The Treason of "Consensus" Institutions

How the Liberal State Became Totalitarian

This article is the culmination of an ongoing series. It reflects my previous work, along with clarification and illustration added in response to you, the readers. Consequently, it repeats some ideas from previous article, but in a much clearer and visceral form. Enjoy!

Democracy and Populism are incompatible. Free speech and Democracy are incompatible. Democracy and social media are incompatible. Every few weeks, prominent media publishes this genre of article.

By their telling, ‘democracy’ appears completely fragile to dissent. One would be surprised it has survived for hundreds of years of dissent. It would be a mistake to attribute these articles to mere left-wing bias. A genuine desire for consensus underscores their desire for both control and leftism.

Consensus, by definition, is an agreement of all people to believe the same thing. Dissent disrupts consensus. Just one dissenter makes the political legitimacy of consensus vanish.

This fragility is part of what makes consensus so alluring. During Covid, censorship was used to enforce lockdowns which were ultimately extremely unpopular and destructive to health. People behaved in extreme and unconscionable ways because they believed there was no socially acceptable alternative. Consensus is a powerful tool, if it can be guarded.

For this reason, the idea of a government by consensus was long considered synonymous with tyranny. Enlightenment thinkers and founding fathers alike sought to create institutions of anti-consensus — social spheres or political branches with opposing interests and powers. In the West, dissent established the foundation of freedom.

If journalism, academia, and the Democratic party are any indication, many of those institutions and social spheres now believe in consensus. At some point in time, the preachers of education, liberalism and “human rights” stopped believing in dissent. Instead, they believed in an aggressive enforcement of consensus through social engineering, private censorship and, in some cases, legally-enforced censorship.

The split between liberal institutions and dissent was a betrayal. This betrayal was gradual, then sudden, but it has its roots in John Stuart Mill. Mill is often associated with the defense of Classical Liberalism. He is best known for his ‘Trident’ argument for free speech:

Mill recognizes that there are only three possibilities in any given argument:

You are wrong, in which case freedom of speech is essential to allow people to correct you.

You are partially correct, in which case you need free speech and contrary viewpoints to help you get a more precise understanding of what the truth really is.

You are 100% correct, in the unlikely event that you are 100% correct, you still need people to argue with you, to try to contradict you, and to try to prove you wrong. Why? Because if you never have to defend your points of view, there is a very good chance you don’t really understand them, and that you hold them the same way you would hold a prejudice or superstition. It’s only through arguing with contrary viewpoints that you come to understand why what you believe is true.

This narrative was not only false, but a poison pill which led to the modern collapse of liberalism.

The premise of this argument, which Mill explicitly states in “On Liberty”, is that debate moves people closer to the truth. We can call this the progressive view of liberalism, not in that Mill necessarily agrees in modern progressive positions, but that Mill believes in progress through debate. But what if debate doesn’t?

The illiberal left and illiberal right both question Mill’s assumption. The illiberal left believes that social media debate moves people further from the truth, and therefore that Mill’s arguments do not apply and censorship of social media is justified. The illiberal right believes that elite control of media and human conformity means that debate broadly moves people further from the truth, and therefore that censorship more broadly may be justified.

This was not the only view of classical liberalism. In “Two Faces of Liberalism”, John Gray argues that liberalism started with a pluralistic, pessimistic justification, which he identifies with the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Hobbes roots his argument not in consensus, but in conflict.

He lived through the Thirty Years War, a vicious and bloody war between Catholics and Protestants. At that point, both extremely faithful Protestant or extremely faithful Catholics could believe that peace with heretics was preferable to war. This argument could stand up to extremely faithful woke, even one who believes that social media causes disinformation.

In my view, Mill's classical liberalism is particularly vulnerable to modern postliberal arguments. The belief that all disagreements — economic, moral and political — are subject to reason transforms debate into a calculable end. It turns media into a mandatory place of confrontation, in which parties race to turn their belief into consensus. Mill’s logic, which most modern liberals believe at heart, is that there is only one moral truth and that debate is nothing more than an instrument to the process of consensus-making. Media becomes a global coliseum that no man can step out of.

This argument is bolstered by the analogy to the natural sciences, which has blossomed in popularity and importance. It is a fact that debate can advance mathematics, computer science and physics towards a definite truth. The semiconductor and the rocket are undeniable proof of this accomplishment. Consensus liberalism argues that politics and ethics work the same way. They live their lives accordingly, treating political disagreement as “misinformation”.

However, politics and ethics fields in which different individuals and cultures start with distinct and often contradictory assumptions. Philosophies exist which value equality as a fundamental good and which difference as fundamental good. Fundamental human emotions run in conflict, from greed to anger to envy. As a consequence, only a fraction of political questions have definitive answers.

Political Eschatology

We have a word for attempts to bring moral questions to ultimate conclusions: eschatology, or the study of the apocalypse.

“What was the modern European state?” All of Carl Schmitt’s work can be understood as his answers to this question. In the Concept of the Political, he focuses his attention on the centrifugal forces within the state tearing it apart. He lives through a time in which the political energy on all sides of the political spectrum are obsessed over consensus — totalitarian control by any other name. Carl Schmitt, grappling with the legacy of Thomas Hobbes, attempts to uncover why exactly the state has adopted this eschatological tendency.

