Dictatorship, not autocracy is the most precise diagnoses for slavery. “Autocracy” is about power, but “power” is too ambivalent word, it can be applied to strength and to violence; power of strength is health, power of violence is a disease. It is impossible to distinguish force from violence quickly and confidently. It is easy to distinguish writing a dictation from writing an essay. “Democracy” is a collective essay.
Aristotle differentiated autocracy from oligarchy, but the difference is a secondary one. Oligarchy is a collective autocracy, several lenins dictating me what to do. (Stalin is usually supposed to be the worst dictator in history, but I think Lenin is number one, Stalin is only a paperback edition of Lenin, so dictatorshipness is better measured in lenins.)
Democracy can be called a collective essay, but an essay cannot be called personal democracy, because it cannot be created by two or more people. Essay is a sort of parthenogenesis. Writing an essay is like writing one’s own Bible with the first book “Partheno-Genesis.”
Essayist is giving birth to himself. Still, he is not alone in a process. Tio write an essay, to be an essayist, to be a thinker, to be human (these are only three faces of one and the same phenomena, and amount of faces is innumerable) means to speaks with someone in you who is definitely not you.
This is one of the primordial literary genre with “Meditations” of Marcus Aurelius as a most known example. Original Greek title is “Ta eis heauton”, “To myself”.
“Soul” is another designation of this inner self, and Hadrian’s “Animula vagula blandula” is the same dialogue with one’s self as Jesus’s advice concerning saving or losing one’s own soul.
To save or to lose means to give birth or to kill. Second birth and God knows which killing, because in dealing with himself I usually kill myself, many times a day, becoming dead soul. Life is a set of suicides of all sorts, physical one excluded. The same can be applied to any dictatorship, totalitarianism, autocracy: a slow social suicide.
To avoid this spiritual suicide I must communicate with myself (my soul) in a sort of dialogue. Freedom sometimes is described as a sort of self-government, but it is a sort of self-dialogue. Not auto-autocracy, but auto-democracy. There is a great temptation to give orders to myself, to rule over myself, and I am the only one who can lead not my self into this temptation but deliver myself into thinking.
12 July 2023