Polarization Is Not Inherently Evil

1,123 words

Eric Voegelin

Anyone who wishes to live in a relatively tranquil society knows that polarization—that is, the times of das Politische—is anything but reassuring. This is not difficult to understand: during moments of polarization, every situation, act, subject, or object, no matter how insignificant it might appear in more “normal” times, becomes unbearably politicizable and politicized, as though the tangible and intangible alike were ontologically impregnated by the political.

For this reason, it is not surprising that republican-minded individuals, parties, and movements tend to privilege spaces of dialogue where moderation, lukewarm gestures, and contemplative restraint are exalted as virtues.

Yet the desirability of virtues can mislead human beings, who, in seeking to avoid polarization—that is, to avoid the absence of virtue—may embrace a phlegmatic moderation, performing a sort of cosplay of republicanism and civility. Some will try to halt the madness by insisting on moderation. But there are processes—adolescence, or the rupture of a love affair—that must be lived through, assumed, and overcome. The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy” (Schmitt, 2007). To deny polarization outright is not to overcome it, but to repress its essence.

In ecological terms, homeostasis corresponds to the ability of systems to maintain equilibrium and adapt to external conditions through internal control networks. For human societies, homeostasis is desirable insofar as a state of eternal chaos is unsustainable due to the social and psychological exhaustion it generates, as well as the economic costs of permanent revolution. But such homeostasis does not mean societies tend toward the political center or moderation. Rather, they tend toward those conditions that are “sufficiently functional” for the continuation of life—whether or not such life is desirable. One example might be the Mexican “new normal,” in which conditions are far from ideal, yet still allow society to persist. The political is not a substance but a conflictual relation, irreducible to other spheres of existence” (Freund, 1965).

With the West’s current situation, there is the risk of cultivating a homeostasis in a process that has not yet matured. Taking something out of the oven before it is fully baked yields food that is not ready, for there are still chemical reactions that must occur to produce the desired result. The greater problem is that what is being cooked, given the elements in the recipe, does not yield a single outcome, but multiple scenarios emerging from the same oven.

Ideology, meanwhile, can deform or dissimulate reality when authority must resort to it in order to conceal domination—appearing, then, as a distorting mirror. But this authority is not necessarily localizable or individualized; worse still, it is not even necessarily personified. Authority can also be exercised by memetic entities [1], which feed on narratives and accepted “truths” regardless of intention. These entities are patterns of information that act autonomously across time, interacting with human beings at multiple levels (Farber, 2008). Thus, democracy itself may be seen as a memetic entity, a site upon which countless meanings are projected—some more academic, others less so—while also reflecting back our own psyche. Multiple human consciousnesses intervene in its creation, depositing their desires, fears, confidences, and suspicions upon it.

Voegelin (1987) saw in ideology precisely this deformation of order: ideological constructions are not theoretical explanations but symbolic actions of self-salvation. Democracy, when reduced to a meme or an idol, risks becoming precisely the kind of “illusory order” Voegelin feared.

The homeostatic impulse in human beings is genuine, for it creates safe spaces for creativity and the flourishing of life—even at the cost of subordinating negative liberty to mere survival. Pain can scream louder than dreams, which become abstract and unattainable when environmental conditions reinforce trauma. The current situation—the times of das Politische—incessantly hammers upon Popper’s three worlds (World 1, of objects not only palpable, visible, or material; World 2, of mental states, conscious or unconscious; and World 3, of the products of the human mind, theories, problems, the objectivation of thought; cf. Epistemology Without a Knowing Subject). Today, these worlds and their interactions are being pounded at a rhythm faster than anything experienced in previous decades.

Girard (1977) is instructive, for the crowd chooses its victim not because he is guilty but because he is the one who can be accused without danger. Polarization can, in moments of social exhaustion, generate scapegoats—individuals or groups sacrificed to restore a false order. These “memetic entities” are nothing other than the imaginary institution of society itself, a creation of a world of significations, which is irreducible to rational calculation or functional necessity (Castoriadis, 1997).

To impose moderation, not in form but in substance, would risk spawning chimeras far worse than the hypothetical scenarios our oven could yield. And not because such chimeras are unviable—on the contrary, because the collective moulding of memetic entities might make such monstrosities viable. Sometimes processes cannot, and must not, be stopped.

Notes

[1] The notion of memetic entities emerges from Dawkins’ (1976) seminal formulation of the meme as a unit of cultural transmission, analogous to the gene, capable of replicating through imitation and variation. Blackmore (1999) radicalized this view by suggesting that memes are not merely passive carriers of cultural content, but autonomous replicators that effectively “use” human beings as vehicles for their own survival and propagation. In this perspective, human culture itself becomes a battlefield of competing entities of information, each struggling for attention, retention, and reproduction.

Within the sphere of esotericism, Carroll (1992) spoke explicitly of magical forms and symbols as self-sustaining informational systems that could outlast their creators. So memes could be seen not simply as ideas but as living fields of power, shaping both consciousness and social orders. Farber (2008) carried this synthesis further in his Meta-Magick: The Book of ATEM. Farber’s experiment underscores a provocative thesis: information patterns are not inert, but self-organizing systems with the power to shape human perception, decision, and even social reality. Thus, whether in the biological framework of Dawkins, the replicator theory of Blackmore, or the experimental magick of Farber, memetic entities reveal themselves as phenomena that blur the boundaries between the symbolic and the real.

References

Blackmore, S. (1999). The Meme Machine. Oxford University Press.

Castoriadis, C. (1997). The Imaginary Institution of Society. MIT Press. (Original work published 1975)

Dawkins, R. (1976). The Selfish Gene. Oxford University Press.

Farber, P. (2008). Meta-Magick: The Book of ATEM: Achieving New States of Consciousness Through NLP, Neuroscience, and Ritual. Weiser Books.

Freund, J. (1965). L’essence du politique. Sirey.

Girard, R. (1977). Violence and the Sacred (P. Gregory, Trans.). Johns Hopkins University Press. (Original work published 1972)

Schmitt, C. (2007). The Concept of the Political (G. Schwab, Trans.; Expanded ed.). University of Chicago Press. (Original work published 1932)

Voegelin, E. (1987). The New Science of Politics: An Introduction. University of Chicago Press.