Let’s Define Our Terms
“Democracy” is NOT government. It is not freedom, it is not human rights, it is not universal values, it is not free speech or free press. It is not capitalism or free markets. It is neither cabbage nor broccoli.
Government is just government, the managing of the affairs of a nation.
“Democracy” is Western-style multi-party politics, a winner-take-all simian-Christian competition with the only attraction being the thrill of victory – a useful substitute for a civil war.
The hallmark of any democracy is the process of campaign and voting. This is a team sport where everyone can play, and is totally unrelated to the quality or even form of government that will emerge after the competition is over.
Next, keep in mind that 50% of any population is, by definition, below average in intelligence, and perhaps only 2% or 3% of any population are in any sense actually qualified to either stand for election to a senior government post or to evaluate and select those who do stand.
Third, voting has not, contrary to popular belief, been sanctioned by god as the preferred mechanism for dispute resolution. Let me briefly quote:
Voting is Fair
The hell it is. Voting is nothing more than bullying by a majority. There is no system of decision-making that is less “fair” than putting something to a vote.
It is an arrogant decision-making process deliberately designed to disregard the wishes and best interests, to disenfranchise, isolate and betray at least half of the population whose welfare is at stake.
Where is the fairness and equity in such an all-or-nothing system that produces only winners and losers?
On what basis can you claim that your 51% majority entitles you to 100% of the rewards while my 49% minority entitles me to zero? That’s just individualistic, selfish, bullying, law-of-the-jungle Christian Darwinism.
This system was born, and can exist, only in an individualistic, black-and-white, religious environment, a Darwinistic “law of the jungle” society.
And it’s even much less equitable than this, because often my “minority” comprises as much as 75% of the population of a nation. But you ‘win’, so it’s ‘fair’.
Voting Makes Decisions Legitimate
No, it does not. There is no law, no gospel, no philosophical principle, to dictate that a 51% majority is “right”, thereby rendering its decisions legal, justified and legitimate, and which should therefore be imposed on the minority.
This legitimacy is an illusion concocted by those who believe that “might makes right”, and promulgated as a theological virtue to silence the bullied minority into submission. It is a repugnant philosophy supported by extensive propaganda and brainwashing to ensure the minorty fail to realise what is happening to them.
And what has happened, is that the minority have been duped into participating in a system that ignores their wishes, strips them of their rights and benefits and gives everything instead to the majority. And that’s fair. After all, that’s Christian democracy.
As we pointed out in another article, the losers have been browbeaten, bullied, propagandised and hoodwinked into believing and accepting that, because they are the losers, their wishes, rights and welfare are now irrelevant and they must remain silent.
It is one more tribute to the power of propaganda that the minority, who may comprise 75% of our population sample, will abandon their own self-interest and surrender their fate to a hostile majority on some contrived moral principle of fairness and legitimacy.
So effective has been the propaganda that it apparently never occurs to either majority or minority that a system designed to disregard half the population is neither moral nor fair, and that legitimacy is being conferred only by a “might makes right” theology.
Too Bad You’re The Losers
It’s the cornerstone of the democratic system that the ‘winners’ control everything and the ‘losers’ are totally marginalised.
In Western political society there is little apparent concern for the losers. After all, they are the losers and their wishes are unimportant – even though they often form 60% or more of the population.
Western multi-party democracy is the only government system in the world designed to disenfranchise, isolate and betray at least half of the population. Perhaps that’s why sometimes 70% or more of the population doesn’t bother to vote.
Two Brains and Two Moralities
If we wanted to separate our population politically into two ideological ‘parties’, the logical division would be a gender separation of men and women. Or maybe a sexual division – the homos and the heteros. That should make an interesting election campaign.
Unfortunately for democracy, the deliberate cleavage of our societies – for purposes of politics – was done according to perhaps the most infllammatory of human characteristics, an irreconcilable simian-theological divide, creating two factions perpetually at each other’s throats.
We have many names for the ideological teams: Liberal-Conservative, Labor-Capitalist, Democrat-Republican. We sometimes refer to them as the Left Wing and Right Wing, or Socialists and Corporatists.
But the division is more sinister than these names suggest. This ideological rift that has been created for the sake of politics is really between the ideological left and the Christian right – between the pacifists and the war-mongers.
Freedom! Democracy! Human Rights!
Many people will tell us – often, at the top of their lungs – that the multi-party government system is about “freedom” and “choice” and is “real democracy”.
But the multi-party system is not about freedom and choice, and it is not about either democracy or government. It’s about social conflict and competition, about playing in a team sport.
In a multi-party democracy, the “game” is not good government but the election process itself. After my team “wins” the election, the game is over and we all go home. And we absolve ourselves of any responsibility for what “the players” – either the voters or the elected representatives – do after the game is over.
And that is the reason Western government leaders, incompetent as they tend to be, are almost never held to account for their actions.
____________________________________
Beyond this, direct selection is being tried in China at the village level, but mostly descends into the typical immoral morass we see in the West, where a villager wants the power and promises anything in order to get it. Already, nobody believes or trusts the “politicians” or the system.
