The other night I parted ways with some friends and enjoyed a solo nine mile bike ride. Music kept my right ear company while my left listened for traffic.

And I had a thought. Ruminating on that Ironman post, I discovered a connection. I wrote about how weapons and systems of control can shrink the sphere of discourse. I realized that shrinking the sphere of discourse is absolutely necessary. A national community is far too large to engage in collective decision making. Indeed, the very goal of our representative democracy is to shrink the sphere of discourse in the name of efficiency. This presents a serious problem, however: representative democracy is so easily corrupted that it is not a viable means of protecting the people’s interests. Indeed, if we want to increase freedom and create a more just society–or more just societies–we must decentralize power through collective decision making.

The postmodernist answer lies in something like the interpretive communities that Stanley Fish has written about, which are parallel to Lyotard’s concept of local determinism. Power is currently centralized in an overarching superstructure. To be decentralized, we need viable substructures. These are interpretive communities which house what I call vernacular institutions.

The realization is that society already recognizes the need to shrink the sphere of discourse, and meets this need with violence and coercion which result in oppression. The importance of this realization is that–given this preexistent realization–my task is to advocate and experiment with better alternatives, and not to spend too much time arguing the importance of shrinking the sphere of discourse.

I apologize for the probable lack of clarity in this post. This is the tip on the iceberg of all my best efforts at a critical theory of society. I have written in innumerable length about these concepts, yet their significance seems lost without a full explication, which would require much more than a blog post. This is the struggle I wrote about in my first post, to express myself in a way that is accessible. I truly believe that combining many of the theories I have encountered can produce a very powerful argument for the direction society will take in the decades to come, but analysis is impotent until shared. Please bear with me as I practice expressing these thoughts.