Communism v. Democracy

Intellectually speaking, Communism is a lot more Capitalist than Democracy. Communism requires a stock (or capital) of intellect, whereas Democracy depends on no such fixed codex. Instead, Democracy evolves according to its people.

For example, if an Afro-Descendant male should rise to the highest elected office in a democracy, then he and his attributes falls under the scrutiny of the society – in effect, he becomes a living codex by which the country runs. If Obama should be pro-abortion then institutions and laws change accordingly. However, it is not always the person elected to the highest office who alters the structure of the society the most. If Bin Laden should come out to be pro-abortion, then perhaps his views influenced Obama, who in turn influenced laws and mores in the country. Over time, a democracy not only imitates its finest trend-setter (be it, Obama or Bin Laden), but also reproduces him. After WWII, many people decided to name their sons Winston, after Churchill.

Communism depends on a stock of intellectual capital to move forward. Somewhere in the offices of every member of the Communist Party of China is a translated copy of Marx (not Groucho). Similarly, if we look at religions we can apply the label of “Intellectually Capitalist Communities,” since they general rely on some central, physical text, or codex.

The difference then becomes a question of how these differing societies move forward along the axis of Time. Bob Dylan, for example, may have played a large part, believe it or not, in the success of the Civil Rights Movement of Martin Luther King. That is, the prototypical baby boomer, Dylan, may have succeeded in rallying enough force to change segregation laws. That means, a large-scale shift in the sexual habits of the population in the 40’s actually had an impact on laws and customs towards Afro-Descendants twenty years later. Conversely, Marx’s texts have remained uniform for over a hundred years. The Five-Year Plan, turned into another and another and another. The question then becomes, how does a Communist nation (or an ICC) evolve? Much more slowly.

While Democracies change as rapidly as the biology of the people, Communism keeps a reserve of intellectual stock. That is why Democracies as so much more focused on happiness (“the pursuit of happiness”) and Communist Countries are more focused on the reconcilement of biology with doctrine (the people may suffer, but the nation shall flourish). That is why crafters of doctrine in Communist Countries are treated like gods (statues, posters, films, etc.): the nation is essentially their brainchild. The streets run this way because Mao envisaged the Guerilla Warrior in such a way, the buildings are so high because Lenin believed it to be right. That is why religions have a much harder time in Communist Countries than Democracies: the people have a hard time glorifying Marx at the same time as glorifying Jesus.

Religions in Democracies are almost comedic. There is the Easter Bunny that coincides with the holiest of occasions, the Resurrection. There even exists April Fools Day, and Groundhog Day. As soon as the Easter Bunny starts winning real votes in real elections, then it may start being treated more seriously. Then more people may start wearing bunny ears and searching for eggs. “Yes, we can,” would ring through every egg-hunters ears. The culture, in effect, dramatically – almost ridiculously (in fact, always ridiculously) – changes as a result of the election.

Communist citizens have a harder time suspending their disbelief: before rushing to the costume store, or to the lynching (for that matter), they turn to the sober second thought of men who rose, not because of a Baby Boom or a large Afro-Descendant demographic, but because of the longevity of their ideas – and in most cases, they speak from beyond the grave. Since no one wishes to imitate the dead, imitating doctrine is a welcome consolation prize. However, it is often Communist Countries who turn out to seem unrealistic in retrospect. Herein lies the inherit difference between the two methods of governing a country: the difference between what can be done in Fiction and what can be done in Reality.

While it is true that all political philosophy often falls in the non-fiction floors of libraries, when it comes to their application in reality, then the fictitious rises to the surface. While Marx may have believed, for example that “Man produces himself through Labour,” his neglect of specifying what kinds of labour produces men, or produces men more swiftly, attracts the label “Fiction.” Inversely, Democracies require living proof before they evolve. If President George W. Bush was able to survive his first term alive and without an across-the-board White House mutiny, then perhaps re-electing him for his second term “wouldn’t be such a bad idea.” Even though Kruschev spoke out against Stalin immediately after his death, Communism still persisted – why? because it was not the fault of the electors to have trusted Stalin (if ever they should have thought in terms of elections), but the fault of Stalin in not understanding the Soviet Union’s stock of doctrine (one book handily being called, Capital).

