The Social Contract

I’m sure you’ve all heard the phrase “the Social Contract”. Political scientists use the term to describe good-faith relations consent between government and the governed which constitutes what is called “legitimation”. It is, in those terms, what is called “the consensus” or the condition of “unanimity”. Social peace is largely the result of all parties respecting and adhering in good faith, and not in bad faith, to the social contract. It’s this social contract that gives us the term “nation-state” those being the people and its government. When the social contract breaks down through bad faith actors, this stable relation between nation and state also breaks down. This is called loss of legitimation. This is pretty much the situation today. When we speak of “bad faith” then, it is because one or more parties has broken the social contract.

You may have also heard the saying “truth to the friend, lies to the foe”. When governments lie, or when hypocrites rule, or when people lie to one another, you have a state of war that, in the extreme, amounts to a “war of all against all”, or you may have a divorce between state and nation when neither party considers itself bound to uphold the social contract that is the basis for unanimity or consensus. If the social contract is irretrievably broken or discredited, only a revolution can restore social order by writing up a new social contract. Revolutions only break out when the old social contract is already broken, typically through the disease called “decadence”. There is, thus, a dialectical relation between social revolution and social decadence.

What we call “post-truth” or “post-rational” is, in effect, a breakdown of the social contract. Bad faith governments and politicians lie with impunity and equally the people lie to each other. A man like Bernie Sanders insists on a “political revolution” and a new social contract between the government and the governed precisely because he sees that the old social contract is irretrievably broken, and he believes passionately that health and health care can serve effectively as the core feature of a new social contract. He knows that the old one is discredited and dead and now is little more than a zombie even as certain politicians pay lip-service to it, yet break it in practice — the hypocrites.

Everyone sees today, I think, that many politicians lie and act in bad faith. And yet, for merely partisan reasons, their supporters continue to support them in that bad faith, and so are just as complicit in breaking the social contract as the politicians they support. And, of course, one of the bad faith practices that undermines the social contract is the practice of “plausible deniability”. The reason many people find this practice shocking is precisely because it breaks the social contract.

When Pope Francis, rightly, laments that “duplicity is the currency of the day” — the normalisation of lying and hypocrisy, and our acquiescence in that, in effect — this means that the social contract is irretrievably broken and must be replaced. Another way of describing the social contract is “the peace of the land”, so there can be no peace if the social contract is broken, and this problem of legitimation actually extends beyond just America.

You may recall, from earlier posts, our brief reviews of Rosenstock-Huessy’s unique interpretation of the pattern of modern revolutions in his Out of Revolution: Autobiography of Western Man. Based on his interpretation of that pattern, he anticipated yet a conclusive revolution that would seal and close the Modern Era, and he anticipated that the core value or principle of this revolution would be “health” — another term for “integration” since integrare means “to mend”, “to heal”, “to make whole”. Such a revolution would establish a new social contract, in effect, and he seemed to understand the principles of ecology and social ecology long before most people had even heard of the word “ecology”. But when we survey the situation today in many jurisdications, we see that the existing social contract is broken also, and that there is a new insistence and persistence that health and well-being, in all its forms, be made the centre-piece of a new social contract, so we can conclude that we are in a pre-revolutionary situation.

Such a principle of health and well-being (which Gebser, too, might call “the vital centre”) will necessarily include all the aspects of the human fourfold — the mental, emotional, spiritual, and natural aspects — and so must necessarily be integral in those terms, for otherwise too narrow an understanding of health will not hit the target for which it pretends to aim. To be successful, the new social contract must include, in its terms, all four of these aspects of human well-being. Earlier revolutions only specialised in one aspect.

This would, indeed, constitute a major transformation of society, for it would mean recognising human beings in their fourfold aspect as creatures of nature, creatures of emotion, creatures of thought, and spiritual beings as well. So any new political or social revolution must recognise and acknowledge this four-dimensional or quadrilateral character of the human fourfold. This would, of course, bring about Blake’s anticipated new consciousness of “fourfold vision” and Jung’s “integral Self” or what otherwise might be called the “ecodynamic Self”.

This seems very likely when one considers how many people, working in different areas, are nonetheless articulating a common new fourfold or quadrilateral description of human being and of reality. They are, in effect, working out the terms of the new social contract.

That’s a good way of describing it.

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