Chapter Eight: Healer or King

Abstract

This chapter explains the tensor of kum which features centrally in the author’s anthropological work on chiefdoms in eastern and central Africa that centralized into kingdoms. The data intertwine with conversations with a modernly educated chief, a man of the world living in the metropole of Dar es Salaam. The effort of the previous chapter continues as we extend our analysis from frame and sphere to cultural systems and the human species. Ethnographic reflections about lifeways come to the fore, as do intuitions one acquires after being trained in medicine. The training draws on a long-standing initiatory network spanning central and eastern Africa. Divination and initiation keep the chief’s rule medicinal. They prevent power from corrupting into autocracy.

Can Western democracies, which presently go through rough times, learn from the mechanisms? An intriguing similarity is how the tensor splits into simplexes, and that members of the human species intuit the split as ‘no good’. Elections are politics of the real that reveal collective reason. The chapter ends with the contrasting case of a European country after 400 days without government. Do the better educated know best?

My thoughts go to that fateful afternoon in early 1996. Masanja and I are driving back from the annual festival organized by the Sukuma chief of Ndagalu, just south of Lake Victoria. In the back of our car, an old Land Rover short-chassis of 1978, sit a girl and her father catching a ride to the Mennonite hospital of Magu. The girl is ill. I did not realize how much. She has excruciating headaches, her father says. He asks me to slow down. At every bump of the rocky road the worn-out shock absorbers send a pang to the girl’s head. Each time, she groans and stifles her cries with a howl sharp to the bone. I drop the speed to a mere twenty and then to ten miles per hour, but to no avail. Holding both hands on the wheel I glance back at her. A watery eye from beneath a scarf briefly penetrates mine. Her pain visibly worsens. The planned one-hour journey to the Mennonite hospital extends to four hours. Words fail anyone. The next morning a nurse at the gate tells me the girl died. Meningitis.

The diagnosis reduces the event to a biomedical code. The nurse could have pointed to the absence of nearby hospitals, of tarmac road or of clean environment. Such factors also explain the death of this particular girl. But the diagnosis of meningitis made the event easier to digest. It normalized the event by normalizing the absence of infrastructure. The tiny thing called life had slipped away because of a viral infection. I returned to the car and gave the passengers the closure they needed in yesterday’s aftermath.

Witchcraft as diagnosis would have been an option too, if closure is what matters. The reader will have to forgive me stating that there is something truthful to the lie of witchcraft. Unlike medical labels, the witch as cause of illness embodies the patient’s feelings and past experiences. As the fever rises, energy dwindles and death is inescapable, the bewitched seek closure in ideas projected on the community. Where did I deserve this? Have I done enough? The healer’s compound with its shrines and therapeutic management group organizes a frame of experience that re-emplaces the human in the existential reality of uncertainty. True to that state, magic allows thoughts to hover without landing. Magic is in that sense ‘good’ to think.

The realism of uncertainty alone cannot justify the ‘lie’ of witchcraft. Life as a source of energy must come into the picture. Indeed, it is thanks to divination and its frame of experience that the bewitched gets ready to use magic and resume to live. In the previous chapter healing proceeded from (sorcerous) intrusion to (magical) reciprocity via (divinatory) expulsion. According to Sukuma tradition, a patient will be cured after being initiated in the healer’s medicine. Rebirth in the healer’s compound costs one head of cattle like in initiation, and afterward the patient can return for free. One day s/he may compete with initiated others to succeed the healer. Initiation and healing adopt the same structure, which I call the DIMA tensor. They socialize Sukuma novices into four practices with fundamentally interrelated meanings: to climb a rank in the cult or association (see A in Fig. 1) you depend on the good will of the spirits conveyed in divination (D); to acquire the power of medicine (M) you must submit yourself to initiation (I). The institution of those four practices together creates status (kum) for the initiands which they did not have before. They acquire lifeforce. As argued elsewhere, medicinal rule, the DIMA tensor, is key to understanding chiefly power in a wide network of groups spanning central and eastern Africa and mostly speaking Bantu-languages.¹ Kingship removes from the tensor the two medicinal practices that democratize power, namely divination and initiation. In Mwanga magic too, divination and initiation play no role. What they have in common is to mitigate the power of the user: success is predicated on the real in divination, and on the group’s or ancestor’s wish in initiation. Both are passages for collective reason. Kingship blocks these to shift autonomy to an individual. How does this compare to elected leaders in modern democracy?