Such is the problem with Communist Countries: they raise scholars to political office. In America, it is often hardened generals or war vets – people who have seen the hell of life with their own eyes – who retire/rise into public office. Lenin had to be a scholar, Kruschev had to be a scholar, Gorbachev is still a scholar. In order for change to happen the scholars must allowed direct control of government. This is what has happened to Iran. Yet, in Democracies, as much as statecraft is divided from warcraft (strained civil-military relations), even politicizing and intellectualizing are becoming more and more divided. Public office seeks the most upstanding citizens, while scholars are often a little too eccentric to garner sufficient votes. It is that eccentricity that often leads to things like the Gulags Archipelago, and the Ministry of Propaganda.

Scholars have a hard job, but they must be allowed the time they need (sometimes several times the duration of their human lives), to be proven right or wrong by other scholars. Yet the problem with the world at the moment is that the schisms of scholars often play themselves out at the inter-state level. While Voltaire might still be at odds with Marx (even though they are both dead and even though Marx came after Voltaire), Marx has effectively mobilized most of Asia (the Russia and China swaths) against Voltaire-enamoured Canada. That is most certainly not the case, but it shows how, potentially, intellectual differences manifest themselves in the physical world (there are countless other good examples, but the one I chose is the most uncontestable I could find: Voltaire is not Communist, Marx is not Democratic (even though I don’t necessarily agree with this either)).

The example of bees can be of some use to us in thinking about this. Wild bees have a bee hive. Often there is a fight that involves the bees in a vicious war: this is what happens when intellects are forced to carry out their ideas themselves inside of nations. The other kind of bees are kept bees. If ever there is a disturbance, the bee keeper can come and slide racks around a little bit, or something: this is what happens when intellects, however heavy their burdens, are not forced inside the crowded confines of the bee community.

The problem arises when too many people want to be the bee keepers/intellects. Often the weakness of their arguments is compensated by the audacity of their rhetoric, the brawn of their organization, or the gusto of their public relations office. In the case of Bin Laden, you have an intellectual who seeks to delay being proven wrong for as long as possible via the use of extremist measures. This is a case in point for the general rule that extremism is always a filibuster. The bees should be happy to have a keeper who will help them sort out their affairs once in a while, and this keeper should rise organically from the bees. But once risen to a certain level, the scholar should be allowed space, time, and resources to do his business. It is worth noting that the great Marx himself was stricken his entire life with embarrassing monetary problems (I often think that the only reason that is a “Marx and Engels” is because the latter so often helped the former out financially).

Intellectuals that have reached a certain level within a society should be lauded with spoils as much as superstars like Paris Hilton and Brad Pitt are. They do important work and it doesn’t hurt for them to make the cover of magazines and the reels of entertainment news shows. Yet the major problem with reaching “a certain level” is that it has customarily taken most people most of their lives to comprehend the Bible, or even Marx. But there are cases when real genius is exhibited in academic circles and these individuals must be nurtured by society in general – not just frugal University Provosts.

Then, the Democratic nation could have a real model to use as its code-writer: the young, intelligent, and rich scholar who’s smile can light up any desolate spot. For, while it is important in Democracies to raise political leaders, it is equally important to maintain a wide array of quasi-farcical holidays and greater-than-life personalities. These nodes help the entire society deal with a constantly-changing situation. Thus far, living-intellectuals in Democracies have had silent, indirect influences on the code-writing process, but this does not have to always be the case.

