I hope you have seen Adam Curtis’ “Happiness Machines“, episode one of the 2002 BBC “The Century of the Self” series.

The arguments that Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss make, and to some extent Frued in his “Civilization and its Discontents“, that humans are far too dangerously irrational and prone to chaotic barbarism to ever participate in a democracy of self governance, is both tautological and false. It is also powerfully self serving. But Eddie Bernays and the National Association of Manufacturers, and now Karl Rove and the Neocons, would certainly make you believe it was gospel.

They are past masters of playing to the emotional aspects of our imperfect rationality. Bernays’ “Freedom Torches” as the name for cigarettes was brilliantly successful in getting women to smoke cigarettes — much to their detriment.

We need to expose their cynical assumption, going back to President Hoover, that citizens can only be, must only be, passive consumers.

Fact: Their imperfect knowledge is clearly as imperfect as anyone else’s — just look at their record of horrific mistakes. Their claims to know better than the citizens how things should be done are purely self serving claims to power and the right to enforce the status quo to their advantage, status, and profit. That they claim to have more perfect knowledge is in itself proof of their ignorance.

Secondly, they create a false dichotomy when they reduce the argument to their terms: Is man rational or irrational? They then point to the far too many episodes of carnage in the last 100 years — the first 100 years of transition to an era of Industrial Mass Production — as proof that man is far too irrational and incompetent to rule himself. QED their conservative assertions on the nature of politics must be true. For them, politics is the ends and the ends do justify the means. Liberals who believe politics are the means are delusional and irrational.

A better explanation than Freud’s 19th century constructs may simply be that the essential human condition of imperfect knowledge can lead to both good and bad outcomes. The new post-industrial world of the internet has examples of both: Amazon.com on the one hand vs child pornography rings on the other. It is how we address our imperfect knowledge that matters. The neocons’ claim to more perfect knowledge is patently impossible and thus false.

We liberals have had a hard time with this tautology, as can be seen from our inability to respond effectively to the Bush take over of our government.

It is past time that we Democrats assert our belief that we all, neocons and liberals alike, have imperfect knowledge and thus are imperfectly rational. None-the-less, we believe that we the people are sufficiently rational, ala FDR and the Founders, to participate in the process of our own self governance. Liberals are the party of and for the engaged Citizens. The Neocons are the party of the passive Consumers. This distinction is sharp and hard. Yet we Liberals have been unable to make it. Why?

The neocons have contempt for we the people as they view us as irrational beings whose only role is to be consumers. This is deeply cynical. Note Bush telling us to go shopping in times of crisis. This is pure Eddie Bernays. It denies the very premise of the American revolution.

We must make this contrast in what we stand for, and believe in, starkly clear. Today, am not seeing it, or hearing it, from the leadership of the Democratic party.

I am reminded of the age old conflict between the Apollonian and Dionysian. The subject of Thomas Mann which he addressed in Death in Venice and resolved in Magic Mountain: the synthesis of the snow flake and the snow drift.

Likewise, we can see an approach and solution to this problem in B. Franklin and his Junto Club: Coming together for self improvement, the improvement of the commons, and, lastly, for gains in private wealth.

Franklin’s synthesis of the conflict between private gain and strengthening the commons is one of the secrets of American Liberalism. On the other hand, DeToqville was convinced Franklin was wrong - that the conflict between the impulse for private gain and the impulse for community and the commons would tear America apart.

Today, we benefit from realizing that the old arguments about human nature and politics were rooted in the shared assumption that a central authority, either government or other large centralized orgnaizations, would naturally be the locus of power. Central planning by technocrats of one stripe or another, or, the opposite side of the same coin, total absence of planning, imposed by the demands of a single metric, free market capitalism, were the two polar opposites of this old false dichotomy.

We are now able to see that a world more in tune with the principles of internet architecture, an IP world view, with distributed solutions to distributed problems may offer a third way. What if the edges are as important as the center? Or more important? What if the edges are made up of millions of imperfectly rational citizens actively engaged in the world. What might emerge?

The Wikipedia is one answer. It is neither the product of central planners nor the product of unregulated free market capitalism. Is the product of a new view of the world with a new set of energies - more akin to spirit of Franklin’s Junta than anything else.

Our new synthesis, then, may well be imperfect rationality expressing itself at millions of actively engaged points on the edges.

Can we now re-affirm the genius of American Liberalism in the revolutionary era and restate it in terms appropriate for our era? We will never defeat the Neocons and their tautological arguments until we do.

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