Chapter Six: Collective Reason

What is the reason for recent prodemocracy causes failing to push through? Frameshift does not suffice in itself to break the deadlock and implement social change. A second way out of the simplex, and effective in combination with frameshift, is to move sphere. This operation concentrates on the second dimension of validity, following social analysis. An example is an ecological intervention leaving party politics behind to engage with the judicial sphere, where sanctions are imposed on a failing government. Enlightenment and Marxism were feats of de-simplication to achieve freedom and equality respectively. The first matrix on free-thinking individuals taking rational decisions deconstructed collective traditions, specifically the religious simplexes of evil and sin. The second matrix rejected the employees’ obedience to the employer by revealing that the former were the actual sources of the latter’s capital because they produced commodities. Is the battle inevitable between the two matrixes, the West’s twin paradigms, the French Revolution’s first two values? The third value of inclusion, a necessity since globalization, turns out to be the missing link to uphold the other two values. A mysterious logic transpires in our structuralist analysis: ‘The sources of reason are collectively produced.’ To escape Luhmann’s dilemma stating ‘No inclusion without exclusion’, we have to shift our attention to the species, the source of collective reason, situated in the future. The species has a common fate. The chapters of Part II illustrate how to think inclusively; how to be ‘tensorial’.