In the beginning years of this blog, I published a series of articles called “Meditations on Democracy and Dictatorship” which are still regularly read today, and have had some influence. They still elicit inquiries from remote corners of the globe. They are now buried in the back pages of the blog, so I’m moving them up the chronological counter so they can have another round of visibility, especially (I hope) with younger readers. I am re-posting them in their original sequence over part of 2018. Some references in these “meditations” will date them to 2007–2008, when they were written. But I will leave them un-retouched, though I may occasionally append some retrospective notes. Mostly, they deal with abstract issues that do not need updating.
A few days ago, I was in the subway, and I overheard a conversation about our current national election. Two boys who, from their appearance, could have been no further along in school than grade nine or ten, were discussing the televised debates between the leaders of the five major political parties. What struck me, as I listened in, was that the discussion was cogent and intelligent. One of the boys, who seemed the youngest, was particularly articulate, and his opinions were not the simple parroting of some adult he had heard, or the pursuit of a party line. In fact, his analysis of the debate showed keener observation and judgment than that of the professional commentators who dissected the debate after the broadcast.
Now, I’m sure that these were exceptional kids. It’s unlikely that there are many in their age group who share their interests and skills. But it’s a sign that there is something going on, under the surface of our society, that you would never guess by watching television or reading a newspaper. I grew up in a family where national and provincial politics were argued at the dinner table with gusto, and I have a clear memory of the issues in an election held when I was ten years old. That was probably an exceptional environment. But I did not have access to the wealth of information now available on the internet. No amount of cleverness is very useful if you have poor information, so my capacity to analyze was limited. I doubt that I could have matched the sophistication demonstrated by the kids in the subway. Many people, of any age, are still prey to the traditional tools of obfuscation, button-pushing and appeals to prejudice that politicians have successfully deployed for centuries. However, if someone is fairly sharp, and raised with the information tools now available, they have a good chance of seeing through these stratagems. So you can expect there to start appearing a layer of young people who are relatively immune to the kind of silly-ass campaigning that our current government relies upon. It will be very interesting to see what happens when that layer of people, who were born with the internet, grows up and walks into the poll-booth. They will be displacing a generation that grew up with the much more passive and homogeneous medium of television.
One of the results may be that the electorate does some growing up in a psychological, as well as a physical sense. One of the chief points that I’ve tried to put across in my “meditations on democracy” is that the core concept of democracy is self-respect. Self-respect is manifested, in a healthy mind, by a willingness to take on the responsibilities of an adult when one becomes an adult. The principal responsibility that an adult has is to govern oneself. A child is born helpless, and must at first be controlled and guided by parents, in order to survive at all. But, as the child grows older, the caring parent relinquishes one aspect of control after another, until adulthood is reached, and the child becomes autonomous and self-governing. That is common sense, understood by most people on the individual level. However, on the level of collective action, on the level of society, that common sense lesson is rarely understood.
When people discussing politics talk about “leadership”, you know that they are encased in a primitive, pre-logical, and infantile state of mind. People who seek leaders are simply not grown up, and people who advance the claim of Leadership are attempting to keep adults in a state of perpetual childhood. If to be an adult means to govern oneself, then no adult should be seeking a “leader”. The purpose of democracy is not to “select a leader”. It is to select policies. The mechanism of democracy is not intended to choose someone to govern the people, but for the people to govern themselves. In rational democratic thought, office holders are not “leaders”, they are servants. The purpose of an election is to 1) choose a policy of administration and an overall plan, 2) assign people to the relevant tasks, and 3) make sure they do what they are told to do. “Leadership” does not come into it. Voters are not supposed to be “led”, they are supposed to be in charge. The last person I want to see hold public office is some strutting alpha-ape who claims the right to tell me what to do. If I see someone running for office who is flaunting dominance signals, claiming to have “vision” and telling me I need “leadership”, then my healthy, sane, adult response is to want to see such an asshole slapped down, humbled, and kicked out of public life. I want to see them replaced with some competent person who will faithfully carry out the instructions they are given by the people. I am an adult, and a free man, so anyone who dares to claim to be my “leader” earns nothing but my contempt. My fundamental heritage as a Canadian is that the only legitimate leader of me is me.
Canadians are supposed to know this. We are not some backward tribe of savages dancing around a golden calf and waiting for a crackpot Messiah to tell us what to do. We are supposed to be grown up enough not to be impressed by a tailored suit, a jutting jaw, or a manufactured publicity image. The political system we have built, slowly and prudently, out of disparate traditional sources — England’s slowly evolved parliament, New England’s town meetings, native Canadian councils, the long fight for universal franchise, notions of autonomy, individual rights, social equality, and self-rule — should not be permitted to lapse into some kind of mystical monarchy, after all our struggles. That is precisely why, in our system, the prime minister is not the head of state, and his or her government can be called to account at any time, or dissolved by a vote of no-confidence. In fact, the presence of a prime minister is a mere superstitious holdover, an artifact of primitive hierarchical thought that is fundamentally incompatible with democracy.
The only valid function of a prime minister in our system is to “form a government”, i.e. to select a cabinet and oversee the administration of whatever laws the assembled parliament chooses to pass. Otherwise, he is merely a minister like any other, elected to represent his local riding. It is the assembled members of parliament who are supposed to be making decisions, not the prime minister. A parliament can function better without the office, and if we manage to evolve our system further, it will eventually be abolished.