The concept of political is most famous for defining the distinction between friend and enemy. He begins by documenting the erosion of boundaries between political and non-political.

The concept of a state presupposes the concept of a political. The state is the political status of an organized people in a closed territorial unit. There's nothing more than, so the people must be organized and be in a enclosed territorial unit

…

another common definition, state equals politics, becomes erroneous and deceptive at exactly the moment the state and society penetrate each other.

Consider a modern example — pop stars performing for and endorsing Kamala Harris. The barrier between politics and culture was eroded with normally apolitical actors and singers playing a political role, intentionally attempting to sway the votes of their audience. When people draw their loyalties from different parts of the social sphere, those parts become upstream of the state. They become something that politicians have to account for. Then, they also become downstream of the state. The logic of the state is bi-directional. When power flows from the people to the state, control flows from the state to its people.

The modern censorship framework operates by the same logic. The “whole of society” framework used for “disinformation” policy recognizes the bi-directional relationship between popularity and information control explicitly.

Individuals, civil society and companies shape interactions in society, and their actions can harm or foster integrity in their communities. A whole-of-society approach asserts that as these actors interact with public officials and play a critical role in setting the public agenda and influencing public decisions, they also have a responsibility to promote public integrity.

This relationship is clearest at the extremes. You can imagine a society where the Taylor Swift endorsement is the most meaningful thing. The game of politics becomes catering to Taylor Swift, trying to win the Taylor Swift endorsement. Replace a single endorsement with thousands of individuals and institutions and you get American democracy. Similar arguments apply to religion and commerce.

If all of those things are what the political is not, then what actually is the political? Schmitt answers:

The nature of such a political distinction is different than those of the others. It is independent of them and speaks clearly for itself, and can speak clearly for itself. The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.

This is maybe the most important paragraph in the entire work. Schmitt continues:

An enemy exist only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity. The enemy is solely the public enemy, because everything that has a relationship to such a collectivity of men, particularly to the whole nation, becomes public by virtue of such a relationship.

Schmitt recognizes the totalizing reality of violence, particularly State violence, described by Hobbes. Violence must be absolute. He differs from Hobbes in accepting John Stuart Mill’s treason to classical liberalism. The bi-directional logic of totalitarianism is applied to speech in two steps. Firstly, opinion produces power in democracies. Secondly, Mill’s treason (and the popular instinct behind it) subjects all opinion to reason and debate, making it subject to manipulations of the state and the “whole of society”.

Strauss’ Criticism

Leo Strauss begins his commentary of the Concept of the Political opens the door to a new metaphysical order. His criticism is most famous for suggesting that Schmitt remains too much of a liberal.

Liberalism negated the political, yet liberalism has not thereby eliminated the political from the face of the earth, but only hidden it. Liberalism led to politics being engaged in by means of an anti political mode of discourse. Liberalism has thus killed not the political, but only understanding of the political.

Agreeableness is a metaphysics of its own. The relationship modern liberal institutions have to debate is one of creating social harmony, which is directionally inseparable from creating social consensus. To be fair to Mill, a male-dominated academia or a male-only franchise may differ in this tendency towards consensus. However, the desire for social consensus in the “whole of society” framework is evident in modern Western countries.

The phrase “polarization is good for its own sake” is often attributed to me. Understanding how much human values differ in intrinsic values, it becomes possible to believe in universal salvation without universal consensus. The relationship between universal consensus and universal social harmony is the foundation for the modern support for tyranny. Strauss continues:

Precisely by the negation of the political, if liberalism has already become implausible, if it accordingly must be countered by another system, then the first word against liberalism must in any case be the position of the political.

This illustrates the philosophical significance of the idea that “polarization is good for its own sake.” Polarization does not change people. It does not cause them to hate each other. Instead, polarization is an unveiling. It is revealing the true nature of man to each other. People actually just disagree. It is a return to a Hobbesian understanding of human nature.

In the modern West, liberal institutions have increasingly advocated for universalist egalitarianism that by their own observations are not compatible with dissent. Any questioning of fundamental natural or metaphysical disagreements between individuals, groups, andbiological dispositions completely undermines the universalist structure. Universalism can only exist by the suppression or collaboration of its dissenters. Egalitarianism can only survive when the public is ignorant of its assumptions. Egalitarianism dies in light.

Modern psychological and genetic measurements have proven that some people are predisposed towards modern democrats and others are predisposed towards modern republicans. It is revolutionary to simply understand that those differences are pre-rational, either biological, spiritual, or otherwise non-negotiable.

Several scientific breakthroughs made it possible to observe the basic reality of human nature again, despite the total control of the consensus-seekers over philosophy. First is the aforementioned improvement in psychometric and genomic measurement. Second is the development of social media, which has allowed people to see an unfiltered representation of adversarial publics and elites. These visceral observations of reality hold the most promise for saving philosophy from Mill’s treason. They hold the most promise to overturning the actually existing totalitarianism advocated for by the “whole of society” framework.

