The necessary social change that will bring flourishing and liberty is linked to being able to act in such a manner so that we can comprehend the World as it is, a totality of interrelated processes rather than the logical atoms that the Anglo-Saxon intellectuals pretend we are. The problem of climate change demonstrates this reality in the most intense and brutal manner, since the cumulus of interpenetrations between economic activity, the atmosphere, life, and the sun attacks us with the whole force of the Real: the mortal blow delivered against us by the assemblage of the living, the inert, and the economic.
Isn’t this causal nexus evident when clairvoyants inform their civilizations of the misfortunes reflected in the heavens? A human being is affected by electric, nuclear, and gravitational fields that are emitted by creatures and other entities in its surroundings for example, the light of a star that has extinguished millions of years ago can affect our destiny today.
Science has demonstrated the ancient intuitions of the Daoists that the Universe is made of fluxes and potentialities, and that each one of us contains the whole World within. This is not because activists do not have vision, but because the fragmentary realities of the State and this society conspire against a conception of the interrelation of the Universe. One may focus on climate change, trade unions, or police brutality, but the question of the “good life” is not the ultimate root of these themes. For in order to mobilize against this infernal machinery, it is necessary to package actions into discrete interests that can be absorbed by the State. This environment corrupts even the most virtuous of activists. The question of the “good life” does not exist in political discourse, for the political limelight is a concatenation of micro-discussions about business and demographic interests, and when a general idea is invoked, in place of flourishing as a collective activity, a spurious and violent universality is summoned, such as nationalism or rule of law. Only those who are animated by mercenary purposes end up acquiring the positioning to navigate and capture the State. The labyrinthine nature of this coordinating machine prevents common people from accessing it. Many of these individuals are willing to carpet bomb entire cities simply to win the next election. Sometimes, this mercenary aspect of politicians is not only evident in their thirst for power and their capacity for lying, for saying what certain interest groups want to hear, but also in their stomach for violence. Being a “good politician” today means being the most effective at winning elections, and in this mercenary society where money and moral manipulation move everything, a politician that “wins elections” inevitably ends up being a virtueless person. The State simply exists as a machine that administers commercial and interest groups under a squalid scheme of rule of law and private property. We live in an epoch that is morally and intellectually mediocre.
A mural from 1943 called Endocrinology by Montreal artist Marian Dale Scott. To pursue an emancipatory politics that can address planetary climate change, one must answer the question of “what is the good life?” Yet for this question to be intelligible, a Polis that understands its relation to the cosmos, prefigured by the Party, is necessary.
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