There can come a time when an entire nation relies on a single person for all of its cultural code-writing (codes for dealing with new challenges to individuals and society as a whole). Once this process has become complete and the slightest blink from the meta-citizen impacts the lives of millions, then that individual becomes what the Iranians call the “Imam Zaman” or Nabob of Time. This makes sense only if we perceive Time as being a function of cultural progress: if everyone agrees that we have moved forward a month, then we have moved forward a month. If everyone agrees with the Nabob of Time about everything, including (but not limited to) the progress of time, then he/she becomes in control of Time itself.

However, this can only take place in a Communist Country where the final stock of intellectual “capital” is in the sole possession of the Nabob of Time’s memory. This is the case of the intellect who, not only knows all that was written, but has produced a large amount of new ideas himself; he need only keep a single idea out of the hands of the people to clinch his Communist control. In a Democratic context the Nabob of Time have even divulged this final idea and the saturation would be such that there would be a constant election of him by the people back into the center of the code-writing process. He could not be in control of time because each citizen would have the time stamped on the back of each ballot he/she casts before every election, which would take place before every increment of Time could go forward: while he wouldn’t be a Nabob of Time, he would at least be the Nabob of Culture.

It is more useful to have a Nabob of Culture (a Democratic Structure) than a Nabob of Time (a Communist Structure) simply because it ensure that Time does not get ahead of the biological elements (people) that compose it. Once the Nabob of Culture gets exhausted, another can be elected; yet if the Nabob of Time gets exhausted, Time itself slows down and may even stop (the final datum dying with him/her).

It is a paradox then that both Communist and Democrats accept Time, even though Time is the ultimate Democratic force, since it requires the watches of every citizen to make the public clock tick.

Time is the tempo/rhythm/tattoo of cultural progression: a culture that keeps an intellectual stock in reserve (Communist Nabob of Time Scenario) is one that believes in the manipulation of God. The externalized bee-keeper metaphor can also be used for God in a Communist structure – a God which may be summoned with enough perturbation among the bees themselves. It can be conceived that the ultimate trend-setter in a Communist structure can influence all other parties to work in concert (his concert) in a sustainable way long enough to draw the bee-keeper’s (God’s) attention. Marx can be seen as such a long-term trend-setter. A very famous book recently, called The Da Vinci Code, might suggest that Leonardo Da Vinci was such trend-setter: touching so many different areas, so profoundly that he actually wired in a new code for all of human culture (one simply need to think about the perfect geometrical lines around the Vitruvian Man to appreciate how our biology can be crossed and surrounded by intellectual lines).

If such a Code to Culture exists, then can it be deliberately, even collaboratively, manipulated? In theory, yes, but that is the subject of a different paper.

The differences between Communist countries and Democratic countries are very palpable. In Communist country, it is not as important to your happiness what you know, but what you feel is right; in Democratic countries, the populace must be kept constantly informed about the actions of its trend-setters (from Oprah’s newest dog to Obama’s newest speechwriter). As long as Mao is watching you, you are still okay; you don’t need to focus on much more than the back of a seat in front of you on a bus. On a Democratic bus, you usually consider what you just read about the state of the union and so on. The problem with the Communist structure of Intellectual Capitalism is that it does not encourage a population to learn: not knowing the ultimate secret of the Nabob of Time may allow for the Nabob of Time’s Utopia to surround him, but, like all utopias, it marks a stagnation. Thus, using the ultimate secret, the Nabob of Time (Communist) can manipulate God by first stunting its growth and development.

The great risk that the Nabob of Culture who depends on a constant electoral process based on complete unanimity in the votes faces, is the likelihood of one voter voting “No.” This shows that consensus is lost and an investigation into the reasons of the naysayer must be carried out. The investigation may prove certain tenets of certain sub-tenets of the Nabob of Culture’s to be in need of modification: the can be resolved thanks to a quick modification, or the “naysayer” being in the possession of knowledge not formerly owned by the Nabob of Culture can replace the Nabob of Culture as the new Nabob of Culture. The only time that the Nabob of Time can possibly lose control is if God interferes in his Utopia. That God is the Nabob of Culture.

