An “Unphilosophical Spirit”: ...

 

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2022/10/13/an-unphilosophical-spirit-root-causes-of-american-intellectual-decline/

An “Unphilosophical Spirit”: Root Causes of American Intellectual Decline

By Louis René Beres - October 13, 2022

“The enemy is the unphilosophical spirit which knows nothing and wants to know nothing of truth.“- Karl Jaspers, Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1971)

For the most part, Americans loath mind-challenging excursions into philosophy. At times, certain other forms of intellectual activity are judged more-or-less tolerable, but only to the extent that they are conducted in pursuit of practical academic certifications or job-related advancements. To be sure, many Americans do remain conspicuously proud of their specific educational accomplishments and associations, but only rarely because of any connections to genuine learning.

               In general, these university-based relationships are valued for presumed personal status and income enhancements.[1]

               Still, in the final analysis, core origins of America’s intellectual decline are best explained by philosophy. Reasoning as an educated European in the late 20th century, German philosopher Karl Jaspers observes succinctly in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1971): “The enemy is the unphilosophical spirit which knows nothing and wants to know nothing of truth.” Though there is nothing tangible about such a spirit – and while the philosopher’s subtle indictment would soar indecipherably over the heads of most Americans – this demeaning spirit has palpable consequences.

               Inter alia, it is anything but benign.

               We should begin at the beginning. What does it really mean for a nation to be “anti-intellectual”? On its face, intellect is “elitist.” Always. At a minimum, intellect seems impractical, contrived, “highfalutin.” Typically, in the United States, from its very beginnings, the most casual mention of “intellect” or “intellectual” has been met with opprobrium. In essence, such mention has elicited precious little in the way of curiosity. Instead, it has brought forth variously acrimonious cries of disapproval, an openly belligerent rancor and abundantly witless howls of execration.

               So what (if anything) has changed?[2] Credo quia absurdum, exclaimed the ancient philosopher Tertullian, “I believe because it is absurd.”

                Significantly, with few discernible exceptions, the United States celebrates pragmatic accomplishments and “common sense.” Don’t bother with abstract or speculative learning, we are instructed early on, especially when any dedicated citizen excursions into literature, philosophy, art and poetry “don’t pay?” This command becomes still more worrisome when the broadest meanings of Jaspers’ “enemy” is uncovered and understood. Far worse than “merely” knowing nothing of truth, the philosopher already understood, is “wanting to know nothing of truth.”

               This distinction is more than a matter of degree. It is vastly meaningful per se.

               There are assorted pertinent details. Truth is exculpatory, always, and a proper answer ought always to be prompt, unhesitant and unambiguous. Accordingly, there are times for every nation when history, science and intellect will deserve an absolute pride of place. Recalling Plato’s parable of the cave in The Republic,[3] our American politics and Realpolitik-driven[4] foreign policies are just “reflection.” Inevitably, they are mere “shadows” of reality, epiphenomenal and misleading.[5]

               In the United States, politics still offers only a deformed reflection of what lies below. This American  politics also reveals a problematic vacancy of “soul.”[6] Sometimes, such wearying vacancies warrant even closer analytic attention than usual. Today, especially after Trump-led efforts at seditious conspiracy and cultivated criminality, we are in one of those dissembling times.

                Donald J. Trump is gone from the White House,[7] but there are compelling reasons to fear his return (directly, or by obeisant surrogates) in 2024. The crudely retrograde and simplifying sentiments that first brought him to presidential power still endure unabated. Now, still lacking the refined intellectual commitments of mind necessary for dignified democratic governance, We the people ought not to display incredulity at the unprecedented breadth or depth of our political failures.

               And the next time could be much worse.

Too-many American debilities remain rooted in a presumptive “common sense.” Over the years, it remains difficult too contest, American well-being and political freedom have sprung from variously orchestrated postures of engineered consumption. But in this steeply confusing derivation, our national marching instructions have stayed clear and demeaning:  “You are what you buy.” It follows from such planned misdirection that the country’s ever-growing political scandals and failures represent the predictable product of a society where anti-intellectual and unheroic lives are routinely encouraged. Even more insidious, American success is measured not by any rational criteria of mind,  compassion or “soul,” but dolefully, mechanically, without commendable purpose and without any “collective will.”[8]

There is more, much more. What most energetically animates American politics today is not any valid interest in progress or survival, but steadily-escalating fears of personal insignificance. Though most apparent at the presidential level, such insignificance can be experienced collectively, by an entire nation. Either way, its precise locus of origin concerns certain deeply-felt human anxieties about not being valued, about not “belonging,”[9] about not being “wanted at all.”[10]

                For any long-term intellectual renaissance to become viable, an unblemished candor must first be encouraged. Ground down by the demeaning babble of half-educated pundits and jabbering politicos, We the people are rarely motivated by any elements of real insight or recognizable courage. We are just now learning to understand how badly our Constitution was recently battered by dissembling voices of anti-reason, of assaults by a law-violating head of state who “loved the poorly educated,”[11]  proudly read nothing (nothing at all) and who yearned not to serve his country,[12] but only to receive plaudits (and monetary “donations”) from its self-deceiving citizens.

               Truth is exculpatory. Donald J. Trump abhorred any challenging considerations of law, intellect or independent thought. For the United States, it became a lethal and unforgivable combination.

               At the chaotic end of his incoherent tenure, the former president’s personal defeat was paralleled by near-defeat of the entire nation. Lest anyone forget, the catastrophic events at the Capitol on January 6, 2021 were designed to undermine or overthrow the rule of Constitutional order in the United States. The once-unimaginable plan failed not because it lacked criminal intent (mens rea), but because its backers lacked all relevant intellectual and historical understandings. If there hadn’t been such an evident lack, leaders of the American insurrection would have readily understood that an SA-style (Sturmabteilung) para-military force would need augmentation by a more seemingly “respectable” infrastructure of field commanders and organizational bureaucrats.

               There is more. To understand the Trump presidency’s self-induced declensions, we must learn to look beyond “reflections,” beyond transient personalities and beyond the daily news. Even now, in these United States, a willing-to-think individual is little more than a quaint artifact of some previously imagined narrative. Even now, more refractory than ever to courage, intellect and learning, much of our American “mass” displays no decipherable intentions of  taking itself seriously.[13]

               Quite the contrary.

               “Headpieces filled with straw…” is the way poet T S Eliot would have characterized present-day American citizens. He would have observed, further, an embittered American “herd” marching insistently backward, cheerlessly, wittingly senseless, in pitiful lockstep toward still impending collective declensions.

