Obligation liberalism
This article is also available in Slovenian ( here ).
Times of crisis are times of contradictions. The present time is no exception, chained to an anthropological model projected towards the non-existent – "progress", the future – and therefore condemned to set the bar of its promises higher and higher to justify the destruction it sows in the existing. . The most macroscopic contradiction, the logical one, is in the now obscene gap between the declared aims and the consequent outcomes. There lies the apologetic arsenal of the blaming of the victims , the repetition compulsion, the decline of speech and thought in the bar-bar of slogans, emotions on command, appeals to the dreamlike irrationalism of "visions" and "dreams" and other numbers already described elsewhere .
Whoever violates logic violates reality . The principle of non-contradiction is neither demonstrated nor contested because its postulate is the given – what is given , not what is produced or interpreted – of the experience of all ( sensus communis ). And whoever violates reality, violating everything that is real, can only find refuge in a sick imagination because it is unaware, in the belief that things, as in biblical cosmogony, are created and come true because they are repeated by newspapers, by demonstrators, from hashtags, from academy and institutional parrots.
If the result is alienated and contradictory, can not the theory upstream, one in which we celebrate the "freedom" of modern times and coming already in the etymology of its myths corollaries: political liberalism, economic liberalism, liberalization services, the free circulation of goods, capital and people, the freedom of morals and sex that must unhinge everything, even the constraints of biology, the free West, the crusade against a corrupt, provincial and bigoted past from whose burdens you have to free yourself . To accomplish all this, this theory is translated into the palingenetic and bold practice of "reforms" whose fruits all fall within the category of limitations of freedoms , in every possible variant, without any margin of derogation.
Freedom is slavery , wrote George Orwell imagining the society of the future. And today there seems to be no problem, big or small, real or presumed, that cannot be solved by introducing new constraints and prohibitions. It never happens, not even by mistake, that the free dream of liberal-liberals translates into greater freedom for citizens . In the hail of unheard-of obligations that come down or hit their heads there are not only the most sensational, such as using electronic tools to pay and invoice, exhibiting documents to use a social network, undergoing health treatments invasive in order to enjoy the most basic rights, to hand over the children to state tutors , possibly from birth , to parrot the weather and health dogmas of the moment or, more simply, to "love" . Below is reproduced a forest of obligations, limits, conditions, procedures, quibbles, mandatory communications, requirements, taxes, deadlines which, placed one on top of the other, form an impassable wall for those who do not have the strength, economic or criminal, to get around it without consequences. In the past I have enjoyed (so to speak) illustrating how the liberalization of an energy service in natural monopoly has entailed not only the introduction of a plethora of obligations and constraints that did not exist before, but even the birth of a new legislative subject not envisaged by the Constitution, thus raising the weight of state intervention to power. But many other examples are under the eyes and in everyone's life, so I won't dwell on them.
After having trained Augusto Pinochet's economic advisors and having himself turned to the dictator to advise him on how to reform the state in a more liberal sense, Milton Friedman often had to deplore the oppressive regime of the Chilean dictator, while appreciating his measures. I have no reason to believe that the American economist was not sincere, but his illusion, that freedom and liberalism can coexist and cultivate each other, is the same that we are reliving today when, as then, we have no other way to keep the freak of an unnatural system that serves no human needs, other than to make men servants.
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The increase in obligations, like the increase in taxes, is a move for desperate people , who, not knowing how to change reality, delude themselves into imprisoning it in their own fantasies. And to hear with how much pathos the new chains are being promoted, always under the ax of "epochal" wounds and "emergencies" that loom, one wonders how civilization ever managed to resist and indeed to develop until the day before yesterday, immersed as it was in an anarchoid disorder where people – just think! – they could choose.
The increase in obligations is also an increase in mistrust, of those who shut themselves up in the rancorous cage of their own exception and from there scrutinize their fellow men and are convinced, in a paranoid crescendo of fear, that they would use every crumb of freedom granted to them to give themselves to superstition, crapula and villainy. If the community belongs to men, those who despise men despise the community, which in fact cracks in the grip of new constraints. The cracks in the social pact intersect, on the one hand between those who cannot govern the consequences of their failures and those who, disgusted and elusive, must suffer them, on the other between the governed themselves trained to look for the "guilty" among their ranks : the state, the old man, the foreigner, the hater, the functional illiterate, the mother belly, the masked plumber .
