SENSUS COMMUNIS

Sensus Communis.
This is of course a tongue-in-cheek entry, which I have blithely chosen as my opener in the Social section.
According to my Webster’s Dictionary [which is quoted here exclusively for its linguistic authority] the term common sense is derived from the Latin sensus communis, with the original meaning (taken from Aristotle) being: the faculty which supposedly united and interpreted impressions of the five senses.
For a more thorough elucidation of this rather technical epistemological term, I am sending the reader to the appropriate encyclopedic sources, as well as to the horses’ mouths of such superb stallions of philosophy as Aristotle and Cicero, as well as such inheritors of the glories of Antiquity as St. Thomas Aquinas and the Scottish philosopher Thomas Reid, featured in my Significant Others section. Meantime, I am drawing the reader’s attention to the fact that there is yet another common understanding of “sensus communis,” as communal spirit. Needless to say, both of these derivative understandings of sensus communis (as either common sense or communal spirit) are faulty, to say the least.
It is however remarkable how these two very imperfect constructs have found each other under the common roof of the Latin term, to the delight of all communistically-minded cognoscenti. Perhaps, as they might say, such a remarkable kinship of the communal spirit and common sense cannot be attributed to a mere accident of inadvertent misconstruction?

Collective And Other Things.
This section is devoted to the theories and practices of social organization. There are two basic types of organized society, which constitute the extremes: the completely decentralized free society and the fully centralized totalitarian society. Both types have their advantages and disadvantages, but both are quite legitimate, in terms of representing legitimate concerns and desires of their citizens. The free type is best suited for peaceful times, and tends to gravitate toward capitalistic free enterprise. The unfree type is best suited for the times of war, and is associated with state-controlled functioning, socialism, or communism.
It is a deliberate mistake, or, perhaps, an outright deception, to call the capitalistic society a free society. It may be relatively free from central control, but it is run by the power of money, and thus its unfreedom is of a different, less conspicuous type than the conspicuous unfreedom in the totalitarian society. I can go further to say that totalitarian societies tend to be actually more crudely “democratic” (in the non-Jeffersonian sense of majority domination over minority), whereas capitalistic societies, although “free” in a number of very important respects, represent the control of the wealthy over the poor, their genuine built-in democratic elements being dominated and habitually manipulated by the powerful rich, while the actual “freedoms” of the social majority are often ephemeral, and sometimes even illusory.
I hope that this highly controversial question, as well as numerous related others, will be properly covered as this section progresses.

Sociology’s Congenital Disease.
Continuing our conversation from the previous entry, we ought to reiterate that there are different ways of using the word sociology. One can even say that, in a certain sense, it had preexisted the nineteenth century, and can be traced to the great Greeks, but in this critique sociology is viewed in its specific denotation that originates from Comte and is carried on into the twentieth, and perhaps also into the twenty-first century, by his positivist (or should I say neo-positivist?) successors.
Modern sociology differs from the Comte baby in several important respects, and modern sociologists may even be somewhat contemptuous of the old dad, but only insofar as their adult ward has by now dispensed with her infant features and homegrown ways, and has entered the real world with a mind and an attitude “all of her own.”
Yet, much harder than running away from home is it to escape from the genetic code of the family, and, in this sense, sociology does exhibit a predisposition for certain inherent weaknesses, which can be attributed to a serious congenital disease.
Even a most perfunctory examination could reveal to the examiner the great prejudice lying at the heart of Comte’s sociology. According to Comte’s Law of Three Stages briefly discussed in a previous entry, there is a certain spiral of progress within the history of human intellectual development, where the theological and the metaphysical stages receive an inferior grade. Thus, utterly dismissing the importance of theology and metaphysics, Comte is virtually disallowing the importance of religion and philosophy in the modern stage of human development, however, obscuring the fact that his crowning glory of sociology is grounded in the philosophy of positivism, whereby one specific brand of philosophy is granted exclusive rights over the rest, and whatever scientific objectivity had existed before this transfer of ownership, has now been all but lost in the transaction.
Substituting a comprehensive study of society by a secularist-positivist ideological bias, sociology has also lost its potential allegiance to the truth, as we are so well aware of the fact that in all ideologies, the tenets of such ideologies get supremacy over those facts and opinions which do not support them.
The appalling disease of political correctness, which has infused modern society with a treatment-resistant strain of hypocrisy, must be recognized first. (Hypocrisy as-such had obviously existed since prehistoric times, but as I have just said, with a literal vigor, we are talking here about different strains of the infectious disease, each age and each culture receiving its own plague.) Thus, we might say that modern sociology is infected with the incurable disease of political correctness, or, changing the metaphor for additional clarity, that political correctness is the Gray Eminence behind the throne (what a shocking overstatement!) of this queen of all sciences.
In practical terms, I might first refer to the case of Soviet sociology in my time, that used to be infected with its own virus of political correctness, shallowly called Marxism-Leninism, both by the Soviets themselves and by the consenting West. Although, like all sociology, it could claim some successes in statistical studies and similar mechanical applications, its basic premise was hopelessly tainted by an anti-Western prejudice, as it implied an ethical superiority of the peculiar “Marxist-Leninist” model of society over all competition from the enemy camp.
Today, Soviet sociology is behind us, apparently forever, and good riddance, as the model it was promoting was essentially artificial, hiding behind the misleading theoretical façade a nationalistic socialist principle, whose own legitimacy could not be adequately established because of the state’s lip service to an ideology, which was declared in meaningless slogans without an intimate connection to either the perfect essence of the Soviet social principle, exemplified by its Stalinist ideal (sic!), or by the far less coherent practice of the seventy-plus years of Soviet history.