Fig. 1

Tensor of medicinal rule

In many groups speaking Bantu-languages the ritual of installing the chief does not differ fundamentally from the initiation of commoners.² The chief perfects the initiation. Medicinal initiation has its roots in hunting groups having to rely on luck to find game in the forest. Hunters set up divinatory societies to invent practices of soothsaying and medicine to deal with the real. Chiefs and healers accept life as it comes, without claiming a separate source of production only they could benefit from, like kings do. Mwanga, a medicine without initiation or divination, has to strike users as bizarre, and has this simplex and kinglike quality, at odds with the tensor teaching that no initiation or enthronement will take place unless an oracle in the form of mediumistic intuition or haruspication has first indicated its appropriateness. In terms of the scheme, the first column reads ‘no I without D’, the second column ‘no A without M’. Association (membership and rank) means medicine, and vice versa. To be a patient is to become a healer, for every cured patient enters the curer’s association, ‘cult’ or newly invented tradition. The two diagonals express the interrelations between divination and association (an oracle gives way to a new cult), and between medicine and initiation (the patient is initiated).

Medicine and Chiefship: Communal Truth or Collective Reason?

Oyster Bay, Dar es Salaam. My thoughts return to where I am. ‘Do you know the Mennonites?’ my interlocutor repeats. I answer. It is a Saturday afternoon in 2017, a few days before Christmas. Despite the occasional banner in the street promising happiness for the coming year, nothing of the festivity ambience lingers in this port city at the Indian Ocean struggling through its most humid period of the year. We are looking at a few narrow figures in the distance roaming the beach at low tide in search of the rare big shell or any valuable stuff drifted from the many cargos reaching the harbor. Our view is from a balcony window and I am content with that. Twenty-three years ago an English expat told me he had his shoes stolen at Oyster Bay while jogging. Then it seemed like a sensible thing to do for a hungry beachcomber contemplating the preposterous sight in the distance of a white person on shiny white Nikes approaching fast. ‘In those days the white guy would have continued running at even speed … shoeless’, my interlocutor jests. It would be different today. I wonder why. Is Tanzania becoming less postcolonial and more ‘itself’? The gap between rich and poor has not shrunk since my first visit. The coast, pwani, from where the Arab-influenced commercial language of Swahili spread and became the region’s lingua franca, exudes an eerily unwelcome ambience that differs from life in the villages of the interior. And this is not any port or city. It used to be slavers’ territory.

The balcony on the first floor in a modest condo belongs to Chief Edward Makwaia, a former high-ranking civil servant. In his mid-60s he has the age to ponder about a second career, one befitting a respected elder. He has the pedigree, as son of Chief Kidaha Makwaia from Busiha, who during colonial times acted as paramount of the Sukuma chiefdoms. I am staring back at the map he laid out before me with dots of waterholes interconnected to outline Busiha’s borders. Just in time I refrain from protesting that frontiers are artificial, for they replay the colonial urge to map Empire and use ‘customary authorities’ better known as ‘chiefs’ for that purpose, and so on. Who am I anyway to determine what African chieftaincy ‘is’? It has been so many things throughout history, from the most peaceful to the most violent for one thing.³ Nothing human, including the imperialist urge of conquest, is alien to any society, to paraphrase Publius Terentius, the Roman playwright nicknamed Afer (the African) because of his Berber descent.

Edward Makwaia has a profundity to share about customary rule. The whole idea of a paramount never attracted Sukuma farmers. The chiefs treated each other as equals, were checked by their circle of court experts, and had to reckon with the relative autonomy of the large extended compounds of farmers in the valley. These rural communities in the north of Tanzania did not really distinguish commoners from aristocrats. The farmers and cattle-herders were self-reliant, covering all social functions, from the economy their fields and pasture yielded, down to the education and ritual initiation delivered at the extended compound, up to the political decisions at community level, wherein each household had equal say. Through initiation into medicinal cults, any adult could actually be a sort of aristocrat and through gifts to the other members climb up to top rank. Autonomy was the dominant frame, guaranteed by the medicine anyone could acquire.