We arrive at Strauss’ criticism of Schmitt:

It is thus insufficient to establish as a fact that liberalism has failed to show how liberalism drives itself ad absurdum in every political action to indicate that all good observers despaired of finding here any political principle or intellectual consistency, nor does it suffice to attain the insight that the manifest inconsistency of liberal politics is the necessary consequence of the fundamental negation of the political.

What is needed, rather, is to replace the astonishingly consistent systematics of liberal thought, which is manifest within the inconsistency of liberal politics by another system, namely a system that does not negate the political but brings it into recognition.

What Strauss observes is that Schmitt cannot only be making a judicial critique. This is not simply a critique of liberal judicial theory or political theory. By the arguments Schmitt makes, it must be a critique of liberal metaphysics. This leads to the famous passage accusing Schmitt of remaining a liberal:

Schmitt is aware that the astonishingly consistent systematics of liberal thought has, despite all setbacks, still not been replaced in Europe today by any other system. This awareness alone suffices to characterize the significance of his efforts, for with this awareness he stands wholly alone among the opponents of liberalism, who usually carry an elaborate unliberal doctrine in their pockets.

In making this observation, Schmitt also points to the basic difficulty of his own investigation. Also, if it is true that the systematics of liberal thought has still not been replaced in Europe today by another system, it is expected that he, too, will be compelled to make use of liberal thought in the presentation of his views.

This alternative metaphysical system is what the reality of human psychological variation leads us towards. Hobbesian pluralism is a start – pluralism which does not come from the assumption that humans will agree, but instead from the assumption that humans will disagree.

Another path towards this alternative metaphysics is the history Hobbes lived through. It is remarkable that historical political systems exist in which the Catholic thinks the Protestant is a heretic, and Protestant thinks the Catholic is a heretic, and yet, they do not believe it is man’s role to resolve this conflict on earth. At the time of Hobbes’ writing, the mid-seventeenth century, England had lived through hot wars ravaging both sides for decades, with no resolution to their differences.

Realistic mortal fear is foreign to the modern day. Modern social and biopolitical neuroses are no substitute. There is a different formulation of the original impulse for the modern day, with finance substituted for war. Here is an example. In a stock trade, both people involved in the transaction believe they are taking advantage of the other. Their exchange stems from disagreement. The seller believes the stock will go down while the buyer believes the stock will go up (both relative to their alternatives). As the trade is being made, both parties are at an equilibrium of difference.

This is easiest to observe in the market, but it is present in numerous financial and political systems where people “agree to disagree”. There is a clear analogy to the Protestants and Catholics in Hobbes’ time. Agreeing to disagree is one aspect of what it means for a Christian to pray for a non-Christian. For a believer, this optimism is called divine providence. A Christian believes that conversion happens by the heart, not the sword. This is fundamentally the same optimism as the trader.

The distinction of friend and enemy can result in three forms of competition. From the perspective of friends, the enemy is either greater, equal, or lesser. We can call these forms of competition superiority, rivalry, and envy.

From superiority proceeds optimism. Recall the deal made between the stock traders. The more each believes the other to be wrong, the more strongly they wish for the other to agree to the deal. Traders believe they have superior information or intellect. Christians may not believe they are personally superior, but they believe their God is superior.

In modern times, this is not an appealing metaphysics, for all of the reasons that Schmitt describes. Fundamentally, the reason is that modern men are largely not confident. They believe they are always left worse off by enterprise, even if they enjoy its fruits. They are taken by envy, or at best rivalry, rather than superiority. Conversion does not come from rivalry or envy, but from belief in providence — belief that their spiritual enemies will be undone by their difference. Where the stock trader believes in alpha, the Christian believes in God. By doing so, each removes himself from envy and rivalry.

Liberal metaphysics claims to be the metaphysics of equal reason, or rivalry, but in practice reveals itself to be the metaphysics of envy.

Envy is the reason there is an increasing attraction towards escatological problems. In the egalitarian minds, any problem that implies a solution of forced homogeneity is worth exaggerating, from exaggerations of climate change to complete fabrications of AI risk. This was the argument that used to justify unwarranted surveillance: any single terrorist attack is too many. The same argument is made for AI, for example by Nick Bostrom in the Vulnerable World Hypothesis. Peter Thiel identifies this choice as between the Antichrist or Katechon — Creating a totalitarian system that imitates Christ, but only in the present life instead of the afterlife.

The bi-directional relationship between egalitarianism and modern safety ideologies is best understood through Hobbes’ relationship between protection and obedience. The narrative is that everyone must come together. The desire for a totalitarian state is primary. The narrative of total protection from a hypothetical, unprovable risk is secondary. Everyone must do the same. Everyone must constantly be paranoid. Everyone must participate in consensus-making security theatre. “Peace and Safety”, the slogan of the Antichrist.

The metaphysics of consensus creates two problems. I will start with the lesser problem — it creates a totalitarian police state.

The greater problem is that it creates a metaphysics of imitation and homogenization. It is itself evil. It destroys the souls of men it infects. It destroys the soul of civilizations it infects.