As in broken couples, the suspicious spouse is under the illusion of regaining control by monitoring the other to asphyxiation, in our case with the connected idea, both inhuman and childish, of transforming society into a huge computer where everything is connected and nothing. escapes the administrator of the system. Where everything can be measured, modified and suppressed with the sadistic-anal magic of a "click". But since human beings are not machines, it is necessary to force them to become such, to pour their wishes, secrets, assets, affections, thoughts, fantasies, health and professional data into someone else's electronic circuits, even and above all when it is not needed or it is not recommended to do this, such as in the case of voting. But it is not enough to have thrown the net (in the fishing sense) of the net (in the telematic sense) on the minds, so here is the claim to extend it to the universality of bodies, for now with the otherwise incomprehensible enthusiasm of opening them by law to an arbitrary number of State injections, tomorrow with the biotechnological plants that we begin to talk about cautiously while the pretexts are being perfected: "comfort", health, safety.
But even this is not enough. Because a chained servant is still a servant who hatches revolt and propaganda, even the most anesthetic and refined, cannot erase the risk of what was yesterday the recipient of the divine spark, today an unreliable heap of doubts, hesitations and feelings . The difficulty of forcing everyone to do everything by closing every way out then produces an even more delusional ambition, that of a society that no longer needs obligations because it is ready to carry out orders with the demented diligence of machines. Such as? In the only way possible: by putting machines instead of men . Integration – obviously forced – an "artificial intelligence" in any industry is to this ambition like the wet dream is the dream and worthily closes the carnival of "honest" , of a political community that needs only respect sicut ac cadaver rules , do not discuss them or, let alone, question who are the beneficiaries and authors.
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Having established that the new obligations are never useful for the purposes for which they are introduced ( here I explain how and why), the ultimate goal of these maneuvers can only be the ancient one and I would say archetypal to govern without consent , here declined in a true and precisely the cult of death where the perfect and inanimate subjects – the machines – would have the task of disciplining the imperfect subjects because they have a soul. In the meantime, however, it is necessary to flat out that consensus and ensure the collaboration of the prisoners in building the walls of their prisons. In this a long series of rhetorical tricks helps, some already mentioned, others more specific, such as the hairy lie of the inevitability and unstoppable of these processes and, therefore, of the need to anticipate them in order to "govern" them.
But most of all I think that the aforementioned sectional conflicts are at work, having pitted everyone against everyone – children against fathers, employees against self-employed, natives against allochthones, right against left, middle-small bourgeois against petty-medium bourgeois etc. transforming even the slightest difference in condition or opinion into confrontation – to ensure that, each craving the chains, censorship or pillory for their enemies, and in the blindness of a "hurry up" willing to endorse the suspension of guarantees elementary juridical, all end up in chains, without distinction. Which then is only the result of an already latent and structural struggle in the exhortations to competitiveness, to " merit " and to the primacy of the individual over the heap where the other, when not an enemy, is always an adversary.
This last aspect brings to light another even more reckless contradiction, the one in which the pretext of making the community more cohesive by subjecting it to shared rules instead originates from the disintegration of the community and indeed feeds it, making the obligation and the sanction a spite , a weapon that everyone is under the illusion of aiming at their own ghosts, suffering their recoil instead. It is a contradiction that is increasingly savored considering the apologies of the obligation that snake among the obliged, where it has become customary to deny the arbitrariness and the danger of the new constraints because, after all, they would only institutionalize a choice, an inclination or an opinion that is believed to have always cultivated. Here then are those who (they) already paid cappuccino with the gold card, they (they) already made all the vaccinations, even those recommended, they (they) did not already believe in homeopathy, they (they) did not follow the extremists (?) censored by the web or by the establishment of the Ministry of Love, they (they) already used name and surname on Facebook, they (they) already recorded the invoices on the management of Buffetti. Thus we are witnessing a prodigy, the one in which the freedom of individuals serves to deny the freedom of all , with a logical and moral inversion that until yesterday was really difficult to imagine and in which instead the very idea of community dies today, perverted to the misery of a narcissistic projection of one's own self, to the neglect of the singularity of others as a system. In short, quite the opposite .
Even in this paradox, the last only in chronological order, the ontologically corrupt root of the process is measured and its foundation on the denial of a reality and of a will whose failure to take note can only give birth to the Promethean illusion desperate people, that they have always wanted their yoke. Already many, too many, are practicing to repeat the words of prayer directing them no longer to Heaven but to the mud of earthly domination (which is then the true inversion, the most radical): " Grant your people to love what you command ".
Because perhaps they sense that nothing else will be granted to them.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Il Pedante at the URL http://ilpedante.org/post/liberalismo-dell-obbligo on Mon, 13 Jan 2020 09:33:07 PST.