You, Me. Them, We.

There’s no us.

The current malaise in our politics and its corollary in our elite’s thinking is that we are experiencing a clash of world views. This prevents compromise. It disallows the existence of a muddled center. And it looks down upon the notion of a coherent polity. Instead it substitutes an endless series of small scale interest groups or a single multitudinous collective. It assumes that there is no ‘us’, there is no commonality sufficient to bind us or potent in and of itself.

On the one side there is a view that posits everything in terms of individual rights, powers, and responsibilities. On the other is a monolithic collective called the state that overrules and subsumes the individual entirely.

Both are abstract.

The one extends outward from a heroic ideal of a superhuman individual capable of self-realization, self-sustenance, and self-defense. The other extends inwards from an idealized supergroup such as class, race, or gender that substitutes for the self and ridicules as implausible idiosyncratic inconsistency.

Both demand inhuman rationality.

Both deny the other.

Both crush and defy history.

Both are utterly perfect. Both are totally right. Both are completely wrong.

For the truth is the human beings: you, me, them, and we are a messy, incoherent, and error prone bunch whose experience of life is, at best, a bit of everything, and at worst, not much of anything.

Yet here we are involved in one of our perennial Platonic debates about extremes neither of which reflects the real world. This is what happens when extremists rise to control politics.

Gombrowicz, in his diary, writes:

“Buber, a Jewish philosopher, described this pretty well when he said that the individualist philosophy we have known up to now has done itself in and that the greatest disillusionment that awaits mankind in the near further is the bankruptcy of collectivist philosophy, which conceives of the individual as a function of the masses but really subordinates it to such abstractions as social class, state, nation, and race. It will be on the corpses of these world views that the third vision of man will be born: man in relation to another man, a concrete man, I in relation to you and him …”

That was 1953 and Gombrowicz was an emigre Pole stuck between Cold War obsessed West, where he took up residence, and his homeland suffering under the heavy hand of Soviet style authoritarianism. He looked for a future where neither extreme, neither ideal, could ruin the essential experience that defines being human.

Here we are sixty years later and the argument still rages.

This time it is fanatics of the right who want to impose their inhuman vision. They subscribe to wholly unrealistic descriptions of individualism – the idealism of Hayek or the fantasy of Rand – and want to undo the social constructs that undergird the economy of the past eighty years. We are living through a full blooming of archaic and impossible thinking being acted out in Congress.

It manifests itself as a return to some magical world where individuals had complete control of their own lives, where the state didn’t oppress, and where freedom allowed those with initiative to rise inevitably to the top.

That place never existed. It never has. Nor will it. Nor can it.

It is a world without human error, greed, envy, or crime. It is a world without collusion, corruption, communication, relations, or any form of distortion of the pure superhuman upon which it depends for its efficacy. It imagines that the only form of inequality is one earned rightfully through diligence. It imagines that the tumult of competition will eliminate crime, malfeasance, or all unearned forms in inequality. And it argues that all forms of collective action are an abominable usurpation of individual rights. They are thus to be purged.

Collectivists are, of course, just as bad. They want to eradicate the individual through subordination.

Their’s is a world where human error, greed, envy, and crime are extinguished through that subordination. Their’s is a world also without collusion, corruption, communication, relations or any other distortion of the pure group, because the pure group eliminates the need for such things by endowing us with never ending harmony within itself. As long as we never step outside. It imagines the tumult of competition as the source of all crime, malfeasance, and all forms of unearned inequality. And it argues that all forms of individual action are abominable intrusions into the harmonies of the group. They are thus to be purged.

You will notice that idealists love to purge.

It is one thing to write a critique of society through the lens of one of these absurd extremes. It is another to imagine that such a critique offers a blueprint for society. They don’t. They cannot. They ignore reality. Their attraction is that they suggest we can bend reality and defy the muckiness that is humanity.

They simply cannot.

Yet here we are suffering through the argument one more time.

At the end of the day the never ending endemic uncertainty that continually intrudes into our lives undoes even the best philosophy. It throws up perfect counter points to every system of thought. It contradicts us all at some time and somewhere. It makes a fool of us whenever we proclaim to know something with certainty. It nudges us to the center and requires us all to seek a balance.

Keeping such balance is a very hard art to learn, but easy to forget.

Agreeing to disagree is also disagreeing to agree.

Right now as we stumble towards austerity we have lost our balance and are lurching towards an extreme.

You, me, them. We will all pay a price.

Why?