Rotating Dictatorship

A few posts back I suggested “pointman” as a possible title for the occupant of the center (so I don’t have to keep writing “occupant of the center”) but in doing so I continued to overlook the fact that the perfect term already exists and has for a long time: dictator. This completely innocuous and perfectly descriptive term for whoever governs directly and without formal hindrances dates back, of course, to the Roman Republic, where “dictators” would be appointed to see the republic through some emergency (that, presumably, normal means of consensual rule, i.e., convoluted dictatorship, were inadequate to). My reason for rejecting (or deferring) this term is the massive accumulation of moral opprobrium piled upon it through the 20^th century, to the point where, like “fascist” or “Nazi,” it just became a way of describing anyone who, say, prioritized the safety of potential crime victims over addressing whatever conditions or trauma we imagine to have driven the criminal. One would have to introduce your use of the term by wading through the accretion of misuses that, of course, anyone will be free to reintroduce or attribute to you at any point along the way of your discourse. But maybe I don’t have to concern myself with that, since I’m not going to be going mainstream in any familiar manner, and if the word “dictator” serves as a kind of repellent to those concerned how their liberal friends assess their associations perhaps that should be embraced as a filter. Conceptual clarity has to precede all.

The question of the dictator is situated within the question of “the West,” a certain version of which has been ideologically embedded since WW 2 and has been vigorously contested in recent years. The debate usually concerns intellectual and ritual traditions, on the one hand, and genealogies, on the other—which peoples, which ideas, genuinely comprise the West. I reduce “the West” to a simple observation or definition: the West is where the problem of “tyranny” is a perpetual concern. Is there even a concept like “dictator” in any other civilization? Other civilizations have a much more direct line back to sacral kingship than the West has had for a long time—the experience of the ancient Greek city-states, where the sacral king was usurped by a ruler relying upon no ritual validation, and supported, instead, by money (to pay for supporters but also to weaken the sacral order), has not been replicated anywhere, I think. Philosophy, in its break with myth and poetry, emerges as a response to the problem of tyranny, which raises the question of what is a “good” ruler and by extension social order. Furthermore, philosophy’s initial “mandate” was to determine the meaning of words, because one of the effects of “tyranny” is to destabilize meaning. All of the classical and modern philosophical problems, of ethics, epistemology, ontology, and so on are all tributaries of the problem of tyranny, and the limit of philosophy is that it can’t recognize this without surrendering the privileged status it still clings to.

Judaism also makes its own contribution here by positing a God who is King of Kings and to whom, then, any existing King, however sacralized, must be subordinated and by whom he will eventually be humbled. The linear history invented by the Hebrew Bible is essentially the fall of one arrogant king after another until we get to the end when we can all acknowledge God as the only real king. Modern, progressive teleologies are really just secular versions of this, and modern democracy in particular is driven by a virtual paranoid terror of the return of the tyrant, always conveniently lurking behind your electoral opponent. Christianity restored sacral kingship for quite a while, but the split within Western Christianity was precisely over the question of the “tyranny” of the Pope, portrayed in the most lurid manner in Protestant propaganda. And it is from the Protestant (a whole religious tendency calls itself a “protest”) insistence on no one having a right to tell anyone else how to read the Bible (because that would be tyranny over one’s very soul) is the origin of modern democracy. With all the palace coups, conquests, peasant revolts, etc., that have marked history everywhere, nowhere, I think have these struggles ever been framed in terms of “tyranny,” i.e., ungrounded rule. And outside of the sacral rule cannot, in fact be grounded—popular will was a stop-gap measure that managed to hold things together long enough to take us through industrialization but we can now see that any particular configuration or representation of the “will” of the “people” can be as easily denounced as “tyrannical” as the bloodiest and most brazen “usurper.” Robert Filmer already saw this in the 17^th century. Once you can put the king on trial for “treason,” there is no turning back.

But this account leaves out the fact that the West has seen vigorous and effective governance, in both the state and corporate spheres. It turns out that rule is possible without “grounds,” and that maybe the absence of grounds, ultimately a philosophical, i.e., fraudulent, problem, is just nostalgia for sacred kingship. Before sacral kingship, though, there was the Big Man, who usurped the ritual center and took over distribution on his own “authority.” A viable narrative for the recovery of the West might argue that the West has conserved within the transitions through various modes of kingship, that original, revolutionary usurpation—a revolution far more radical than any attempted since the French Revolution. The West is the inheritor of the Big Man revolution—as for why this should be the case, well, here we can welcome all those intellectual, political and even genetic genealogies of the West. The Big Man, in usurping the ritual center, places himself in the company of those terrifying metapersons who ruled the “primitive” community. The only real “rule” for the Big Man is that he indeed distribute, at least to those whom he needs to fend off any challenges from those “reactionaries” who would like to return to the older ritual order or from other, prospective, Big Men. The Big Man is domesticated through the obligations of chiefdom and then the various kinds of kingship, but all that really serves to occlude from view the usurper within. Issuing a command makes you at least a little bit of a usurper and the immediate impulse is to derive that command from some metaperson, however indirectly (the “will of the people,” as the saying “vox populi, vox deus” already suggests, is a kind of metaperson, mythically constructed)—and one is not wrong in doing so insofar as the command does come from language, the ultimate ritual machinery. But meta-awareness that one is invoking a semiotically constructed metaperson makes it a stretch to invoke him in good faith.

