore questions about its evolution as a culture and ideology, not least because these violate the norms against looking at matters in the light of more comprehensive significance. The Many lulled and gulled by modern culture find it a kind of tonic for their morale to be told that anything is possible, that arbitrary will has triumphed over all previous civilizational regimes of normative principles (Nature, God, Society, Tradition, Reason). It is flattering to suppose that the pattern and direction of their lives are utterly their own willful design. Moderns, as Dostoevsky wrote in Notes from Underground, do indeed hate a wall, a limitation ⁠— they abhor being told no. It inflames a spirit of rebellion in them, a dementia modernity has stoked to the maximum. Commercialized youth culture is one of its most successful experiments in manipulable, heteronomous mass-nihilism, a celebration of uncontainable appetites and drives. But from a more comprehensive philosophical perspective, the culture of license means something quite different from this naive or idiotist (self- infatuated) nihilism of "liberation. " It means abject powerlessness and worse for the vast majority of mankind, especially for those led to imagine they will be personal beneficiaries of the profligate culture of laissez-aller and its ideological glitz and copious hype and promises.

"Omnipossibility" does not mean one can actually do anything and everything one imagines or wants to do: Only that moderns believe in principle that no moral or metaphysical logic may any longer prohibit such self-indulgence. Moderns believe in an obligatory moral infinitude, the obliteration of all traditional authoritative landmarks for conceiving what is essentially good, bad, just, unjust, sane, insane, rational, irrational, etc. This belief is effectively the death-knell of culture as traditionally comprehended and practiced, i.e. a corpus of norms subliminally attuning its members to its presuppositional domain. Moderns believe themselves entitled not only to their own "views," perspectives, consciences and values, but to their own logics, truths, realities ⁠— in sum, their unimpeachable delusions: That is anomie, of course, the reign of absolutized subjectivism. Most people are far too sterile, shallow and closed-minded to generate their own credos; in actuality they have so profoundly capitulated to the engulfing ideological swamp that they have no idea this matrix is anything apart from their own "minds." In truth what they suppose to be their "own" thinking is the invasive effluvia of a mass culture to order, to subserve the interests of its "sponsors." How that system actually works and what content it deposits in the cranial dumpsters of its populace are utterly unrelated, as unrelated as can be. The system prefers its inmates incompetent to rise to the level of believing, knowing, understanding, judging or other traditional indicia of rational or moral subjectivity.

Oxymoronically expressed, moderns believe they are ought to accept the extinction of all imperatives or transcendent dictates: It is the onus of our overweening cultural norm that we should no longer respect norms, because we should no longer respect; we should as a culture lose the very meaning of respect. Modern culture is the systematic cultivation of anomie, that is, subjective and normative chaos. Factual or contingent impediments may obstruct modern will's self-indulgence and self- aggrandizement; but moderns are confident that science and economics (and their love-child technology) will eventually override these accidental obstacles to mass-gratification. Omnipossibility means that moderns believe they are, like God or like Nature, not just pregnant with infinite variations but rife with authority over what is not will: They believe themselves no longer particles within the natural cosmos but rather driving forces, principles within a new order of reality that answers perfectly to human whims. Not just God is dead ⁠— deposed ⁠— but so are Nature, Tradition, Values, Reason, all forms of Authority whatsoever; their Heir is the Marketplace of Delusions. Authority is per se incompossible with modernity's extremized concept of abstract Will or Ego. But this Will or Ego is not that of individuals or aggregates of individuals; it is the Will or Ego of the system that defines them thus for their own benefit (which it also defines). The modern artificialist universe has invalidated all that premoderns took for granted as the firmament of actual existence, all the unsavory "irrational" and "metaphysical" forces that once prescribed the terms of natural and human life to generations past. The Whole Earth Catalog intoned, "We are become as gods, and might as well get good at it." But we should have thought of that second consideration first. Is God not absolutely free and unaccountable? Are there qualifications or responsibilities for serving in His office? This bodes ill for our competence at the job of Gods; we didn't think there was going to be a test.

For we are wracked with that primary problem: We (that is, the overlords and organizations that act for us and inform us what "we" have "done") are incompetent to bear such presumptuous power, even in the form of possibilities of the mind, and are incompetent to see that we are incompetent. Goethe insightfully captured the dilemma: "... Everything that sets our minds free without giving us mastery over ourselves is pernicious." It was one thing for science and technology to accept Nature's premises and find ingenious ways of extending or modifying them, something else altogether to dictate man's premises to Nature ⁠— as if this drunken Sorcerer's Apprentice might recognize his own hybris. Corresponding to every expansion of the domain of possibilities, our critical power over our delusions and appetites must be enhanced: Values, responsibility and philosophical-moral culture strengthened. But modernity has brought on no new resources for subtilizing and intensifying purely inward self-discipline. Its licentiousness is ultimately lassitude, dissolution of human and societal structures of purpose and mastery: The modern era has nursed one delusion or narcosis after another, and from its entire history (as Hegel saw) no people has ever yet learned a thing.

