Paradoxical Democracy & the Problem of Human Communication
The world we inhabit today is alive with strangeness and confusion. But perhaps what is most uncanny about our shared way of living in the early years of the 21st century is how inclined we are to feel this way about it.
Profound mysteries of existence have captivated the human mind since long before our ability to dissect them under the lens of a microscope or command a machine to mimic their complexities. At the same time, the ease of access we have to empirically verified answers to some of the most complex questions of human existence would have astonished even our nearest ancestors.
Why, then, despite such extraordinary scientific advances and unfathomable accumulations of information does our world seem to continue its decent into uncertainty, confusion, and chaos?
While the complexities of human existence rarely lend themself to simple answers, clues can be found within the contexts of our shared states of being. That is, we can begin by asking questions of ourselves and others. For example, “If our confusion stems from too much rather than too little information, what might this reveal about the root of the problem?”
Aside from the distinctly 21st century phenomenon of experiencing human life completely stripped of its context in place and time (i.e., via technological mediation) and unattached to any agreed upon social history (i.e., tradition), the greatest problems facing humanity today are not new — they are only newly magnified.
Our second clue arises from within a foundational tenet of Western thought. It is the Socratic command that a person must first “know thyself” before ever becoming curious about things that are “not [their] concern.”
Even before our “self” became filtered through the lens of another person’s perspective and encoded with the trap door belief in our own “individual timeline,” no person’s journey toward knowing thyself has ever made for an easy trek. In fact, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle were unified in their belief that such an endeavor only fit for those free of all “labor requirements” in society, a belief that necessarily excluded women, enslaved people, and forced laborers from participation in philosophy.
Thinkers and philosophers much wiser than I am have spent a great deal of energy pondering Socrates motives for issuing the command now inscribed on the Apollo Delphi. But, for my purposes, the explanation given by Andrea Hurst at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa illustrates the point sufficiently:
“Finding an adequate means to know ourselves depends on approaching subjectivity as a complex phenomenon defined in terms of necessary internal conflict.”
Now, we have three symptoms to help us diagnose the sickness ailing our society:
1. The confusion stems from having too much information, not too little.
2. A foundational tenet of Western thought — a style of thinking that has left no corner of the Earth untouched regardless of cultural endorsement or personal resonance — is the Socratic command to “Know Thyself.”
3. The task of knowing thyself is inherently complex, which means it cannot be achieved without the experience of internal conflict.
Before we can make a causal diagnosis, we must agree upon a historical framework for contextualizing the present phenomena under our investigation. This necessarily includes the truth content of a series of events. As is symptomatic of our collective disease in the year 2022, reaching this type of agreement is no easy task. Therefore, the historical descriptions that follow are intentionally liberal, that is vague.
Contextualizing history
The anchor year is 1945. The truth content is the United States’ atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan and the Allied Forces liberation of Nazi controlled concentration camps. Because our present interest is in the social phenomenon of mass confusion and uncertainty, it is the “abyss of Auschwitz” that becomes the central point of focus.
The question of inquiry: How? That is, what were the social conditions of a people that made possible the systematic killing of more than 8 million men, women, children, and babies at the hands of Hitler’s regime? How did human beings who had been friends, neighbors, and members of a shared community of meaning shut their eyes and callous their hearts to the realities taking place around them?
For those un/fortunate enough to survive the German Holocaust of the Jews, it seems impossible that the trauma, terror, shame, and outrage could not have infiltrated every aspect of their being. And yet, as Esther Perel reminds us, “the erotic drive toward life is the antidote for death.” (Perhaps, too, this might help us understand why a disproportionate number of people with Jewish heritage have ascended to the pinnacle of human “civilization” in the early years of the 21st century — after all, the power of any force is determined by the strength of its opposition.)
My reason for choosing the year 1945 and the culminating events of the Holocaust as a shared historical foundation for the present work is not for histrionics or attention-seeking shock value. Rather, it is an attempt to build upon the constructive thinking of Hannah Arendt, a German-born Jew, journalist, political theorist, and (in my view) the first woman philosopher of Western thought in recorded history.