America, the furthest point West of the West, is where the Big Man revolution can be unapologetically restored. I may be mythologizing here but the mixture of the assumption that he who is in charge should be in charge along with the seemingly contradictory assumption that anyone in charge could be dispensed with fairly easily is quintessentially American. Authority is absolute and contingent at the same time. This is the only way to fully recoup the Big Man revolution (against the Left, which is really primarily, ferociously, primordially, opposed to precisely this) and “solve” the problem of tyranny is through the establishment of a rotating dictator system. In the background here is the notion of sortition, or the determination of ruler by lot, also from the Greeks; my own system, of course, is singularized succession in perpetuity which on the face of it is the direct opposite of sortition, but if we consider that once we’ve passed the threshold beyond which being dethroned doesn’t mean death, power can be passed around with facility, and then we approach the point where we might say that anyone might give ruling a try for a bit. The more market approximate (or market virtualization) approach to succession I suggested in my recent Originary Debt, Credit, Succession post fits this assumption. If those amongst the ruling elite trust each other sufficiently, as they must if something better than the troubled American imperium will result from today’s collective cluelessness about the problem of tyranny, then we can easily imagine the chief executive of the central intelligence company simply handing-off command to the successor who best meets that moment and perhaps receiving it back in return at a later point. And this also leaves open the possibility of introducing a bit of randomness into the selection process, maybe first of all in the lower ranks, to give people a chance to govern who might otherwise be overlooked. After all, in the system I’m hypothesizing, having some direct role in governance will be the central way of acquiring respect and dignity, and it will also be an essential component of pedagogical practices. If someone who is given a chance proves incompetent, it would not be too difficult to ease him into selecting the “right” successor.

So, the rotating dictator system combines extreme concentration of power with simplicity of replacement of those exercising it. This is a good time to review the function of the juridical in this set-up, because I have already been exploring at some length the possibility of bringing a lawsuit against the “dictator” (I’ll be removing the scare quotes now). Lawsuits, properly understood, can only be brought after an action has been taken, and only by those with standing, i.e., injured in some way by that action. (So, the kinds of restraints we see from district court federal judges now on Trump’s executive orders are not lawsuits in any meaningful sense—they are just the invention of a new form of partisan power.) In that case, the power to carry out any action is not hindered. Still, the awareness of the likely success of a future lawsuit serves as a kind of prior restraint, not only for the dictator but for those implementing his commands. Our current polarization, in which the party in power understands they are likely to be criminalized once out of power, makes this very palpable. Just like the party system seeks to defer civil war by internalizing it into rotation in power, the possibility of a lawsuit against the dictator in a rotating system internalizes this kind of civil war scenario. Ruling can never be risk free, and even civil war can never be once and for all eliminated as a possibility, but the dictator will not be defenseless against lawsuits. The problem with the impeachment process under the US Constitution is that it replicates putting the king on trial, which means that the president has the right to defend himself but not to file countercharges. If the president could seek to remove from power and impose further penalties on those participating in a failed impeachment and removal attempt, impeachment would become an entirely different proposition. And that is the way to look at it—legal “weaponry” would be built into the dictator’s actions from the beginning, so you would need an extremely strong case to charge him and, therefore, intimidate him or his team even prior to any action.

Who, then, is appointing the judges? This may seem like a more important question than it actually is. Judges are part of the governing system so they are appointed, more or less directly, by the dictator, or chief executive of the central intelligence company. Any form of governance, once it attains a certain scale, will need some kind of juridical order—the carve out of the juridical from the ritual happens some place along the transition from sacral to divine kingship (the ancient Greeks had an extremely robust judicial system, suing each other all the time in what I imagine were fairly wild scenes, and this will always be the case with republics or democracies with unsecure central command structures), simply because at that point commands from the center are no longer transparent and generate disputes—disputes which the king can’t adjudicate himself requiring that he delegate. Even an army will necessarily create military tribunals, in which decisions by commanders might be examined. Administration is merely a streamlined juridical order, with what we call “bureaucracy” a degenerate form (kind of like, for Plato, oligarchy is a degenerate form of aristocracy). Administration implements commands and always has decision and appeals processes precisely because there is almost always more than one way to implement a command, and there will be parties on the various sides of doing so. Imperatives change as they are prolonged. This all means that judges and administrators (all descendants of priests and scribes) should be loyal to the system and that also means loyal to whoever is governing at the moment—their role is keep the vendetta at bay, both from below (tribal conflicts) and from above (systemic resentments instrumentalized by a section of the governing class) and this enforces what appears to be “neutrality” but is really just preservation of commands from the center. In dealing with specific cases, including those involving the dictator, even the one to whom they owe their appointment, they will remain loyal to their role and respect the boundaries constitutive of vendetta deferral. Otherwise, the very order required by the dictator himself is weakened. So, if the case against the dictator is very strong, having a “loyal” judge wouldn’t really help (there will also be other judges, who might be less “loyal” and each judge would anyway, like anyone in the governing class, have to weigh the likelihood of various outcomes of any such lawsuit). Unless we are talking about a very desperate man, but in that case we’re also talking about a different kind of order. I am always assuming an order in which good data is king—as long as we don’t have such an order, it is toward it that anyone primarily concerned with governance should urge the powerful to move.