Beyond Democracy, Or, Why Shooting The CEOs of Venal Healthcare Corporations Won’t Solve The Healthcare Hell Problem, #1.

(Marcetic, 2024)

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction

2. The Core Argument for Dignitarian Anarchism

3. Anti-Oppression, Quasi-Federalism, and How to Construct “The World As It Could Be Made.”

4. Post-Democratic Social Dynamics: DDAO, Concordar, and Carnival

5. Healthcare Hell and Universal Free Healthcare

6. Conclusion

The essay that follows will be published in three installments; this, the first installment, contains sections 1 and 2.

But you can also download and read or share a .pdf of the complete text of the essay, including the REFERENCES, by scrolling down to the bottom of this post and clicking on the Download tab.

Beyond Democracy, Or, Why Shooting The CEOs of Venal Healthcare Corporations Won’t Solve The Healthcare Hell Problem

Enlightenment is the human being’s emergence from his own self-incurred immaturity. Immaturity is the inability to make use of one’s own understanding without direction from another. This immaturity is self-incurred when its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in lack of resolution and courage to use it without direction from another. Sapere aude! Have the courage to use your own understanding! is thus the motto of Enlightenment. (Kant, 1784/1996: p. 17, Ak 8: 35)

1. Introduction

As I write this, during the week immediately preceding Christmas 2024, it has become self-evident to any reasonable person that, given the results of the November 2024 Presidential election in USA, a decisive victory by the bigot and demagogue Donald Trump, and given the widespread democratic popularity of extreme right wing and neo-fascist political movements worldwide, democracy in general, and liberal democracy in particular, especially neoliberal democracy, is deeply questionable. As I wrote in “Trump, Truth, and Logic,”

[t]he fundamental flaw in democracy and democratic politics is the malign manipulability of people’s beliefs by means of intentional illogic, misinformation, and sophistry. (Hanna, 2024a: p. 1)

A glaring example of this fundamental flaw is the profoundly wrongheaded idea that given a huge moral and sociopolitical problem like the radically insufficient and unfair healthcare system in the USA, which I call healthcare hell, the right response is to shoot the CEO of the venal corporation UnitedHealthcare (NYT, 2024a; Marcetic, 2024). Not only is owning, carrying, or using a gun in and of itself rationally unjustified and immoral because it violates respect for human dignity (Hanna, 2024b). But it’s also patently “gun crazy” to turn a gun-toting assassin into a folk hero (NYT 2024b). So it’s more than merely reasonable to look for post-democratic alternatives right here and now: it is morally and politically imperative to do so.

As I’m understanding it, the thesis of philosophical anarchism says that there is no adequate rational justification for political authority, the State, or any other State-like institution; and, correspondingly, the thesis of political anarchism says that we should reject and exit the State and other State-like institutions, in order to create and belong to a real-world universal ethical community, in a world in which there are no States or other State-like institutions. More specifically, I think that a highly original, politically radical, and if not revolutionary, then at least robustly State-resistant, State-subversive, and even outright civilly-disobedient, and yet at the same time, fully morally principled version of anarchism that I somewhat longwindedly call dignitarian existential Kantian cosmopolitan anarcho-socialism, or for short, dignitarian anarchism, very naturally flows from Kant’s moral philosophy, his philosophy of religion, and his political anthropology, or, in a word, from existential Kantian moral theology (Wolff, 1970/1998; Hanna, 2018).

