Liberalism of the obligation
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 nonexistent – "progress", the future – and therefore condemned to fix higher and higher the bar of its promises to justify the destruction it sows in the existing . The most macroscopic contradiction, the logical one, lies in the now obscene gap between the stated aims and the consequent results. There lies the apologetic arsenal of blaming the victims , the compulsion to repeat, the failure 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 data – what is given , not what is produced or interpreted – of everyone's experience ( sensus communis ). And those who violate reality, violating everything that is real, can only find asylum in a sick imagination because they are unaware, in the belief that things, as in biblical cosmogony, are created and come true because they are repeated by newspapers, by demonstrators, by hashtags, by parrots from academia and institutions.
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 of services, the free movement of goods, capital and people, the freedom of morals and sex that must unhinge everything, even the bonds 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 translates into the palingenetic and bold practice of "reforms" the fruits of which all fall and without margins of derogation in the category … of the limitations of freedoms , in every possible variant.
Freedom is slavery , wrote George Orwell imagining the society of the future. And today there seems to be no problem, small or large, true 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 gragnola of obligations never heard before that they hit or fall on their heads there are not only the most sensational, such as that of using electronic tools to pay and bill, to show documents to use a social network, to undergo health treatments invasive to enjoy the most basic rights, to hand over the children to the tutors of the state , possibly from birth , to parrot the weather and health dogmas of the moment or, more simply, to "love" . Below is a forest of fulfilments, limits, conditions, procedures, quibbles, mandatory communications, requirements, taxes, deadlines which, placed one on top of the other, form an insurmountable wall for those who do not have the strength, economic or criminal, to get around it without consequences. In the past I had fun (so to speak) to illustrate 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 legislator not foreseen by the Constitution, thus raising the weight of state intervention to power. But many other examples are visible and in everyone's life, so I do not go on.
After training Augusto Pinochet's economic advisors and turning to the dictator himself to recommend him 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 provisions. 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 shack of a counter-system that does not serve the needs of men, except to make men servants.
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The increase in obligations, like the increase in taxes, is a move by desperate people , who, not knowing how to change reality, delude themselves into imprisoning it in their fantasies. And to hear how much pathos the new chains are promoting, always under the ax of "epochal" plagues and "emergencies" looming, one wonders how civilization ever managed to resist and indeed develop until the day before yesterday, immersed as it was in an anarchoid disorder where people – think! – they could choose.
The increase in obligations is also an increase in mistrust, of those who lock themselves in the grudging 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 bit of freedom granted to give themselves superstition, crapula and wickedness. If the community is of 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 manage the consequences of their failures and those who, disgusted and elusive, have to suffer them, on the other among the governed themselves trained to look for the "culprit" among their ranks : the state, the old, the foreigner, the haterer, the illiterate-functional, the mother, the masked plumber .
As in broken couples, the wary spouse deludes himself to regain control by supervising the other to the point of suffocation, in our case with the associated idea, both inhuman and childish, of transforming society into a huge calculator where everything is connected and nothing escapes those who administer 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 fish sense) of the net (in the telematic sense) on the minds, so here is the claim to extend it to the universality of the bodies, for now with the otherwise incomprehensible ardor of opening them by law to an arbitrary number of State injections, tomorrow with the biotechnological systems that we begin to talk about cautiously while the pretexts are perfected: "comfort", health, safety.
But even this is not enough. Because a chained servant is still a servant who broods revolt and propaganda, even the most anesthetic and refined, cannot erase the halo of what was yesterday the recipient of the divine spark, today an unreliable combination of doubts, hesitations and feelings . The difficulty of obliging everyone to do everything by closing any way out therefore produces an even more delusional ambition, that of a company that no longer needs obligations because it is ready to execute orders with the demented diligence of the machines. How? In the only way possible: putting machines in the place of men . The integration – obviously forced – of an "artificial intelligence" in every sector is to this ambition as nighttime pollution is to the dream and worthily closes the carnival of the "honest" , of a political community that must only respect the rules safely. , do not discuss them, let alone ask yourself who the beneficiaries and authors are.
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Having ascertained 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 even say archetypal of governing without consent , here declined in a true it is precisely a cult of death where the perfect and inanimate subjects – the machines – would have the task of regulating the imperfect subjects because they have a soul. In the meantime, however, that consensus must be ruled and the prisoners' collaboration in raising the walls of their prisons must be ensured. A long series of rhetorical devices, some already mentioned, others more specific, such as for example the hairy lie of the inevitability and unstoppability 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 acting, having put everyone against everyone – children against fathers, employees against self-employed, autochthonous against allochthonous, right-handed against left-handed, middle-small bourgeois against small-medium bourgeois etc. transforming any difference of condition or opinion into clash – to ensure that, each yearning for chains, censorship or pillory for one's enemies, and in blinding a "hurry up" willing to endorse the suspension of guarantees more elementary legal systems, all end up in chains, without distinctions. What 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 pile where the other, when he is not an enemy, is always an opponent.
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 nourishes it, making the obligation and the sanction a spite , a weapon that everyone deludes themselves into aiming at their ghosts while undergoing their recoil. It is a contradiction that is savored more and more considering the apologies of the obligation that meander among the obliged, where it has become customary to deny the arbitrariness and the danger of new constraints since, basically, 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) already did not 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 witness a prodigy, one in which the freedom of individuals serves to deny everyone's freedom , with a logical and moral inversion that until yesterday was really difficult to imagine and in which the idea of community itself dies today, perverted by the misery of a narcissistic projection of one's own self, by taking advantage of the singularity of others as a system. In short, on the contrary .
Even in this paradox, the last one only in chronological order, the ontologically corrupt root of the process is measured and its foundation on the negation of a reality and a will whose failure to take note can only give birth to the Promethean illusion desperate, to have always desired 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 the real 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.