The republic exists to hold the Great and the Small together in enforced Unity. That total relation doesn't need to exist; in fact, almost every atrocity over the past 2500 years is a consequence of it. We can scuttle it as easily as the Classicals were dragged into it: hard, but possible.
The taste for delusions is acquired. Some societies get them, some do not. It's become apparent that the love for heroic drama (and the arts of lying, wastes of material wealth, inherited debts and performances, etc.) was particular to certain kinds of rural cultures, whose epic aesthetics recombined with the religious bureaucracies of the time, much like the "alt-right" of today. Steve Bannon isn't "evil", he's just participating in a historical process that heroic tradition "needs" in order to exist. But not everything needs to exist, in fact, there is no such thing as a need to exist. There are only consequences and predicates foregone.
There really isn't a reason to have heroic ideologies anymore or to let them run free-range in the streets, not just because the material bases for them have been subverted, but because they are all the same argument for spectacle as Truth. We're much better off with sortition than with any system that allows for cosmic drama.
The republic exists to hold the Great and the Small together in enforced Unity. That total relation doesn't need to exist; in fact, almost every atrocity over the past 2500 years is a consequence of it. We can scuttle it as easily as the Classicals were dragged into it: hard, but possible.
The taste for delusions is acquired. Some societies get them, some do not. It's become apparent that the love for heroic drama (and the arts of lying, wastes of material wealth, inherited debts and performances, etc.) was particular to certain kinds of rural cultures, whose epic aesthetics recombined with the religious bureaucracies of the time, much like the "alt-right" of today. Steve Bannon isn't "evil", he's just participating in a historical process that heroic tradition "needs" in order to exist. But not everything needs to exist, in fact, there is no such thing as a need to exist. There are only consequences and predicates foregone.
There really isn't a reason to have heroic ideologies anymore or to let them run free-range in the streets, not just because the material bases for them have been subverted, but because they are all the same argument for spectacle as Truth. We're much better off with sortition than with any system that allows for cosmic drama.