People consistently confuse (because they have been encouraged to confuse) a political party with government. But a party is merely a private association of citizens, some holding office and some not, that supposedly shares some particular opinions about policy. Members of parliament may choose to belong to a political party, but their role in parliament is to propose, debate, and vote on legislation for the well-being of the country, as representatives of their constituents. They are not supposed to be cogs or functionaries of whatever party they belong to, and they are supposed to be answerable to the electorate, not to their party leadership. The fact that Stephen Harper, the current prime minister, is the leader of his party (a private organization) should never be confused with the fact that he has been instructed by the Head of State, Michaëlle Jean, to select a cabinet and carry out public administration.
But what, in this system, actually necessitates there being a prime minister? The affairs of government are supposed to be undertaken and managed by cabinet ministers. The “chief executive” of the government is Parliament itself. It is the process of voting in assembly that determines policy and assigns tasks to the relevant ministers. Therefore, there is nothing necessitating the designation of any single person as the “chief executive”. The only thing that brings the office into prominence is the chronic and dysfunctional habit that people have of seeking a “chief”. They embroil themselves in his or her personality, rather than concentrating on the actual concrete decisions that have to be made and carried out. That is not democratic behaviour ― it is the behaviour of people who fail to grasp the elementary principles of democracy. Parliament as a whole could elect the cabinet ministers from their own number, and dispense with the prime minister entirely. In such a reformed system, the electorate would be forced to think about policies, programs, and choices of action, rather than idiotic irrelevancies such as what clothing a candidate wears or the timbre of their voice, or their sense of humour, or their putative “leadership qualities”.
Stephen Harper and the Conservative Party have done everything in their power to import an American-style “cult of the prime minister” into this country. He has been largely unsuccessful in this enterprise, since it runs against the grain of the country’s habits and temperament. But he does successfully deploy the “leadership” concept, because Canadians are just as much accustomed to assuming that “leadership” is a positive, desirable thing as Americans are. The notion is relentlessly pounded into us, from early childhood, through education and the media. In the current election, millions of foolish people will vote for Harper because he looks like a television casting choice for a “distinguished leader”, and spends millions of dollars shouting the word “leadership” at the public. In reality, he is a pathetic flunky who jumps to the orders of global oil executives, believes in a discredited crackpot ideology, and has pissed away most of the country’s savings. His leading opponent is a competent enough administrator, reasonably well-informed, proposing far more sensible policies, but he is awkward in front of a camera and has no acting skills. His party’s policies are a more reasonable choice in this circumstance, something evident to anyone who has an adult revulsion for “leadership” nonsense. After decades of constant inculcation, many have come to believe that the posturing and mannerisms of “leadership” are the only things worth thinking about. Consequently, there’s a great danger that the current government’s blatant incompetence will go unpunished by the electorate, simply because the opposition cannot make the necessary dominant simian noises. In this election, it is the Conservative Party that embodies the cult of leadership, so the optimum voter strategy is to vote for whomever might defeat the Conservatives in their riding, a strategy popularly known in Canada as “ABC” (Anything But Conservative).
When I want my car fixed, I don’t want “leadership qualities”, I want knowledge of auto mechanics. When I want my kidney stones extracted, I want a competent surgeon, not someone who can make people cheer at a rally. When I want my rights protected, I want an honest servant who acts morally, not a clever power-seeker. When I want the environment protected, I want someone who knows the physical and biological sciences, and is not in the pay of polluters, not an expert at manipulating people. When I want the economy protected from fraud, I want an honest accountant, not a con-artist with “charisma”. When I see a pompous ass telling me he is my “leader”, I want to see him defeated, laughed at, and dismissed. That is because I’m grown up. I’m an adult. If I have any doubts about this attitude, I need only look south of the border to see what happens to a great nation when it flees into a state of permanent, artificial childhood.
The presidency, in the American system, is an even more archaic leftover than our office of prime minister ― and it has mutated into a dangerous royal cult, which has brought the American people near to destruction. In the midst of that destruction, Americans are not talking about what should be done to fix the problems, but about who will be the charismatic Leader who will kiss them and make things better. In other words, it is still an election about magic, when it’s precisely a belief in magic that got them into the disastrous position they’re in. Luckily, in Canada, we don’t seem to have moved so far into such a world of unreality. The typical Canadian voter does not sit around calculating whether a candidate bears the number of the beast, or demand that a politician infuse them with “hope”, or that they fix the economy by being handsome, or that they produce effortless prosperity out of a hat. Canadians still see politicians as human beings hired to do a job for them, though the “leadership” concept intrudes and confuses their otherwise common-sense instincts. But that confusion is critical in this particular election, where our future is more at stake than usual. The election will be held in two days, and we will see exactly what percentage of us are children and what percentage are adults, since purported “leadership” is the only thing the incumbent government is running on. It is our Thanksgiving weekend, and polls suggests that most undecided voters plan to make their decision after family discussion over the turkey dinner.
Which brings us back to the kids in the subway. The kids I overheard did not say any of the stupid things routinely spouted by adults in the press and on television. They did not once mention “leadership”. Will the greater access to information they enjoy, and the habits of research, process modeling, and interactive participation, which home computers have exposed them to, eventually allow them to see beyond the “image” and “leadership” fallacies? Will they be more inclined to grow up into functioning adults, rather than eternally dependent children? Will they learn to follow facts and principles, rather than Leaders?
I have a suspicion that they will. They will, unlike the current generation, grow up. The question is, will they grow up quickly enough to save us from the destructive choices of a generation of artificial infants?
This article was written earlier than it’s publication date, and the incident in the subway refers to the federal election of the previous year. That election initiated the long tenure of Steven Harper and his Conservative Party in the national parliament. At the time it was published, another election was being contested here in the Province of Ontario, which resulted in the even longer tenure of Liberal Party government. The impact of home computers and the internet on the electorate has taken somewhat different turns than most of us assumed when this was written. However, the ultimate results may turn out something entirely different.
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