As we enter the seventh year of a new millennium, the saddest thing to contemplate is not only the problems we face, but the pathetic inadequacy of the intellectual tools employed to address them. There has been, in effect, no progress in the way human social, political and economic issues are discussed. It is as if we were attempting to practice modern medicine, but incapable of employing any terminology except the prescientific concepts of “humours”, divine retribution, witchcraft and astrology. That is surely the state of affairs, for instance, when the idiotic “left/right” template is employed to describe “the political spectrum”, or when the childish pseudo-intellectual superstitions of Marxism and Conservatism still provide the frame of reference. These concepts were worthless when they emerged and petrified two centuries ago. That they remain dominant, unchanged, and inescapable in their putrescence, after all this time, suggests that our politicians, journalists, academics, and pundits are not capable of reasoning, learning, or growing up.
We face daunting challenges, as a species. Much of the earth’s resources are wasted, ruined, and destroyed, usually for the short-term benefit of a handful of aristocratic gangsters. Several intertwined and synergistic ecological disasters loom, and they can only be addressed by a rational political process. This is possible only in democratic polities based on respect for human rights, and cultivating an educated, well-informed public. Yet much of the world still remains in the hands of criminal gangs. Since the problems we face are global and interdependent, it is somewhat like one relatively clean household trying to maintain its health when the adjacent neighbours are dumping raw sewage in the street and heaping rat-filled piles of garbage in their yards.
As long as an exploitative Communist aristocracy continues to rule in China, for instance, no serious global ecological problem can be solved.… and all of the world’s elites are determined to keep that particular gang of criminals in power as long as possible. Africa has been abandoned to rot in abysmal poverty, and it functions as an incubator for global pandemics. The Middle East has been strategically meddled with by the global power elite in such a way as to turn it into an incubator for psychotic ideologies ― the conceptual equivalent of disease pathogens. Primitive ideas of ethnic hatred, collectivist conformity, racial mysticism and religious fundamentalism still dominate much of the world. People functioning in such conditions are in no position to solve ecological problems.
But the saddest state of affairs is not in the areas which are ruled by megalomaniac dictators and Communist Party thugs, or, in the more common situation, parasitic oligarchies hiding behind a thin veneer of fake “democratic” formalities. These obviously backward places can, potentially, be improved by any population determined to rebel and reform. What I find most discouraging is the disappointing performance of the territories with democratic experience. Though conditions for the majority of ordinary people in these places are much better than for their fellow human beings forced to live under dictatorship, they are not evolving democratically. At best, they are merely holding still, at worst they are rapidly eroding their democratic heritage. This is manifested in several ways.
1) Democratic ideas, introduced as radical innovations many generations ago, have remained fixed in their formulation. When people say “democracy”, they assume that it can only mean the various parliamentary and congressional institutions that developed in the nineteenth century, with only minor tweaking in the twentieth century. There is confusion between direct democracy (such as you find in the classic New England Town Meeting) and representative democracy (which is a compromise of direct democracy produced by the dilema of large scale political entities). The system of legislatures, parties and electoral politics evolved slowly, and it is reasonable to expect it to evolve cautiously. But caution has been replaced by paralysis.
2) There has been constant pressure to degrade democracies into monarchy. This process is most accelerated in the United States, where greater and greater powers have been handed to the President, over successive generations. Each fresh “emergency” has been accompanied by additional growth in the power of an office that the founders of that republic regarded with deep suspicion. Each successive President has added more visible symbolic trappings of monarchy. It is the White House, not the Capitol building, which is invariably used to represent the seat of government. In Parliamentary systems like Canada, at least, this process has not gone as far, but it is a danger in all democracies.
3) There has been a systematic attempt to recast democracies as just another variant of the Ideological State ― a mechanism for promoting some kind of historicist mysticism and defined by an “economic system”. This is what is happening when democracies are represented as being the political vehicles of a pseudo-concept labelled “Capitalism”. This is a complete falsification of the democratic idea, and it arises from an attempt to transform a democratic polity into some kind of bully ideology like Communism. There is no “ideology of Capitalism”. That is an entirely Marxist concept, referring to an imaginary “stage” in its incorrect determinist fantasy of history. Democracy was not intended, designed or conceived of as an institutional vehicle to promote any such notion.
