Deep Thoughts: Invisible Dictatorship 4 (why America is a dictatorship cross-dressed as a democracy) - serial essay by Adam Ash

III. SING A SONG OF PHILOSOPHY

12. How you experience the world

So far I’ve mentioned two ways – your opinion and your vote -- in which our democracy doesn’t work like a democracy. I’ve also asked the question: why do we persist in calling America a democracy when it doesn’t work like one?

It’s because of a major flaw in how the human mind works. The human mind always privileges the Conceptual over the Real.

Let me explain. This is going to get philosophical, so hang on to your cerebral hat. But we can’t go any further without a little philosophy. We’re doing some serious thinking here, about the serious state our “democracy” is in. Thinking is a habit that puts our heads in the clouds; we need philosophy to get us back to earth.

As I said, the human mind privileges the Conceptual over the Real. What the heck do I mean by that?

Let’s begin with the concept of consciousness. That’s what makes us human: we’re conscious. We’re conscious of the world outside ourselves. In fact, we divide the world in two. An inside: me. And an outside: the world. That’s the first act of consciousness.

We experience ourselves inside ourselves, in our heads, as a thinking self. “Cogito ergo sum. I think therefore I am.”
We experience the outside, the world, via our senses.

But we have only five senses -- sight, hearing, taste, smell and feel -- so we experience the world in those five ways only. There may be more of the world to experience, but human consciousness knows only those five ways.

The world produces higher tones than we can hear, for example. Dogs hear them; our auditory system can’t. There may be much more to the world than what we can see, hear, taste, smell and feel, but we can’t know what it is. Maybe evolution, which has given us our five senses, will bring us more senses in the future, and open up whole new worlds for us.

Technology has in fact given us interesting new ways to experience the world. We experience radio waves, for example, when we hear a human voice over the radio, even though we don’t have radio antennas in our body that experience radio waves first-hand.

Now:

What does consciousness do besides experience the world in five ways?

It conceptualizes. The very act of consciousness is conceptualization.

It says, I feel the sun. Mmm, it makes me warm.
It says, that woman is fine. I want to sleep with her.
It says, I live in a democracy. They live in a dictatorship.
There are those two words again, democracy and dictatorship. The mind has just divided the world into two concepts. Pretty daring. How does that happen?

13. How your mind fools you into thinking you live in a democracy

Concepts are useful. They help us deal with the world, navigate it, manage it, control it, use it.

But they have a way of sweeping us into their extravagance. Concepts always try to get bigger. Some concepts attract minds like magnets grab nails, and get very big. They try to get as big as God, the biggest concept ever, which tries to fit the entire world into one concept. Others call it the universe (a place), but most human beings call it God (a consciousness). That’s the problem with the majority: they don’t always have the most sensible opinion. A century ago most people believed women were born to serve men.

Language is our biggest conceptual creation. It’s how we communicate our concepts, and how we make human communities possible. We can call language our communal sense, our sixth sense – the sense that allows us to experience and interact with the world of other human beings, of other selves, of all the other insides outside our own inside.

However, when your inside creates a concept to deal with the outside, it is doing a strange thing. It is not accepting the world at face value. It is making something else of it, something for the mind to play with. It brings the outside inside by giving it an inside-like character. It turns the outsideness of the world into the insideness of the self.

The self is out walking, and it gets tired, and it sees a nice rock, and it says to itself, I can sit on that rock -- and now it has turned the rock into a chair. It turns the outsideness of the rock into the insideness of a chair. The rock is not a chair. It doesn’t even look like one. But to the tired self it is.

The self of consciousness never accepts the world as it is. It looks at the world and tries to fit the world into itself, in the act of fitting itself into the world. It tries to get along with the world by accepting the world on its personal terms of self, instead of the world’s terms as it really is, in and of itself –- what the German philosopher Kant calls the Ding An Sich. The self tries to incorporate the world into consciousness by the act of conceptualization.

The Conceptual is how we deal with the Real. It infuses our most basic acts. It makes the Real functional.

You see a flower. That is real. You pick it. That is conceptual. You pick it because it is pretty, which is your concept of it, and you want it, because you like pretty things. You have a concept of the flower – it is pretty -- and you have an emotion about the flower – you like it for being pretty -- so you pick it.

You go home and stick a bunch of flowers in a vase. They sit there. They’re real. But you are not satisfied with the Real. You want to improve it. So you arrange the flowers in the vase. You make the pretty flowers even prettier. You get really Conceptual, because you like your concept of prettiness.

To get technical, the Conceptual is what our consciousness makes of the Real. Our consciousness turns a rock into a chair, a flower into an arrangement. The rock is really a rock, but we’ve conceptualized it into a chair. We say it’s a chair when we sit on it, even though it’s a rock.

In the same way, our consciousness turns a dictatorship into a democracy. We say it’s a democracy when we vote, even though it works like a dictatorship. We feel better if we can say we live in a democracy instead of a dictatorship.

It is hard for us to acknowledge the Real. The poet T.S. Eliot said humankind cannot bear too much reality.