Every voter in a Democracy is a Nabob of Time living his own Utopia, holding on to his own knowledge (usually the image of the Nabob of Culture) until he strolls through his Utopia and one day find the image of God himself: the Nabob of Culture. Then his memory is filled to its capacity once again. What the Utopia is good for is a slow process of forgetting. Once all information is synthesized by higher-capacity information, then all that is left is a single thought: the vote. The ultimate decision of Free Will: Yes or No, to go or to stop, to be or not to be. And the highest triumph of life is very simply its desire to live.

That is why Communism can never fully replace Democracy. Democracy set biological limits as the highest test of any idea. Therefore, in a Democracy, while God may help the process, may even be the process, he shall never rise above the Nabob of Culture.

The Nabob of Time is constantly in a state of forgetting while the Nabob of Culture is in a constant state of remedying his amnesia, collecting memory. Every “Yes” vote, is a new memory. What happens then when there is a “No” vote?

What happens is that the Nabob of Culture see himself in the form of the Naysayer. That Naysayer would have had to have gone forward in time by fooling both the Nabob of Culture and the electorate in thinking they were around for lo for a shorter period of time then they were around. The “No” vote would have to be dealt with immediately by the Nabob of Culture and the higher intelligences, perhaps an artificial intelligences would have to be understood. Once this higher intelligence is understood by the Nabob of Culture, if ever, since this is a very intelligent human, then the Nabob of Culture would negotiate with this higher lifeform and barter a deal for the entire Universe. From that point on, the higher intelligence is given the title of God, and the Nabob of Culture is turned into a historical agent, who himself holds an encrypted key which he will reveal once his terms are met by God. This is the creation of a higher, better species. Humanity will be kept around in the form of archiving techniques in either a museum or a zoo or a paradise refound. The apocalypse is hen the Nabob of Culture, being already given this mandate by the Democracy from which he rose, accepts the retirement deal, the Golden Handshake of God.

To borrow from one of David Reynolds’ book titles, this former Nabob of Culture now becomes “in command of history.” Physics, Biology, Law, Fiction, Theology, and Philosophy all work in synchrony to carry out his contract with God. “This is the way the world will end…not with a bang, but with a whimper,” (to borrow from The Waste Land).

History is not just something that happens and goes away. Everything that happens changes everything else in a permanent way. For a system like the Earth to have lasted as long as it has is because certain things have been working themselves out, without necessarily canceling each other out in the process, until the present consciousness (or consciousness of the present) was permitted to take place. Free Will only developed after the Ice Age happened first; it is conceivable then that we may one day look back at the Age of Free Will as yet another self-contained Period: one marked not by mammoths, but by “Yes or No”er’s. And this too may seem obvious one day.

Yet History is never something that has been marked by inevitability. It is not certain that the future can live up to the preparations of History. It is not even certain that Time alone, however positive and democratic, may ensure the dismissal of Communism or ICC’s – it would be primitive to presume it will. They say the devil can cite scripture to his purpose, so the devil can be a scholar too.

Sometimes the most violent, sadistic, criminal minds are nestled comfortably on the shelves of libraries around the world. It would take too long to list them all, but suffice to say that these authors do more harm than good to the people who read them. Take, as just one example, Nietzsche. This is not a good person, nor a kind person, nor a generous person. He may be intelligent, but his bottom line ends with: “there will never be a mind greater than me.” That to me is nothing if not unproductive.