Roughly, the idea is that if we take Kant’s famous injunction to have the moral courage to use your own understanding, and apply this morally courageous act not merely to “the public use of reason” (that is, to intellectual activity, writing, and speech or self-expression in the broad sense of “free speech”), but also to our individual choices, our individual agency, our shared social life, and especially to what Kant quite misleadingly calls “the private use of reason” (that is, to our social lives as functional role-players, or functionaries, within the State, including, for example, citizenship or public office), then the result is dignitarian existential Kantian cosmopolitan anarcho-socialism. Then and only then, in my opinion, can we understand the last sentence of “What is Enlightenment?” as it truly ought to be understood, namely as formulating a vision of radical Kantian enlightenment:

When nature has unwrapped, from under this hard shell [of the “crooked timber of humanity” (Kant, 1784/2007: p. 113, Ak 8: 23)], the seed for which she cares most tenderly, namely the propensity and calling to think freely, the latter gradually works back upon the mentality of the people (which thereby gradually becomes capable of freedom in acting) and eventually even upon the principles of government, which finds it profitable to itself to treat the human being, who is now more than a machine, in keeping with his dignity. (Kant, 1784/1996: p. 22, Ak 8: 41-42)

In this essay, I do three things. First, I argue for dignitarian anarchism (section 2). Second, I motivate, spell out, and defend a political methodology I call Quasi-Federalism and a corresponding procedural political principle I call Devolutionary and Dynamic Anti-Oppression (sections 3). Third, I argue directly against democracy, and more specifically, against liberal democracy, especially including neoliberal democracy, and then describe how we can replace democratic political theory with a dignitarian anarchist theory of post-democratic social dynamics (section 4). And fourth, I apply this dignitarian anarchist theory of post-democratic social dynamics to the problem of healthcare hell (section 5).

2. The Core Argument for Dignitarian Anarchism

Ironically, just as Kant himself defended the death penalty, so too, he defended Statism in his political philosophy, as formulated in the “Doctrine of Right,” the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals. But just as he was simply mistaken about the death penalty, so too Kant’s own Statist, neo-Hobbesian liberal political philosophy was simply mistaken (for more on this point, see also Hanna, 2017). On the contrary, dignitarian anarchism is true on dignitarian moral and sociopolitical grounds alone (Hanna, 2023a, 2023b).

1. Dignitarian anarchism says that there is no adequate rational justification for political authority, the State, or any other State-like institution, and that we should reject and exit the State and other State-like institutions, in order to create and belong to a real-world, worldwide ethical community, aka humanity, in a world without any states or state-like institutions.

2. All human persons, aka people, are (i) absolutely intrinsically, non-denumerably infinitely valuable, beyond all possible economics, which means they have dignity, and (ii) autonomous rational animals, which means they can act freely for good reasons, and above all they are (iii) morally obligated to respect each other and to be actively concerned for each other’s well-being and happiness, aka kindness, as well as their own well-being and happiness.

3. Therefore it is rationally unjustified and immoral to undermine or violate people’s dignity, under any circumstances.

4. By political authority I mean the existence of a special group of people, aka government, with the power to coerce, and the right to command other people and to coerce them to obey those commands as a duty, no matter what the moral content of these commands might be.

5. By coercion I mean either (i) using violence (e.g. injuring, torturing, or killing) or the threat of violence, in order to manipulate people according to certain purposes of the coercer (primary coercion), or (ii) inflicting appreciable, salient harm (e.g. imprisonment, termination of employment, large monetary penalties) or deploying the threat of appreciable, salient harm, even if these are not in themselves violent, in order to manipulate people according to certain purposes of the coercer (secondary coercion).

6. By the State or State-like institution I mean any social organization that not only claims political authority, but also actually possesses the power to coerce, in order to secure and sustain this authority.

7. And by the problem of political authority I mean: “Is there an adequate rational justification for the existence of the State or any other State-like institution?”

8. This problem applies directly to all kinds of political authority, States, and State-like institutions, from pharoahs, pre-Socratic tyrants, Athenian military dictatorships, caesars, kings, popes, and emperors, to constitutional monarchies, communist states, fascist states, religious fundamentalist states, capitalist liberal democracies, provincial or city governments, military organizations, business corporations, and universities—basically, any institution with its own army, navy, air-force, police-force, or armed security guards.

