Letters to an Imaginary President

Alexander Makedon

Chicago State University

Immediate Past President

Midwest Philosophy of Education Society

Presidential Address, Annual Conference of the Midwest Philosophy of Education Society, MPES Dinner Banquet, Hilton Hotel, Oak Lawn, Illinois, Nov. 12, 2004

Copyright © 2004

Dated: Sometime in November, Year 2004 Anno Domini

Dear Ambitious:

So you are now President? Have you thought of the consequences of what that means? Is it possible ever to preside over other humans? Are humans easy to lead, or are they by nature self-defeating anarchists? But even if for a while you can lead them, or they pretend they listen, is the presidency itself something useful? Is his or her office a good excuse for humans to transfer their frustrations on someone else? Finally, if presidents can muster the will and wherewithal which presumably others working alone lack, is it ethical that humans are led? Is it a sign of moral weakness that humans must be told what to do? To paraphrase Nietzsche, are humans ... "slave" or "master" when they don someone "president" simply to make him, or her, their ... servant?

It is perhaps to their credit that unlike less intelligent creatures, who are often bee-like in their blind allegiance to their queen, humans are opportunistic: they often change the presidency, whether by the ballot or the bullet, to make it fit their needs; build it up only to bring it down; use it as a projection of their hopes, even if they love to hate it; invent any number of devices to undermine it, undertake it, or usurp it; flatter it when they are either bored or beaten, either for fun or furlough from disaster. Witness what happened to a Winston Churchill when they longer needed him; or to any other leader who dare take himself, his people, or his leadership for what he dreamed them to be. Perhaps presidents big and small, and more broadly, leaders of all types sense their precarious hold to power all too well, and learn quickly to mirror the Other on their sleeves merely to survive.

Forgive me, Mr. Ambitious, for my forthrightness, but being president is not only silly, considering our insignificant place in the universe, but also an oxymoron. It reminds me of the queen ant that barely knows there are mountains much higher than its lowly anthill; space much vaster than its hole; planets more numerous than all of the ants that were, are now, and will be, combined; time more infinite than a flicker of the ant's life. So whether a queen or a king, you are a momentary relief from the hard reality of your "sickness unto death." (1) How much like the ants we humans are stratified, as if to overcome with titles and their accompanying psychology the relative non-importance of our species. As they say, in the end you can't take it with you, so all that remains after you die is the empty bottle of an ego booster drug. Not unlike the opium of the masses in a Marxist critique of religion, so is the presidency symbolic of the human dependency on the ego, including our need to recreate the universe in our image.

Did you ever think, Mr. Ambitious, that by laying claim to some higher office, whether on your own or as a result of circumstances, would protect you from your nakedness? Did you believe that the people who put you there can collectively postpone the wisdom that comes with age? Did you think you could escape your mortal "self-actualization?" Didn't you or your friends (or enemies, as the case may be) ever consider that no matter how deeply you attempt to hide your head in the sand, in the end you have just about as many genes in you as the lowliest creature, including the tiny roundworm C. Elegans, and even fewer than Arabidopsis, which is a small flowering plant? (2) All of your trumpeting glory aside, including your civilization, what else do you have to show for yourself? Afer all is said and done, what else do you have other than the history of your vanity, if not pitiful cry for help?

But all is not lost. You may still find your proper place as non-presidential "president" that presides over nothing but your own observations. At the same time that we humans bask in our glory, we parody ourselves in our plays, poetry, festivals, literature, and philosophy. By undercutting our own seriousness, we may yet save our soul. We realize that all of the dressing up can just as easily crumble quickly to the ground before our creator, which is, according to the evolutionists, the universe that gave us life.

They say humor makes it easier to go through life, perhaps because we realize that behind the illusion of our seriousness lies the seriousness of our illusions. I mean that perhaps more than the social circumstances that we create to make it seem as if we count, including the Presidency, we may have a bigger purpose to live without presidencies, like orphans as it were, in the homeless Palace of our interpretations. To paraphrase Jean Jacques Rousseau, we never become socialized enough to corrupt ourselves completely! (3) We learn to live in Nature by deconstructing our needs, our ideas, and our institutions. We keep ourselves ever so near, but always so far from ever becoming exactly like the ant!!

