Syed Muhammad Hur Jaffri — The Open Manuscript

PART IV On the State as the New Church Or: Why the Secular Cathedral Is the Most Dangerous Building in the World

“The State is the coldest of all cold monsters.” — Friedrich Nietzsche

The Mechanism of the Modern State The state presents itself as the servant of the people who constitute it. This is its founding myth, its permanent advertisement, the claim it makes on every occasion when its authority is questioned or its demands are found excessive. The state exists for you. The state protects your rights. The state is the collective expression of your will. Marx identified the gap between this presentation and the reality with a clarity that his subsequent followers did their best to obscure: the state is not the collective expression of all wills. It is the organized expression of the wills of those who control the means of production — the economic structure — and who use the state apparatus, including its monopoly on legitimate violence, to maintain that control. The laws that protect property protect, first and foremost, the property of those with the most of it. The police who enforce order enforce, first and foremost, the order that benefits those who wrote the order. This is not a conspiracy. It does not require that politicians meet in secret rooms to deliberately oppress the masses. It requires only that the people who write the laws are the people who have the most interest in certain kinds of laws, that the systems that select for political influence select for people who have already demonstrated their compatibility with the existing economic order, and that the ideology that legitimizes the state — democracy, the rule of law, the protection of rights — is taught universally while the question of whose rights are most effectively protected is examined as little as possible. The genius of the liberal democratic state is not that it eliminated the concentration of power. It is that it provided the concentration of power with a vocabulary of legitimacy so durable and so appealing that the people subject to the concentration became its most enthusiastic defenders.

6.1 Democracy and Its Discontents

Democracy is the best system of government that has been attempted at scale. This is a genuine compliment, and it is necessary to offer it because what follows will be read as an attack on democracy, when it is more precisely an attack on the mythology of democracy — the gap between what democracy claims to be and what it demonstrably is. What democracy claims to be: the authentic expression of the collective will of the governed, the mechanism by which political power is accountable to those over whom it is exercised, the system that makes the government the servant of the people. What democracy demonstrably is: a system in which the choice between pre-selected candidates, representing pre-selected positions developed in the context of pre-existing economic pressures, is made by a population whose political preferences have been formed by media ecosystems that are themselves owned by the class that benefits most from the existing economic order. The choice is real in the narrow sense. The range of the choice is not. The political scientist Sheldon Wolin called this inverted totalitarianism: a system that achieves the population management of totalitarianism without the apparatus of explicit coercion, by ensuring that the managed population believes itself to be governing. The belief is carefully maintained. It is the most important product of the democratic system, more important than any policy outcome. The vote is not power. The vote is the ritual by which the population periodically reaffirms its belief in a power it does not have, and the ritual's completion produces the legitimacy that the actual power requires to operate without resistance. Every four years, the chain is put on by the prisoner. The ceremony is called democracy.

6.2 Nationalism as the State's Sacred Narrative Every state requires a narrative of itself that transcends the merely contractual — that gives its citizens a reason to die for it that goes beyond the calculation of rational self-

interest. Rational self-interest, honestly computed, does not produce soldiers willing to die for territory. It produces defection. The soldier who dies for his country is not computing his rational self-interest. He is operating from a different register entirely: the register of identity, belonging, sacred obligation, the love of a thing that is more than the sum of its policies. Nationalism is the manufacture of this register at scale. The nation — the people with a shared history, a shared language, a shared set of myths about who they are and where they came from — is partly a real thing and partly a deliberate construction, and the difficulty of distinguishing the real from the constructed is precisely what makes nationalism so effective. The flag, the anthem, the founding myth, the sacred historical events taught in schools with the emotional weight of religious instruction — these are the liturgy of the national church. The soldier who dies is not dying for the state, the administrative apparatus, the economic interests it serves. He is dying for the nation — the imagined community, in Benedict Anderson's term — that has been constructed specifically to produce this willingness. The nation is the most successful mass hallucination in human history. Millions of people who have never met, who share nothing but a story told to them in childhood, will kill and die for each other in the name of that story. The story is powerful not despite its fictional elements but because of them. Reality does not inspire this quality of sacrifice. Only myth does.

6.3 Surveillance, Consent, and the Comfortable Police State Foucault described the panopticon: Bentham's prison design in which every cell is visible to a central tower, and the prisoner, knowing he might be watched at any moment, internalizes the guard. The genius of the design is that the guard need not actually be watching. The possibility is sufficient. The prisoner polices himself.

This was a metaphor, in Foucault, for the broader disciplinary mechanisms of modern society. It has become, in the twenty-first century, a literal description. The digital infrastructure that governs modern life collects data on behavior, communication, location, consumption, political preference, and social connection at a scale that the East German Stasi, the most comprehensive surveillance state in history, could not have imagined. The Stasi had one informant for every sixty-three citizens. The modern digital infrastructure has a continuous, automated record of every communication of every person with a smartphone, stored indefinitely, accessible to state actors under varying degrees of judicial oversight. The difference between this and the totalitarian surveillance state is not the surveillance. It is the consent. The citizen consented — in the terms of service that no one reads, in the exchange of privacy for convenience that constitutes the foundational transaction of the digital economy. The consent was manufactured by making the alternative — nonparticipation in the digital infrastructure — increasingly impractical. But the consent exists. And the existence of consent is the thing that makes the surveillance politically stable. The most effective prison is the one built by the prisoner's consent. The most effective surveillance is the surveillance that the surveilled enthusiastically maintain, update, and carry with them everywhere, because it is also the device through which they communicate with their friends.