Nevertheless, the old Makwaia did manage to introduce a form of paramountcy. Thanks to the Mennonite hospital that cured leprosy. And thanks to a considerable dose of his own anthropological reflection. Knowing very well that the local model of rule was not governance, in the narrow sense, but medicine, he had the means to attract families, their patients and caretakers, from all the chiefdoms. Traditional medicine did not work for leprosy, one could tell from the patient’s skin. After the discovery of the drug Promin in the 1940s a leprosy camp was set up at the hospital in Kalandoto, near the chief’s palace. The medicine may have been American now but the place that healed was Makwaia’s.

It occurred to me, as Edward spoke, that his father had reinvented the local model of leadership as a cultural engineer would, attuning political administration to medicinal rule in such a way that neither the local farmers nor the British would notice the difference. How did the crossover of a chief tapping into foreign medical technology transform the model of rule? The practical fact that Promin required regular injections, kept patients in the vicinity of the hospital. The chief could perceive himself as governing a people. He set up social works, rallying inhabitants to form parties working on wells, roads, the school, church or a communal shelter. That sort of governance was new, Edward stresses. Pastoralists passing through his chiefdom were asked to sign for their residence at the chiefdom. The number of inhabitants was important in the eyes of the British administration, for the chief’s prestige. The colonizer needed paramountcy, as it reduced the mass of spokespersons to one representative only. By making deals with a paramount the British thought to address an entire region of 5 million people covering about 100,000 square kilometers.

The British policy of indirect rule, of letting the people rule themselves under the colonial administration, meant that in principle the local system had to be adopted and integrated. In practice, the African political systems were too diverse, with varying degrees of state centralization. The chieftaincy traditionally focused on shrine and royal drum, on the incumbent’s defense against witchcraft and maintenance of the fertility of land and people, through his initiation into ritual knowledge and backed by his circle of medicinal experts, ‘the children of the drum’.⁴ According to oral traditions, Busiha was named after the female healer founding it. Her sisters set up their own cults before these became chiefdoms. Cult and dynastic clan historically overlap. The successors were chiefs or kings, and healers or medicinal cult heads as well, the difference being secondary (since visitors could choose the register of terms wherein to greet). The variations in the system were not planned or invented. They emerged from historical contingencies such as the personality of an incumbent, the arrival of external cults or regional changes from outside such as slavery and ivory trade affecting the community. Singularities elude neat categorizations. They are nevertheless what history is about.

Development cooperation became the postcolonial version of medicine, Edward says. Today the link with customary authority is to be found in an NGO promoting culture (utamaduni) presided by him as Busiha chief. Nominal and unofficial, his office is backed today by the one medicinal cult extant in the region, the Chwezi. Their ritual knowledge is of the same order as the chief’s. In a rapidly changing country, the cult in its turn draws on the chief’s office for significance. It is because the local model of rule has been medicinal that people, mostly the elderly Sukuma, can still imagine to have customary rulers, without the government (whose model is governance) feeling threatened by their beliefs.

Does medicine have relevance today? The bunch of plants studied by ethnobotanics at the margins of the natural sciences have for 10.000s of years been the source of life and death for hunters and gatherers in the rainforest and savanna, and for farmers and pastoralists who maintained their link with the environment through specialists. Finding a remedy in response to a new epidemic, due to migration or contact, required leadership in the experiment of subsistence and survival. Leaders had to trust their dreams of certain diggable plants before engaging in trial and error looking in the forests at hand, as healers do today. Anthropologists have no indication that medicine stopped being central to people’s lives after they started farming in the Neolithic. Far from it. Peasant societies in equatorial, southern and east Africa developed political systems that relied on medicine for rain and protection. The enthronement of both chief and king, as well as the initiation ritual to climb social ranks, still draws on forest symbolism at odds with the model of governance. Stronger still, politics was a business in this region, because the medicine that ruled could be sold, as long as the dead gave their blessing. In short, another logic of rule has reigned people’s lives in the past than the one we as educated readers are socialized in.⁵ Might it reveal a blind spot about the politics we take for granted? The blind spot will return in the next chapter’s discussion of representational democracy.