And now, as I openly hinted in that last sentence, here comes the most controversial part of my sociological conjecture, in fact, so controversial, that it should not be at all surprising that Western sociology would not touch such a suggestion with a ten-foot pole, and is, therefore, forever destined to suffer from its congenital deficiency, and here it is.
It is a simple fact of life that no mater how reprehensible the historical practice of the so-called totalitarian societies may have been, the totalitarian principle of social organization does possess a certain legitimacy, which free societies are consistently and purposefully denying to it.
Needless to say, throughout this section, and undoubtedly elsewhere, I will be returning to this controversial assertion again, and again, and again.

Haggling About Comparative Worth.
In the previous entry, a perfectly teasing proposition concerning the legitimacy of the totalitarian principle was left hanging in the air, expecting to be addressed as the first order of business in the entry to follow.
Not so fast, however, as I intend to sprinkle my argument all over the place, that is all throughout the entries of this section, keeping the final summary of my argument closer to its end.
In the meantime, I am going to proceed with other things, such as my own take on the subject of sociology, centering on the historical question of comparable worth, choosing between the society and the individual. This terribly complicated subject is now getting its first probe in the present entry.
Inaugurating this so far unconventional super-series of two sections (sic!) on the most conventional, if not altogether trite, philosophical fodder of “society versus the individual,” I cannot escape one of my opening entries, namely this one, being centered around the choice between the following two propositions: “Society is worth more than the individual” and “An individual is always worth more than the society that houses him.”
While the second proposition is philosophically dubious, and even unsustainable, except as a protest against the tyranny of the majority, the first one has its vociferous proponents, and it is much more often taken at its face value. Here is an authoritative statement by an unimpeachable authority from ancient times: “We were born to unite with our fellow-men, and to join in community with the human race.” (Cicero: De Finibus iv.) The implication here is that men are released into the world with the main purpose of “being fruitful, and multiplying.” One may even add that the Bible itself dissolves man within society, by the unexpected subtle shift from singular to plural in Genesis 1:26: “And God said, Let us make man in our image, and let them have dominion over all the earth.”
There is no point, however, in haggling over the comparative worth of society vis-à-vis the individual, or in lamenting how bad society really-really is, in absolute terms, as Schopenhauer’s self-asserting pessimism is keen on doing, in sayings, like this: “Though the world contains many things which are thoroughly bad, the worst thing in it is society.” (Schopenhauer’s Parerga: Our Relation To Ourselves.)
Making my own position unmistakably clear up front, I am reluctant to commit myself to either side of the argument, even though my harsh criticism of society suggests a certain bias against society, which I am not anxious to disavow with too much vehemence.
Indeed, I accuse society of bearing a Collective Guilt, for its frequently exhibited propensity for democracy, with its vulgar egalitarianism, as opposed to a refined elitism. Yet, I am fully aware of the society’s role as a repository of national culture, tradition, custom, and all such nourishing liquids (Collective Glory), without which an individual is incapable of bringing himself to intellectual gestation, of reaching a certain starting point, from which one can then assume a distinctive life of one’s own. In fact, it is virtually impossible for an individual to achieve an independent existence outside society. It is, therefore, incumbent upon society to help the individual in his self-assertion, to recognize and encourage individual elitism, and thus, to accept the notion that, insofar as society itself is concerned, the comparable worth of a self-asserting unit is to be judged far greater than the worth of the whole divided by the number of its units.
It is incumbent upon society to exercise some humility, even to the point of developing a healthy inferiority complex vis-à-vis the individual. However, it is essential to distinguish between the individual freedom of a superior individual to be different from society, and endowing one with political power, on the assumption of that person’s superiority. Genius has no use for political power. He may not even know what to do with it, and when he finds out, he may then become a danger to the society and to others, exactly because of his superiority, unless his political talent is used by society in advisory capacity only, with political power far removed from his impulsive grasp, and conditionally placed in the custody of mediocre minds, possessing good administrative skills.
The modern conception of representative democracy prides itself on giving a voice to all sorts of minority interests, thus presumably precluding the odious tyranny of the majority. But its intrinsic mistake is in the misunderstanding of the unresolved conflict still hidden within. Any minority group is but a small version of the society as a whole, and, insofar as the individual is concerned, whether that may be majority tyranny or minority oppression, does not make any difference whatsoever. Within the context of the conflict between the individual and society, a representative democracy, as opposed to majority rule, provides a relief in the quantity of oppression, but by no means in its basic quality.

Collective Glory.
Societies that unfairly treat their individual members, whether in millions or in single units, bear a collective guilt for their fate. But by the same token great national achievements, even those that come at a heavy price in human death and suffering (but can the former even be possible without the latter?), must also be counted toward their collective glory.
My father was a great admirer of Stalin, but he was sensible about the downside of Stalinism. When asked by an interviewer about the Gulags, he did not deny either the scale or the severity of mass persecutions, but justified them in the classic totalitarian terms: “Yes, there were arrests, there were the Gulags. But tell me, how much has our country achieved after they were no more?”
Indeed, it was under Stalin’s admittedly cruel regime that Russia had made giant steps from a literal basket case to the lofty status of one of the world’s two superpowers, the vanquisher of the German superpower in World War II. Those who have an unbounded admiration for the historical greatness of Peter the Great, comparing him favorably to Stalin, may have deliberately failed to recognize the fact that during his reign there were also massive persecutions on a no lesser scale, relatively speaking, than during the Stalin years…
Too often we pay little attention to history on the scale of centuries, and that history tells us that Collective Glory walks hand in hand with Collective Guilt, both being rooted, whether we like it or not, in unequivocal crimes against humanity.

The Tyrant And The Genius.