9. If it is rationally unjustified and immoral for ordinary people to undermine or violate the dignity of other people by commanding them and coercing them to obey those commands as a duty, then it must also be rationally unjustified and immoral for governments to undermine or violate the dignity of people by commanding them and coercing them to obey those commands as a duty, no matter how those governments got into power.

10. But all governments claim political authority in precisely this sense.

11. Therefore, there is no adequate rational justification for political authority, States, or other State-like institutions, and dignitarian anarchism is true, on dignitarian moral and sociopolitical grounds alone.

To make this core argument even clearer, here is the same argument, by way of a fundamental analogy.

1. It’s been well known ever since Plato’s Socratic dialogue, the Euthyphro, that what is called Divine Command Ethics is rationally unacceptable.

2. Divine Command Ethics says that God’s commands are good and right, just because God says that they are good and right, and God has the divine power to impose these commands on people, no matter what the moral content of these commands might be.

3. But this means that God can command anything, including commands that undermine or violate of the dignity of people, which is rationally unjustifed and immoral.

4. So Divine Command Ethics is rationally unacceptable.

5. Correspondingly, Statist Command Ethics says that governments’ commands are good and right, just because governments say that they are good and right, and they have the coercive power to impose these commands on people, no matter what the moral content of these commands might be.

6. In other words, governments play exactly the same functional and logical role in Statist Command Ethics as God does in Divine Command Ethics.

7. So, just as in Divine Command Ethics, God can command anything, including commands that undermine or violate of the dignity of people, so too in Statist Command Ethics, governments can command anything, including commands that undermine or violate the dignity of people.

8. Therefore, Statist Command Ethics is just as rationally unacceptable as Divine Command Ethics, and again, dignitarian anarchism is true on dignitarian moral and sociopolitical grounds alone.

This conclusion might still seem incredible to you. But please consider this.

Since the time of the pharoahs and pre-Socratic tyrants, humanly-created States and other State-like institutions have explicitly claimed to possess political authority, and then have proceeded to use the power to coerce, especially the power of primary coercion, frequently of the most awful, cruel, and monstrous kinds, thereby repressing, detaining, imprisoning, enslaving, torturing, starving, maiming, or killing literally billions of people, in order to secure their acceptance of these authoritarian claims. Even allowing for all the other moral and natural evils that afflict humankind, it seems very likely that there has never been a single greater cause of evil, misery, suffering, and death in the history of the world than the coercive force of States and other State-like institutions.

Now imagine a world without States or other State-like institutions, in which all the members of humanity freely form various dignity-respecting sub-communities built on kindness, mutual aid, personal enlightenment and rational enlightenment, and the pursuit of authentic happiness, and then freely link them all together in a worldwide network of partially overlapping sub-communities, aka the worldwide human web, aka the Kosmopolis. Isn’t that an infinitely better world than the world of States? To make this moral intuition fully vivid, simply listen (again) to John Lennon’s “Imagine.”

Jesus preached the ethical gospel of universal human love. Yet he also reportedly said:

Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s. (Matthew 22: 20-22, King James Bible)

By a crucially important contrast, dignitarian anarchism says:

If Caesar and God can command things that undermine or violate our moral obligation to treat everyone everywhere with sufficient respect for their human dignity, then why should we render anything unto them? Render unto humanity the things that respect human dignity.

But is it not obvious that this is the ethical gospel of universal human love? Like Kant, who was simply mistaken about the death penalty and also about Statism, Jesus too was simply mistaken about rendering unto Caesar and God. But that is also irrelevant to my argument. Leaving aside Kant’s mistakes about the death penalty and Statism, and leaving aside Jesus’s mistakes about rendering unto Caesar and God, just like Kant himself—and John Lennon too, for that matter—Jesus was implicitly a dignitarian anarchist. I conclude that we should reject and exit the State and other State-like institutions, in order to create and belong to a real-world, worldwide ethical community, humanity, in a world without any States or State-like institutions.

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