                What’s next for America’s increasingly-imperiled Republic? For the moment, whatever our specific political leanings or party loyalties, We the people have at least restored a basic normalcy to the White House.[14] At the same time, our self-battering country still imposes upon its exhausted people the hideously breathless rhythms of a vast and uncaring machine.Once again, we witness, each and every day, an endless line of trains, planes and automobiles transporting weary Americans to yet another robotic workday, a day too-often bereft of any pleasure or reward, and a day filled with yet another inexplicable inventory of mass shootings.  

               Let us be candid.  Even for those who can “work from home,” the cumulative outlook for happiness is dreary at best.

               “I think therefore I am,” announced Descartes, but what exactly do Americans “think?” Answers should come quickly to mind. But even now, We the people lack any unifying sources of national cohesion except for celebrity sex scandals, local sports team loyalties, inane conspiracy theories and the hideously murderous brotherhoods of gratuitous violence.

               As for the more than seven million people stacked cheek to jowl in our medieval prisons, two-thirds of those released will likely return to lives of crime and mayhem. Simultaneously, the most senior and recognizable white collar criminals – in part, those Trump-era sycophants who managed to transform their humiliating personal cowardice into a religion – can look forward to lucrative book contracts and to far-reaching immunity from criminal prosecutions. Ironically, these contract agreements, prima facie, are for manuscripts that they themselves are intellectually unfit to write.

                We the people inhabit the one society that could have been different. Once upon a time we displayed discernible potential to nurture individuals to become more than a “mass,”  “herd” or “crowd.”[15] Then, Ralph Waldo Emerson described the United States as a nation animated by industry and “self-reliance,” not moral paralysis, fear and bitter trembling.  Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would have urged Americans to “learn to live upon mountains” (that is, to becomewillfully thinking individuals)[16], but today a declining nation remains grudgingly content with the tiniest of metaphoric “elevations.”

               In Zarathustra, Nietzsche warns decent civilizations never to seek the “higher man”[17] at the “marketplace,” but that is where a “practical” America discovered Donald J. Trump. What went so badly wrong? Though basically a manipulative confidence man, Trump was seemingly very rich. How then could he possibly not have been both smart and virtuous? Perhaps the best answer lies in Reb Tevye’s clarifying remark in Fiddler on the Roof, “If you’re rich they think you really know.”

                Previously, many could not understand Vladimir Lenin’s concept of a “useful idiot” or the improbable corollary that an American president could become the witting marionette of his Russian counterpart. Still, truth is exculpatory. The squalid derelictions that Americans were forced to witness at the end of the Trump presidency resembled nothing less than The Manchurian Candidate on steroids. These sordid derelictions could arise again.

               “Credo quia absurdum,” said the ancient philosopher Tertullian. “I believe because it is absurd.”

               The true enemy faced by the United States is not any one individual person or ideology; neither is it any one political party or another. It is We the People. As we may learn further from Nietzsche’s Zarathustra: “The worst enemy you can encounter will always be you, yourself; you will lie in wait for yourself in caves and woods.” So we remain, even today, poised fixedly against ourselves, against our own literal survival, badgered by conspiracy theories and battered by the former US president’s inane policy forfeitures.

                Again, there are relevant specifics. North Korea presents much more of a nuclear threat today than before Trump’s proudly declared “romance” with Kim Jung Un.[18] This potentially existential threat (especially if it should become synergistic when joined with coinciding dangers from Russia and China) was not in  any fashion diminished because Kim and Trump “fell in love” at their Singapore summit. To deal with growing nuclear threats across the world,[19] national leaders will finally need to conceptualize their task as one of “mind over mind,” not just “mind over matter.” Donald Trump’s frequent assertions notwithstanding, world politics is never just about “attitude.”

               Never.

               There is a conceptual “bottom line” here. In spite of our commonly clichéd claim to “rugged individualism,” we Americans are generally shaped not by any exceptional personal or national capacities, but by abysmally rote patterns of imitation and conformance. Busily amusing ourselves into oblivion with illiterate and cheapening entertainments, our endangered American society audibly bristles with childish jingles, chronic hucksterism, crass allusions and potentially fatal equivocations. Surely, we ought finally to inquire: “Isn’t there more to this unhappy country[20] than abjured learning, stomach-turning violence and endlessly manipulated commerce?”

                “I celebrate myself, and sing myself,” observed  Transcendentalist poet Walt Whitman, but now, generally, the self-deluding American Selfis created by stupefying kinds of “education,”[21]  by far-reaching patterns of tastelessness and a pervasive national culture of rancor and self-defilement.

                There are other special difficulties. Only a rare “few” can ever redeem courage and intellect in America,[22] but these quiet souls remain determinably well hidden, often even from themselves. One can never discover these souls engaged in frenetic and agitated self-advertisement on television or online. Our necessary redemption as a people and aa a nation can never be generated from among the mass, herd or crowd. There is a correct way to fix our fractionating and anti-intellectual country, but not while We the people insistently inhabit pre-packaged ideologies of anti-thought and anti-reason.[23]

               Going forward, we must finally insist upon expanding the sovereignty of a newly courageous and newly virtuous[24] citizenry. In this immense task, basic changes will be needed at the microcosmic level, that is, at the society-shaping level of the individual human person.  Following the German Romantic poet Novalis’ idea that to become a human being is essentially an “art” (“Mensch werden ist eine Kinst“), the Swiss-German author/philosopher Hermann Hesse reminds us that every society is a cumulative expression of unique individuals. In this same regard, Swiss psychologist Carl G. Jung goes further, claiming, in The Undiscovered Self (1957), that every society represents “the sum total of individual souls seeking redemption.”[25]

               One again, as in earlier references to Sigmund Freud, the inherently “soft” variable of “soul” is suitably acknowledged.

               Looking to history and logic, it would be easy to conclude that the monumental task of intellectual and moral reconstruction lies far beyond our normal American capacities. Nonetheless, to accede to such a relentlessly fatalistic conclusion would be tantamount to an irremediable collective surrender. This could be unconscionable. Far better that the citizens of a sorely imperiled United States (1) grasp for any still-residual sources of national and international unity; and (2) exploit this universal font for national and international survival.

               We have been considering the effects of an “unphilosophical spirit which knows nothing and wants to know nothing of truth.”[26] During the past several years, huge and unhidden efforts have been mounted to question the “cost-effectiveness” of an American college education. These often-shallow efforts ignore that the core value of a university degree lies not in its projected purchasing power, but in disciplined learning for its own sake. When young people are asked to calculate the value of such a degree in solely commercial terms, which is the case today, they are being asked to ignore both the special pleasures of a serious education (e.g., literature, history, art, music, philosophy, etc.) and the cumulative benefits of authentic learning.