In case it was too vague to notice, my earlier entry Haggling About Comparative Worth, despite its opening caveat, was in fact faithful in delivering on my promise to address probably the most controversial subject of this section, regarding the legitimacy of the totalitarian principle again, and again, and again. So does the present one, even though its specific focus centers on the relationship between an exceptional individual and the ruling authority of the society in which he lives. (Incidentally, it may be worth reminding the reader repeatedly that my use of the word “he” in this or any other instance does not establish the supremacy of the masculine sex in such cases, but has a gender-neutral, generic connotation, which is taken for granted in any gender-normal culture, where this linguistic fact gives no offense to political correctness. Ironically, such gender-normal cultures have been producing women-presidents and women-leaders with a matter-of-fact nonchalance, in droves, whereas the politically-correct and gender-hypersensitive American culture does no such thing in reality, yet making a huge fuss about gender-equality in the areas where it matters the least.) My central point here is that the genius is better off under the tyranny of another genius, who is capable of recognizing and appreciating one of his own, than in a democracy, with its tyranny of the mediocrity, which is, at best, indifferent to the genius, and, at worst, jealous of him… So, here we go---
Putting one’s trust in conventional wisdom is a fairly safe occupation, in the sense that it seldom puts one at odds with the established authority, which seeks self-affirmation and general acceptance in exactly that kind of established truth. It is the paradox which unsettles the convention, acting like cold water on the bad witch of the West.
This entry reflects on the shocking paradox that there is undeniably a much better cohesion between society and the individual within any restrictive form of government than within a free society, where alienation and the question of me versus them reaches the outer limits of mutual incompatibility.
In fact, totalitarian societies are not egalitarian societies. It is always the democracy, where the votes and the polls matter more than the individuals and their private opinions. Totalitarian mobilizations of the collective effort are hostile to any form of laissez-faire, in which priceless pearls can be easily trampled into the mud by an onslaught of the market swine. Totalitarianism extracts individual worth by assigning individual tasks, while mistrusting any social subgroup to take care of its own business. In oppressing the political minorities, totalitarianism liberates the individual from their mini-oppression, placing him under the control of a single macro-entity, which is less interested in micromanagement of an individual activity, as long as that activity does not come in conflict with the political functioning of the State. Thus ironically individuals have a much greater recourse against abuse by their immediate supervisors by appealing to the state over their heads than in a democracy, where the chain of command, and the so-called “due process” play a much more important role in the functioning of society, creating institutional red tape to a far-far greater extent than in a genuine totalitarian society, such as was, at least in its principle, Stalinist Russia.
Incidentally, equating Stalinism with totalitarianism via the ‘Führer-Prinzip’ indicates a sufficiency, but not a necessity. A non-totalitarian dictatorship under an enlightened despot, still allows geniuses to fare better than they would fare in an egalitarian society, where only a successful genius is reasonably appreciated, but a penniless one gets no respect.
…Anticipating an instant furious outburst against my controversial contention, I might suggest reasoning along simpler practical lines. Who is in a better position to appreciate the genius: a tyrant or some faceless bureaucrat, an embodiment of mediocrity? The tyrant can, of course, kill the genius, in case he sees in him a threat to himself or to his power. But in the absence of such a threat he may allow the genius to thrive in an almost ideal environment, specially created for him by the tyrant’s whim, where money, to which our genius has a congenital aversion, is not even a part of the equation, whereas in a democracy money is indeed the measure of all things.

Life-Saving Diet.
Just as we are to admire a person for his wisdom of self-control, self-discipline, self-denial, in renouncing those of his freedoms, which lead to degeneration, such as the freedoms of self-indulgence, licentiousness, promiscuity, gluttony, drunkenness, and others, we might, perhaps, admire a society that exercises similar restrictions on “freedoms,” promoting something I may call “life-saving diets,” ensuring the prevention of degenerative diseases and dissipation of its collective body. Why, then, are we so keen on approving of, and even encouraging, those social freedoms that dispense with the society’s self-control, and acquiesce to the numerous ills and social vices which undermine the very fabric of a responsible society, under the aegis of social tolerance?
Here is where the title Collective Guilt prominently comes into the picture. We blame the parents for such family troubles that result from their permissiveness toward the children, yet we applaud society for similar laxness, just because it covers up its own social inadequacy under the convenient slogan of “freedom.”
A very telling point is the current situation in most of the recently liberated nations of the New Europe (or rather, in those of them, which have remained nations). Whatever their level of social oppression had been under the old regimes, under the new liberated conditions, some of their most rampant freedoms include a pandemic of child prostitution, human trafficking, and slavery, reckless neglect of the most disadvantaged groups of population, such as the children, the elderly, and the sick. This ugly side of freedom has turned me now into an angry detractor of free societies, and, malgrè moi, a defender of “reasonable oppression.” That is, in addition to my latest preference for socialism, and utter revulsion for the practices of capitalism running amok. I wish I had at least rationalized these sentiments before, when it mattered. At the very least this would have given me a worthy cause, which could have lasted me a lifetime…
The closing two paragraphs of this entry are not intended as a prescription for change,--- in fact, it would be extremely naïve for me to join the battle for a better society with less than a book-size essay on the subject. They are rather a shorthand sketch toward the overall direction, where I would have liked the things to be going, had it been at all possible. Alas, I am afraid, free societies are ever so paranoid about losing any of their precious freedoms, especially the freedom to engage in immoral behavior, while their leaders, ever so anxious to curb the people’s freedom to curtail their ambitions of greater power, could never even think of touching any of those freedoms, which do not stand in their way of attaining more power, and the freedom of immorality is in that latter category.
Which prompts me now to turn back to my wishful thinking.