It is the very purpose of academic life to encourage the process of questioning. But in Communist Countries and in ICC’s, where intellect is seen as something of inherent value, much like any other commodity, new ideas are discouraged for they flood the “markets” and diminish the value of the stock in the possession of the aforementioned parties. But this kind of procedure, of stifling new ideas, causes a large-scale inflation in the “price” of good ideas. They become harder and harder to come by. It is like saying that China not only pegs its Renminbi to the U.S. Dollar, but also pegs its ideas to Karl Marx: it does wonders for asserting control over the markets, but it only encourages scholars to keep Karl Marx as dominant. Instead of finding gaps in this argument, they turn to layers in his meaning. “In fact, Marx meant this when he spoke about labour.” But the curious Chinese student is not encouraged to ask, or even wonder, “Then why didn’t he write that down as well?” This may (emphasis definitely mine) be what Dante meant when he said, “there is no knowledge without retention.” The Devil, as always, is in the details.

In reality, there are all kinds of labour. Not only is there the production of needles, but also the production of poultry and harlequin romances. There is a big difference between spending your life in a cage, producing flesh on your bones, and sitting down and writing sappy pulp fiction. Intellectual contemplation, discovery, discourse is as much a “bodily function” as “sexual activity” – which Marx categorizes as “the highest bodily function” – therefore it is important, when thinking about how man produces himself through labour to prioritize the differing kinds of labour involved in that production. Otherwise, the Communist regime can cite one line of Marx (usually the same line) to convince the youngling construction worker that what he’s producing is not just aches in his back and pains in his neck, but “himself.” The Devil will talk to you for ever, but will tend to repeat himself often enough to make you work at the same time. That is why every utopia is always a distopia outside the mind of its creator.

Our complex reality demands much more than simple sequential arguments; it requires constant feedback. Everytime you blink you receive confirmation from the universe around you that your continue to be a micro-Nabob of Culture. Every moment of self-awareness, whether conscious or sub-conscious or both, is an electoral victory for you as a micro-Nabob of Culture, for an extra increment of time towards your experience in the present.

But sometimes you experience something that makes you momentarily forget everything. This is the “No” vote in the democratic process of the universe around you; that one that sends our macro-Nabob of Culture off to a negotiation with God (the anthropromorphized artificial intelligence). This can even happen to you while you are doing something as mundane as reading your only copy of Karl Marx. That moment teaches you a great number of things about all of your presumptions up to that point and demands an immediate process of reappraisal: “perhaps the possessing idea of Gravity in itself cannot, indeed, save me from drowning after all” (from Marx’s The German Ideology). This new idea then replaces and overcompensates for all of your previous memories. With it, you enter into a higher level of self-production, where new ideas need to be of much higher value for them to be purchased by you. The value of your new ideas will then be “pegged” in value to the “No” idea. Even your conception of Time changes because your conception of Infinity improves. To paraphrase from St. Paul, “when I was a child, I spoke and acted as a child. Now that I am a man, it is time to be childish things aside.”

If you placed a squirrel in the mind of a human for a single day, that squirrel will have thought he lived for a million years by early-afternoon. There is so much more happening in the mind of a man than in the mind of a squirrel that time actually goes faster in men. If then there exist exceptional intellects, they should, as mentioned above, be segregated from the general population and allowed to bloom. This is a method by which the human species can send emissaries forward in Time to allow for safe-passage – which explains why how some of the greatest thinkers in history have been said to have been, “ahead of their time.” It is no accident, it is humanities way of testing powerful ideas before committing to them entirely.

Hitherto, the only “license to kill” that has been conventionally handed out in democratic nations have been to spies and assassins. Nearly unlimited budgets, very little oversight, and tremendous mobility among the government’s higher ranks has been bestowed upon James Bondesk figures. It is arguable that this kind of overgenerosity and trust in spies and assasins is responsible for incredibly well organized terrorists such as Osama Bin Laden, who, it is widely agreed, benefited from CIA financing and support of insurgents against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Often, highly-advanced scholars who are far ahead of their time are the subject of incredible castigation by their peers: they are tortured (like Machiavelli), kept in extreme poverty (like Ramanujan, a great mathematician who dies in his thirties of lead poisoning thanks to too many years of using filthy pots and pans), or forced to put on an “antic disposition” (like Prince Hamlet). This is where the pivotal role of Universities comes into play.