During the years preceding independence, the founding president of Tanzania and son of a chief, Nyerere, had expressed his demand for chiefs to abdicate in order to abolish customary rule. It would be the only way to prevent ethnic strife in the nascent postcolonial state, he assumed. He thought about the potential demands of Sukuma speakers, forming the largest cultural group officially at 17% of the very diverse population (over 100 languages). Just as the colonizer needed a unitary model, homogenous, to subjugate recalcitrant groups, the postcolonial government faced the challenge of integrating the cultural manifold into the functioning of the state, with the added difficulty that resort to coercion would be negatively perceived, reminding of the colonizer. For moral leaders like Nyerere, colonial tactics were out of the question. That made ethnic expectations a problem hard to fix. The colonizer’s simplified version of local rule could not do anymore either. A return to precolonial times was impossible. Therefore, Nyerere created the nation of umoja, ‘unity’, something quite different from Mandela’s rainbow nation later. One language, Swahili, in service of the development of one people, marginalizing intra-national cultural differences lest these grow into ethnic demands.

As the forced resettlement of Sukuma farmers into centralized villages in the 1970s illustrated, the postcolonial government drew a line between two modes of production, old and new. The state wanted farmers to grow cotton as cash crop for the national treasury and wanted their children to go to school to learn about the Tanzanian state. Agriculture remained the mantra (kulima kwanza) but without the old mode that lent autonomy to polycentric families, which was visible spatially in the valleys. Therein the government intervened. The numerous cases I witnessed in the 1990s of how government officials addressed Sukuma farmers indicate that they were seen as citizens with less rights, often as easy victims for extortion, because of their old mode of life (as the colonizer put it) impossible to integrate in modern Tanzania.⁶ The mode of production was portrayed as obsolete and thus as emanating from a discardable lifeway, a separate source of production. We know such a thing does not exist.

Having observed this cultural evolution toward a split source of production from rather close by has formed me. The disconnect recurs in many guises.⁷ The last couple of pages postponed to clarify the crux of my argument, because of a condensed set of issues overwhelming me whenever I reach this point. As I and my Sukuma collaborators understand it, and I checked with Edward for confirmation, a fundamental misrepresentation characterizes the dominant account among Tanzanian elites about the precolonial past and its remnants. The account teems with anachronistic assumptions about religion and what religion was before modernity, and chieftaincy before parliamentary democracy. Firstly, the role of religion or ‘the occult’ will be overrated by educated elites unable to imagine what someone’s lifeworld would be like if politics were religion were economy were medicine. Sukuma farmers are autonomous precisely because they, the healer and the chief tap from the same source. Medicine is not reserved for a cast of priests. Secondly, an obstacle for educated elites to connect with the past is that chiefs had a model of leadership inspired on healers, not on autocrats. Chiefs traditionally took care of the land, ritually ensuring rains, and protecting the fertility of inhabitants, which was to safeguard the inhabitants’ possibilities of livelihood. Village heads made decisions that were regularly monitored by the council of elders.

The monitoring was based pragmatically on ‘what people think’. What does that exactly mean? At first inspection, we are dealing with the communal concept of truth which the postmodern philosopher Richard Rorty defends against the modern claim that truth corresponds to reality. Progress would be obtained through the mirroring of nature (Enlightenment seeks ‘light’ through a representational concept of perception).⁸ Activists exposing exploitation (like Rorty’s father who founded the journal ‘The New Masses’) will not be convinced by Rorty that their mirroring is an illusion, that it is just a model agreed on by the community of activists at some point. Rorty imagines ironical activism, someone dying for a belief quite aware that it is historically contingent.⁹ He is certain that history is inanimate. More valid seems to me a theory open to both possibilities, hence also to the one that contingency, what arrives, is animate. By this I mean that communal truth would in the end not be arbitrary, but driven by some necessity (in an origin-oriented instead of event-based time). The arbitrary is within us, within our body, our genes, our neurobiology, and within the history of each, yet every time naturally selected in Darwinian interaction with the environment at all levels, from micro to macro, so by the time the selected outcome surfaces in our minds and we are conscious of it, there is necessity, a degree of nonarbitrary. And if not individually, such as one mind intuiting the right choice for survival, the necessity may show in the community at occasions of sensing life and judging events in that light. The species speaks through the collective.

