This Piece was Originally Pitched as a Speech For The 2023 Witan Event.
Entropy is a force we all must contend with—any instance of order or organisation in human affairs will in time always break down. Within the measures developed to reconstruct said order, an essence or state that was present in the previous order is lost. An element, either material or immaterial is lost in the chaos, and further banished into the past in the course of reordering. Politics is a wash with examples of this—and it would be, as politics by necessity always requires new techniques with every attempt to reorder society.
Those who are aware of my speech from Witan 2022 on “Propaganda: The Power of Logos in Mass Society” will recognise the idea that technical supremacy is paramount to achieving political sovereignty. Whilst my previous essay discussed the development of technique in the mass age, and more specifically in the context of propaganda and its application. This essay will discuss the development of political techniques more generally, and analyse the effect these techniques have on wider society through their application, which tends to be almost exclusively entropic.
All political techniques revolve around the legitimation of political formulas, first to the client groups required to run an effective regime, and latterly to the wider public who repeat said formula until it becomes taken as a given in social affairs. Across history, political formulas have changed immensely, and in consequence have greatly changed man as a social and political animal. There are no set boundaries to these changes; revolutions can happen over night, but the conditions that set a revolution in motion and the aftershocks can carry on for centuries either side of the revolution itself. Each previous age morphs into the other almost seamlessly. Those present at the time struggle to identify the changes that are taking place before them; this is why each previous age’s superior principles still have their remnants in the next.
“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development- in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver-but also because of their systematic structure, the recognition of which is necessary for a sociological consideration of these concepts. The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology. Only by being aware of this analogy can we appreciate the manner in which the philosophical ideas of the state developed in the last centuries.” —Carl Schmitt - Political Theology
Three eras of Man’s political order can be distinguished. Ancient/Pagdan Man, the Man of Christendom, and Modern/Mass Man. Ancient Man organised society via rituals and practices, which were exclusively of an esoteric nature, and were wholly oriented towards superior principles of faith and religiosity. These principles took root in the family, the first political unit within which man was organised.
“First of all there is the family, then the tribe, and lastly the nation, but even then finality is not reached, for the nations grow larger and larger, and those that do not expand fall by the wayside…” —Charles Petrie - Story of Government