Paradise lost and the question of legitimacy

this paper reconstructs the deficiencies of formal democracies to explain the internal injustices of the modern state, the self-righteous swaggering foreign policy of Western powers, and the dangerously over-simplified, polar logic characterizing the war rhetoric of the modern era. In a brief tour through the non-liberal tradition of democratic thought, drawing connections between the tragic mythological origins of Western understandings of self and world, the paper attempts to demonstrate that a failure to find alternate, healthier means of value-creation has caused Westerners, int heir constructive identity work, to adhere themselves to their systems with a ritualized, 'religious' fervour. Legitimacy in the world becomes, in the final analysis, a simple matter of might. The possession of firearms and bread render self-sanctifying myths legitimating aggressions on the argument of 'good' powers fighting the battle against 'evil' contaminants.