               The core problem of U.S, decline is less that its people don’t know what is true than that they don’t want to know what is true. Even now, even when the risks of a nuclear war are rising over intersecting crises in the Ukraine and North Korea, America’s citizens remain too easily charmed by their suffocating national politics of gibberish and chicanery. To finally rescue this declining American democracy from a population that insists upon its own collective defilement, We the people will require nurturance by a suitably philosophical spirit. Recalling the philosopher Karl Jaspers,[27] it is a spirit that openly rejects any witting destruction of American education and intellect by always-ubiquitous forces of anti-reason.[28]

               “Seditious conspiracy” is not just a matter of US criminal law and jurisprudence. It describes what happens whenever an “unphilosophical spirit” is allowed to displace core human obligations of intellect and mind. Now looking ahead to a more expressly chaotic world of nuclear proliferation and genocidal threats, such an allowance could no longer be accepted as tolerable. At one time or another, it would prove insufferably lethal.

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[1] See, by this writer, Louis René Beres, at Princeton:  http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/article/2018/06/a-core-challenge-of-higher-education

[2] The Founding Fathers of the United States were intellectuals. As explained by American historian Richard Hofstadter: “The Founding Fathers were sages, scientists, men of broad cultivation, many of them apt in classical learning, who used their wide reading in history, politics and law to solve the exigent problems of their time.” See Hofstadter’s Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1964), p. 145.

[3] See by this writer at Oxford University Press: Louis René Beres, https://blog.oup.com/2011/08/philosopher-king/

[4] For philosophical background of Realpolitik, see, by this author, Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: US Foreign Policy and World Order, Lexington Books, 1984; and Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy, Lexington Books, 1983. Regarding this background in law or jurisprudence: “Right is the interest of the stronger,” says Thrasymachus in Bk. I, Sec. 338 of Plato, THE REPUBLIC (B. Jowett tr., 1875).  “Justice is a contract neither to do nor to suffer wrong,” says Glaucon, id., Bk. II, Sec. 359.  See also, Philus in Bk III, Sec. 5 of Cicero, DE REPUBLICA.

[5] See by this writer, Louis René Beres, at Horasis (Zurich): https://horasis.org/looking-beyond-shadows-death-time-and-immortality/

[6] Freud was always darkly pessimistic about the United States, which he felt was “lacking in soul” and a place of great psychological misery or “wretchedness.” In a letter to Ernest Jones, Freud declared unambiguously: “America is gigantic, but it is a gigantic mistake.” (See: Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (1983), p. 79.

[7]See by this writer at Yale Global: Louis René Beres, https://archive-yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/trump-and-destruction-american-mind

[8] The origin of this term in modern philosophy lies prominently in the writings of Arthur Schopenhauer, especially The World as Will and Idea (1818). For his own inspiration (and by his own expressed acknowledgment), Schopenhauer drew freely upon Goethe. Later, Nietzsche drew just as freely (and perhaps still more importantly) upon Schopenhauer. Goethe also served as a core intellectual source for Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y’ Gasset, author of the prophetic work, The Revolt of the Masses (Le Rebelion de las Masas (1930). See, accordingly, Ortega’s very grand essay, “In Search of Goethe from Within” (1932), written for Die Neue Rundschau of Berlin on the occasion of the centenerary of Goethe’s death. It is reprinted in Ortega’s anthology, The Dehumanization of Art (1948) and is available from Princeton University Press (1968).

[9]The extent to which some young Americans are willing to go to “belong” can be illustrated by certain recent incidents of college students drinking themselves to death as part of a fraternity hazing ritual. Can there be anything more hideously pathetic than a young person who would accept virtually any measure of personal debasement and risk in order to “fit in”?

[10] “It is getting late; shall we ever be asked for?” inquires the poet W H Auden in The Age of Reason. “Are we simply not wanted at all?”

[11] Said candidate Donald Trump in 2016, “I love the poorly educated.” This strange statement appears to echo Third Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels at Nuremberg rally in 1935:  “Intellect rots the brain.”

[12] This brings to mind the timeless observation by Creon, King of Thebes, in Sophocles’ Antigone: “I hold despicable, and always have anyone who puts his own popularity before his country.”

[13] “The mass-man,” we may learn from Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y’ Gasset (The Revolt of the Masses, 1930), “has no attention to spare for reasoning; he learns only in his own flesh.”

[14] In this connection, cautions Sigmund Freud: “Fools, visionaries, sufferers from delusions, neurotics and lunatics have played great roles at all times in the history of mankind, and not merely when the accident of birth had bequeathed them sovereignty. Usually, they have wreaked havoc.”

[15] “The crowd,” said Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, “is untruth.” Here, the term “crowd” is roughly comparable to C.G. Jung’s “mass,” Friedrich Nietzsche’s “herd” and Sigmund Freud’s “horde.”

[16] See by this writer, Louis René Beres, at Modern Diplomacy:  https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/12/01/living-on-mountains-antecedents-of-a-dignified-and-secure-world-order/

[17]We can reasonably forgive the apparent sexism of this term, both because of the era in which it was offered and because the seminal European philosopher meant this term to extend to both genders.

[18] See by this writer, Professor Louis René Beres, at e-Global, The University of California: https://globalejournal.org/index.php/global-e/february-2020/limits-long-distance-romance-risks-catastrophic-war-north-korea

[19] For accounts by this author of nuclear war effects, see: Louis René Beres, Apocalypse: Nuclear Catastrophe in World Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980); Louis René Beres, Mimicking Sisyphus: America’s Countervailing Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1983); Louis René Beres, Reason and Realpolitik: U.S. Foreign Policy and World Order (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1984); and Louis René Beres, Security or Armageddon: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (Lexington, Mass., Lexington Books, 1986). Most recently, by Professor Beres, see: Surviving Amid Chaos: Israel’s Nuclear Strategy (New York, Rowman & Littlefield, 2016; 2nd ed. 2018).

[20] See: https://www.discovermagazine.com/mind/why-are-americans-getting-unhappier

[21] In an additional irony, these already unsatisfactory kinds of education will be supplanted by even more intrinsically worthless forms of learning. Most notable, in this regard, is the almost wholesale shift to online education, a shift made more necessary and widespread by the Covid-19 disease pandemic, but unsatisfactory nonetheless.

[22] The term is drawn here from the Spanish existential Jose Ortega y’ Gasset, especially his classic The Revolt of the Masses (1930).

