Re: Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn on the herd instinct vs liberty

Great selection.

1/ Building on Von Kuehnelt-Leddihn's point: Civilisation itself is not spontaneous and self-sustaining, and its reproduction requires force in the form of artificial and purposeful constraints.

Force is applied by the body-politic against material scarcity and environmental uncertainty, other polities, and its members. Individuals internalise force as constraints, but in concentrated form re-express it into renewed institutional structures. Force acts on human drives, channelling them into constrained action-spaces from which political order emerges.

I've been thinking of this as the "force model of civilisation".

2/ I would add that the "contradiction" of liberal democracy (individual sovereignty + equality claims) is a _constitutive_ tension.

It's a Nietzschean 'tension of the spirit', produced through the sustained channelling and constraining of human drives, which extends the reach of possible action, both generative and destructive.