Note on sin, ideology, persons, and states: Morality in the time of totalitarianism

Marxists who think, as Althusser did and Zizek tends to, that the subjectivity of persons is an effect of ideology are repeating in a political gesture the Christian idea that personality is sin. So is Levinas with his elevation of the Other. The twentieth century's greatest Jewish religious philosopher in this meets and repeats its greatest Christian philosophical mystic, Simone Weil.

And so too is the popular criticism of narcissism. This is hardly a new disorder, neither in its existence nor its prevalence. It is the old Hellenic and Christian idea that the self is the site above all of the meta-sin of pride or hubris.

What all of these political and ethical ideologies have in common is that in an era of totalitarian states, criticism is needed essentially of individuals. All too often, they are bad. And they are bad when they are because they are exercises in their own logic of Being. They are found guilty of being individuals by states that can sanction or exclude them, cause them to die or allow them to. States are above reproach, like historical institutions. Who can be tried and found guilty for racism or sexism? Since no one can be, politics needs to separate itself from morals, so that it can allow judgments of negation.

Maybe persons are all spiritually or intellectually 'sick'. Their individual manner of being would be their illness, which names their particularity, transforming the creative potentiality made possible by lack into the potentiality for negative externalities -- crime, poverty, failure, dysfunction laboring or consuming, or ill health--alone, which are then risks and liabilities the managers must control.

This is a secular form of original sin, just as the ultimate and unpardonable sin is denying the basic authority of the institution that represents society and the state of things: that is, the state and its ideologies. The secular equivalent of the unpardonable sin of pride that sets oneself outside of God's church is the malediction of the one who says he is not subject to the judgments of the doctors; such a person would have to be incurably psychotic and insane, because that could not be tolerated since to do so negates the system as such by denying it its authority.

The state, being sovereign, cannot be evil in a legal sense (meaning that calling it such is just not liking it) because the system of laws cannot be against the law. The state cannot be wrong; only individuals can be accused or found guilty of wrongdoing. A state can only be wrong for another state, which opposes it based on its interests. Justice applies internally to states; among themselves, they are merely competitors with interests, like the individuals that are business firms.

The state cannot be wrong (evil or sick), though a society could be; it is always above morals, because it is not a person. Like a machine, it has needs and what it demands is what is said to be necessary. One must do what is necessary. (Most seeming moral injunctions are represented as tautologies, which makes them obviously true.) But it is not healthy or sick nor moral or immoral, though it can be just or unjust. For it to be unjust means that it does not suit us. The state, being sovereign, cannot be evil in a legal sense (meaning that calling it such is just not liking it) because the system of laws cannot be against the law. The state cannot be wrong; only individuals can be accused or found guilty of wrongdoing. A state can only be wrong for another state, which opposes it based on its interests. Justice applies internally to states; among themselves, they are merely competitors with interests, like the individuals that are business firms.

What is tacitly promoted in contrast to being oneself is working at projects given not by the self but an other. In this one feels the grace Kleist attributed to (conscious) marionettes. It is as if to say: If I am not myself, who is in me and what I do but God?