Sacredness and the basic social emotion

 

Modern democracies are not the government of the majority, but the government of any elite that controls the means of production and is capable of satisfying the emotional needs of the majority through a mythical- ritual axis that can be ratified in full electoral rituals  in which the subversion of order (at least as a possibility) is considered as a ceremonial principle. This principle, as we have already seen, has been in force since at least the plane of the King-God in Akitu . Obviously, the degree of anomie is reduced by the liminoid exposure of the risk in a controlled space-time . In postmodern democratic electoral campaigns , the liminoid critical opening functions as a justifying principle of the process, in which any center of power, public or private, is exposed to criticism and is held accountable. Democracy, as a narrative of the identity of human law , is measurable by the degree of openness of the liminoid space that is enabled for the representation of anomie, of the narratives that contradict it. And it is in this test where the majority of the liberal, Marxist and fundamentalist democracies of the present fail . The emotional needs of the majority are well served by whatever axis in which social emotions are properly channeled. The mythico-ritual configurations of Marxism , liberal democracy, Fascism or Religious Fundamentalisms, satisfy the needs of social emotions in an analogous way, regardless of the coherence with the economic determinations offered in each case, then, in fact, all these political forms place the social group (even that of the elite) at the center of the representation of meaning. The divergences occur with respect to the channeling of the emotion of the Seeking, in its economic facet and critical identity, as we see in the different dynamics of social flexibility and freedom of expression. Freedom of expression and flexibility for social action constitute the dynamics of the formation of social persons , and therefore, of new identity narratives that complicate the mythical-ritual axes and transform them. Resistance to such transformation gives us the degree of linkage of an axis to the principles of universal law, resistance that, due to the paradox of modernity , can come both from the theoretical soil of the great religions and from merely humanist postulates. Any ideological system that does not operate internally through a critical principle is equivalent in its operation to a religious myth . In this sense, most of the political and social institutions of today follow religious principles, however profane their interests may be. 

The identity narrative of liberal democracy separates itself from the identity determinations of the great religions , to establish in its place the will of the majority, the group emotion of unity in its most basic form, aspiring to subsume under its mythical representation- ritual any of the representations of the previous mythical planes, however, its ritual procedure (inherited from one of those traditions) as well as the myths that it needs about the person of the human being as the foundation of political power, are already impregnated by metaphysics of the planes that it subsumes, with the result of a sacralization of democracy that revitalizes, in general, the narratives of das Heilige (the Sacred), generating double mythical-ritual axes in which a space is left for a private psychological sphere, in which to give meaning to the social person of the individual that justifies the economic determinations of the axis, but without posing a threat. 

As Walt Whitman understood , the survival of liberal democracy goes hand in hand with its sacralization, with its integration with the rest of the myths that constitute the axis of the society in which it occurs, although more than an integration it is about its ability to show itself as the continuation of those other myths and determinations of the past. It implies coming to terms with them and guaranteeing a space in which they can be continued, in a liminoid manner , and without interfering with the mythical- ritual axis of the city . Athenian democracy derived its sacredness from the narrative of the free citizen no less than liberal democracy from that of the human being. In both cases, it is about a sacredness that refers not so much to individuation and individual freedom as to the social emotion (a basic neural system) that backs up human communities. From this point of view, the demos of Athens, the Volk of Nazism, or the communist proletariat, express the same basic emotion that can be articulated in different mythico-ritual axes.