On this optimistic note, I will close my first letter to you, for I intend to keep writing even if you ignore me.

Respectfully,

Diogenes

Your irreverent Subject

Second Time, sometime in November

Dear Mr. President:

Thank you for your thank you card. I appreciate that you took the time to read my first letter to you, although I can't tell from your card whether you actually read it. But as I said in my first letter, even if you never read my letters, your being the president gives people like me a reason for writing about you. And for that alone, you deserve our respect, and patience, for who else but you would be willing to perform the role of the gadfly that gives us swats the opportunity to do something purposeful?

Writing is the lifesaver of ideas. It is like the LOGOS in the Bible: it can create something from nothing, invade minds, and like a virus have a life of its own. Writing is the presidential anti-hero that rules without tearing the house apart.

There are presidencies of all kinds, from the least powerful to the most feared, paid or unpaid, democratic or dictatorial, loved or hated, remembered or forgotten. What do they all have in common? First, they lay claim to some type of leadership, of being at the top or at the helm, or more bluntly, where the buck stops, be it filled with sense or nonsense. Second, they owe their existence to social stratification. The presidency highlights you for you, differentiates you from the rest, underscores your loneliness, demarcates your responsibilities, pulls you out from among the crowd, sits you down in dead center, highlights, amplifies, exaggerates all of your strengths and weaknesses.

The presidency is an illusionist that can make you hide your true self even from yourself. To survive, you often become a caricature of your former self, an angelic figure that people love to dream about, you can no longer sit anonymously in the crowd, or nonchalantly blame someone else. Presidencies give time and place a human face, as in historical periods known better by their presidents, than strictly chronologically by their dates. Presidencies stake out territories, as did kings before the rise of nationalism, except with the advent of democracy they are usually elected, and therefore presumably more representative.

It requires a psychological leap of faith to identify with your president, than with your king, knowing that you are on the side of the majority. Of course we will never really know whether people marched to their deaths in times past to defend their king or queen because they were ignorant or blind, or worse, afraid, or just did not know any better. Were they then as equally protective of authority figures as they are now? The irony is that young people dying in a democracy are not always represented by their own kind, as they are likely to be economically poorer than their elected representatives, if not at the other end of the socioeconomic spectrum, and may fight more for food, than for principle.

If being president requires being able to convince, control, and coordinate your subjects, then knowing all of the circumstances that got you there, as presumably you did when you applied, will help you redefine yourself in their most likely image, including their projections, expectations, and definitions. Small wonder that presidents, and before them kings and queens of all types, learned all too well how to act, dress the part, and play the role of the popular Other. It is not surprising that in recent times actors have made headway in politics, given their facility in self-redefinition, acute sense of their audience's strengths and weaknesses, and a realistic market assessment of their success. Where before kings would literally wear on their sleeves their power of persuasion, and decorate their lifestyle with processions that people dreamt about, in modern "democratic" times they adopt to the lowest common denominator of popularity, including in some places colloquialisms and bad grammar, to earn the largest number of votes.

Presidents adopt the ways of the chameleon, blending in with the background landscape, with the exception of a few strokes here and there that make them stand out, and therefore "presidential," except never too far or too radical to throw them out of the accepted canvas. As such, presidents represent the ethos of a group, place, or country, if not sincerely held as their own, at least symbolically as that which the people who elected, appointed, or ordained them "president" expected their president to have. Presidents, then, are a mixed symbol of cognitive, imagined, physical and emotional expectations, and therefore hardly ever capable of living up to all of them without some help from themselves, particularly their ability to redefine themselves. To the extent that presidents live the lie, meaning, their self as the Other others want them to be, as contrasted to what they would rather be if they were to let their guard down, to that extent they are not being themselves, and therefore possibly unfree, unhappy, or hypocritical.

