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.
Þingvellir, the outdoor site of the medieval Icelandic elected parliament. Þingvellir, the outdoor site of the medieval Icelandic elected parliament.
“Civilization is the process in which one gradually increases the number of people included in the term ‘we’ or ‘us’ and at the same time decreases those labeled ‘you’ or ‘them’ until that category has no one left in it.” — Howard Winters, an American archaeologist who studied ancient settlement and trade patterns [quoted by Anne-Marie Cantwell in Howard Dalton Winters: In Memoriam]
“Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” — Hermann Wilhelm Göring, second in command to Adolf Hitler.
What most tellingly distinguishes democratic from non-democratic thought is its respect for human beings. By this, I don’t mean respect for some nebulous abstraction called “humanity” or “the people”, which is all too easily transformed into a mystical collectivism. It’s a respect for real-life individual human beings, who live, fall in love, have children, and struggle to find security and happiness. In democratic thought, the wellbeing of individual human beings is the purpose and measure of political choices. Wellbeing, to the democrat, is defined first in terms of what matters most to conscious beings — liberty, self-respect, dignity, control over their own lives. The physical necessities of life, such as food and shelter, are meaningless to human beings except within the context of those values. We are not cattle.
It is this respect for human beings as human beings, and not merely as domestic animals, that distinguishes democratic thought from all other forms of political thought. The purpose of non-democratic thought is to secure power, glory, and wealth for some particular people — invariably a very small number of them — over the remainder. In order to accomplish this end, those who seek such power concoct fraudulent intellectual structures. Their aim is to convince human beings to sacrifice themselves, to abandoned their rights, or to victimize their neighbours. Some supernatural or collective entity is presented as the purpose and beneficiary of political choice. Whether it be nation, race, religion, party, or whatever, the survival of some collective entity is presumed to be the measure of all worth. Human beings are presented, not as valuable in themselves, but as existing only to serve and perpetuate the chosen collective entity.
Democratic ideas are not variants of, relatives of, or extensions of any form of non-democratic ideas. They are not part of any “spectrum”. They do not constitute an “ideology”, competing with other, essentially equivalent “ideologies”. The gulf between democratic thought and non-democratic thought is a chasm of absolute and irreconcilable opposition. The two ideas — that human beings have value, on the one hand, or that they are merely objects to be sacrificed to a collectivity, on the the other — exist in two separate conceptual universes. The first exists in a moral universe, and the other does not.
I must emphasize that I don’t believe in the sincerity of non-democratic thought. Those who are called upon to sacrifice their lives and liberty would not do so if they discovered that the only beneficiary was some other individual, not close or dear to them, who lived and prospered parasitically from their self-sacrifice. They must either be convinced that human beings are ranked in real value, and that their self-sacrifice reflects their own innately lesser value than their beneficiaries; or they must be distracted from seeing the self-serving interest of the beneficiaries by imagining that some more important, non-human thing is being served; or they must have their ordinary human needs for love, friendship and family crushed, and a neurotic emotional transference to a “leader” substituted for them. For any of these phenomena to come into effect, the beneficiaries cannot be unconscious of the fraudulent nature of their claims. It requires a constant refreshment of lies and manipulation, switches in tactics and techniques, and substitutions of one “aim” for another to maintain the spell. In all my studies of tyrants and non-democratic regimes, I have never once seen any credible evidence that the central leadership of any such regime actually believed in the truth of their supposed “ideology”. One of the chief pleasures of domination, from the point of view of the dominant, is the satisfaction of knowing that the “suckers” believe absurdities which they would never fall for themselves.
To understand this process, we must not look to some dubious notion of human nature, but to the more concretely visible phenomenon of human character. Human nature, whatever it might be, is that which all human beings hold psychologically in common. People have argued fruitlessly for millennia about whether people are “essentially” selfish, or benevolent, or violent, or peaceful, or submissive, or aggressive. Whatever they might “essentially” be, our experience tells us that human beings vary in their character, that they do not all fit a single template. We have invented words like “cruel”, “kind”, “selfish”, “pompous”, “credulous”, “gentle”, or “sensitive” because we encounter different kinds of behaviour in human beings. Within a certain range, we are prepared to deal with these variations, and to recognize that our own character is among them.
However, certain specific human characters present problems to human communities.