Therefore, instead of communal truth, I claim we are observing collective reason—reason in the double meaning of a necessity (possibly following a destiny) and a thought process (possibly with its own principles of rationality). This possibility is another way of critiquing the individual reason of the moderns, but that path Rorty refused.¹⁰ I have emphasized the importance of collective reason in human (see infra: ‘speciated’) history, and did an intercultural exercise for it here (excursions in Arabic and Asian philosophy would dovetail and so would the contemporary interest in collective intelligence)¹¹ to show that the postmodern neglect is a copout.

As argued in the next section, both the modern preference for individual reason (an educated capacity) and the postmodern critique in favor of communal truth (an actively organized consensus) reiterate an ancient refusal of continued (origin-historical) significance, that of collective reason (which neither of the former two options controls). The autocratic king anticipated it. The postmodern refusal of collective reason is historically significant for it highlights the parting of the two halves of the concept: reason and the collective (which will appear to have close affinity with mirror and model respectively, as well as frame and sphere). The next chapter will argue that the two halves of our split collective reason live on in a reified way as Left and Right in politics. Previously presuming each other and complementing, they are identities without connection in post-knowledge society. Progressives firmly adhere to individual reason, thus expect all good (including good leadership) to come from mirroring reality. Conservatives cling to collective tradition, thus expect nothing but good (including good leadership) from modeling reality. My remedy to simplex society will be the retrieval of collective reason, after learning from its demise in modernity, which made way for post-knowledge.

After Collective Reason: Anthropocene Autocracy

The monograph ‘Medicinal Rule’ presents several cases from east and central Africa where the king’s autocracy went against the communal ethic of autonomy, which was guaranteed via medicine for all. The role of collective reason in a chiefdom was guaranteed by subjecting the chief to divination and initiation. The chief’s rule was not detached from life because initiation planted wisdom from the ancients in him while the real in the form of the oracle’s chance events influenced his decisions. The exploiter-king evaded those two institutions. His rule in all simplexity, like a machine, denied dependence on the source of production. Culturally, kingship was a freak event. The event was a process whereby the medicinal tensor of power was deprived of the shamanic elements on which it drew (as a discussion piece demonstrates).¹² A speciated history asks whether the ancient widespread model of chieftaincy, with roots in egalitarian hunter bands, did somehow inspire the leadership of Eurasian kings and emperors, or later on the electoral democracy with a president representing a faction. The answer is of course no, and according to Enlightenment luckily so because individual reason ended the tyranny of communal truth, including scapegoating, discrimination of minorities, witch-hunt, inertia of the masses, and intellectual stagnation through the marginalization of outcast geniuses and the prohibition of unconventional ideas. But why did it sacrifice something else along the way, which I named collective reason?

An origin-oriented history takes into account the neurobiological constitution humans had for hundred-thousands of years, and the environmental conditions before the Anthropocene. A linear evolution, of one production mode progressing to take over from another, clouds this origin-oriented history. Colonizers did the clouding when they took the ‘big man’ or ‘boss’ as model of reference in ‘primitive Africa’, and as ‘primitive’ to humanity. The king imposing his will and enslaving would be a continuation of it, rather than an exceptional figure. The model spread in Europe through travelogues and picture books to reveal humanity’s ‘primitive nature’ and the process of civilization which this nature had to undergo and which also the local model of leadership had to undergo to operate in service of the colonial administration applying indirect rule.¹³