The bottom line of the society’s life-saving diet, then, is not a complete denial of freedom to the individual, of course, but only a denial of freedom to behave immorally. As to who is to be the judge of morality, there is already a cultural-religious tradition in any society, which includes the authority of its major religions, a secular criterion of what social morality means. A certain social consensus can be worked out in this case, with the necessary condition that the term moral behavior must be a part of the discussion.
The issue of enforcing this moral law does not in any way encourage the state to police people’s bedrooms and closets. The difference in enforcement practices between the status quo and the suggested introduction of the moral law principle may in fact be negligible. The key point, however, is to develop a social attitude of what is okay and what is not, so that such activities as pornography and adultery, for instance, would be understood as antisocial, whereas today they seem to be socially acceptable, and even in good standing.

Many Ways To Cut The Cake.
There are many ways to cut the sociological cake: up and down, sideways and crossways (even slantways), as the crow flies, and as the Vonkavator goes. There is, however, a very scientific expression: “sociological stratum,” or “strata,” in plural, suggesting horizontal slicing as the cutting of preference.
The rationale for stratification is bubbling upon the surface. It suggests an array of distinctive correlations between the slices, somehow inviting the laws of gravity, as well as those of caste superiority or inferiority into the picture, and offers a palpable physical explanation of upward and downward mobility on the social ladder, presuming that such vertical mobility is the only game in town.
Ironically, taking the stratification social pattern as the definitive one, we immediately start seeing double, namely, two cakes, instead of one, conveying the essence of the same society. To quote my submission in a previous section of a peculiar parallel dichotomy of the rich, but powerless versus the poor, but powerful, in earlier societies, or the disturbingly intimate bond of an inevitable one-side intimidation and the other-side corruption between the ultra rich and the financially disadvantaged elected representatives of the people in a modern democracy. Putting it in simpler terms, which layer of the social cake is the President of the United States stirred into, relative to, say, the billionaires’ upper crust?
Jokingly, although not terribly amusingly, President George W. Bush once referred to the richest people in America as his “base.” This rather in-your-face joke brings to mind the inbuilt double-meaning of the word base, not just in this context, but in its general correlation of literal spatial and figurative lowliness, on the one hand, and the reverse ratio in importance, which the foundation holds, vis-à-vis the top. Here is an ambiguity, fully exploited by Karl Marx and by all radical revolutionaries in history. In palatable words, it is the lowly working class that creates all national wealth, and also pays the bulk of national taxes, thus it is the most important social stratum, whereas its spatial position at the bottom reveals a supreme unfairness, in Marx’s reasoning, although logically, the whole question of the ups and downs of the base is nothing but an illusive trick conundrum.
Returning to the question of the powerless rich and the powerful poor of the earlier ages, one may wonder why the powerful chose to stay poor and at the same time allowed the powerless to get rich. The answer is in the Christian nobility’s arrogant attitude toward money as something lowly and beneath contempt, which left the money business in the hands of those who saw nothing shameful in it and, of course, knew how to make it and how to handle it. Needless to say, when the powerful needed the money, they knew where to get it fast, whereas the “wealthy powerless” also learned when to give it away, without too much argument, “for the sake of peace.”
Without going into further details, it is clear that this division of money and power did establish a certain equilibrium within the society, whereas in the modern age of financial capitalism the power scale is heavily unbalanced by throwing the real power where the money is. In this sense, all Presidents and elected heads of state become the pawns of the money holders, and the seeing-double effect referred to above, turns out to be nothing more than a discrepancy between perception and reality.
All this time we were discussing the stratification cut of the cake, not in its non-essential elements, such as the specifics of how Western social strata can be organized and prioritized along the lines of the old Hindu caste society, but in the main principle. Now, the time has come to suggest that there are different ways of cutting the cake, all of which are more substantial than the stratification principle, and they also avoid the horizontal ambiguity.
In the course of my intense, but rather short-lived public-speaking and lecturing career, flourishing between 1983 and 1987, I used to come down with some severity on the popular concept, which contrasts people and their governments. (“It is the Soviet government which is bad,” I was often told, “but the Soviet people are really good.” To which I always replied with some annoyance that in fact the government were people too.) The “crude subtlety” of my reply used to puzzle the cliché-ridden masters of “thinking-by-numbers.” It was inconceivable to them how there could possibly be no deep divide after all between the two, that is, between the government and the people.
Unless this belief, in its application to Russia, was a result of the cold-war hysteria, and its adherents were a flock of Armageddonists, who thought that the Soviet government counted exactly six hundred and sixty-six members, and ruled over a mass of poor souls, whose goodness was, alas, not enough to have them taken in rapture, because none of them knew Jesus, it is ironic how this disconnect between the government and the people could be conceptualized.
Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address talks about a “government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” As we already have seen, there is a deceptive substitution of perceptions in the place of reality in ascribing a “supernatural” social quality to the government, as opposed to the people, or hoi polloi, to use the Greek word for the masses.
Yet, what has been even more inconceivable to me is how such a silly concept could have lingered beyond the ages of aristocracy and autocracy, the ages of a caste society, where an unbridgeable chasm had indeed existed between the educated patricians and the educated clergy, on one side, and the illiterate nobility and the likewise illiterate plebs, on the other. In modern free societies where governments are run by a faceless clique of staffers, lurking behind a façade of quite mediocre bureaucrats, whose only claim to distinction is their mastering of the art of demagoguery, the difference between ‘governments’ and the general populace has no sociological significance, unlike the real difference between the class of the independently-wealthy and all those who have to work for their paycheck. (By the same token, the sociological composition of the Soviet society throughout the post-Stalin era makes no sharp distinction between the bureaucrats at the top and the bureaucrats at the bottom.)
