There is a saying which goes something along the lines of "among all of the various forms of government that we have tried, democracy is the least worst". While that might sound like an altogether harmonious and splendid aphorism, it is worth pointing out that we have never actually tried pure democracy either.
Democracy, insofar as it exists in parliamentary systems, is the surrendering of the authority to various elected officials, as opposed to actual democracies in which things are decided by the general consensus of a population; which usually involves some kind of majority vote directly by the people concerned. Now obviously in a population of any more than about a thousand, direct election and consensus becomes unwieldy; however there are jurisdictions which still pose important questions to the people in direct referenda but most of the time, democracies usually involve one or multiple people representing some constituency. In that respect, representative democracy could be said to resemble pure democracy but only really at the point of the election of officials and at no other point in time.
That being said, although questioning the means by which those representative officials are elected is perfectly reasonable, disparaging the system despite all evidence, looks really really stupid and actively undermines the polity's confidence in the system.
I don't wish to get into a discussion about the details of conspiracy theories which are being touted as news and truth by self-interested profit taking media companies, but the existence of those theories points to two underlying conditions that are always bubbling away below the surface; which occasionally burst forth like an ill maintained sewer. Those two conditions have to do with the tension between freedoms and authority, and the maintenance of power and governance.
If we have been taught anything by the last 200 years of history, it is that democracy is fundamentally a good idea; not because of the goodness of people but because of the undeniable truth, that people are universally terrible. I completely reject the suggestion of philosophers like Rousseau who think that people are fundamentally good, based upon the overwhelming evidence that this is simply untrue. One only needs to look in any daily newspaper, or the news on the radio and television, or the abundance of cases being taken to court, to see this truth writ large.
Suppose for a second that we could install some kind of surveillance chip into people's skulls that would record every thought that someone had in a sample week. Ideally, in order to find someone who would be suitable to be Governor, King, President, Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else etc. we would first need to find one individual who be worthy enough to be fit for the job at hand. My bet is that we would find no suitable candidate in the entire world.
Let me run this thought experiment further. If I tell a lie to my cat, there is literally zero consequence. If I tell a lie to my wife, the consequence is that I might end up sleeping on the couch for a very long time. If I tell a lie to the central authority, through the civic means of say taxation or perhaps by violating the law through perjury or some such, then the consequence might be that I go to prison. If we are looking through the data on the surveillance chip to find anyone who might be suitable for the job, where they are in charge of the central authority, then I very much doubt that we'd find anyone who was not only fit for the job but also sufficiently good enough to avoid prison. I will even go so far as to suggest that Mother Theresa, Michelle Obama, Dr Victor Chang, all thought about stealing someone's delicious apple cider at some point.
I would further suggest that deep down, we know this to be true; which is why tyrants of varying degrees of competence have worked out that you do not need to present the truth to people in order to get them to make you the Governor, King, President, Grand Poohbah and Lord High Everything Else etc. All you need is a catchy slogan; to disparage the systems in place; and then declare "I alone can fix it", thus getting people to voluntarily select someone for the job whom our theoretical surveillance chip has said should rightly be in prison.
Democracy exists and was fought for because not only should all people quite rightly be in prison (which by my estimation includes literally everyone in the whole world) for some crime but people should not have unchecked power. Unchecked power always only ever leads to a single place; that is, unchecked cruelty. The unchecked power and unchecked cruelty of Governors, Kings, Presidents, Grand Poohbahs and Lords High Everything Else, results in suffering; which is why groups such as the barons, freemen, burghers, guildists, chartists, abolitionists, reformists, suffragettes, and civil rights activists, have all spent the better part of centuries trying to place checks on power and by extension, cruelty.
It is for this same reason that I personally think that the right to bear arms is dangerously stupid. A weapon that does not kill people has failed in its only purpose; so anyone who tries to tell you the lie that they want weapons for their 'defence', as someone else who is also openly unfit to be in charge of unchecked power, openly lies to both you and themselves because what they really want is the maintenance of power and governance and they want the means to kill you in order to keep it. Killing someone, even if it is under the banner of 'defence' is still cruelty.
