Pluralism is performance. The options available to you in liberal society are as superficial as the choices on supermarket shelves – all actually the creation of a handful of megacorporations – and are aimed at a nefarious end: to convince you of your ‘individuality’.
The core illusion of liberalism is the private/public distinction: that the state merely oversees a society of ‘free individuals‘ who act out of ‘private initiative’, intervening when necessary. To render this plausible the state generates a (superficially) pluralistic culture.
How can we be anything but a collection of individuals overseen by the liberal state? We’re all so different! We have nothing in common! He’s a Jew, she’s a Christian, he’s a Leftist, she’s a conservative, etc. Pluralism and agonism (the generation of conflict) aid the illusion.
The liberal state must continually refresh its stores of pluralism and conflict. It taps into many sources. Creating activist movements, elevating subcultures to political importance, scouring the world for exotic ethnicities to add to the melting pot. Anything to break unity.
All this subterfuge has one end: to convince you that you possess a kind of ‘asocial’ individuality, that instead of being part of a polity, with a specific role, you are merely a member of a loose aggregate of individuals who act out of ‘self-interest’, overseen by the state.
There‘s much more to the subterfuge: psychology, economics, the ‘scientific method‘. Everything that elevates the individual mind above our participation in a organized polity (the actual source of our uniquely human powers) is a lie. It must all be replaced.
This conception of the ‘individual mind’ was the product of the ultimate act of cowardice: Confronted by the Cosmos, we created it as a place to hide. Liberalism is merely the commitment to propagating this diminished self-conception from generation to generation.