Continuing our examination of the Soviet society in its later years of maturity and stagnation, it is quickly becoming clear that a cross-sectional division is far more meaningful than any horizontal slicing.
The predominant rural class of villagers, as well as the class of industrial workers, are best seen as chunks of the cake, and not as layers. A special category is made up of big-city dwellers, particularly Muscovites, in Russia’s case. The so-called “social filling,” known as the intelligentsia, must not to be visualized as a layer either, while not a separate chunk, perhaps. The expression social filling provides the exactly right sense of enrichment, special spicing of the plain biscuit, something that permeates the entire society and gives it an individual character. However, the actual intelligentsia does not always rise up to its billing, and conversely, one can find unique, flavorful, and precious spice in the categories outside the intelligentsia domain.
Returning to the capitalist society again, the meaningful cross-sections once again might include the great divide between the educated and the illiterate, the skilled and the unskilled, the smart and the naïve, and a few other cuts along similar lines. The celebrities tend to form a separate clearly identifiable class, but the internal dissimilarities within that class soon make this effort at meaningful categorization as futile as all others. Likewise, one can point to a host of other clearly identifiable “classes,” such as Wall Street brokers and public administration bureaucrats, but one can go on and on with no end in sight, until someone asks, “So what?” and the whole house of cards, whether it continues to hold or falls apart, in either case becomes irrelevant.
There is therefore no other meaningful classification of the society than distinguishing between its regular functionaries, who are like ants, all essentially the same, no matter which part of the anthill they operate in; and its extraordinary “freaks,” who are like parasitic worms in mollusks: some mollusks kill them and eject the remains from their bodies, others envelop them with a fine protective cover, allowing a priceless pearl to develop.

Societies And Social Responsibility.
In the mollusk metaphor, which closed the preceding entry, the genius was compared to a pearl, which is, essentially, a foreign body inside the more or less uniform body of society. Whether or not society tolerates this foreign body, which can be seen in perception, and be so in actual reality, as a parasitic worm, feeding off the host body, and as such, deserving either an immediate rejection and destruction, or recognition and welcome incorporation as a unique and different, but, eventually, the most valuable element within society. The choice for the cultivation, as opposed to the rejection, of the unicum is far less obvious, and far more challenging, than the commonly recognized necessity to keep the regular members of the society safe, fed, and happy.
Dostoyevsky’s Legend of the Grand Inquisitor, which is part of his last novel The Karamazov Brothers, is a magnificent metaphor for the dilemma stated above. The Grand Inquisitor, representing the ruling power of the society, rejects the Second Coming of Jesus, rationalizing his decision to Him by a need to take care of the anthill, keeping his little ants happy and satisfied, as opposed to becoming terrified and confused by the disturbing and anthill-shaking appearance of Jesus and his destructive wrecking ball of truth.
Compare this legend to the Nietzsche-coined Latin aphorism Fiat veritas, pereat vita. Not surprisingly, he sets his own priorities for the society in favor of the exceptional individual, regardless of the consequences. In this, as in several other important things, I am in unison with Nietzsche’s thinking, which was less the case in my younger years, when my philosophical thinking was largely affected and limited to my Russian experience, but now has reached a state of complete harmony with Nietzsche’s point, in the process of my skeptical reexamination and gradual social alienation, induced by my American experience.
It is true that Soviet society had many ugly blights. What I might call “glorified Stalinism” is a totalitarian Utopia, unreachable just like its Christian-Communist counterpart which has also, and unmistakably, been a totalitarian model an-Sich! And the mildly, but increasingly, corrupt and ideologically degenerative post-Stalinist society was a state of extreme hypocrisy, a masochistic nation-state suffering under the yoke of a self-imposed, super-equivocal and pseudo-internationalist ideology, while in ostensible and vocal denial of its inherently native nation-idea of a benign national-socialism (of which “state capitalism” is only a tool, and by no means a definitive essence). But what the Soviet society even at its worst did possess at all times was a collective recognition of spiritual and aesthetic elitism, genuine respect bordering on veneration, not for official authority, but for the exceptional individual, the genius, be that Stalin the statesman, or Zhukov the soldier, or Vysotsky the artist, or Raikin the comedian.
Alas, my American experience has revealed to me a different type of society, bringing home this otherwise discommiserative socio-pathological sarcasm of Nietzsche’s Jenseits: “We have a different faith. To us the democratic movement is not only a form of decay of political organization but a form of the decay, namely, the diminution of man, making him mediocre and lowering his value. Where, then, must we reach with our hopes?” (Jenseits-203).
The worst possible mistake for anyone reading these lines would be to assume that I am, perhaps, suffering from an acute nostalgia for my youthful years as a very-much somebody in Russia, as opposed to a nobody reduced to a caterpillar size, having fallen down the American rabbit hole. As if our physical presence in a certain place made this place unbearable, while liberating and exculpating from all sin and worry the place which we had just left. As if a transplant from one culture to another, like a traveling snail, were carrying his own hell on his back, leaving behind a suddenly liberated paradise...
Without denying a certain element of it in my philosophical and contemplative attitude, I must still protest that my writing here is neither emotionally tainted, nor intellectually biased. It is understandable to see the dark side of the reality of the here-and-now, pining over the bright patches of the memory of a time which was. But let my personal emotions, if I like to splash some around, be confined to the Mirror section. This writing is a consistent link in the continuous series of objectifications of my will, determined by changing surroundings and a newly acquired ability to see things from a new perspective. As a practical illustration of the objective validity of my sociological comparison of the two societies, but, mind you, in just this one aspect of consideration, here are the widely different connotations of the term special education in Russia and in America. There, it refers to the education of exceptionally talented children, here, it means a school for developmentally disabled…

Down And Aside.