The most obvious problem is created by the violent person. Everyone has the potential to be violent, but it’s clear that some people come to it more easily than others. Every community has its bullies. On a small scale, these can be held in check by the threat of revenge, and this, in fact, is how most local communities have dealt with the problem. However, the solution has never proven very satisfactory. Examinations of “non-state” and preliterate societies, time and time again, have revealed death rates from war and murder averaging .5 per capita per annum [see Keeley, Lawrence H., War Before Civilization, Oxford UP 1996.]. The typical preliterate society studied by anthropologists customarily sanctions a series of “nesting boxes” of relationships defined by who is obligated to take revenge on who for thefts, assaults, or insults. A fistfight between two cousins over a coconut can rapidly be transformed into generations of brutal warfare, as family, then clan, then collateral clans, tribes, and confederations of tribes are each called upon to exact revenge for previous acts of revenge. In response to this danger, most such communities create consular bodies, usually of widely respected people, village elders, or heads of families, which attempt to dampen these cycles of vengeance by persuasion and diplomacy. Democratic techniques, such as we have developed them, have evolved from these consular bodies, which can be found in every region of the world, every era, and every extensive cultural and religious tradition. [see Muhlberger, Steven R. & Paine, Phil = Democracy’s Place in World History. Journal of World History 4:1 1993]. Their effectiveness in limiting vengeance is hard to determine, since we can’t compile statistics of violence that might have happened, but did not. However, the death rates per capita speak for themselves. Cultures in which state organization does not exist, or in which it is only superficial, exhibit death rates by war and homicide far exceeding the most violent cities in the United States, and often exceeding the mortality rates in modern civil wars. This contradicts a widely-held romantic fantasy of primordial non-violent societies in harmony. This is not to say that the consular techniques developed in such societies are unimportant. They are early attempts to implement proto-democratic ideas, and such democratic practice as we have today owes its existence to these faltering first steps.
Lucy Mair’s comparative study of several small societies in East Africa [Mair, Lucy Philip. Primitive Government: A Study of Traditional Political Systems in Eastern Africa. 1977] ranging from extremely decentralized clan societies to full-fledged monarchical states, shows that informal consular bodies are reasonably good at inhibiting violence at the family and clan level, but progressively less effective as the conflict involves larger or more distant parties. What is more, the process comes to a halt when the “ethnic limit” of the group is reached. Consular bodies make no attempt to limit violence outside of the largest group that the society defines as “we”. Stateless or “tribal” societies, usually exist in a perpetual state of warfare with their neighbours. Raiding neighbouring ethnic groups for cattle, grazing land, access to water, or simply to massacre and take captives, is usually regarded in such societies as a demonstration of valour. The supposed provocations are usually spurious, or cynically contrived. Such warfare is commonly very brutal, emphasizing torture and rape to inflict the maximum humiliation on the enemy. Archeology has unearthed vast numbers of fortifications and villages placed in locations that were obviously chosen for ease of defense, all in times and places where it is assumed that no large-scale states or kingdoms existed. Recent attempts to claim that tribal societies engaged in warfare only because they were subject to economic pressures from more technologically advanced societies are not convincing. The pattern of perpetual inter-tribal warfare, throughout history, is evident.
This may give us a clue to why violent people are surprisingly tolerated in human groups. Where there is a distinct tribal “we” which is engaged in perpetual violent rivalry with several “thems”, it is handy to have people within your “we” who have an unusually violent temperament. They may be a nuisance at home, but they can deliver a useful amount of fierceness in war. Their psychology may even be mimicked and stylized into military cults, so that young men of more placid temperament can be trained into effective military forces.
Another human type that strains the egalitarian ethos in human communities is the psychologically dominant personality. Some people take pleasure in controlling other human beings, and are very sensitive to the body language, vocal intonations, and other subconscious tricks that trigger an unthinking obedience in others. If you don’t have this particular skill, it’s hard for you to imagine how it works . Some people are simply able to tell other people what to do, and obtain automatic compliance. If they embark on some project, they can expect to have other people doing the work for them, not just because they are offered a quid-pro-quo, but because they are infected with an irrational desire to please that person. They fall into an unthinking assumption that their own priorities are less important. Even when skeptical of their aims, or irked by the arrogance implied by their manner, people tend to assume that some great talent, intelligence, or secret knowledge must underly the confidence that the dominant personality radiates. At the very least, people imagine that the dominant personality is gathering the fruit of intense and self-disciplined labour. These assumptions, however, do not stand up to examination. Adolf Hitler, for example, was able to get millions of people to obey him, even when the obedience was obviously destructive to their interests. Why? He was not particularly intelligent, and other than perusing a handful of popular crank books, was not particularly knowledgeable about anything. Even at the height of world conquest, he spent very little time working. He spent most of his time sleeping, having leisurely meals, and watching movies. He read almost none of the reports that came to him, and rarely inquired into the details of his administration. On the few occasions where he chanced to issue detailed and direct orders, they usually made no sense or caused considerable damage to his own aims. What he did do, unfailingly, was to command people to solve problems for him. They went out and did so. Generals were told to win battles, finance ministers told to finance them. He himself had no idea of how to do such things, but he did know that if he gave any order, it would be obeyed.