The pathos of being human is that we are always creating the Conceptual out of the Real. That’s how our minds work. We try to improve on the Real, to make it better, more convenient, more comfortable and comforting, easier to deal with, functional, something we can use. We construct the Conceptual in a vain attempt to console ourselves about the brutality of the Real.
We construct the concept of a democracy to console ourselves about the brutality of a dictatorship.

14. You can’t help it, your mind thinks emotionally

Conceptualization is not only how we deal with the Real. It’s also how we cope with the Real. It’s always an emotional act. Our inside relates to the outside emotionally. We want the outside to be more agreeable. We want to like the outside. We want the outside to like us. We idealize and anthropomorphize. We symbolize and make myths. We are always fooling ourselves about the nature of the Real by deducting the Conceptual from it -- by translating the Real into the Conceptual.

The Real has no emotions. The Conceptual is all emotion. The rock has no emotions. It is neither friendly nor unfriendly. But we make it agreeable. We make a friend of it when we sit on it. We enjoy sitting on the rock, we’re grateful it’s there, we get all emotional about the rock.

We forget the rock is a big piece of stone. The Real is what gets lost in the act of translation into the Conceptual. We never see the wood for the trees.

We are like a man in a whorehouse who thinks he is at a fashion show.

15. A song of philosophy

Now I’m going to get a little more philosophical. Think of the next few lines as a song of philosophy. It’s quite short, only 19 sentences long, so hang in there, even if it appears meaningless. I’ll let you know when I stop singing.

Here goes:

Neither the Conceptual nor the Real actually exist. What exists is the difference between them.
The Conceptual is action. The Real is events.
The Conceptual is knowledge. The Real is the world.
The Conceptual is language and words, and how they hang together. The Real is gravity and things, and how they hang together.
The Conceptual is how we live, how we construct our lives. The Real is what life is.
The Conceptual is community, the Real is people.
The Conceptual is a man or a woman, the Real is a person.
The Conceptual is the right and wrong of morality; the Real is the damage and pleasure of experience.
To get practical, the Conceptual is a table, the Real is the wood.
To get scientific, the Conceptual is E equals MC squared; the Real is -- when I apply the energy of a blade to the matter of my hand, it bleeds.
To get philosophical, the Conceptual is living, the Real is being.
To get personal, the Conceptual is love, the Real is sex.
To get serious, the Conceptual is mortality, the Real is death.
The Conceptual is what you do. The Real is what you are.

That’s it. The song is over. Enough of this philosophical heavy lifting. Let’s get back to democracy and dictatorship.

But let’s take an interesting choice of words from the last line of our philosophy song.

The Conceptual is what you do. The Real is what you are.

We can use these words like this:

Democracy is what we do. A dictatorship is what we are.

OK. How do you do democracy, besides expressing an opinion and voting?


IV. WHO DOES YOUR REPRESENTATIVE REPRESENT?

16. In a democracy, you can run for office to serve the people

In a democracy, you are free to organize and run for office. But when you run for office in America, you find out something bizarre. If you want to get elected, you have to join one of the only two parties. You have to adjust yourself to one of them. It’s not like the supermarket, where you have a wide choice of stuff. You only have the Democratic Party or the Republican Party to choose from. You can choose the Green Party, but then you won’t get elected.

You don’t really have a wide choice – what one might call a democratic choice.

So you run for office. But you need money for it. So you have to ask people for money. If you have a good chance of winning, people will give you money. Most conveniently, companies will give you money. You will get more money from business than from people. You may end up finding that you represent big business instead of people.

If you get elected, you go sit on the city council, in the State senate, or in the US Congress. There you represent the people who voted for you, and you deliberate, debate, make budgets, allocate funds, and make laws. You try to allocate funds to your district to help the people who voted for you.

All well and good. That’s how a democracy works.

But when you make budgets and laws, you find a very strange thing. People knock on your door who call themselves lobbyists. They represent organizations and business people who have a lot of money. So you invite them in. They talk to you about the budgets and laws you make, and give you good reasons about how these budgets and laws could be made to benefit the businesses they represent, and so, they say, help the country.

You are happy to talk to these lobbyists. You can raise money for your next campaign from them. You spend most of your time talking to these lobbyists, so you can raise money to fight your next election. You get so busy raising money to keep your job, you don’t have time to write the laws.

But hey, no problem. The businesses will write the laws for you.

So you end up making laws about bankruptcy written by credit card companies.

Laws about the environment written by businesses that don’t want to clean up after themselves.

Laws about energy written by oil companies that get big windfalls from the laws they write.

Laws about Medicare written by pharmaceutical companies that don’t want Medicare to have the right to bargain down the high prices of their drugs.

These laws hurt the people who voted for you, but you make the laws anyway, because that’s how you keep your job.

These laws have in fact been written in the past five years by lobbyists to the Congress you voted for.

Is that how a democracy is supposed to work? Not really. That is how fascism is supposed to work, which is when government and big business are in cahoots with each other, as happened in Italy under Mussolini, and in Germany under Hitler. So we find that our Congress works like a bunch of fascists, beholden to big business, and not to little people like you and me.

In fact, we might say they make laws AGAINST people like you and me. In that case, what did we vote for? A democracy? Hmm.

TOMORROW: Your right to protest.