[23] “There is no longer a virtuous nation,” warns the poet William Butler Yeats, “and the best of us live by candlelight.”

[24] As used by ancient Greek philosopher Plato, the term “virtuous” includes elements of wisdom and knowledge as well as morality.

[25] Carl G. Jung eagerly embraced the term “soul” following preferences of Sigmund Freud, his one-time mentor and colleague. Also, says Jung in The Undiscovered Self (1957): “The mass crushes out the insight and reflection that are still possible with the individual, and this necessarily leads to doctrinaire and authoritarian tyranny if ever the constitutional State should succumb to a fit of weakness.” American readers should detect in this last clause the seditious events of January 6, 2021.

[26]Although this present consideration has been offered as a pièce d’occasion, it also has much wider conceptual applications and implications.

[27]Jaspers notes elsewhere, in Reason and Anti-Reason in our Time (1971): “The masses have followed the magician again and again. The fraud has been perpetrated by the promise of absolute knowledge…An aura of magical efficacy has been produced.” In present-day United States, the defiling sway of a former presidential “magician” endures, plausibly with grievous long-term consequences.

[28] In a newly published book by Stanley Corngold, The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton (Princeton University Press, 2022), the author states in explanation: “Mann cites the absorption of the educated classes by the masses, the simplification of all functions of political, social, economic and spiritual life.”  Thomas Mann calls this process “Barbarization.” In some respects, his argument is reminiscent of an earlier work by Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y’Gasset, The Revolt of the Masses (1930), especially his chapter on “The Barbarism of Specialization.”

Strengthening Democracy: Future and Transformation of Political Leadership

 

Reflection Paper on the Future and Transformation

of Political Leadership:

QUALITY - ETHICS - NORMATIVITY

I.   Background

II.    'Enlightenment': Actualization, Renewal, Ensuring

III.   LDBO, Parliamentarism, Federalism (GE and EU)

IV.   "Coopetition": Transition to 'Integrated Market Economy'

V.   Recommendations

I.   Background

After more than 70 years of democratic political leadership in the German and (western) European societies, the forces of necessary perception, control and future-oriented design of mechanisms and processes of ruling / governing are, if not exhausted, at least "used out" and must be put to the test. In the end, governing was to be identified more as reacting, representing and administering daily political demands.


In this way, the form and substance of government drift dangerously apart and can only be brought into an appropriate balance and consistency through clarifying self-improvement and self-critical qualification. Then, instead of just confirming political "realities" according to surveys, political leadership can again correspond to their actual functionality / responsibility: to understand political determinants and normativity as factors of consistent development dynamics and progressing processes of free societies and to master them in a coordinating manner.

This applies all the more as today, in contrast to 1980 et seq., there are clearly more and more far-reaching structural conflict and crisis developments. Freedom, the rule of law, and democracy are indisponible on the one hand, and their continued existence has become extremely fragile both internally and internationally oon the other hand. Authoritarian governments and dictatorships are extremely inhuman, at the same time highly "efficient" and like to see themselves as winners in the so-called competition of systems, which increasingly leads to "democratorship" (formally democratic, factually dictatorial). The pathological finding of this condition can be classified under: quantitative-materialistic based nihilism! In addition, the short-sighted, destructive use of so-called "artificial intelligence" provides the mastery of technocratic-bureaucratic enforcement capacity, the ability to "guillotine" individual freedom on a massive scale - far beyond free and international legal systems.

At the same time, crises and conflicts are usually man-made and consequently indispensable opportunities and promising challenges for substantial further development in the sense of self-renewing power from (inner) individual and social (self-) awareness: the innovation of the social contract related to human dignity, the return to the human image contained in the Basic Law and the order superordinate to it, the so-called free-democratic basic order (fdBO).

Thus, critical-creative, organizational-political definitional achievements, especially as adjustment of future and leadership ability, coincide with necessary social transformation achievements: proactive design of innovative social process control, updating and a priori facilitation of crises and conflicts within the framework of strategic-visionary, political normativity and legitimation systems. - The following three subject areas form the central, substantial potential for initiating and consistently qualifying the internally and externally effective transformation process (outlined briefly):

II.   'Enlightenment': Actualization, Renewal, Ensuring

1   Innovative ways to strengthen individual awareness of freedom as the source code of mental and intellectual inner guidance - based on the historical experiences of the "external" freedom fight: Recovering individual freedom of action from internal substantial reflection and ethical justification of external development spectra and their qualified mastery according to identical, reasonable thinking and emphatic feel.

2   (Inner) freedom as a spiritually guided emancipation process from the formal conditions to the determinants of individual and social implementation: This emancipation is still an open process of "completion" and a central determinant of future social development. The outer becomes the consequence of the inner freedom, truthfulness, integrity, transparency, identification, verification.

3   From this, not only an appropriate culture/educational policy and reconnection with social processes can be derived, but all the more intellectual quality saving in the area of ​​political leadership and personnel development; "Benchmarking" in particular of intellectual and human capacity / excellence as a constitutive condition of state responsibility within the framework of empowerment: self-reflection and faculty of judgment - independent of formal and content-related (power) political positions, ideologies and timely half-value knowledge of power.

4   Associated with "enlightened" political leadership is the de-economization, de-materialization and de-monetization of the social concept of performance as a humane quality generation of interaction processes in innovative-creative cooperation societies. Above all, an ethical normativity is created that is a convincing, sustainable alternative to: quantitative-technocratic nihilism, authoritarian-dictatorial "equal treatment", creeping erosion of formerly free societies towards "democratorship". The political leadership will then again understand statehood as empowering free societies and processes and coordinate them in a responsible and future-oriented manner - lean, competent and creative-visionary.

5   The "physical" resonance space of societies is thus reconnected with metaphysics, and at the same time understood as a privileged source of "productivity". The focus is no longer on the formally acting egocentric and political power, but on the transpersonal human being: responsibility and discourse ethics instead of pure benefit and consensus ethics, awareness and being instead of having, joy instead of fear, self-determination instead of heteronomy only, creative domination instead of "impoverishment" , free design instead of compensation, quality instead of just quantity - if and to the extent that political leadership is primarily understood as "leading by example" (Gandhi).

III.   LDBO, Parliamentarism, Federalism (GE and EU)

1   After almost 75 years of German constitutional reality on the basis of the Basic Law and 'Germany in Europe', an analysis must be carried out in particular with regard to the desired future viability: Are the basic political functionalities still in coherence and concordance with the normative functions of the Basic Law, but above all with the so-called 'free-democratic basic order (ldbo)?