British Labour Party MP Tony Benn, who repeatedly championed the cause of the vulnerable and stood up for the people who would become targets for whom the British Government would send planes to bomb, put forward five questions to ask powerful people:
1. What Power Have You Got?
2. Where Did You Get It From?
3. In Whose Interests Do You Exercise It?
4. To Whom Are You Accountable?
5. How Can We Get Rid Of You?
If you can not get rid of someone in power, then you do not live in a democracy but something else. That is why no one who currently has power likes democracy and also why every generation must struggle to win it again and again and keep it. If we do not, then the people who currently have power, will tend to start making changes in order to keep it; which includes voter suppression and putting in place barriers to voting such as really arcane and draconian ID laws. The great historical struggle, for the past two hundred or so years has always been over the scope and character of democracy and of the rich and powerful's attempts to snuff it out.
When those people in power begin to question the legitimacy of the process which is going to get rid of them, then the most logical assumption is that they intend to maintain their hold on power and governance by undemocratic means. If the people for whom they wield that power is not the people but the already rich and powerful and private corporations, then the marriage of the state and private privilege starts to border on functional fascism.
It is also worth being extremely suspicious of people touting personal responsibility as some cure-all to the necessary problems of government. What they really mean to say is that they would prefer smaller government and for the state to get out of the way; so that private entities can fill the void of power and governance. Private power and governance, which isn't actually answerable to the people, is the equivalent of privately run oligarchies who act as if they have no responsibility to the state or the people at all; and if you think for a second that they will do a better job than the state because of some notion of benevolence, then I should remind you that as compared with GDP, total charitable donations works out to be consistently less than 2% across the world. That isn't enough to run an old age pension system, much less any of the other functions of government.
A wise saw once said that those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it. If may add a supporting reason why that is in fact the case, it is that no society is actually physically capable of remembering anything beyond the memories of its oldest member. Admittedly we have invented better methods of recording the present, such that people have a greater ability to get a sense of what the past was like but this is still at best, only like looking at the world through an expensive looking glass. Once one returns the looking glass to the shelf with all of the other items upon one's dressing table, it is again physically impossible to look at one's self. Herein lies the central problem of the past and indeed of history generally. Even if one chooses to study the past (and the vast majority of people will not), they certainly will not remember the implications of what the past might be able to teach them if they have neither studied it, nor experienced it first hand.
And so it is with myself. I am two generations removed from the unpleasantness of last century in which more than one hundred million souls on board this world, were destroyed (some of whom were destroyed more efficiently and effectively due to mass extinction devices) and physically can not remember the past. I find it bordering on insanity that the nations which fought against fascism now find it so easy to themselves shift to the right and embrace those same things; while private interests try to convince them that the state can not help them, or rather is not capable of doing so.
I make no bones about the fact that I think that US politics for the last four years has been an absolute horrorshow (and this spirit of horrorshow is quickly infecting Australia). Rather than choose someone who had any experience in running civil government, the American people actively chose the star of a so-called 'reality TV show' who then proceeded to run the administration of the nation with as much reality as a reality TV show; actual civil government was allowed to wither and die. There should have been a warning that the person was unfit for the job when he uttered those words "I alone can fix it" on multiple occasions.
He then went on to repeatedly prove that he had no intention of fixing anything through demonstrated inactivity. Back in 2016 the NPR Politics podcast would report how many posts in government remained unfilled and by about mid-February of 2017, then ceased doing so once it became apparent that those posts would probably never be filled. That number remains at about 1600.
The Trump Administration is not the worst in US political history as is often declared in hyperbole but it's certainly up there in terms of badness and unfitness. It would take something abysmal to knock off James Buchanan's administration which broke the Union and plunged the country into civil war but it was at least as bad as Richard Nixon's or Calvin Coolidge's administrations in terms of patronage and corruption. Right at the very end of its days, the act of questioning the democratic process itself in a desperate bid to hold onto power for power's sake, is currently going on like a fever; which is an apt metaphor for the administration's lethargic response to the Coronavirus pandemic which has now claimed more American lives than all wars combined since World War 2 but yet still hasn't gained even enough of an economic response which is appropriate to the scale of importance of the thing.
For the rich and powerful, Democracy itself has to be attacked for the simple reason that those same rich and powerful, who have benefited and profited from the anemia of the state, have sensed that they might finally have a chance to smash what was built by human blood. Democracy, insofar as it exists in parliamentary systems, is the surrendering of the authority to various elected officials; if it will not be surrendered then they have decided to fight to take it by legal force.
No comments:
Post a Comment