In light of collective reason (and life-sensing) an important distinction should be drawn between medicine, the stuff of chiefs, and religion, the stuff of kings. The chief has access to the sources of production. Failing access shows in natural phenomena such as lack of rain or excess of it, in oracles (D) and if initiatory knowledge (I) is not consecrated through ancestral blessing in dreams. It is most illuminating that the royal centralization of power evolved from a simplication of chieftaincy that split the DIMA tensor, translating away D and I. The chief, subject to spirit wishes, transforms into a king with autocratic power once he develops an aversion to the frame of uncertainty. Historical data confirm that kings often claim the royal medicine or the top rank of the medicinal association, after creating the position of priest for someone else who deals with the domain of initiation and divination.¹⁴ Far from completing a natural evolution toward centralization, the chief aspiring to establish kingship is marked by an aversion to the institutions that constrain his power. Kingship discards these in favor of medicine and association (M and A). From the perspective of western modernity, preoccupied with secularization and the democratic state, the separation is rational because gives way to the subsystems of the political (M and A) and the religious (D and I), each with its own principles. From the perspective of Sukuma chieftaincy and medicinal rule, however, the new model of rule simplicates the viable exchange with the environment. What the state gradually got rid of is not something irrational called religion but something realistic, its dependence on the production sources. After that, the social and natural environment could be exploited. Evidence of a split source of production is the king acquiring sacred power and denying commoners any degree of it.¹⁵ The chasm cannot be bridged with initiatory knowledge. Secondly, he is free to exploit humans, animals and nature, for he no longer depends on the spirit’s message. That agro-logic driving his State and emerging in the Holocene carried the seeds for the ensuing Anthropocene.

Humanity’s earliest surviving epic, over 4000 years old, may very well be telling the story of the split that announced the Anthropocene. At the height of his might, King Gilgamesh of Uruk in Mesopotamia desperately seeks the secret of eternal life. Death has become a problem to Gilgamesh ever since the death of his friend the shepherd, woe of the hunters and killer of the gods’ bull. Inconsolable, he travels to find a priest, for only in the latter’s segregated realm would the secret, the unruly part of power, be known. Why? How could the priest monopolize the knowledge? What had happened to the collective reason that any set of humans can share? Kingship had been invented by Gilgamesh by splitting life into a political and a religious sphere. Before his rule, by his father the Sumerian healer-chief Lugalbanda, every leader was his own priest, like every initiated. True to life’s contingency, the leader had healing capacity that did not render his power ‘sacred’. In contrast with the experiential initiation of hunter and shaman, a State indoctrinates, which is to separate feelings from learned meanings, to invent the sacred and monopolize it. The Sumerian priestess Enheduanna, considered the earliest writer in human history, narrated the pressure on her upon conquest of new territories to pragmatically merge the foreign gods. The subservience of religion to politics is predicated on splitting the source of production into political and religious realms, earth and sky. The epic recounts a corrupted vocation, a loss of access to collective reason as earth and sky disconnect, a beginning entropy of the system’s humanity.

The faceless violence of war technology and Mwanga magic returns in kingship. Kings of the most sophisticated realms in the region, such as Kuba in the Congo basin, famously excelled in cruelty. They had thousands of slaves slaughtered at royal funerals, the number proportional to the blessings they expected in the afterlife.¹⁶ The logic presumes a split source of production and reminds of an investment (a gift without sacrifice). They too, like the mad Mwanga healers and contemporary warriors against terror, thought to have discovered a natural law for success. Earth’s early kingdoms emerging some 4500 years ago in the regions of Mesopotamia, the Indus river, Huang Ho river, the Nile valley with the Pharaohs, and later in the Andes with the Incas, and in Mesoamerica with the Mayas and Aztecs, exemplify the complexity of governance attained thanks to the exploitation of energy resources in a densely populated area. However impressive culturally, none lasted as long as the hunting band and chiefdom, which the colonizers encountered across continents. Empires die on their own account owing to an unsustainable cultural system.¹⁷ Their social hierarchy’s proverbial pyramid denies that their production pivots on something no system controls. The healer-chiefs accept mediation in communication through oracles, dreams of ancestral spirits, councils of clan elders, and exchange with other chiefs having undergone the medicinal initiation in the forest. They engage in a politics of the real, which differs entirely from realpolitik, a unidimensional pragmatic sort of governance. The experiential frame of chiefs and healers is medicinal and multiplex. The frame of kings, of the bewitched and of Mwanga magic is simplex for disconnecting from collective reason and the life of the species.

