Vanishing Mediators UNITE

I’ve been reflecting on this disappearance of elders thing more. Some good discussions were drummed up around my piece last week, especially at Parallax (that’s the intellectual DEEP web, not DARK web), prompting me to want to dig a little deeper.  

All my life I’ve resisted authority. I’m not alone. Especially in the “west”. But there is something beyond “individualism” at work—something more fundamental.

Warning: you’re getting the heady and speculative me today. Rating: Single Black Bar.

(If you’re not in the mood for this me, hang tight, tomorrow I’m sending along a fun podcast I did that touched on similar subjects).

I’m clarifying authority into 3 groups: Absolute Authority, Authority Figure, and False Authority. Absolute Authority is the existential threat—death. The Authority Figure mediates the existential threat of Absolute Authority. False Authority is the Authority Figure who assumes the role of Absolute Authority (the existential threat). (Note that I’m choosing these terms to represent the view of the Subject).

In the long shadow of Absolute Authority (the existential threat), the Authority Figure is made necessary—and so granted authoritative powers contingent on their perceived ability to mediate existential threat. Thus the substance of authority is doubly inscribed within the Authority Figure, here by the existential predicament itself, there by their perceived capacity to mediate it—such that when the Authority Figure says “or else”, the full power of Absolute Authority extends itself into the threat. 

Ah, but then we progress—and authority necessarily breaks down because of it.

Owing to our success in greatly reducing immediate existential threats, Absolute Authority has drifted into a deep state of abstraction. Sure, the fear-mongering politician can drum up existential dread and maintain a tenuous status as an Authority Figure. But the act becomes unsustainable as it increasingly relies on non-visceral abstraction, and so the Authority Figure, left with too little to mediate, slips into False Authority (despotism).

When the existential element is not perceived to be viscerally present, the raw substance of authority is collapsed into the Authority Figure themselves, making them no longer a mediating figure, but authority itself. This is the False Authority (despotism, I repeat, no matter the genteel form). In this absence of higher power, False Authority—the modern authority—has nothing to mediate but their own ambitions, and cannot confer but their own desires. In this, the False Authority seems at once immaculate and disreputable; not to be trusted—and rightly resisted.  

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So what?

This isn’t a plea for a return to the “Authority Figure” as configured. This is a call for a new variation on the Elder as the Vanishing Mediator.

The problem with the Authority Figure is that their status as authority is a terminal condition. They’ll do just about anything to keep on mediating—make up Gods and make up threats and whip people into false and abstracted existential frenzies—all just to convince us that they are necessary, and to hang on to their status as “powerful”. Thats all fine, I suppose—until, with enough distance from Absolute Authority, it yields False Authority.

And so we need mediators willing to vanish. And the Vanishing Mediator, if they are to be capable of vanishing, must first learn to accept a flux of status from mediating authority to non-mediating non-authority and back, to expand the notion of status, such that a fluidity of status is their status.

There is one profession already accustomed to some aspects of this—the teacher. Teachers are entrained to accept themselves as mediating authorities until the student graduates, at which point the asymmetrical position of authority vanishes into equilibrium with the student—upon graduation.

I suddenly recall Zachary Stein’s work on education and his advocacy for a return of teacherly authority. Central to his notion, as I recall, is this idea of graduation—a ceremony explicitly designed to graduate the initiate into the same realm of mastery their teachers once solely occupied, vanishing the asymmetries between them and rendering the teacher a Vanishing Mediator.

But this is not so easily achieved elsewhere. The professor, sure, is trained to accept their student’s ascent to their own level, more or less, vis-à-vis the graduation—and yet the professor would not be so obliged if the student were, upon graduation, to take over their tenure, too. The teacher would protest with force, as do our politicians, as do our authorities generally when proposed with changes of the guard. 

And so we need mediators willing to die, in the sense of status.

And this is more of the predicament—there must be a mediating class willing to cede the territory to the new masters. Otherwise, of course, the graduation is meaningless. 

(This is not to say that the Vanishing Mediator cannot play the role of the pugnacious Master unwilling to cede their superiority, forcing the student to overcome them, but it does mean that the “master” who has become hypnotized by their role to the point of existential dread is no master at all.)

And so what sort of initiation should we, as Vanishing Mediators, be guiding our young people to?  

To Absolute Authority itself.  

In this move, the triadic paradigm of Subject/Authority Figure/Absolute Authority is replaced by the triad of Initiate/Vanishing Mediator/Absolute Authority.  

While this would seem to freely introduce the Subject to Absolute Authority, this disintermediation is actually a re-implementation of a barred absolute—a crucible gateway—between the subject and the absolute authority: the initiation itself is the bar to entry.

By initiation into Absolute Authority I mean death initiation. I will not pretend to mean anything else. It is neither barbaric nor primitivist. A call to the return of existential initiation is precisely a call to the return to our sanity. That is, to our senses as they sit waiting to be fully plugged in to our epistemic stack. 

Of course, as in today’s society there would be public outcry if 13-year-olds were coaxed into existential quests, today’s existential initiations are to be designed for the adult. Most importantly, this sort of initiation cannot be undertaken as a commodity, nor as stripped of its social component, nor as eco-village vacation. The very notion of graduation means a witnessing must occur that confers, upon completion, the state of graduation upon the initiate. Thus, the function of the tribe is central.  

In so many ways what differentiates tribe from polity is initiation, as defined by the sublimation of existential dread within the Absolute Authority, through the Vanishing Mediator, and into Graduation.

Graduation, then, is not merely a material arrival, but is an arrival demonstrated through a readiness to dematerialize—to vanish—on behalf of the next generation of initiates.

And so, an earnest vision:

Thus confronted with Absolute Authority instead of the hollow talk of False Authority, the initiate seeks out the Vanishing Mediator for guidance, casting wasteful rebellions aside, and creating a natural cultural interest in those who have gone before—the elders.

That’s the general idea, anyhow.