Hannah first encountered the embrace of Lady Liberty in the port-harbor of Ellis Island on May 22, 1941. Her seminal act of communication to the outside world after her feet were planted on American soil took form in a telegram to her friends in Europe: “WE’RE SAVED!!!!”
For the rest of her life Hannah regarded the United States with a disposition of gratitude. She was especially struck by its Constitutional guarantees of freedom and liberty to all people who merely gave their assent to its governance. Even so, for her, grandeur professions of love and loyalty were reserved for friends, and she never doled out these sentiments so liberally as to encompass the unknowable entirety of a group identity or nationality. In fact, she thought that it was precisely this type of sentimentality that was the precursor of all political disaster.
Instead, Hannah oriented herself toward a politics of community building and communication, believing that the challenge of the time was to formulate a basis for communication located precisely within the abyss of Auschwitz. This, she hoped, might help account for the “strange misunderstanding” among some that German-Jews were shocked by Hitler’s rise to power. For her, there was no shock in learning that the Nazi’s were her enemy, the shock came from the betrayal of her friends — those around whom a “vacuum had formed,” who voluntarily “got in line” to organize their beliefs and behaviors, not yet under the pressure of terror, and held open the crack that became the abyss.
What we now know is that Fascism thrives amid vague uncertainty and confusion. Authoritarianism is a reactionary backlash to the uncertainty of Fascist confusion. The paradox of Democracy is this: it can exist only as a fragile, precarious, and neutralizing third-force that forecloses the potentiality of abyss within both.
A diagnosis
Now we reach a diagnosis within the place of my own expertise: Communication (with a big C).
Communication, like the air we breathe, has often been overlooked by philosophers and regarded only as a secondary concern by scientists. This might seem surprising given the abundance of scholarly and technological advancements in the fields of computer science, economics, advertising, marketing, political advocacy, and the myriad forms of subliminal persuasion developed since the mid-20th century. And, indeed, these are fields where students and practitioners have become quite adept in the use of advanced technologies to understand the function of Mediation in society.
But the phenomenon of Mediation is entirely distinct from that of Communication. The purpose of the former is to identify points of shared positionality between two or more separate entities. The purpose of Communication, however, is to create a shared understanding of the humanity of another person regardless of any alignment with or endorsement of their individual position. Like Democracy, the purpose of Communication is to serve as a neutralizing third-force that forecloses the abyss of the “other” within the safety afforded by the inherently human capacity to call someone a neighbor or a friend.
However, when Communication becomes dissociated from its role as a neutralizing third-force between two opposing camps polarization is the only option. And when Communication itself becomes colonized by an outside force—like Nazi propaganda, Russian strategic disinformation, surveillance Capitalism, micro-targeting, or any form of Mediation intended to measure, control, or persuade behavior—the gap widens, “the center cannot hold,” and the evil of abyss is certain to follow.
For this reason, Arendt adopted a Hegelian view of the problem of Communication, understanding it not as a psychological problem of two private minds touching, but as a political and social problem of creating the conditions where mutual recognition of self-conscious individuals is possible. The “Communication problem,” as categorically distinct from the problem posed by Mediation, is the problem of developing a person’s awareness of the meta-cognitive function of intersubjectivity and its foundational role in all iterations of organized, ordered, and harmonious human society.
Contextualizing this problem within the history outlined above, we might understand it this way: When the Democratic lifeworld splits along any faultline — and especially when the discourse becomes increasingly polarized and segregated into Fascist and Authoritarian modes of thinking — then the problem any (once-ordered) socio-political system is encountering is always a problem of Communication.
To bring this full-circle we might understand it this way:
If we find ourselves overwhelmed and confused by the shared world we inhabit today, it is because we have not achieved the capacity to listen to our neighbor; and if we cannot listen to our neighbor, it is because we have not yet developed the capacity to know ourselves.
To be sure, listening to another person is not the same thing as endorsing their behavior. However, to “know thyself” is to know that everything our human hands touch will be left scarred by our own internal conflicts, complexities, and contradictions of Being. Making the choice to Love Thyself anyway is making the choice to transcend the terror of our own being so that we might join our neighbors and friends within the radical safety afforded by a paradoxical Democracy.
