Amerika

“The prophet who accurately foretells the growing corruption of a society discredits himself, for the more corruption increases, the less the corrupted are able to perceive it.”
— Nicolás Gómez Dávila, Escolios a un texto implícito

Once I had to complete a task that required a very specific methodology. I did not question the method itself, nor did I suggest modifications to optimize it. In truth, I wanted to learn from that method rather than impose myself upon it. So I listened closely and, at some point, asked about one step that remained unclear to me:

— “Why is it done this way?”
— “Because that’s the way it is.”
— “But why is it that way? What’s the reason?”
— “Because that’s the way it is, and that’s how it has always been.”

The answer, of course, was an answer — yet not the answer. It asserted such a reality without explaining it. It made of such a reality a final cause, self-justifying and invariable. This kind of response is rooted in a paradigm whose form is revered even when its substance is forgotten.[1]

In the same manner, the democracy that governs us is justified by its own existence. If we ask the public why democracy persists in its current shape, the most common response would be: “Because that’s the way things are.” As if the very being of things were an argument. The established is divinized; what is massive is believed to be good. Millions of fools, it seems, cannot be mistaken. Thus informal institutions arise, guarded more fiercely than any formal law, animated by the conviction that things are as they are because they are so — and that what is must therefore be right.

This is what Ortega y Gasset diagnosed in The Revolt of the Masses (1930) as the triumph of the “mass man,” the one who “feels safe in his environment, which he considers definitive; he cannot imagine that things might be otherwise.” The masses, proud of their docility, mistake inertia for virtue; their comfort becomes metaphysics.

When one affirms that “things are the way they are,” one commits a subtle but powerful linguistic fraud. The verb to be is invoked to sanctify the current order — as though existence itself were proof of legitimacy. The grammar of politics becomes ontology. In Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger (1935) reminds us that “language is the house of Being.” To speak of what is as though it were eternal is to trap becoming within syntax, to transform flux into dogma.

Reality, however, is not static; it is a field of becoming. We build it continuously — each act, each silence adds or removes a stone. The moment we inhabit will never return. Circumstances change, thoughts change, and so does the architecture of what we call the real.

In Roman Catholicism and Political Form, Schmitt (1923), observed that

“every form, once it is set, tends toward autonomy; it seeks to justify itself not by reason but by its own existence.”

Democracy today is precisely such a form. It no longer appeals to transcendence or to the telos of the common good; it survives by the sheer weight of its persistence. The citizen no longer venerates freedom but the apparatus that claims to protect it. Years later, Voegelin, in The New Science of Politics (1952) warned that when transcendence is denied, the order of being is deformed, and man “divinizes the world and himself.” In our time, this deformation takes the shape of political secularism — the worship of systems that no longer point beyond themselves. Democracy has become a demiurge, generating its own legitimacy ex nihilo, immune to critique because it alone dictates what critique means. To this blindness, Gómez Dávila responded with cruel precision:

“Modern man’s error is to believe that social order can be founded on reason.”

The worship of democracy as summum bonum is not the sign of maturity but of exhaustion: a civilization so afraid of chaos that it enthrones habit as divinity. Things, then, have not always been this way. They have only been this way for some time. Nothing guarantees they must remain so — except our fear. The tragedy is not that we believe in democracy, but that we no longer believe in anything strong enough to challenge it.

If we insist that things are the way they are, it is only because we lack the courage to imagine that they could be otherwise.

Notes.

1. The problem with means-over-ends is that by focusing on method, it eclipses goal; ends-over-means on the other hand orients toward a positive goal, meaning something to be achieved. Means-over-ends replaces the positive goal with negative impulses, namely avoiding taboo methods (eugenics, paganism, authoritarianism, carnivorism) (Stevens, 2025).

Bibliography

Gómez Dávila, N. (1992). Escolios a un texto implícito. Villegas Editores.

Heidegger, M. (1959). Introduction to Metaphysics (R. Manheim, Trans.). Yale University Press. (Original work published 1935)

Ortega y Gasset, J. (1930). La rebelión de las masas. Revista de Occidente.

Schmitt, C. (1923). Römischer Katholizismus und politische Form. Hoheneichen Verlag.

Stevens, B. (2025) “Means-Over-Ends.” Amerika. url: https://www.amerika.org/politics/means-over-ends/

Voegelin, E. (1952). The New Science of Politics. University of Chicago Press.

Tags: democracy, Jose Ortega y Gasset, mass man, mass revolt, means over ends