Elections as Politics of the Real

The French Revolution (the event) and Enlightenment (the process) respectively substituted democratic elections (for kingship) and rationality (for religious truth) contributing to two of the revolution’s values, the first to equality, the second to freedom. What about the slogan’s third, brotherhood, which has been recast as inclusion and is meant by ‘humanity’? The answer I proposed is the recovery of collective reason, for it can remedy what simplex society dehumanizes.

Could free elections accede to collective reason? They voice the collective. The ideal democracy resembles divination in that an unmanipulated moment decides the future; a moment of the real is organized. It of course differs from divination in that the outcome is based on the accumulation of individual votes. A sum of individual reasons does not equal collective reason. The negative view that democracy gives voice to all opinions, to avoid provoking any single one, seems less significant than the positive view, that in the intuition of the demos (the people) a truth can be found, and otherwise the group’s legitimacy at least. Communal truth may have a collective reason. The connection to life, a care for the species and the sources of production, call it a sense of both origin and destiny, returns in the intuition of the demos. What jeopardizes political access to collective reason are two obstacles associated with simplex society.

As the country I live in entered its 400th day without government and broke its former record, a couple of politicians from different parties let on to journalists what impedes their formation of a coalition—increasingly so with every election. The complex Belgian system, where language communities and economic regions with conflicting interests must collaborate at the federal level, suffers most from a structural feature of the network society. Every step in the difficult negotiations is commented on by the actors themselves on Twitter, Instagram and TikTok.¹⁸ Any will to compromise by a party falls flat the next morning because is depicted by supporters and opponents in the simplex (binary) terms of winner and loser. The social media do not grant the time it takes for a new consensus to grow. The communication only seeks to influence, thus continues the divisive logic of elections instead of feeding trust and building society based on the electoral results. Futility prevails.

Another aspect politicians are less eager to point out is that those in power have little to gain from parliamentary elections. In case of an unpredictable result (which democracy permits) the election will come across in the population as momentous. Yet, the ‘voter signal’ backing a specific candidate interferes with the ruling parties’ permanent interests. Parties, situating themselves on the spectrum of left and right, are unable to deal with the pinnacle of democracy. Nevertheless, they have every say in the decisions of elected members of parliament. Europeans have a word for it, ‘particracy’, a threat to democracy that ‘statesmen such as Churchill’ supposedly overcame. In the current mediascape, the politicians stay locked up in their circle of supporters, unable to sneak away from their limited sphere of exchange, the bubble.

The two tendencies, simplex and bubble, hinder a democratic sum of individual votes in attaining collective reason. Elections insert a moment of real, but afterward the president, prime minister and their government act according to the model of kingship, which expels any form of the real (like kingship has done with oracles and initiations) from the realm of politics. Parties anticipate on that, as opposed to a system in continuous empirical confrontation (which daily digital monitoring of all citizens through issue-oriented polls could achieve). Moreover, elections have a liberating unpredictable dimension, but in their premises they resemble social media for they identify opinions and treat these as units with fixed meaning. A visible public trait, in this case an opinion, to learn about a person is not as bad as relying on a physical trait, but it skips the person’s frame of experience that underlies the statement. At no stage in the democratic process is the voter’s frame examined. If it did, new organic alliances would be possible between frames, whereas similar opinions (e.g., critique on Islam) could count as different votes because of their frames (e.g., racist versus rationalist). Such rearrangement and crosscutting of spheres based on the frames is of course not appreciated by political parties who would be made irrelevant because of their fixed ideologies.

A medicinal type of politics manages the tie with the production sources. The tie is retained neither by the left nor by the right, but by their union. Liberalism remedied the excesses of theocracy; socialism those of capitalism. Left and right complemented each other’s bias in coalitions and the succession of governments. As argued in the next chapter, simplex society has separated them further, seemingly beyond repair, which indicates the need for a new system of governance.