2   This analysis and evaluation is a key prerequisite for programmatic organizational-political classification and future adjustment of political will. Normative, regulatory and legitimation functions are central pillars of strategic political leadership, daily political requirements are to be balanced with them and not vice versa: the derivation of normativity and legitimation from (assumed) political reality describes the smooth transition to "democratorship". This is to be averted and neutralized with high alert vigilance if the parameters of the ldbo are also indisposable as action paradigms, for example in the case of crises and conflicts, and are enforced without exception. Because in every day-to-day political re-action, only the directed action component reflecting the ldbo is strategically normative.

3   The policy analysis should first be set up in the area of ​​ parliamentarism. Not only the coherent, consistent functioning of the separation of powers and/or questions of representative / direct democracy (e.g. mixed forms) are actually to be checked for their future viability in accordance with the ldbo and Basic Law. For example, the so-called faction discipline as a possible paralysis of the individual decision of conscience is central. Above all, however, the parliamentarism and its functional mechanisms in the context of German EU membership must be closely correlated with the parameters of the ldbo:

The European democratic deficit caused by "idle runs" or vacuums of legitimation in the context of European cooperation - currently a purely intergovernmental coordination of "European governing" - can only be overcome in the sense of an integrated European future on the basis of parliamentary governing through the political will and implementation of European sovereign statehood to be founded:

4   A federation of the “United States of Europe” with comprehensive sovereignty, at least based on the example of the Federal Republic of Germany, has a future if the previous European parliamentarism is significantly modernized and adapted in terms of the constitution and the rule of law: through the introduction of a two-chamber system after the French-German one role model. In addition to the directly elected EU Parliament (with a free mandate), an EU Senate should be established (on the basis of a charter or constitution), then equipped with a direct mandate analogous to the US type. The basis of the EU Senate is the 'Europe of the Regions'; their representatives / senators are made up primarily of committed civil society, business, culture and, secondarily, representatives of political parties. This is the only way to create real political power for the EU. (See annex, separate introduction to European governing: EU Senate)

5   With regard to the further, essentially deepening development of Europe, it is quite appropriate to assume that only the complete dlbo-securing establishment of a European parliamentarism - with the 2nd chamber: EU Senate - will also guarantee a contemporary and future-proof European sovereign statehood also in terms of power politics will. To date, so-called "spill-over effects" and ultimately only external pressures have led to European unification steps / semi-cohesion.

A fully completed whole 'from within' with all constitutional functionalities, this development of the EU into the "United States of Europe" is still pending. The Federal Republic of Germany is called upon from the center and federal historicity of its ldbo to generate this process as a driving force and to lead it to efficient and qualified success in the middle/long term.

So the first step is the constitution-based introduction of a holistic European parliamentarism. This presupposes overcoming the semi-European facticity emancipatively and creatively, finally tackling a quantum leap in innovative qualification. In full consequence, this means at the same time that the ldbo-based United States of Europe does not have to be identical to the EU, but rather develops and constitutes itself concentrically within the framework of the existing EU contractual mechanisms (“increased cooperation” and “different speeds of development”). The significantly increasing centripetalism of the EU is finally turned transformatively through this integration achievement into the necessary federally based centrality and future-opening, real coherence from within.

IV.   "Coopetition": Transition to 'Integrated Market Economy'

1   The 'social market economy' is by far the most successful model in German and international societies: free competition on the basis of a socially responsible model to ensure the balance between freedom and material justice. The welfare state became the “synallagma” of the rule of law and thus at the same time a central mechanism for safeguarding social peace as the “substructure” of the ldbo. This equilibrium between the functions of capitalism and social ownership, between individual freedom and social justice is the raison d'être of a humanistic society.

2   The question therefore needs to be asked: is the so-called strong state above all the well-funded welfare state? Are the necessary bureaucratic-technocratic economic controls and overstretching of state interventions viable for the future? Is the individual economic subject as a social “nuclear force” still part of the deliberative determination of justice? Is the assumption of material responsibility by the state to the current extent compatible with the ldbo? Has the majority society established itself in a paternalistic statehood that has assumed extensive responsibility beyond the level of empowerment? What kind of distributive justice does the legitimate authority of the state encompass? But above all: How can a normativity of regulatory power (government interventions also in the market economy) in accordance with the ldbo be legitimized? What is the basic measure of ldbo conform self-responsibility?

3   Distributive justice (or chances of generating it) only works within the framework of justice. This process of social consideration can be fulfilled if freedom is understood as a space of determinants and security as a space of existential conditions. Material security is also a condition of freedom, but never its reason. Because freedom determines the meaning and degree of security and controls the liberal, creative and innovative potential of individuals and societies. Only then justice, including distributive justice, can be developed.

Within the framework of the ldbo, the state is authorized to regulate the framework conditions and/or economic entity in the area of ​​infrastructure. Above all, the market regulates the justice of distribution and performance, which is the basis for the the social market economy became the direct systemic equivalent of the ldbo in the area of ​​economy/ecology.

4   At the same time, it can be percieved that the extremely successful social market economy "permits" at least a saturation of bourgeoisie and system agents dimension, which increasingly poses a threat to progress and innovation. Due to the persistence of the material factual, social challenges of innovation, environmental justice and digitization cannot be met, especially against the background of globalization. Materially based egoism and technocratic-quantitative "sufficiency" - stabilized by rampant bureaucracy - cause the opposite of future viability and stability.

However, the 'will and vision' of the future absolutely need desired, targeting creative power and social freedom in order to ensure that the individual free performance potential can actually be used and made available as a driving force. In particular in the areas of environment/energy, internal/external security, security of supply/health and digitization (AI), systemic and structural undesirable developments and catch-up processes are urgent in order to transform in quantum leaps of free productivity and human intelligence use in open and transparent social (scientific) dialogues.

5   The creative ability required for this is to be achieved in an appropriately politically guided, at the same time socially facilitated process of qualification, de-monetization and – as a result – adequate humanization of interaction and performance. Cross-check: The future of authoritarian / dictatorial societies cannot be secured, since creative (adaptation and progress) dynamics are denied first of the individual human being.

Free and social economic activity must be transformed from the traditional polarity – employer / employee – of social partnership; The same applies to 'product versus consumer', in order to understand productivity in particular as a creative solution and service. Competition is not only competition, but according to the basic idea of ​​the market economy as cooperative "serving" in the sense of generating social prosperity with sustainable creative capacity and as such "to be priced in". The consumptive logic of 'competition' has to include the quality of the solution and the performance conditions as well as ethically relevant classifications. Above all, this system logic corresponds to the human need for solidarity, to cooperate freely and to network in a solution-oriented manner (regional and global, analogue and digital): "coopetiton instead of competition"!