4) People in existing democracies have ceased to see politics as the domain of citizens, but as the specialized profession of a special caste of “politicians”. These people are not even pretending, any more, to deliberate upon public policy decisions as they perceive them to be good or bad for the nation. It is understand that the “career” of politics exists for its own sake, and that the caste of politicians is there for no other reason than to continue to exist, with neither responsibility for nor loyalty to the public it was intended to “represent”. The political parties are seen as tribal clusters within this caste, which exist to perpetuate themselves, and which merely take on or manufacture “issues” as strategies to perpetuate themselves. Genuine issues (such as whether we are going to poison ourselves, or not), are simply ignored as too much trouble to think about. It’s not surprising, given this attitude, that the intellectual level in this political caste has declined precipitously. The men who founded the United States where among the major intellects of their times, often as accomplished in philosophy, history, science, literature and the arts as they were in politics. Now it is possible for a disgusting, ignorant, intellectually worthless piece of shit like George W. Bush, Jr., to sit in the office that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington inhabited. For this alone, Americans should feel the profoundest shame. Canada is doing a little better, in this regard, but not much better. The same problem holds true for other democracies, to varying degrees.
5) Few of these professional politicians take democratic ideas seriously. As far as they are concerned, “democracy” is merely a quaint ceremony that they are compelled to go through in order to aquire their positions of authority. Loyalty to party leadership or to cliques within parties is their primary sense of obligation, followed by response to pressures from the financial interests that fund their campaigns. They see themselves as “representing” their constituents only in a some vague symbolic sense.
6) Few intellectuals in democracies have any interest in democratic ideas, and their chief entertainment has been, since the time of Plato, to idealize dictatorship and totalitarianism, and to promote the idea that democracy is inherently ineffectual, irrelevant, or inferior to aristocratic power.
7) There is almost no public understanding of the fundamental aims of democracy. Democracy is not a “system” with the primary aim of producing prosperity, or of glorifying and perpetuating a State. Democracy’s purpose is to protect the individual human being from arbitrary force, to protect the weak from the strong, and to prevent individual beings from being bullied, abused, or exploited by collective power. Whether the collective power is exercised by an army, a corporation or a church or a mob carrying torches, the moral issue is the same. The purpose of democracy is to make sure that the strong do not gang up on the weak and treat them as chattel. The philosophical basis of democracy is the sanctity of the human individual, and the recognition of absolute, inviolable, and universal human rights, applicable to all individual human beings, without exception.
8) A majority of people, both within and without functioning democracies, continue to embrace the fallacy that democracy is merely an appendage of some particular “culture” or regional tradition. This is sometimes propounded by people who wish to claim democracy as a unique manifestation of their own country, ethnic group, or religious tradition. But it is more often, and more maliciously, asserted by intellectuals and aristocrats who wish to prevent their own people from acquiring the liberating power and material benefits of democracy. Thus, you are likely to hear a sneering dismissal of the “Western notion of democracy” from any intellectual who admires dictatorship. The phrase is, on the face of it, an absurdity. Democracy is a technique that you employ when you want to make group decisions without violating human rights. It is universally applicable, not only to all human beings, at any time and in any place, but to any sentient being, anywhere in the universe. It has nothing to do with ethnicity or location, and is not the property or invention of any particular culture. There is no human being on this planet who does not deserve to live in a democratic society, or for whom a democratic society is unnecessary or inappropriate.
