The Origins of the Origins of Political Order and the Purpose of the Purpose of America

Fukuyama begins his search for The Origins of Political Order with the state -- the state of nature. And although he doesn't express it this way, he is absolutely correct to locate that origin in our irreducible intersubjectivity, or shared being. He rejects what he calls the "Hobbesean fallacy,"

"the idea that human beings were primordially individualistic and that they entered into society at a later stage in their development only as a result of a rational calculation that social cooperation was the best way for them to achieve their individual ends."

As I explained in the book, not only did human beings not evolve as individuals, they could not have done so. The mere evolution of a larger brain would have been insufficient to sponsor or host our humanness.

Rather, humanness emerged as a consequence of the unique circumstance of runaway growth in brain size, which ultimately resulted in mothers giving birth to premature and neurologically incomplete infants. At the same time, the mother's defenselessness in the face of having to care for a helpless infant created and strengthened the role of Father, bringing the trimorphic family into existence.

Thus, in my view, the internally related family is the first (and very possibility of) political order. But prior to it is the mother-infant dyad, which is not really a dyad per se, unless only looked at externally.

Rather, this is a uniquely interior dyad. In the orthoparadoxical formulation of D.W. Winnicott, there is no such thing as an infant. Instead, there is a single organism -- one might say the quintessentially human organism -- with mother acting as the infant's "auxiliary cortex," so to speak, to translate what is otherwise an infinite and dread-prone space into thought, or nonlocal being into local existence.

I don't want to get bogged down in details here. Interested readers can check out my book, or peruse the psychology department of the Raccoon Store -- in particular, the works of Schore (hard), Siegal (easier) or Greenspan (easiest).

A more subtle point, but critical to psychoanalytic neuro-developmental theory, is that the thinking process itself is intersubjective.

In other words -- and this is bobvious once you look at it -- human beings are intersubjective with ourselves. We are always in dialogue with an Other, and sometimes it is difficult to say which end of this relationship is more "us." I would say that neither side is, because we are again dealing with a fruitful complementarity, not a vicious duality.

Put it this way: if we weren't "two," we couldn't think. But if we weren't "one" underneath that, we couldn't actually know anything. So one might say that the One is revealed in the bipolar space between oneness and twoness, which we might call the psychic Third.

This third area is where it all goes down for human beings. It is the actual space we inhabit, only (for most people) projected out into the world and reified. This is why one jaded person can be "bored" with the world, while another sees it as an unrolling theophany, the very garment of divine being. Both are fundamentally interior states, apprehended externally.

Where I believe Fukuyama errs is in failing to appreciate the spiritual oneness that underlies our existential twoness. As he puts it, "it is in fact individualism and not sociability that developed over the course of human history. That individualism seems today like a solid core of our economic and political behavior is only because we have developed institutions that override our more naturally communal instincts."

This passage is fraught with potential economic and political mischief. For while it is correct to say that individualism (which is to say, colonization of the interior) evolves with time and history, Fukuyama implies that it is therefore completely contingent and historically conditioned, which would be the postmodern, ultramoronic view of the tenured.

I cannot emphasize enough the arbitrary and self-defeating nature of such a distorted view of human beings. Yet, it is so pervasive in academia and in culture, that we are in danger of revoking our essential humanness as a result.

Again: human beings are two (i.e., intersubjective) only because the subject (and ultimately the metacosmic Subject) is fundamentally one.

But the oneness of the subject cannot be known or thought about until it bifurcates into two, e.g., thoughts and thinker, conscious and unconscious, Father and Son, form and substance, Absolute and Infinite, space and time, etc. What evolves is not the "individual" per se; rather, what specifically evolves and deepens is the process, which, in my symbology, reduces to O ←→ (¶).

Now, since the ultimate purpose of life is, and can only be, the sat-chit-ananda, or being-consciousness-bliss, of O ←→ (¶), it stands to transrationality that the best political order will be the one that makes this possible, or at least gets out of the way and doesn't stifle or prevent it. It will be the political order that quite explicitly begins with the idea that all men are equally endowed by their Creator with the liberty to pursue their happiness, which is again rooted in some form of matterimanyall engagement with the Real, i.e, O ←→ (¶).

This is why human life is uniquely and cosmically worthwhile, and why the state's first duty is therefore to protect it. Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness = Being Consciousness Bliss, deusrespectively.

The main purpose of the state is to accomplice things we cannot accomplish on an individual basis, which is to say, smack down all the deviants who wish to deny the human reason for being, either through physical or intellectual or spiritual violence.

Obviously, as Cosmo-Americans, we cannot support any state which undermines the explicitly spiritual assumptions of our having brought this great nation into being before its beginning (for in our end is our beginning, and vice versa). If the purpose of America isn't to facilitate the Adventure of Consciousness, then for what Good is it in the ultimate scam of things?

I always consider the settlement of America with reverence and wonder, as the opening of a grand scene and design in Providence for the illumination of the ignorant, and the emancipation of the slavish part of mankind all over the earth. --John Adams

Nevertheless, I'm not completely close-minded on the matter. Liberals do make an articulate and passionate case for a contrary view.