6   This process of "enlightened" humanization, especially in the work and service sectors, is to be facilitated "from above" as an ethical quality in a politically leading manner - sustainable, non-ideological, without "thinking fashions" and in accordance with reason.

After humans entered the so-called Anthropocene a few decades ago (humans as a largely decisive creative and effective power on “their” planet), the demands on their (self-) responsibility have increased exponentially. Primarily intellectual-creative performance potential and intelligence meet the requirements for mastering these challenges as life and interaction processes. These spiritual potentials can neither be replaced by so-called artificial intelligence nor are they a kind of luxury of the “aesthetics” of the bourgeoisie, but have become a non-conditional determination of human (survival) life. A further/longer subordination of this knowledge is fatal and forfeits the realistic chances of a human(e) future in freedom, wealth, and peace.

The (re)connection of the "superstructure" with the "substructure" is urgently needed and their polarity is to overcome through integration. In this understanding, the social to an 'integral market economy' is to furtherly to be developed, and the economic subject as cause and effect is to be understood consistently as a human being. For this it is necessary to develop a normative order, which is then to be initiated and communicated “from above” as an innovative, forward-looking quality in professional, socially guided political-economic dialogue processes guided by determined political leadership.

V.   Recommendations

As a consequence of the evaluation and knowledge as above, the question of quality guaranteeing of political leadership processes, which is not only a question of working methods, but also a principle one, has to be answered through the a priori reflection and strategic correlation of real developments.

As a rule, governing – in the national and international context – is always mastering the demands of day-to-day politics. Nevertheless, governing is mostly reduced to reacting: the "normativity" just of the factual is ruled. Reacting, on the other hand, only produces governing when re-action is directly linked to strategic action (or non-action). The actio describes the inner quality of the driving force, the determination to use the day-to-day political occasion freely and sovereignly in order to force strategic political governance - with democratically required consideration of consequences and consistency, transparency and normative legitimacy.

This type of qualified governing, which is determined and creates occasions (from within), secures and develops real democratic processes. To develop this awareness of good leadership and good governance in a sustainable, qualitative manner, the following organizational policy recommendations are proposed - based on the topics discussed as above:

Based on the example of a think tank, a respective organization's advisory board should be established and set up in the sense of a permanent expert commission for short-term and long-term policy recommendations (including impact assessment and early warning, etc.), reporting directly to the executive committee and board:

Ethics Committee

Ensuring ethical legitimacy and security, qualification of freedom processes, good governance




EU Integration Advisory Board

Parliamentarism reform, establishment of an EU Senate, EU Governance (see attachment)

Integral economic commission

Reform process and facilitation of the further development of the social to a so-called 'integral market economy'

Author: ©  J Michael Heynen

NOMOI INSTITUTE - 03|22

https://nomoi.webnode.com/

A N N E X 

Policy Paper on Transformative European Governing:

Development and Impmenetation of a Bicameral System

Reform of European Parlamentarism: EU Senate

The member states of the EU shape the legislative and executive process of a just coordinated governing. This applies systematically, but not automatically functionally: governing first requires the design of political processes, then - derived from this - their implementation and administration; and that furtherly applies to European governing: just the coordnative addition of national policies does not describe the necessary transformative meta-level / meta-governance of European (!) governing, but merely a supranational coordinating cooperation and intergovernmental agreement. And the following also applies: European governing normatively means to control the societal decision-making processes and their implementation, not primarily the coordination of respective national and/or economic interests.

In short: For sustainable European governing, the EU needs a political reconnection between those who rule and those who are governed, i.e. a qualifying, transformatively deepening of its decision-making processes: institutional democratization and proactive politicization based on excellence in instititional ethics.

This requirement can be met most effectively by institutionally and functionally strengthening and completing EU parliamentarism in accordance with the classic free-democratic basic order within the framework of a bicameral system: by additionally setting up and establishing an upper house, i.e. an EU Senate.

Such an expansion and deepening of the institutional EU structure by an EU Senate should ensure the integration of the following transformative, complementary functionalities:

1.   Reconnection of the political decision-making processes of the EU institutions with the European societies through the establishment of a direct, imperative system of representation: direct-democratic legitimation and political "commissioning" of the senator; this syndicates the horizontal and mediatizes the vertical political decision-making in the EU parliamentary governing process.

2.   Implementing a bicameral system for the introduction of a kind of "hybrid" parliamentary governing: the generation of comprehensive European political legitimacy on the basis of "competing" mandates via direct and indirect representation.

3.   Political decision-making within the framework of the EU Senate is not primarily carried out by the so-called political parties, but essentially by individuals, associations, NGOs, companies, dedicated groups and associations etc. with an active will to shape things within the political spectrum of the free-democratic basic order .

4.   The geopolitical grid of the EU Senate is based on the existing European regions (roughly analogous to the description by the EU Council of Regions); national, formal areas of validity in the EU are not the basis of the spatial definition.

5.   The introduction and implementation of the functionalities of an EU Senate should also be ensured primarily on the basis of internet communication, the necessary digitization and use of artificial intelligence, i.e. through so-called e-government/governance, in order to ensure extensive participation beyond analogue political communication and to organize and facilitate inclusion within the framework of a proactive European democratization dynamic.


European governing in particular is highly complex and, in this sense, of course, cannot be additionally quantified through expansion, but rather to be further developed in a targeted manner through qualitative deepening. It is therefore incumbent on an EU Senate to be set up not only to strengthen tried-and-tested parliamentary and federal structures and real subsidiarity, but also to promote the expression, dynamics and participation of the citizens to focus and moderate their political will and to ensure the transparent implementation.

On this path, the path towards an actual Europe of the citizens (not of the states), the EU can not only democratically reform and transformatively legitimize itself, but at the same time reconnect the future of the EU with its historical task: a real European citizens' movement for the establishment of a federal system of the United States of Europe.

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©  0 3 – 2 0 2 2    J   M I C H A E L   H E Y N E N

N O M O I   I N S T I T U T E   |   B A D E N – B A D E N

SPIRIT AND WORLD ORDER

SPIRIT AND WORLD ORDER

World Order Policy from the Top:

Real Change as the Power Dissolution of Action-Elites

and Transformation through Spirit-Elites - Reflections

by J Michael Heynen

____________________

S P I R I T

Spirit is first! Spirit is in everything; nothing is without the potential of the spirit/mind. Spirit is the All-One, the absolute. Spirit rests in itself and effects out of itself. And: Spirit leads! Spirit is idea, process, reason of being. Spirit is to activate and to experience through enlivening; a life without spirit is meaningless potential.