Before dispensing with this overextended sectional preamble in its entirety, and moving on to other things subsectional, an apposite question may be posited à propos, as to what distinguishes the type of exceptional individual, considered in the next section, The Genius and the Schoolman, (mind you, both these types are definitely exceptional!) from an otherwise undistinguished member of the society as a whole?
So that no confusion on this matter arises, and persists, society’s obligation to each constituent individual, discussed in the previous entry Societies And Social Responsibility, should not be confused with its uneasy relationship with the exceptions to the general rule, where an entirely different set of responsibilities comes into play. But, in the latter case, how do we distinguish an exception from the rule? And, perhaps, no less importantly, how do we distinguish a constructive genius, who must be nourished, from a destructive, evil genius, who must be destroyed?
Before we turn our focus on the genius, here is what Nietzsche says on the relative worth of any individual in the society which he abides in:
Every individual may be scrutinized to see, whether he represents the ascending or the descending line of life. (This is actually a more subtle way of setting our evaluation criterion than my direct evocation of such unyielding terms as constructive and destructive. I have no intention of disposing with my parameters, and I will return to them quite soon, but, in the meantime, Nietzsche’s general criterion may be considered as the starting point for this complicated discussion.) Having made that decision, one has a canon for the worth of his self-interest. (In the sense that individual self-interest, even when the individual is making a constructive contribution to society, always carries a certain value tag, and has to be entered into the equation of relative worth.) If he represents the ascending line, then his worth is, indeed, extraordinary-- and for the sake of life as a whole, which takes a step farther through him, the care for his preservation, and for the creation of the best conditions for him, may even be extreme. The single one, the “individual,” as hitherto understood by the people and the philosophers alike, is an error, after all. He is nothing by himself, no atom, no “link in the chain,” nothing merely inherited from former times.--- He is the whole single line of humanity up to himself. If, conversely, he typifies the descending development, decay, chronic degeneration and sickness (sicknesses are, in general, the consequences of decay, not its causes), then he has small worth (!) and the minimum of decency requires that he take away as little as possible from those who have turned out well. He is merely their parasite. (Die Götzen-Dämmerung, Skirmishes Of An Untimely Man, #33.)
Here is a rather uncharitable prescription for social eugenics, that I am unwilling to analyze at its literal face value, where my disagreement with Nietzsche’s approach becomes unnecessarily extreme.
Nietzsche’s point is neatly capsulated in one short phrase later on in the piece quoted above. The sick man is a parasite of society, he proceeds in Die Götzen-Dämmerung, Skirmishes Of An Untimely Man, #36. In a certain state it is indecent to live longer. To go on vegetating in cowardly dependence on physicians and machinations, after the meaning of life, the right to life has been lost, that should prompt a deep contempt in society. The physicians, in turn, would have to be the mediators of this contempt-- not prescriptions, but every day a new dose of nausea with their patients. To create a new responsibility of the physician, for all cases, in which the highest interest of ascending life demands the most inconsiderate pushing down, and aside, of degenerating life,-- for example, for the right of procreation, for the right to be born, for the right to live. (I am pretty sure about what Hippocrates would have said to this, but Hitler would certainly agree!)
This new morality for physicians, as Nietzsche calls it, feeds into some provocative and startlingly modern moral questions regarding certain types of abortions (of deformed and degenerate fetuses), sterilization (of the mentally retarded and sick) and particularly notably, euthanasia, especially when it is performed with the patient’s explicit or implicit consent.
However, when taken literally, as I said before, Nietzsche’s brutal honesty instantly becomes objectionable not so much because of our natural squeamishness over the principle, as because of the idea’s susceptibility to horrific abuse, through biased judgment, of which history has given us proof in abundance.
My general belief is that society must extend a Christian-like benevolence to all, and provide its most basic social services regardless of the individual’s personal value to it.
On the other hand, society should protect itself and its members against harm done by what Nietzsche calls the descending development, decay, chronic degeneration and sickness (see above, and also my entry Life Saving Diet). In this figurative sense, my agreement with Nietzsche will be almost complete.

Part And Apart.
Returning to the question of genius and society’s obligation to support and nurture the exception to its rule as long as the beneficent nature of that exception has been established, or at least not totally denied, we are now to investigate certain general characteristics of genius, leaving the specifics to the Genius section.
As a start, let us recall this delicious wickedness, concerning genius, from a Reflection of one of the great wits of humanity, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: “Sometimes men come by the name of genius in the same way as certain insects come by the name of centipede: not because they have a hundred feet, but because most people cannot count above fourteen.” Indeed, there is no exact definition or a litmus test for genius, and one cannot even say that one will know a genius when one sees one, because genius is mostly unseen to an ordinary eye, and also, as they say, it takes a genius to see genius.
Yet, genius is not a chimera, it is a fragile and elusive treasure, which must be recognized, and not just by another genius, as much as by an eye trained in aesthetic and elitist appreciation. As I said before, such a training is readily available in repressed societies where elitism is a mark of distinction, but it leaves much to be desired in free, egalitarian societies, where exceptionality is measured by the measure of success, and only too often the dregs of humanity and inherently worthless lowlife are robed in the mantle of exception, just because they attain the status of celebrity, according to the cheap tastes of the masses.
The very next difficulty in understanding the exceptionality of genius is in determining the necessary and sufficient criteria of genius. Whereas sufficiency, as we seem to have determined, requires the special gift of elitist appreciation, an impeccable taste, akin to one’s ear for the perfect pitch in music, our criteria for necessity is of a general nature, and as such, may be even more elusive than in addressing specific cases.
Let us start with the most conspicuous and commonplace criterion of genius, which not only separates, but also isolates genius from society. To be a genius, one has to be apart, and conversely, anyone who is part of the group is “one of us,” ergo, no genius.