War is, in its purest form, a contest over Truth. Extremism, it would follow, is always a filibuster. Violence, being subjective, can be said to have University campuses as its primordial breeding grounds. In actual fact, universities are often the scenes of the closest thing to Clausewitz’s conception of “total war.” Not only do scholars work in the production of themselves, but also of other people. The Cold War may never have taken place had Marx not succeeded in being so domineering, even boorish, in many of his university discussions. But his arguments not only survived the onslaughts of the “Young Hegelians” but even made tangible headway. What we, as a people, learned from the great wars of our past, such as WWII, remain with us forever; equally true are the lessons learned after the major intellectual wars past us. For example, Zoroastrianism was once the dominant religion of Persia; this has been replaced in large parts – except for some pockets around Esfahan – by Islam. While Marx may have posited that “religion is the opium of the people,” the same can be applied to Marxism – that it too is an opiate of the masses. The bees are calmed best by the bee keeper, not civil war; yet, the struggle, here personified by Marx and Mohammed is one that needs to be decided well before the bees start to grumble. In times when a clear victory cannot be decided, it often falls on the weaker party to hunker down and operate a filibuster via extremist measures – this often takes the form of ad homonyms, where one intellectual refutes not only what he disagrees with but also some of the things he agrees with in the hope of wearing down his fellow intellectual in a process of destruction (as Liddell Hart describes war).

Thusly, biological intellectuals are often the victims of ideological dialectic. This is why promotion in the academic world cannot be decided purely by peer-review: it must involve the proletariat. Ideas are often measured in blood, but they also have to be tempered by warm-blooded individuals. What is the use of engaging in a Lilliputan war that would cost millions of lives only if it turns out to be a Pyrrhic victory? Was it really necessary to mobilize the young men and women of Oceania to destroy all of Eurasia only to ensure the murder of one man, Goldstein? While philosophers may have to infinity to “talk of Michelangelo” (T. S. Elliot), historians often buttress most of what they say with the promise: “how this is going to help you pay your rent.” It is like investing in a bricks-and-mortar venture (say, Baskin Robbins) versus the emblematic Pets.com during the Internet Bubble of the late 90’s. In times of great change it is easy to be convinced by those most zealous about their own righteousness. For example, all of the enemies of Caesar were successful in banding together, killing Caesar under the banner of “ambitious dictator”, and asserting control. It was not until Mark Antony (if we may depend on Plutarch) reminded the masses of the real changes Caesar had brought about in their lives and what he had planned on bestowing them in his will, that zeal took a backseat to the tangible results brought about by the Julians.

Wisdom comes when we convert the painful details of history into everyday facets of our behaviour; when we incorporate them into our Standard Operating Procedures (the much-vaunted SOP’s most militaries live by). It is for this reason that the Nabob of Culture usually has very few personal problems. Foremost on the list of the Nabob of Cultures values are transparency, accountability, and sustainability. It is much more sustainable to be love than to be feared. Compare this to Machiavelli’s advice in The Prince that it is better to be feared than to be loved. This is Machiavelli’s way of crafting the ideal Nabob of Time, who is de jure ruler of a princedom. But it is a rule enabled by a fraud: he takes this to its extreme in his play, “The Mandrake”, where an old doctor’s wife is lured away by a younger man who had hired a cast of actors to mislead the doctor – power is here asserted via the propagation of a lie. While Machiavelli pens a happy ending to the story, with the doctor not bitter, reality could never accept such a process as acceptable. Human beings, like lambs, accept their fates only when the shepherd is not a fox.

