What is the man who cannot be known apart from his socio-political
environment? As Zbigniew Janowski asserts, one does not ask who
this man is, for he does not even know himself. This man is
suppressed and separated, and not by Fascism or Communism. In
present-day America this has been accomplished by democracy. "Only
someone shortsighted, or someone who values equality more than
freedom, would deny that today's citizens enjoy little or no
freedom, particularly freedom of speech, and even less the ability
to express openly or publicly the opinions that are not in
conformity with what the majority considers acceptable at a given
moment. It may sound paradoxical to contemporary ears, but a fight
against totalitarianism must also mean a fight against the
expansion of democracy." Janowski all at once brazen and out of
bounds states what he calls the obvious and unthinkable truth: In
the United States, we are already living in a totalitarian reality.
The American citizen, the Homo Americanus, is an ideological being
who is no longer good or bad, reasonable or irrational, proper or
improper except when measured against the objectives of the
dominating egalitarian mentality that American democracy has
successfully incubated. American democracy has done what other
despotic regimes have likewise achieved--namely, taken hold of the
individual and forced him to renounce (or forget) his greatness,
pursuit of virtue and his orientation toward history and Tradition.
Homo Americanus, Janowski argues, has no mind or soul and he cannot
tolerate diversity and indeed he now censors himself. Democracy is
not benign, and we should fear its principles come by and applied
ad hoc. It is deeply troublesome that in the way democracy moves
today it gives critics no real insight into any trajectory of
reason behind its motion, which is erratic and unmappable. The Homo
Americanus is an ideological entity whose thought and even morality
are forbidden from universal abstraction. Janowski mounts the
offensive against what the American holds most sacred, and he does
so in order to save him. After exposing the danger and the damage
done, Janowski makes another startling proposal. It is a "diseased
collective mind" that is the source of this ideology, the liberal
anti-perspective that presses man into the image of the Homo
Americanus, and its grip can only be broken through the recovery of
instinct. Homo Americanus cannot be free again until he is himself
again. That is, until the shadow that belongs only to him is
restored, and he is thereby no longer alienated from others.
Despite the condemnation Janowski seems to be levying on the
citizen of the United States, he betrays a great hope and
confidence that the means to shake ourselves awake from the bad
dream are nevertheless in hand. Janowski's work is the next title
in St. Augustine's Press Dissident American Thought Today Series.
It occupies a controversial overlapping terrain between the
philosophical descriptions of liberalism as a tradition, psychology
and the fundamentally influential critiques of democracy offered by
Thucydides, Jefferson, Franklin, Tocqueville, Mill, Burke and more.
More anecdotal than analytical, Janowski offers the contemporary
proof that the reader is right to be scandalized by democracy and
his or her own likeness of the Homo Americanus. Once upon a time it
was the despicable Homo Sovieticus fruit of tyranny, but now we
fear democratic society too might fall and all its citizens never
be found again.
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