My Dear Mr. Ambitious, are you having second thoughts about being president, considering all of the responsibilities, and almost none of the happiness of a carefree lifestyle? Are social circumstances forcing you to pretend, parade pompously, and pontificate in order to succeed? Have the people that elected you stolen your soul? Or did you manage to pull the wool over everyone's eyes with your friendly but asinine gimmicks? If not elected, but instead imposed yourself on the presidency, what right to power, if not self-inflicted pain, do you have? Were you appointed by some higher authority, secular or otherwise? Or did you simply take the presidency by force, dispensing with all the niceties of democratic camouflage? If you owe your title to your boss, is it worth losing your freedom, if not your dignity, to temporal, and therefore by definition temporary, rewards? If you owe your title to your might, is it worth dressing up your ego with your self-tailored image, if neither your ego nor your image are any less tarnished by your vanity?

Whatever the reason, you must enjoy being president, otherwise I can assume you would have denied the offer, resisted the pressure, rejected the title. What do you hope to gain from it? I heard you say you like to help people. Or is it the other way around? Now tell me, what is it people need that you as president can provide? Material comfort? Sense of security? Understanding? Are you by any chance a father figure? Or a servant? Or are you the president because, like a father, you serve the people? I guess it is not your fault that people need presidents. Will society ever get rid of presidents, or are we condemned to live under the presidential spell? Will we ever transcend our need to lead or be led? Will we ever learn to coexist without leaders? Is anarchy a utopian dream playing on the human need to imagine, or is it a realistic possibility?

Perhaps the presidency is in fact symbolic not of authority, but of human freedom: by having presidents humans demonstrate to themselves and others their capacity for choice, such as, which type of presidency to choose, or who might be called to play that role. Unlike other animals that have hereditary lines of succession that leave little room for choice, humans suspend their freedom in the presidency: like a targeted pinata in a children's fiesta, so is the presidency a human compromise that humans love to hate between total individualism, on the one hand, and group cohesiveness, on the other. Presidents can be held accountable for all social failings under their watch. They are at once the heroes of human achievement, and villains of human shortcomings. They are praised when things go well, and blamed when they do not. It is much easier to blame the "president" for what one fails to do, than to have to acknowledge our mortality, personal morass, or immaturity.

Presidents give life to a group dream that requires someone at the helm to bring about. At the same time they live parasitic lives, albeit often at the consent of the governed. Presently it seems impossible that people could live without the presidential fix. We are presidentially hooked. So much so that people will invent the presidency, dream it, make it up, or believe in it even if there are no presidents anywhere to be found. Witness the widespread religious practice of God-worshiping, which it has been determined people will pursue even in the absence of a legitimate political or social structure that requires a president. What is god, after all, than an imaginary president? If you believe that god exists, how much more convincing this argument from presidency becomes as a result of your convictions: you really feel it in your gut to be a "presidentialist," meaning, to erect a "president God" where there is none available. In fact, this need is so strong that often humans compile one president on top of another in a presidential pyramid of leaders of all types. In fact, aren't the pyramids of ancient Egypt, as Aristotle observed (4), a tall testament to our authoritarianism? Is free will yet another illusion coming to an end? Will it ever survive the Outback of Physical, Emotional and Economic Adversity? Or is it merely a facade, as Freud might have speculated (5), of deeper held convictions?

At this point, my Beloved Friend, I Bid you Adieu. It has been a long journey that you gave me the opportunity to Travel, and saw many an Ithaca along the way, thanks partly to you. I have my ticket for yet another adventure in my pocket, and must run to the airport for my emotional liftoff. I expect to learn many new things where I go, for I always carry with me in a fail-safe suitcase my Mind.

Good Luck to You!

Respectfully,

Diogenes

Your most Disobedient Servant

ENDNOTES

1. Soren Kierkegaard, The Sickness Unto Death, tr. Walter Lowie, Doubleday & Co., 1954. Back to text

2. See interesting analysis of genes in humans published by CNN News on 10/20/04. Back to text

3. Emile, tr. Allan Bloom, Basic Books, 1979. Back to text

4. Aristotle, Politics, tr. E. Barker and R. F. Stalley, Oxford University Press, 1995. Back to text

5. Sigmund Freud, The Ego and the Id, tr. James Strachey, W.W. Norton, 1960. Back to text

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