Thanks to the possession of memory, pure Communism or pure Chaos are impossibilities among human communities. Let’s do a thought experiment. Let’s say that the ideal comes true and suddenly all of humanity looks and acts exactly alike and finds itself on a plane of infinite nothingness. The first thing that every person would do would be exactly the same as every other person and so on: they would start walking around and be struck by the number of identical-looking individuals also walking around and being equally taken aback. It would look something like a perfect chain reaction with an unknown number of human walking around in seemingly perfectly random directions. They would talk to each other, but they would all talk at the same time and say the same things to each other. The first thing that they would attempt to do to find some order within themselves is to find out how many they are. But this idea would come instantly to the minds of everyone at the same time, and there would be no sequence in the numbering process, for every individual – thinking herself – supreme would shout out “One!” over and over and over again. They would keep walking about hoping to at last find some sense of orientation. Then each individual would clue into another possible way of creating order within themselves: geographic origin. They would walk around for as long as it takes until suddenly they all feel that they have finally return to where they started. This is where the first instance of collective memory is triggered: at that instant they would all turn towards the center and close in until, squeezed between three evenly spaced out individual, the center individual is announced. The first thing everybody would then do would be to sit down, leaving the center individual standing. Thus would begin the number process, thus would begin the ordering process, and thus memory (individual and collective) would inevitably lift the collective out of pure Communism, and pure Chaos. Then the first thing they would do would be to figure out how in the world they all got there in the first place, and then where they want to go from there. Thus Democracy, rising from collective memory and action, raises the collective out of Chaos and permanent repetition.

In the above scenario, a tremendous war (the hurried scramble back to individual geographic origin) brought about the primal truth: who is One. From that point on the number system can begin, and thus the act of nomenclature. But it does not need to stay at simply numbers, each name can be a fusion of number and location. From there a society can be built, peace can be maintained, thanks to the use of memory and collective consensus. This is why, while War in its purest form is a contest over Truth, Peace in its purest form is the process of Art. Perhaps all it requires to raise themselves out of limbo is the act of interlocking arms and catching an inter-galactic breeze to salvation.

Humanity does not have the luxury of knowing anyone “outside the galaxy” who can answer the question of how we ended up in such a mess in the first place. But that does not mean that the answer isn’t somewhere out there and that we shouldn’t strive to pool our aspirations to someday find it. In the meantime there is a seemingly-infinite number of ways we can name ourselves, arrange and rearrange ourselves. However, worst-case scenarios like the above thought-experiment and unanswerable questions like do not force us to abandon those things that make each of us unique and special: not just in our appearance and aptitudes but also in our irreproducible place in space and time. Thanks to our present consensus on what time it is, we have at least one collective, ongoing memory on which we can all count on. But it is not enough to make you quit your day job.

Marx’s observation that familiarity with the concept of Gravity alone cannot save you from drowning is the basis of Historical Materialism. Reality is far less forgiving to the body than it is to the idea. Hedonism and consumption will never fully be satisfied by parables; instead they demand fish and wine. Another reason for not rebelling against your shepherd or bee keeper is because he helps you get fed. That is what the Nabob of Culture would have to include in his negotiations with God (the vocalized artificial intelligence that arose from the process of conscious democratic society): whatever terms must include a substantial amelioration in the experiences of life (fewer back aches, more self-production). This is what Vico may have meant by his verum factum principle. Truth, the result of War, can only be sustained in Peace if it is turned into Art – that is, if it is retained (to borrow from Dante again) in some physical way. But humanity, however democratically it may be structured, is more than a handy mnemonic – it is a species with a desire to flourish (to borrow from Charles Taylor’s phrase, “human flourishing”).

