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virtues. 90 Our present, too, has become infinitely divisible from our heritage, and our vision of a non-sublimated world infinitely divisible from the sublimated Forms. In Dionysian revelry, the despotism of the 20th century reached the full-formed spine of Leviathan, as if a postmodern, simultaneous rhizome that proliferates itself ad- infinitum, yet another extreme architecture of our Protagorean delusion that “man is the measure of things that are, and are not.”91 Up to now, inhumanism has been the measure of justifying and perpetuating houndism, with God and without God, with covenants or without them. Sadly, the actions of General Wills show the exercise of partiality and of wielding power. Sadly, self-serving interests prevail and not the common good’s in numberless boardrooms of tyranny. Sadly, the boundaries between a genuine Social Contract and a Suzerain-like Covenant of absolute dominion are blurred. Rousseau’s idealized General Will can revert to the decadent Master of Death of Germany and of Illium. Sadly, when individuals exchange their natural liberties for civil ones, citizens are neither guaranteed absolute safety, nor the absolute protection of their rights by Rousseau’s Sovereign because its magistrates can succumb to the irrational temptation of absolute power, as occurred in Job, Joseph K, and in John Milton’s days.
Job’s tyrannical Celestial Court and Joseph K’s High Court with its flogger’s junk room, and its endless attic courtrooms, are the offspring of what Milton regards the temptation of absolute power, which perverts Kings, courts, magistrates to commit injustice, corruption, arbitrariness and partiality.92 Having broken their covenant to exercise
90 Ibid., Book I. Chapters 8 and 9.
91 Waterfield, Robin. The First Philosophers. The Pre-Socratics and the Sophists. “Protagoras.” Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. 205-222
92 Milton. Complete Poems and Major Prose. Ed. by Merritt Y. Hughes. The Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1957. 755
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