Where aristocracies are firmly entrenched, a great deal of effort is made to train aristocratic children to employ the psychological dominance tricks, and to block their use by non-aristocrats. As a defensive measure, established aristocracies make a special point of inflicting punishment for “presumption” or “insolence”. These pejorative terms are attached to any use of dominant speech or body language outside of the approved circle. Despite the efforts of hereditary aristocracies to train successive generations in domination skills, it does not appear to be something reliably inherited. A talent for it constantly appears among any group of human beings.
Like the violent temperament, the dominant temperament is tolerated in most societies much more than we would expect. Most dominant personalities do not find themselves in a position, like Adolf Hitler or Mao Zedong, of having an entire nation make themselves available for taking orders. The average dominant personality must operate in a situation of limited resources and possibilities, and must use their psychological tricks within some context where quid-pro-quo exchanges constitute the primary activities. Large organizations produce things that the society as a whole is happy to have. There’s a tendency for people to assume that whatever an organization accomplishes is the direct result of a dominant personality’s personal “dynamism” or charisma. Climatic, demographic and economic factors may ensure that, for example, there is a great demand for air conditioners, and money available to pay for it. Any organization that produces air conditioners to meet that demand will prosper. But if a charismatic “leader” is in charge, part of his dominance technique is to convince other people that whatever success happens is the direct result of his dominant status.
In some cases, this is demonstrably true. However, few people consider that the same ends can usually be achieved without the participation of dominant personalities. Equally productive organizations can be put together, and managed skillfully, entirely by quid-pro-quo relationships between people, without the intervention of any psychologically dominant personality strutting around barking orders, or emanating an aura of authority. I’ve worked in such an organization, which was quite successful as an economic enterprise, and characterized by a pleasant atmosphere and high morale.
Politics, of course, has been treated by many journalists and historians as if it were nothing but a chronicle of the successes of various dominant personalities, and there is an unending fascination with the the careers of tyrants. Their ability to “accomplish” things (usually death and destruction) with a powerful stare or a commanding voice, is not interpreted as the sad result of human credulity and emotional weakness, but as the manifestation of “genius”. But Mozart did not get other people to compose brilliant music for him by barking orders at them, or knowing how to stand in an impressive way. He sat down at a desk and created the music with his mind. The music’s value speaks for itself. He was not a dominant personality. Nothing about true creativity has anything to do with psychological dominance.
Deference to dominant personalities will probably exist in any society. However, a civilized society will encourage people to have sufficient self-esteem, forewarning, and self-discipline to ignore automatic obedience to anyone who learns how to arch an eyebrow or speak in a low, even voice.
There’s yet another particular kind of human character that has a profound influence on society, while at the same time remains almost invisible and unidentified. Psychologists have coined terms like “sociopath” and “Antisocial Personality Disorder” to describe the small number among us who ruthlessly and efficiently exploit others, without any restraint from conscience. We understand the process when we encounter it on a small, person-to-person level. All of us have known the jerk with a trail of abused, but incomprehensibly loyal partners. All of us have been subjected to the convincing con-artist who glibly attempted to part us from a hard-earned paycheck. We have sighed when we heard of a naïve friend drawn into a pyramid scheme, or fallen in with a dreary religious cult lead by a charismatic guru. Occasionally, we hear of some extreme case of egregious ruthlessness, such as someone keeping an elderly relative locked in an attic while stealing their pension checks.
More commonly, we suffer the depredations of small-scale social schemers. These people move through a group of friends or co-workers, taking pleasure in manipulating them, planting strategic lies, setting one friend against another, engaging in subtle character assassination, and generally emerging prosperous, privileged and unscathed while the more moral people around them suffer. Any reasonably large group of people is likely to include at least one such person.
