Eso’s Chronicles 266 / 6

The King & I

© Eso A.B.

All comments appearing within brackets [ ] are editorial in origin. This blog series begins at 264.

 

THE KING & TRUST

 

There are a number of elements in my conception of King and Democracy that differ from such as I may come across in the course of the day to day conversation or readings in the media.

 

In the beginning the King probably never existed as a real person (or perhaps only as an exception), but as one of the imagination. In that sense, he was probably more like a God.

 

In an earlier blog, I suggested that at a time when most people lived in the wood and practiced a subsistence economy (keeping their own fruit and vegetable gardens and herding reindeer or other animals in a setting of an all encompassing wood), the King filtered into the lives of the people through the fairy-tale. In other words, this was the “dream-time” of Pangaea http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangaea , even if by then Pangaea had ceased to exist as an actual primal continent.

 

It is possible that the fairy-tale was welcomed and gained favor, because the concept of homo sacer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sacer in a literary Pangaea suggested protection from an arbitrary death brought to men indistinguishable from a lottery number, i.e., through a chance meeting with death and being turned into a shrunken head http://www.skeptiseum.org/images/exh/shrunken-heads.jpg .

 

The reader will note that the geopolitical setting of ‘dream-time’ is distinguished from that of today by the absence of Urbania. Instead, Pangaea and/or wood, were identified as the original home of the King. It was during this dream-time when through the medium of the fairy-tale the ideal King took on his characteristics. It was essential for the dreamers and listeners to the stories about the King they heard told about a trustworthy being. The idea about the King was shaped by both the story tellers and those who listened to the tales at campfires or hearths.

 

The fairy-tales contained facts (the physical reality of an actual kingdom in real space cannot be denied) and fantasy. Fact and fantasy combined in imagining the King as living in a ‘castle of light’. Gradually the castle evolved from (an origin as a Temple in the wood http://www.westheimphoto.com/lightbox/gallery/ChinaStockPhotos/CHNhw296.jpg ?) into a Court, and from a Court into a city. Because the King needed to be one whom one could trust, he was imagined as one who was just, and knowing that to be just (given the subjective nature of the human psyche) is not easily possible, the King was imagined as a being willing to self-sacrifice himself, as much for the sake of the community as for the sake of reminding himself to stay just.

 

The fairy-tale was carried back to the King, and influenced his behavior as well. We see the tale reflected in the Christian story about the life of Jesus, even though the present version of the story differs from the original. The story of Jesus reflects the self-sacrificial nature of the original King, whose name may have been John Basil or John Krst-Yan (see future blog 291).

 

For all the paradoxes involved, the name of John Basil is reflected in the names of Tsar Ivan the Terrible, the Aztec Sun God Nanauatzin, Genghis Khan, King Zheng, King John of England, and many others.

 

At some point, however, the King and the fairy-tale lost control over events. This happened, when the Princes of the Court, took note that Trust could be substituted by Power and acted on their perception.

 

The forces of this ‘perception’ unleashed what we call liberalism.

 

Quote from previous blog’s link on Schmitt: “Although many critics of Schmitt today, such as Stephen Holmes in his The Anatomy of Anti-Liberalism, take exception to his fundamentally authoritarian outlook, the idea of incompatibility between liberalism and democracy is one reason for the continued interest in his political philosophy.^[”

 

With the advent of ‘liberalism’ the city (not necessarily an unknown, though known only as an exception) began to expand and multiplied in numbers, and has—by our time—taken complete control not only of the wood, but of biological nature itself.

 

Humanism, along with the hubris of the violent is in complete control of the social sphere today. Anti-social elements such as Pussy Riot present themselves as forces worthy of trust, even as it is apparent that they do not possess knowledge neither vital to the survival of human kind at large nor even suspect the existence of such knowledge.

 

Elimination of self-sacrifice has turned the rule of ‘law’ into chaos. The ‘law’ today is like a ball of yarn with a thousand strands of yarn somehow rolled into a single ball—where do you seize the tail end of a yarn that leads one to tie all the lose ends together into one string that will knit one sweater?

 

Chaos has led to legal theories such as that of Carl Schmitt. Giorgio Agamben  sees in Schmitt’s theories a kind of violence, which “…necessarily bears a juridical value, [and] is another example of the fusion of right to ‘bare life’ (It. vita nuda, Grk. zoe) that transforms the juridical system into a ‘death machine,’ able to perform acts of pure violence as needed for self-legitimation, creating Homo sacer, a being that cannot be "murdered" or "sacrificed" but only killed.

 

The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt's most historical and geopolitical work, shows that Schmitt envisioned his legal theories in the context of a society evolving along the lines of its immediate preceding past. This writer prefers to look at community in the context of an evolving society that includes devolution in the sense of turning away from a wrong path taken, and not continuing ever deeper into the labyrinth of the city, but making an exit and returning to the wood, in effect, from total distrust of politics to Trust that again becomes God. With the return of the King and self-sacrifice, it ought to be a short step.