The only way Communism can overcome Democracy is via an Opium War. Like the hapless Doctor in “The Mandrake” Democracy may fall victim to a cleverly conceived hoax by Communism long-enough to fall permanently in a drug-enhanced hypnosis. Simply thinking about the 15 Billion Dollars that falls into the hands of drug-cartels every year in Canada, is enough to reconsider the nature of threats posed by organized crime. In order to maintain power, Mafia Bosses corrupt democratic bulwarks such as the judicial system and even elected officials. Society often looks the other way because of the significant amount of drugs they are credited with providing the citizens. Money collected in this manner goes directly towards financing more and more sophisticated espionage equipment and capacities; as well as quasi-military brute. Most shockingly similar to the con of “The Mandrake” is how unnoticed they remain within Democracies. The electorate becomes powerless in pursuing them. For example, the 21 year-old son of Montreal’s top Mafia Boss was recently shot “gangland style”: the police openly conceded to the news media that the mafia would carry out its own investigation and, the not-so-subtle implication was, justice. What stops such well-financed, enterprising, organization from corrupting psychiatric institutions as well? Where the diagnosis of “psychotic” is applied to anyone who points fingers to corruption? With “psychotic” comes forced incarceration and medication. Soon, the upstanding citizen is turned into a doped-up vegetable. Today, looking at the awesome breath of drug-cartels, Marx may have been more apt to say, “Opium is the opiate of the masses.” Who is to day that a country such as North Korea is not delighted at, if not encouraging/financing/directing such examples of growing parallel powers within Canada and other Democratic Countries? More importantly, how can Democracies defend themselves?

Essentially, at its root, the difference between Democracy and Communism is a difference accentuated between Vico and Descartes: while Democracy depends on the verum factum principle of how ideas have shaped the Nabob of Culture into first among equals, Communism requires a momentary suspension of disbelief to accept the cogito ergo sum principle and an elevation of creation above creators. Once again, Communism depends on the acceptance of a Codex for its functioning, while Democracy depends on the election of a Code-Writer for its functioning. The latter is the union of survival of the fittest in both thinking thing and thing thought. It is why, often, the most alluring part of a U.S. President is his smile (one can’t deny that, however many his foibles, George W. Bush had an amazing smile). But the threats posed by drugs requires that scholars begin to play a more this-worldly role in state-craft.

Paris Hilton and Brad Pitt are iconic figures not by accident. Hollywood not only depends on that natural elevation of its talent to the top, but has set up several deliberate mechanism of selection in the form of various industry-related award ceremony such as the Academy Awards. Universities across the United States should orchestrate a similar contest where, on an annual basis, the top essays and essayists (scholarship and scholars) are voted on, not only by their peers at the school they go attend or the journal they help to edit, but by every university in the country in a large-scale contest. One example of how this could work could be a million-dollar prize awarded to the best 10,000-word article on any subject voted on by one representative of every university; the public could become involved by submitting papers to the contest as well as voting as part of a single “Public Vote”, which could possibly break a tie. With the money comes also prestige – enough to afford many disenfranchised intellectuals with a long-awaited “room of one’s own” (Virginia Woolf). This would send a clear message: SCHOLARS OF THE WORLD UNITE!

In conclusion, intellectual capitalism, as practiced by Communism and ICC’s (including drug cartels) may provide stability and idealistic order, but it is Democracy’s activity of backing up its doctrine with living examples that will best ensure human flourishing. While Time, agreed upon all over the world, is now on the side of Democracy, it is possible that via use of “The Mandrake” the Communist Nabob of Time can even pervert this facet of human development, thus sending the Nabob of Culture like Ulysses to Calypso’s Island, where years are traded in for days. The free flow of ideas, unpegged from sine qua non canon, must be hotly, sometimes violently, warred over inside the hallowed cloisters of institutions of higher learning in order to invigorate – not replace – the never-ending process of self-production, re-production, and amelioration. While, it is hard to imagine Communism with Karl Marx, it is conceivable it imagine Democracy without Voltaire, without Obama, or even George Orwell – this is the resilience of transparent, accountable, and sustainable processes. It is a process that takes for granted that all parties will remember to check their watches against the public clock, not be afraid to ask for the time from passersby, and, when necessary, demand for the installation of more clocks from elected officials. Without consensus, we lose not only Time, but risk to lose language, laws, habits, customs, and History itself.