What few people learn, or face up to when it is demonstrated to them, is that the halls of business and state power are shaped and driven by many such people. While they are only a small percentage of us as a whole, their particular psychological character makes them extremely successful. The higher up the chain of authority one goes, the more of this type can be found. We may eventually grasp what they are doing to us, but there is usually no way of undoing the damage they inflict, of exposing them, or of bringing them to justice. The methods they use have always worked, and rarely fail, unless in competition with others using the same techniques more efficiently.
A person may, alternatively, rise in prestige and wealth through the use of talent within a framework of honourable behaviour. In fact, it is absolutely essential that some people do so, or nothing would function at all. Schemers and manipulators expend all their energy in destroying other people, with little time over to accomplish useful tasks. Large organizations, which have usually come into being to effect some practical purpose, can be expected to have a productive core of competent people doing their work well, expecting to be judged by the value of their work, and seeking nothing more than recognition and remuneration appropriate to their contribution. Weaving among them, dodging light-footed from one betrayal or subversion to another, are the schemers and manipulators. These usually wind up at the top of the organization.
Sometimes, manipulators are so effective that they can actually create an organization whose only purpose is to advance their own ambitions, and is comprised entirely of manipulators, subsidiary manipulators, enforcers, hangers-on, and cadres of cult drones who do the mundane work. Rather than being a useful organization that has been corrupted and bent to the purposes of the manipulator, it is an act of manipulation and fraud embodied in an organization. Pyramid schemes, most ideological movements, and many religious organizations fall into this category. The Church of Scientology is a perfect example.
Once again, we should look to dictatorships to see this personality type at its most active. Dictators are usually both dominant personalities, capable of eliciting automatic obedience through subconscious cues, and sociopathic personalities, who will cheerfully employ any deception, betray any trust, or destroy any innocent person to further their ends. In a dictatorship, the sociopathic personality tends to be the most successful. Dominance skills are more widely distributed in the population. A rising dominant is bound to encounter, on his trip up the ladder, a number of people who are just as good at giving orders. On the upper rungs up the ladder, you can expect complete obliviousness to human suffering. Probably the clearest, most undiluted example in history of a pure sociopathic personality would be Mao Zedong, who not only murdered more people and created more suffering than anyone in human history, but who literally would have killed every human being on Earth if it had been within his power. Mao literally believe that he himself, and he alone, was the only thing that mattered in the entire universe.
The violence and suffering of the world was not created by some essential “human nature”, but it has been shaped to a great degree by the symbiotic interaction of violent, psychologically dominant, and sociopathic personalities. These personality types, even put together, constitute no more than a small minority of the human community. But the more reasonable majority has been very slow to develop the techniques of containment, diffusion, and resistance, necessary to prevent them from forming elites and aristocracies. Human history has been dominated by organizations that have been created by violent, dominant personalities, and sociopaths to serve the purposes of these minorities. The survival of particular human beings within the framework of these organizations has usually been a matter of pure luck. For thousands of years, ordinary human beings have struggled to survive, while successful elites have ruled over them, expropriated their possessions, and expended their lives in wars.
But the story of the human race is not just a catalog of victories for the strong and ruthless. There are dramatic differences between different human communities in the degree to which they are under the thumb of aristocracies. As well as the horrifying record of war, slavery, and human torment, there has also been a slow, painful struggle to create alternative institutions that respect human life and dignity.
For this struggle to succeed, it is essential that we learn to expand the concept of “we”. In democratic theory, this is called “inclusiveness”. The gradual expansion of inclusiveness in human institutions is the tale that the democratic historian gets the most pleasure from telling. Struggles over the extension or contraction of the franchise are the drama in the democratic narrative. We know that people are capable of treating each other as equals, because in every society, some people perceive each other as equals. We can document the intellectual and emotional steps by which people learn to see larger and larger groups of people as their equals, and to treat them so. Each step that is taken successfully gives us a template for the next. At some point, among most normal human beings, the blinding revelation that “’we” means “everybody” takes place. When it is grasped emotionally, as well as intellectually, people begin to successfully resist the depredations of the violent, the psychologically dominant, and the ruthless schemers. They grasp that there is no such thing as aristocracy, only people who claim aristocracy. They learn that they should obey moral reason, not the voices and gestures of men. They learn to formulate laws that apply equally and fairly to everybody. They learn to construct political institutions that respect human rights, and economic institutions that produce goods and services without exploitation.