The epitome of genius is the lonely genius, the hermit, the recluse, the outcast, born long before the world was ready for him, and, as a result, hopelessly misunderstood. A towering giant, who, like Gulliver among the Lilliputians, does not know how to fit in, even if he tries. Or, perhaps, physically, not a giant at all, but someone “short, weak, or hunchbacked,” in Goethe’s jocular description, but actually, that is, rooted deep in our Christian consciousness, very much akin to Isaiah’s Suffering Servant:
For he shall grow up before him as a tender plant, and as a root out of a dry ground: he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. (Isaiah 53:2.) There is thus a mark of exceptionality equally applicable to the Servant and to the genius, making both the same.
For some reason, the commonly accepted virtue of sociability in mortal human beings becomes a blemish on the reputation of a genius, virtually disqualifying him from the club, should he, in the slightest fashion, subscribe, say, to Hobbes’s fifth law of nature:
“A fifth law of nature is complaisance; that is, that every man strive to accommodate himself to the rest… The observers of this law may be called sociable; the Latins call them ‘commodi.’” (Hobbes: Leviathan I.) Apparently, in this case, the familiar classic Latin phrase must be put on its head: Quod licet bovi, non licet Jovi. (Terentius has it as: Quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi.)
The stereotype of anti-social behavior, expected from the genius, as his most palpable trademark, is further reinforced by Schopenhauer’s misanthropic rumination: “A man’s sociability stands very nearly in inverse ratio to his intellectual value: to say that so-and-so is very unsociable is almost tantamount to saying that he is a man of capacity.” (Schopenhauer's Parerga: Our Relation To Ourselves.)
With all my love for Schopenhauer, I would never go this far, but, perhaps, I am wrong, and not fit to sit in judgment of the true propensities and dispositions of a genius.
…Part and apart. It seems that we have already found our rule of thumb, and need to go no further. Like a heavenly angel up on high (the good genius), or like a fallen angel, or Satan himself, in the depths of Hell (the evil genius), he is never one of us, never part of a crowd, always by himself, receiving cables from his supernatural master in the privacy of his extreme loneliness.
But wait, if this is what genius is about, then every genius is a sociopath, and, consequently, there can be no geniuses in the social sphere, namely, no leaders of genius, no teachers of genius, no physicians of genius, and so on. One does not have to think long and hard to realize that perhaps there is something wrong with this extreme picture. It may not even be a case of either-or at all. To look into this matter at a closer range, the following entries, Leaders and Followers, and Teachers and Students, may be a good start.

Leaders And Followers.
Not too long ago I happened to coin a pretty good aphorism, with which I was reasonably pleased: “Leaders and followers are two different species of the same genus: the herd.” The underlying idea here is obvious: a true representative of the genus genius does not follow anybody, nor does he lead the crowd.
To be fair to others, my idea here is by no means novel. Schiller is even more uncharitable toward the breed of the leaders, seeing the difference between them and their followers in their foremost location within the moving herd: Whoever is foremost leads the herd (Wallenstein’s Death, iii). Byron has a follower in every self-imagined leader (!!!): When we think we lead, we most are led (The Two Foscari, ii).
I see, however, an immediate glaring contradiction in the presumption of incompatibility in the question of leadership and genius. Haven’t the great leaders of history been genuine men of genius, and, therefore, also exceptional personalities, although their geniuses had put them in an organic connection to their time, and place (unlike the usual genius, who is, of course, both timeless and placeless), closely conjoining them with their people, in other words making them necessarily sociable, that is endowing them with a public spirit, to use Sir Richard Steele’s qualification for the bona fide statesman (“The first and essential quality towards being a statesman is to have a public spirit.” The Tattler 1710), whereas all other types of the genus genius have virtually lived their lives outside their time and their society, and, strictly in that sense, may be called “sociopathic”?
There are actually two separate, albeit connected, questions here. The first one is whether a true genius can be a leader, that is, be sociable enough to attract the masses and to be, perhaps, equally attracted to them, as, without a genuine attraction on his part, they would sure enough be capable of sensing a fake.
Both the theoretical possibility and the practical likelihood of genius to be found in the social territory, are perfectly consistent with Schopenhauer’s idea of the nature of genius consisting in preeminent capacity for complete objectivity, that is, the objective tendency of the mind continuing in the state of pure perception. With this consideration in mind, there can be different kinds of objectification of the will. A genius leader objectificates his will in the social realm, in the idea of the state, and in what I have called the nation-idea, while a different type of creative genius objectificates his in the métier of his creative choice.
In other words, we need not see the ideas of the genius-leader and genius-hermit as incompatible. They do have their substantial differences, of course, but they also have a number of crucial aspects in common, and these ought not to be either trivialized or plainly ignored.
The second question concerns the relative position of a leader with regard to the herd. Can a genius-leader effectively lead the herd without being a part of it, as befits the genius, and yet, the herd not minding to be led by one who is not their own?
Looking at the problem from this angle, we ought to distinguish between two organically different types of leaders. Seeing all society, in Adorno’s terms, as a passive majority and an active minority, whom, if I can remember correctly, he calls the passionarii, the small percentage figure relating to the latter still makes a big number, in absolute terms. Let us call most of them leader wannabes, to whom the Byron quote above applies literally. A small percentage of their number then may be called leaders of talent-- a much smaller number already, but still large enough in absolute terms.
While the wannabes belong to the herd, without a doubt, so do the talented leaders, although theirs is a less obvious case. It is only with the leaders of genius where the dividing line separating them from the herd is drawn.
