Citizen

Watching the video Desirée one night with Judy-Ann, Jack was excited to call attention to Napoleon's act of crowning himself emperor. Bypassing the ecclesiastical meddleman (sic). What might this symbol mean to a 21st century welfare bum?

Jack had crowned himself citizen of a democracy in a free and rich society! Taking each word seriously.

From those who have chosen themselves, wrote Nietzsche, shall arise a chosen people. What more exact formulation for defining a true democracy?

Citizenship: not a barcode stamped on our wrists at birth; its crowning not the crowning of your little head, but the assumption of responsible full adulthood as citizen. Kant: "Freedom is the precondition for acquiring the maturity for freedom, not a gift to be granted when such maturity has been achieved." Thomas Paine: "Men should not petition for rights, but take them." It should be granted at that first crowning, a generic "brand" of citizenship/entitlement. But since that entitlement is rejected by "powers that be," it behooves one to assert.

Your crown, sir. For Jack, this was the matriculation from some years of conscientious autodidactics (studying books) and the slow ignition and development within himself of Kant's motto of the Enlightenment: Aude Sapere.

Have the audacity to act on your own wisdom! As you may guess from these terms, Jack's choice was neither solipsistic nor sociopathic: it was, rather, the deliberate subscription to a wonderful tradition, one that not only gave rise to the terms of democratic rhetoric, but lived the substantial lives from whose soil such terms sprouted and grew.

So despite all the rhetoric around such terms as citizen of a democracy in a free society, Jack's Aude Sapere wanted to recruit the term "common sense," rather an enemy term of his attention, to his assessment of a basic constitution of rights for such a citizen in a rich society: the five pillars of this constitution were free of ambiguity but needed qualifiers:

1. Sufficient nutritious food,
2. Hygienic and adequately warm private (+ sound-private) shelter,
3. Warm, durable, esthetically acceptable clothing,
4. Top quality tools or access to tools/materials, and
5. Ecological support in a sanitary infrastructure in an ecologically desirable (to the citizen) relationship with free nature.

Since these absolutely essential pillars of any democracy were not yet underwritten by governments and implemented across the board, it behove the self-appointed citizen of a democracy in a free rich society to try to implement them. "Castles in the air?" said the great anarchic Henry Thoreau, "That is where they should be. Now put the foundations under them."

How? Well, the self-crowning was the symbol: this was crowning an individual not King or enhanced so-and-so: but crowning him with his generic citizenship and therefore with his public endowment, his estate inherited from the inventors and laborers who brought at long last Cornucopia to the front door of human history. Their calling card was a report from the Four Power Summit in Geneva, 1955, printed in the prestigious Scientific American: Scarcity was over, Plenty had arrived.

Not, then, an act of personal hubris in the sense of personal aggrandizement; but rather an act of offering particularily and personification to an abstraction: reifying the generic case. Everyman claims the democratic franchise.

How, then, beyond the act of enantiodromia?

Next, by a process of mimetic magic. Welfare and its dole was the one institution and institutional process that handed out free money without demanding the sacrifice of most of one's individual time, physical, emotion and mental energy, and personal projects. Its rhetoric of course involved Calvinist shaming, and threatening-- it was sometimes punitive in carrying out its threats. But what other institution came close to offering the democratic basic rights Jack as generic citizen of a democracy in a free rich society decided were essential to give any substance whatsoever to the rhetoric of freedom and democracy? None Jack could see. The lottery foundation offered free money and thus freedom from enslavement for necessities, but as near-to-impossible wish-fulfillment dreaming-- the Deep Calvinist elect, chosen specifically by God (random chance). How appropriate to the involutions of enantiodromia that governments would promote this "God of unreachable stars" on transit posters while the more austere God of Science, ostensibly the official God, declared Plenty for all. Each and every one of us had won the lottery. We "walked on the third floor of Heaven, with stars around our ankles." Jesus, Thomas Gospel: "The kingdom... is spread upon the earth, but men do not see it."

Mimetic magic: as William James wrote:

We need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real and it will become infallibly real by growing in such a connection with our life that it will become real.

Nothing new about this--it was standard in the practice of shamanism around the world. If you want something, says the New Age guru, practice its presence.