Spirit is pure creativity, independent, free, universal - unconditional source code of life. Spirit is at least the first and last cause, contains the initiatory energy towards the big bang, facilitates life and dissolves it, redeems after decline in order to initiate again - as the foundation of the eternal and whole.

Spirit is wholeness, fusion of all time and space, is the most comprehensive energy and information, is omnipresent and omnipotent, unlimited and equally limitless. Spirit is pure metaphysis, is the essence of the universe, the universal substance, the immanence of every consciousness, and the objective norm sui generis, the forming cause of the cosmic constant, the metacode of cosmic law.

Spirit is an infinite space of transcendence, to enter into, to connect with its substance, to recognize its forms, to internalize - especially for humanoid essences in process, for persons on the path of development to human being, for the essential quantum leap in the governance by the emancipating self.

As the greatest, comprehensive nominator, navigator and determinator, the mind is always a priori and normative and predestines the individually recieving and transcending human self. Spirit is the centrally regulating power of the individual‘s percieving and recognizing consciousness, the intelligible revelation as the supreme condition of human's adequate being.

H U M AN

As a human being to connect with the spirit means to enlive spirit and to spiritualize life, to understand the reason and the determination of the real existence, to unfold consciousness, to fill the senses with meaning and to ennoble them, furtherly to develop and to transcend.

Spirit ennobles the finding and connecting thinking and feeling, makes the developing person a human being. Because only the hybrid and as such most exclusive essence of human being - the disposition over both, mind and body – emerges and sustains the process of constant balancing as an equilibrium, working from inside to outside.

The carrier of the spirit is the individual human self: the highest instance of inner leadership, the cause and the driving force of the 'coincidentia oppositorum', the coincidence of the 'opposites' as the fusion procesing of above and below, of the inner and the outer, of the metaphysis and the physis,of idea and reality, of consciousness and being, of material and immaterial.

The individual self is the enliving unity, the activating variation of coagulated spirit/mind, it initiates, develops, transforms the person to a human according to his dignity. The self of the transpersonalizing individual becomes the cause of a direct as well as a cosmic connection with the creation, as a whole as individual. The self is absolute, infinite, free, and its own and infinite cause of creative power.

The transcendence of human's spirit/mind-connected self describes his way of determining the conditions of his existence according to his individual dignity. The transcendent human becomes part of eternity, the universal process, the cosmic law; he becomes the co-creative, individual "analogue" of the all-one, the spirit.

Yet, the human's questioning striving to understand the conditions of his existence and, above all, to govern it transcendently - happiness, salvation, enlightenment, etc. - , seduces him to the present, to devote himself to detours or errands, to egomaniacal omnipotence and egocentric projetions of god given by „human prophets“ in order supposedly to increase, to intoxicate.

In this way, the human's highest and most sublime power, his transcendence, is absorbed by that and fixed in the exterior, his further development is blocked. Fears and superstition, ideologies and theologies, material attachement and disconnection from the self, and thus from the potentials of the spirit, enslave the person, eliminate the chance and the potential to become a human.

Instead of inner knowledge and realisation: faith-made - from loss of paradise to apocalypse - becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is not possible that way to develop beyond the state of a person. This is to achieve only transpersonally: as a human - individually guided by the spirit. The saving way out for a human and to the human is exclusively based on the individually transcendending reconnection with the spirit: by spiritualization of life and thus the enliving of the spirit.

Meditation, contemplation, reflection, cognition, introspection, involution, etc. - the leap into the being-alone, into the all-one-being: to be for itself and from itself, to open oneself into the spiritual, to be received in the sphere of the spirit and to receive from it, to appreciate the spririt as the supreme authority and the stipulaton of being.

This moment becomes to be a momentum, in which mind and body connect, recognize, and balance out. The spirit dissolves the one-sided leadership of an experiencing recognition of external conditions of reality as the supreme "instance", the levels beyond the material-physical clear the liberating realization to the pure determination through and out of mind. An expanding and a freely recognizing consciousness develops the necessary sovereign and critical self-perception as a precondition for processing the learning perception of the other essence as well: reaching adulthood, the human forms his adequate human world.

H U M A N   W O R L D

A human world - beyond pure existence - is the cooperative and constructive coexistence and, above all, the spiritual-based connection between persons who have freely decided to coordinate the conditions of their existence as human beings, following their spiritually determined foundation of being.

This, of course, is more than the sum of all actively contributing, transpersonal individuals, that is the qualitatively creative constellation and configuration of emancipated humans in concordance with the universal space of free will. The communicative and social person firstly fulfills itself as a human being essentially in and out of the bond with his own and the self of the other essence.

A world, which lives itself in opposition to that, a purely quantitative world of persons, lives under and out of the formal supremacy of paternalistic, superelevated states‘ power as a diffuse, self enslaving mass of persons which obstructs the path of human development and paralyzes human related interaction.

Egocentric fixation on the material dominates and counteracts becoming a human, the "absolutized" conditions of the physical world block the potentials of metaphysical determination of a human world. And the situation is similar in a technically dominated world, which, in the context of "artificial intelligence" maintains a kind of „transhumanization“ instaed of consistently to develop the transpersonal individuality of human beings as the supreme and central maxim of their planning and future designing. Because spirit controls and forms every kind of intelligence, intellect and intelligible knowledge, a computer or robot might replace the one or other person, but not human beings.

At the same time – still a quantitative minority - a public, connected with spirit, is emerging, building a human world being firstly initiated by spirit-led elites and expanding through inspiration. A world thus created by and for humans – first turning away from the material-quantitative "mass world" - makes the processing change into the self-leadership out of spirit. This movement of emancipation describes a sort of "Copernican turn" into the real worthiness of human beings and his societal development, a sort of "quantum leap" into a human world of societies, first from within, out of guidance by the spirit.

S O C I E T Y   W O R L D

A world of human beings out of the inner leadership of the self and the individual determination by the Spirit, forms peaceful coexistent society world, according to the minimum requirements of mutual respect. At the same time, each individual society world is carrier of open-minded and co-creative connectedness.

This connectedness of people in societies as well as between the society worlds offers infinite opportunities for growth and development, it allows the implementation of exponential creativity from mutual perceptive and learning exchange to sustaining collaboration.

At the beginning, a policy/polity development is still necessary in and between society worlds. Analogous to universal law, a co-creative social contract may arise, in particular as a basis for the establishment or continuation of systemic entities. As long as this form seems to be necessary, states or groups of states can be constituted in order to coordinate the generation and development processes of culture, law and diplomacy - states as service providers of respective societies and their external relations.