What is, then, the radical difference between a leader of talent and a leader of genius? Here, unexpectedly, I am drawing from a rather unlikely source. Surprisingly, the keenest insight into the nature of the genius-leader, as opposed to the talented member of the herd who aspires to become a leader and succeeds, can be discovered in the Last Words of Lord Edward George Bulwer-Lytton: Genius does what it must, and talent does what it can (written in 1860, this is even better than Schopenhauer’s take: Talent hits the targets which others cannot hit, but genius hits those others cannot see!)… Any attempt to elucidate the author’s meaning here should be not only superfluous, but counterproductive as well.
What is not superfluous, though, is to reiterate that a genius-leader is a genius too. Unlike all herd-leaders however, the genius sees the crowd not as his milieu, but as his métier.
My concluding thought is that, in the clear distinction between the exception and the rule, while the great leaders of history have indisputably been exceptional personalities, their personae have to be substantially different from the persona of a genius-recluse. The latter shuns the herd (which is by no means to suggest that he can subsist on his own), whereas the genius-leader cannot live without it.
In both cases, however, we are looking at truly exceptional personalities, both types possessed by genius. I must therefore reiterate that all other kinds of leaders, who are called geniuses just because those who call them so are not capable of correctly counting the number of feet in a centipede (see the earlier Lichtenberg aphorism) do not qualify for the exceptionality status, and organically remain part of the herd.

Teachers And Students.
This entry is very close to the theme of the previous one, and must follow it in all systematic arrangements, even though, superficially, this one clearly belongs in the Education subsection, while the previous one is a shoe-in with Politics and Movements, although, as I suspect, such a subsection will hardly materialize in the existing order of things, the way my Collective section has been designed.
Just as any political leader, genius or part of the herd, is necessarily a public figure, education is public, in the sense that both the teacher and the student belong to the social aspect of schooling. However, whenever teaching becomes a unique ‘individualistic’ experience, a vigorous chemical reaction between the educator and his ward, or disciple, a deep intellectual and spiritual communion of two brilliant minds of comparable value, the one old and the other young, both capable of independent thinking, this is already an experience which is qualitatively different from the situation in such egalitarian classrooms, where the genius and the idiot are treated the same, by law and by the rules.
It is this important distinction that, generally speaking, sets apart the two sections of my collection: one on society, the other on the individual, and this surprisingly subtle differentiation must, by necessity, become a leitmotif (or rather, one of them) of this whole section.
According to the first rule of structuralism, a structure is a certain fixed arrangement of discreet and stable individual elements into an organized whole, in which the individual elements possess two separate sets of characteristics, as objects in-themselves and as parts of a whole. There are thus two ways of studying these elements: in-themselves, and in their interrelationships with the other elements of the structure.
Applied to our case of Teachers and Students, as well as to the previous case of Leaders and Followers, we can summarize the duality of our assessment of individuals in both cases as, on the one hand, members of their profession or occupation, which bundles them together with others in the same field (their structural characteristics), and exclusively as individuals (that is, objects in-themselves). It is clear that the structural criteria of that first assessment are sufficient to determine the general social value of a member of society, but, by themselves, they will dismally fail in evaluating the individual’s exceptionality. Only by elaborating the second set of criteria can we spot and identify the true treasure of a genius. Only in that second set can we search for the otherwise elusive specific social value of an individual.
All we need is to recognize and retain the principle of structuralist duality, and never to be satisfied with a single set of evaluation criteria. A good teacher may be discovered by the “professional” criteria, assuming that the best of them are being used (modern professional criteria in American education, for instance, are a complete and obscene sham!), but a great teacher can be discovered not as a specimen of the species, but only as a thing in-itself.
As far as the good student goes, the same duality of criteria ought to be applied in his case. It is not enough for the student to memorize the appropriate textbook passages and the teacher’s lecture abstracts, or to turn in his homework complete and on time. It’s not enough for the student to see himself as a student only. As Nietzsche says in Mixed Opinions and Maxims (341), “Not as apprentices do, loves a master a master.” A good student, judged by school standards, is a good recreator, but when judged by the Nietzsche standard above, he must not be satisfied with the role of an apprentice-recreator, but all along strive to be a master-creator in his own right. A “good” teacher may hate him for that, but a great teacher will love him for it.

Cult Of Personality.
Cult of personality is a dirty phrase, familiar to all serious students of totalitarian societies. Along with the Führerprinzip in Germany, where it implies the cult of the leader, this expression is the most familiar when it refers to the practice of assuming the infallibility of the leader in the Soviet Union, thus applied to Stalin and Khrushchev, and, in more recent times, in post-Soviet Russia, somewhat applied to Yeltsin, and now, in its full-blown restoration of the Soviet times, to Vladimir Putin.
Stalin’s rationalization of this principle to his son Vasili is of the utmost interest, when he chastised Vasili for abusing the sacred name of Stalin. “Stalin is not my name, or your name,” he explained. “It is a national symbol!” He was right, of course, and here it is: the essence of the totalitarian cult of the leader that, indeed, his very name becomes a hallowed symbol of totalitarian statehood, and thus enters the treasury of national history, tradition, and overall culture.
Continuing the controversial theme of the dictatorship more capable of appreciating the individual than any egalitarian democracy, here is my further comment on this, which I am bringing out exclusively as a daring psychological hypothesis, rather than a cold statement of fact. Can it be true that the excessive elevation of the person in the personality cult somehow transfers to the appreciation of personality as-such, as opposed to the cult of mediocrity in egalitarian societies, where the concept of an exceptional individual’s inferiority to the “norm” (remember the meaning of special education relating to the retarded in a democracy, whereas relating to the exceptionally gifted in Soviet Russia) is consistently taken for granted in the social formula of success, where money is the measure of all things, and talent is judged exclusively in those financial terms.