9) It is fundamental to the democratic idea that only democratically elected assemblies constitute legitimate government. Any kind of political power or territorial rule that is not democratically elected is, ipso facto, not government. It is merely crime. The various dictators, generalissimos, commissars, and goons who have carved out territories on the earth are merely criminals, who should be treated as such by all civilized human beings. But they are not: instead they are treated as if their power was legitimate. They are accorded embassies and diplomatic privileges, and constantly spoken of as if they represented the people they rule, and as if they had a right to rule them. This demonstrates that the bulk of politicians in democracies do not, in fact, believe in democracy in any serious way. If our politicians actually believed in democracy, then no unelected “leader” would ever be allowed to set foot on democratic soil, or permitted to deposit money in a bank, or allowed any representation in any international body. No passport or document of any kind issued by a dictatorship would be recognized as valid. No court ruling in any dictatorship would be recognized as legally binding. No claim to property by a dictator or his henchmen would be recognized. In fact, any such dictator would be arrested on sight, as would any of his agents or subordinates. Anyone who conducted any kind of trade with a dictator, or gave him even a single dime, would be charged with participating in organized crime. Any politician in a democracy who was found shaking hands with, dining with, or even standing in the same room as a dictator would be automatically impeached, deprived of their office, and charged with treason. Because none of these things happen, it is evident that democracy is neither understood by, or believed in by our politicians. And if the people we elect to office to not understand the basic principles of democracy, or believe in their validity, we should not be surprised that our democratic processes do not function very well.
10) The collectivist creation of government known as the Corporation has been allowed to subvert all existing democracies. By treating this kind of collective body as an “imaginary individual”, democratic polities have, in effect, returned to the pre-democratic condition of primitive societies ruled by hereditary aristocracies, baronial fiefdoms, and collectivized estates. Once recognized in this way, Corporations are potentially immortal “states within a state”, which can override the rights of citizens and bend economic processes to the advantage of an aristocratic elite. The interests of this aristocracy inevitably conflict with the public interest, and with the interests of the individual. Because this is not widely understood, even in countries with a long democratic tradition, democracies are easily manipulated by the rich and powerful, and transformed into machines for enriching an elite. In time, the privileges and perquisites of this elite harden into a caste system, the democratic procedures become ineffective, and ultimately meaningless.
11) During the early phases of the formation of democratic nations, the process of democratization was accompanied by a cultural movement for more advanced and universal education. It was understood that the success of democratic government depended on the people having access to the best available information, and would flourish most where irrationality and superstition where replaced by reason and knowledge. In the larger democracies, this attitude has been largely abandoned. In the most powerful nation on Earth, it is now possible for people who reject the foundation of biological science to control the allocation of medical care, for people who think the world was created in 4004 BC to determine energy policies, and for foreign policy to be determined by people who can’t remember the difference between Austria and Australia. While the population as a whole is not overwhelmingly devoted to primitivism and superstition, politicians have especially favoured and encouraged the most backward and irrational segments of society, and heeded their voices far more than their numbers deserve. This is no accident. It is typical behaviour of a corrupt elite in a dying society.
12) Intelligent discussion and acute analysis will be necessary to see our way through the problems that loom ahead. Unfortunately, the language of politics is hopelessly garbled by the acceptance of a set of conceptual categories, slogans, and terms which bear no resemblance to any events in the real world, or to any process of reasoning. A perfect example is the “right / left” notion, an outgrowth of medieval mysticism and nineteenth century totalitarian thought, which is designed specifically to reduce any political analysis to incoherent gibberish. It is on the same intellectual level as classifying the whole world as Guelphs and Ghibelines or sorting out political views by examining the entrails of chickens. Once used only in primitive totalitarian circles, this foolish concept has grown steadily in influence over the last century, until it has engulfed and rendered useless almost any political discussion. The United States is now intellectually paralyzed by it. The even more childish “red state / blue state” version has reduced political discussion to such a moronic level that it is unlikely that any serious problem will ever be addressed.
So there it is. We are facing some problems that threaten the very existence of the human race, other problems that threaten the quality of our lives, and others that threaten our freedom and the heritage of our civilization. The problems can only be addressed if we 1) curtail the power of the criminal gangs who run a large portion of the planet, and 2) renew, reform, and strengthen democracy. To do this, we must reject centuries of irrational thought and incoherent terminology.
Who will undertake these tasks? Hopefully, the generation that leaves the second millennium behind, and embraces the third.
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