Still Reading: “The Cunning of Unreason” – “Citizens must change themselves…”

This passage seems important for the times in which we live.

John Dunn writes:

“In the modern democratic republic, it is the citizens who must change themselves. They cannot hope for their state to do this for them. If the purposes which govern state power within these polities are to become wiser, less myopic or more austere, it is we who must change, not the states to which we belong.” P. 255

When the state lacks rules of engagement from a morality standpoint or at least reasonable checks and balances on how it can conduct its affairs, the social fabric of this particular state can collapse very quickly. I think this is where psychological theories behind social proof come into play.

Dunn continues to write about how the state is all but absolved from all behavior of its citizens. In a sense, the collective behavior of its citizens is the state.

“The charges which may indeed go home against the modern democratic republic are not charges of spiritual defilement. They do not turn on an assumed superiority of ancient over modern liberty, or of one or another brand of tasteful self-subjugation over any form of liberty at all. They cannot rest in the end on the claim that it is this state form itself which weakens or destroys our capacity to discipline or control ourselves. They cannot, since that form so explicitly leaves each of us largely to work out for ourselves just how far we choose to do anything of the kind. The charges which may indeed go home are far less elevated or evocative. They are charges essentially of practical confusion and inefficacy in relation to whatever purposes the citizens of these states happen to hit upon. They offer not a comprehensive normative attack on the state form from the outside, but a relatively specific diagnosis of its internal contradictions, judged from the inside and by its own chosen criteria.” 256

This is all great, but what if citizens of democratic republics realize they can change themselves all they want but the power to change the state resides in the hands of another (more exclusive) demographic of citizens?