Modernity is licentious and thus amorphous in its normative core, that is, it cannot comprehend the basal precept of Hellenic aristocratism, that power in its most essential and fertile form derives from self-mastery, from competence to command or direct oneself, to harness energy within a form or value. To grasp this precept requires already insight and self-mastery. Modernity presumes power arises not out of an intimate self-relation but out of externals and extrinsics, out of controlling others' appetites or delusions; out of technological marvels, strategic concentrations of wealth, over the possession of which utterly unscrupulous and destructive competition is waged. Modernity obligates its troops to be vacuous of alternative perspectives or interests, hungry for its goods, passive or merely reactive before its meta-programs and ulterior agenda. The modern system wants a populace that values its money over its own life, its career over its very fitness to grasp what is true, appetites over intelligence; it once a mass of postcredal, postmoral, postpolitical, certainly postphilosophical subjects, who cannot grasp the link between individuality, autonomy and self-cultivation. The central insight, the very pilot- light of philosophy and democratic culture, is missing from the modern regime of spectacle, exploitation and gullibility, as Dostoevsky captured it in "The Grand Inquisitor." The Greeks took intimately and ultimately for granted the correlativity or marriageability of form and matter, the artful and organic weave of these factors into the gamete (the "married" organism) of culture: What their is in the world as raw material, including the stuff of human motives, desires and preconceptions, has to be wedded to how it should be seen or dealt with. But it is just this second factor in which modernity is bent on legislating utter licentiousness, that is, cultural illiterateness, tastelessness, obtuseness, myopia, a miasma of fabulous delusions and fantasies. All the more fabulous for those who ride the delusions of their fellows to profit and power.

The domain of culture, of expressions and resources of form, produces the most potent narcotics, rhetoric, delusion, and organized orthodoxy. Only imbeciles, infants at the scale of men, will imagine that licentious appetites can be indulged in that domain with impunity; but modernity has become expert and efficient at mass-producing imbeciles. Not to care about the issue of forms ⁠— of culture, philosophical and political perspectives and values ⁠— is not just to be a tasteless and self-uncritical philistine but more profoundly to be a barbarian, an agent of chaos in the human world. A carrier of the virus of nihilism, all the more horrendous because in itself self-undiagnosable. Rather, it dissolves all criteria and objectivity by which it might be neutralized. It is a perspectival affliction, a pathos or an ideology, a pathology of how humans are trained to see or think about things. It is an ingeniously supple irrationalism that refuses to let itself be seen, named or defined, much less challenged or criticized. As is said of addicts or alcoholics, That's just the chemical talking, so with ideologues: In countless conversations one finds it is not someone's clarified judgment or intelligence speaking, but a more alien, impersonal "alogic." Nothing human is driving. That horrific stereotypical or generic mentality ⁠— like looking into a chicken's eyes ⁠— is ideologized thinking sleepwalking, mass-generated molecules waiting to be mustered into mass-audiences, armies, bureaucracies, parties, congregations.

The awful power of this ideologically chelated mentality, stripped of its humanity and culture, is replicated all throughout the wars, politics, economics and rampant atrocities of the twentieth century. Modern scientific genius may have split the unsplittable a- tomos, it may have loosed man from the firmamental grip of gravity; but its most prodigious experiment in defiance of nature has to be its triumph over the integrity and autonomy of the human personality, the very core of spirit and nous. Human nature itself is Silly Putty in the hands of inhuman nihilistic techne, the "science" concerned not to understand but only to control what is. In essence human individuality is rendered plastic and porous, accessible to the cellular acids of a witless culture now purveyed as blithely as pesticides, microwaves and electromagnetic devices. It is terrifying what can be carried out in the absence of natural and religious due diligence, a profound and vigilant prudence about one's ultimate (rather than imaginary or willful) self-interest. Modernity is that experiment, the rise to untrammeled power of a merely techne- or means-obsessed mentality the Greeks identified with the caste of materialist banausoi. What the Greeks understood this mentality systematically lacked is indeed the virtues and values in which modernity is profoundly impoverished, the aretai or "excellences" characteristic of a personality-type nearly extinct in modernity: Aristoi.

Modernity's dominant culture is in open revolt against limitations, are resentful of authority, fate and nature: Its gospel of possibilism opens an infinite horizon, a gravity-free moral universe in which all is thinkable but alas thinking itself has become strictly impossible for its vast majority. Radicalized modern self-abstraction ⁠— de omnibus dubitandum est, a mindless and undiscriminating wholesale skepticism, the tasteless form of doubt most preferred by barbarians ⁠— ultimately dissolves order as such. Modernity's romance with infinitude, i.e. with unconditional power, is a seduction by the abyss. From where will the values be derived to temper that absolutized power? Moderns have no tolerance for the specific strategies of human order that prevailed in one cultural regime or another throughout history; they demand instead a "scientific" regime, a value-free order in which the so-called science of the market bursts through the bulwarks between private and public to inundate politics, education, culture, family, and conscience. Pennywise and pound-foolish, straining out gnats while they suck on a Camel cigarette, moderns are so suspicious against contrary value-perspectives that they will tolerate being ruled only by the sheer dictatorship of great concentrations of wealth. This is to moderns scientific and objective; this is free of the taint of particularism and personal interest. Awash in an ocean of subjectivism, Moderns are just that desperate for salvation from it; money ⁠— the quintessence of omnipossibility and nihilism ⁠— seems the Messiah to whom the Many are eager to capitulate, the disease taken for the doctor.