Now of course, we have no place on Earth where this job is even close to complete. But despite the brutal horrors that have characterized the human story, objective observation shows that there has been a significant improvement in the world. A number of places have been able to secure a state of affairs that is sometimes called “civil society”. This term has had a variety of contradictory usages in the past, and I’m not entirely comfortable with it’s use. But I think that most progressively-minded people in the world are now using it to mean a society that has achieved a certain degree of dependable reasonableness, and a society that has a multiplicity of independent institutions that can prevent the submission of the society to outright tyranny. In such a “civil society”, the principle institutions are intended for logical, practical, and desirable purposes. They are vulnerable to being infiltrated and corrupted by sociopathic personalities, but they were not created by them. The population that participates in them is more inclusive and egalitarian in its attitudes than most human societies have been in the past. These societies have political structures that are capable of solving major problems by peaceful means, if their citizens put their mind to it.
The achievement of civil societies in this sense has been a very slow and painful struggle, and at the moment, only a minority of human beings are lucky enough to live in them. The majority still live under outright tyranny, or in societies in which civil and democratic institutions are a sham, or too corrupted to be effective. But the minority of functioning civil societies demonstrate to human beings everywhere that improved conditions are possible. The relative success of such societies by material measures has at least exposed one of the loudest lies of totalitarian ideologies: the claim that tyranny is more “efficient” than democracy. This notion was once so widely believed that a majority of intellectuals, even in democratic countries, subscribed to it. Now even the most isolated peasant knows that it’s a crock.
The existing civil societies should be championed, not as utopias or static models, but as encouraging signs on the way to a real civilization. Their citizens may not have achieved civilization yet, but they have tools at their disposal with which they have a chance to do so.
However, greater intellectual clarity is necessary for us to proceed in that direction. At present, we are crippled by an intellectual framework that was designed by various aristocratic elites of the past to enable their predations. Within that framework, the concept of “democracy” is thought of as an “ideology”. I would like to propose that democracy is not an ideology, and that it is a profound misunderstanding to think of it as one.
Democracy is one of the tools employed by normal — that is to say, not sociopathic, dominant, or violent — people, to create a civil society, and limit the power and scope of the sociopaths, megalomaniacs, and brutes. That’s why it is characterized by attempts to create “checks and balances”, divisions of power, government by consent and representation, mechanisms of oversight and recall, temporary offices, and submission of leaders to law. Democracy as a process is still crude. Almost every aspect of it cries out for redesign and refinement. And this procedural aspect is only one of the elements necessary for the creation of a decent civilization. Connected with it are a plethora of associated customs and attitudes that must work in conjunction with the political elements. All of these things together constitute the framework of ideas that I mean by the term “democratic thought”.
But these ideas are not lodged in any holy text, revealed from supernatural sources, or issued as proclamations by a guru or a superhuman leader. They are created by the free interchange of opinion, and the accumulation of experience. The experience we have is of being exploited, cheated, bullied, murdered, and cowed with fear, then slowly devising safeguards against these assaults, testing them by experience, and fitting them together. The process has been slow and incremental. It is only now that we are starting to discern larger, abstract patterns in it, and it is only now that we are in a position to start discussing the entire issue coherently.
Ideology is a different type of tool. An ideology is created by sociopathic and dominant personalities for their particular, selfish purposes. It is an intellectual resource for practicing fraud. It justifies crimes, explains betrayals and reversals, and impresses initiates. The more baroquely complex it is, the more useful it is to its promoters. An ideology like Marxism or Conservatism, for example, contains such a polyphony of absurdities that it can glibly justify any action, appear to explain any event, and appeal to any human weakness or corruption. This is why such “isms” continue to be promoted by those who wish to commit crimes on a grand scale. However, their particular “philosophical” content is not very important. Those who use such an ideology are not bound by its content, and will just as happily use any other gobbledygook to accomplish the same ends. People like the current gang of brutes who have taken over the American executive, for example, are the psychological and moral equivalent of Lenin’s entourage. They find it convenient to employ different buzzwords and different-sounding slogans, but they are intent on committing the same crimes. It’s a mistake to think that the ideology is what creates the crime. The sociopathic and dominant personality creates the crime — the ideology is merely a tool to that end.
This is why democratic thought must never be discussed as if it was an “ideology”. It is as different conceptually from ideology as science and medicine are from witchcraft. It exists for an entirely different purpose, and it is founded in a fundamentally different world view.
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