patrikos.psl
Anglo-Norman North-Atlantid
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On the Necessity of Honest Authority
Patrikos.Psl
The people have always been governable. This is not a modern observation. It is the foundational premise upon which every lasting civilization has been constructed, from the god-kings of Egypt to the Senate of Rome to the absolute monarchies of early modern Europe. What changes across these periods is not the fact of governance but its justification, its language, and its honesty about what it is. The Bronze Age ruler did not pretend to serve the people. The Roman Emperor did not campaign for office on a platform of popular representation. The relationship between the governing and the governed was stated plainly, and within that plainness a civilization was built that the present age cannot replicate and can barely comprehend.
The modern arrangement is distinguished from all previous ones not by being less authoritative but by being less honest about its authority. The apparatus of governance has expanded enormously while simultaneously insisting that it does not exist in the old sense, that no one rules, that the people rule themselves through mechanisms which, as Kenneth Arrow demonstrated mathematically in 1951, cannot aggregate individual preferences into coherent collective decisions without systematic distortion. Nietzsche, writing in the late nineteenth century, understood this inversion clearly. In Beyond Good and Evil he observed that democratic institutions produce a particular kind of managed smallness, writing that the democratic movement is "not merely a form of the decay of political organization but a form of the decay of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value." The governed man who knows he is governed retains his dignity. The governed man who believes himself free has lost even that.
The aristocratic order was functional because it was legible. The nobleman ruled and was seen to rule, and the peasant worked and was seen to work, and the terms of that arrangement, however brutal, were understood by both parties. What the present age has produced in place of this is an authority that operates through the manufactured consent of a press and an educational system that exist to make the governed feel that their governance is self-generated. An honest autocracy asks one thing of the people: submission in exchange for order.