The focus is on processes of governing and governance. Governing is a coordinating service for the purpose of individually evolving social/societal worlds. The central focus of every planning and action is the human being. And diplomacy is the central field with methods of communication, moderation, and conflict mediation to transform and facilitate transitions and development processes. In this way, even for the smallest social/societal units, the space is guaranteed to unfold itself, at the same time freely and co-creatively with others - in cultural diversity and legal equality.

Politics and governance as a service in and between society worlds require, above all, clear legitimation and substantial implementation, based on stringent dialogue and rational decision-making processes. Therefore human related and adequate transformation processes by governing are inherently non-violent, since they must correspond to humane free will formation, in order to be legitimated even in individual cases.

State power is always a borrowed social/political power within the framework of a freely constituted order. Misuse and thus illegitimate use of state power dissolves the ground of state existence or dissolves the form from the society world essentially substantiating the state. Also, parliamentary democracies are obviously not immune to it. For already the reasonably unjustifiable use of structural, psychically mediated violence is, above all, the direct expression of toxic, pathological politics and misdirected as well as incompetent government - in sharp contrast to the central coordination and domination functions of human-friendly social/societal worlds.

By that, the current state of the international policy systems is described: high anarchic tendency and susceptibility to fascist, egomaniacally projected destruction as well as obstruction by state failures and incompetence of formal and quantitatively legitimate personnel. The generation of governing, based on pure materialism and utilitarianism, just focuses on external, manipulable, and gross-structural conditions of the real worlds of life degenerating into pure Darwinism on a global scale.

The resulting, globally effective, collective regress has reached significant proportions, in particular pseudo-legitimated by resistant beliefs and world saving messianisms, in order to keep life bearable in it‘s system-conditioned functioning. Already existing, largely codified - but mostly ineffective - principles as cultural and legal shaping models of human order and peace for the irreversible development of a human and environment-friendly world of life are not used or even intentionally bypassed in order to avoid progressing peaceful-coexistent relations between the social/societal worlds.

In the "spirit of (existing) treaties" and constitutions, no reality of world politics is currently being conceived; in an incompetent attitude, as opposed to spirit and intellect, the so-called "world order" remains caught in purely material interdependence, marked by structural violence and global as well as policy failure. Obviously, this underlying law of action is directed at enslavement and destruction of human being, since global representation systems (such as the UN) fail to establih a substantial as well as effective human based governance.

This ultimately global system‘s power immanence is sustained dominantly by corrupted, at best unconscious, and mostly semi-competent, at the same time networked persons. If they knew what they are doing, these system agents would immediately return their "responsibility". If they do not, however, they remain as dolose tools and functionaries of direct effective contempt of human beings and the distruction of resources, which are necessary for the purpose of securing the human future.

Even the post-Westphalian peace order, which for a long time was regarded as progressive, is to be spoiled, a "New World Order" was, and is thus not recognizable or attainable anyway. For a truly new world order as a free order of peace is to be introduced and shaped exclusively by spirit-led free will.

W O R L D  O R D E R

Society worlds of the human world: the orchestration of their free will-formation towards a permanent, dynamicly and humanly evolving world order will ultimately and exclusively be made out of spirit. Only this can be the fundament of their self-determination and the free securing of co-creative potentials for development: individually generated, universally connected.

The power to shape this truly new world-order is non-conditionally based on the spiritually guided human individual, in order creatively and cooperatively to meet his essential and specific as well as overall responsibility in accordance to his humane future. After long detours of the human development, it becomes clear that only this can be the kind of future securing presence which corresponds to the universal law of thought and life.

In the end, when humans start their real and maturing development and consistency of execution, no longer faith and fear, but simplicity and clarity from conscious realization and inner knowledge will shape their life. When the human puberty is abandoned, the inner being of humans becomes the temple from which the human society world order arises and matures.

In millions of variations, these inner temples will effect outwardly and radiate, mutually enrich each other in creative diversity and inspire the metamorphoses of human existence into the congenial. Each of these temples is sacred, because it‘s based on a spirit, which respects and enhances creation and life ... until the development of the world order corresponds to the human equilibrium and thus to the universal order.

The self- and world-image through and out of the human self is to be further and further developed until it first swings its entire identity in the vertical determinant, ie, the equilibrium between spirit/mind and matter begins to govern. The individual human being thus becomes the bearer and co-creator of "his" world order of inner knowledge and transcendence.

Spirit - human world | society worlds - world order: Reflections of a "Utopia"? - Likewise, free will includes to decide paradigmatically, to create and to design the world no longer from outside to inside, but finally from the inside outwards, so from top to down. Thus the human being decides from the human self about his future, even if this necessary new beginning seems to be a Utopia similar to the phase before the Big Bang.

At least, spirit always appears as a "utopia," and at the same time spirit is the essential a priori foundation of the topos, and thus especially of the nomos, ie the basicly norming consciousness of being. This is the qualitative legitimation of universal concordance and truthfulness of human-social/societal development, that is, the vertical determinant as a decisively ruling metacode of quantitative legitimation within the framework of democratic will formation.

The horizontal and the vertical, both axes of legitimation, are to be merged under the leadership of the spirit in a dynamic equilibrium and to be implemented wisely for the future of mankind. This metamorphosis then lays the foundation for a humane and the real new world order that corresponds to the dignity of human and his potential.

While the old, illegitimate "world order" increasingly paralyzes itself, the contours of the new, real world order are already "discreetly" taking place: for spirit leads from conviction and inner, quiet resonance, not from struggle. The metaphysics of the human self and its societies facilitate the inevitable change in a continuous, deductive development process. This then spirit-led presence determines the future of mankind and its planet in accordance with the creation.

The old "Elites" - pure action elites - and the immanence logic of their system functions are dissolving, and real elites - elites of spiritual governance - assume a coordinating and serving leadership of model creation, conviction, inspiration and creativity. Then the world becomes much easier and clearer, much more life-loving, and this planet also gets to be a metaphysically enlivining part of the universe. Antagonisms and polarities are increasingly solved and, in principle, the holy becomes real, "heaven and earth" merge into the human equilibrium, when it finally becomes clear: Only the human‘s free will is his kingdom of heaven!

(C) J MICHAEL HEYNEN

DUESSELDORF, 31.05.2017

TRANSLATION OF ‚GEIST UND WELTORDNUNG‘ :  

http://weltmacht-selbst.blogspot.de/2017/05/geist-und-weltordnung.html