I have an article I’ve saved from a local paper that detailed one Chinese school’s attempt to introduce “democracy” to its students, using a typical campaign-election system to select a school leader.
The article almost made me cry. Elections are supposed to produce the most outstanding leader for a serious position, but this one became a stupid popularity contest, where candidates were playing a guitar, or singing, or doing magic tricks for the electorate – exactly, on a small scale, what happens in every Western democracy.
There was absolutely no thought of selecting a qualified student leader, in any responsible sense. And these students now believe they understand democracy – and they think it’s fun. In fact, it’s dangerous as hell.
______________________________
One last thing to consider: where the hell did we get the idea that the government of a nation, the most serious of all jobs in a country, should be open to the average ‘man in the street’?
Is that how we choose the CEO of Boeing or Intel? Let anyone from the shop floor get himself nominated, promise free beer and become the CEO?
Do we let the janitors cast their votes for the Board of Directors of GM, and select all the senior executives?
Why is “government” singled out for this special kind of treatment?
Perfect Like Me
American theology tells us that as we reach some arbitrary threshold of income security, or some pre-determined level of progress from apehood to civilisation, our “natural yearnings of all mankind” will magically blossom, giving rise to an irresistible desire for US-style ‘democracy’.
And that does NOT mean US-style Republican government; it means US-style multi-party politics. These two are unrelated.
This is a popular American mantra that sounds good but has no basis in reality – this conviction, however it’s stated, that when a people develop to some undefined but higher spiritual level, the laws of God and nature will release an inborn desire for multi-party politics.
According to these people, as we progress in our natural development toward American clones, we will experience a predetermined, perhaps genetic, impulse, to meddle in the national government of our country.
Religious Dogma Requires No Proof
Note that this theology doesn’t state that our interest in politics arises as we become more educated, experienced, or competent.
A basic tenet of this American religion is that as we develop spiritually and become sufficiently enlightened – in other words, when we become more like Americans – we will then want what they want.
On what do Americans justify such a conviction? They offer no rationale for their beliefs, and indeed none exists. There is no existing evidence of such a human state, and of course they offer none.
As with every religion, you must believe because you are told to believe.
What’s Mine is Yours
When writing of China, these same people tell us the Chinese haven’t yet wanted US-style multi-party politics because “their democratic yearnings have not yet developed.” What kind of nonsense is this?
If I’m not Muslim and my name isn’t Mohammed, that’s because my ‘Allah-yearnings’ have not developed? If I hate McDonald’s, that’s because my ‘hamburger-that-tastes-like-greasy-cardboard’ yearnings aren’t yet developed?
I Want to Do a Brain Transplant
To fully see the incredible stupidity of this system, let’s forget government for a moment – because the mere mention of the word seems to induce a kind of temporary insanity that blinds us to everything.
Instead, let’s go to the surgical ward and deal with brain operations, since we all know fully as much about this topic as we actually do about “government”.
Surely this is just lunacy. It would make equally as much sense for me – once I become rich – to develop a magical yearning to go to the surgical ward and try my hand at a brain transplant, since I know as much about that as I do about government.
But why focus on government? Why not on the nation’s space program, or the country’s real estate developments? Or putting our noses into the nation’s educational system?
The answer is that most people are not so interested in any of these fields, and have no illusions about their knowledge and ability to contribute. And in fact, this is true of government as well – most people are simply not that interested.
But again, the attraction is not government; It is American faith-based politics. It is the ideological cleaving of society on the basis of some arcane theology, and then participating in a smian-Christian rite of conflict, competition and victory.
Again, American democracy is primitive religion, not government.
American Theology is Dangerous
I can scarcely imagine anything more dangerous to the well-being of a nation than millions of uninformed and inexperienced people suddenly wanting to get involved in something they know nothing about but on which the entire well-being of their nation depends.
The most dangerous, and frightening, part of this mindless infection is that Americans have blindly and foolishly included it as one of the 1,001 “rights” in their all-encompassing democratic theology.
That means it is not only my natural and irresistible, inborn human yearning, but part of my rights granted to me by my God, that I, hopelessly ignorant and inexperienced as I am, can now meddle in the government of my country.
And if that isn’t crazy, I don’t know what would be.
The Hole is too Deep
How did the supposedly-great concept of participatory democracy descend to such a pathetic level?
The fundamental issue is that Western democracy changed its objective from selecting an outstanding leader, to one of winning a game in a team-sport competition.
That is entirely the fault of the introduction of multi-party politics into government, and it is too late to reverse course; we cannot return to the beginning and start again.
To do so would require a social upheaval equivalent to a popular revolution. And any Western government would viciously put down any such attempt.
In spite of all the propaganda to the contrary, no Western democracy would permit ‘the people’ to actually gain control of their government to the extent of intelligently hiring managers to serve rather than ignorantly choosing masters to rule.
Mr. Long Xinming, the Founder and the Editor of www.bearcanada.com, is also one of the frequent contributors for The 4th Media.
See more on this topic from the www.BearCanada.com’s 30-part series, click here:
http://www.bearcanada.com/china/chinagovernmentanddemocracy.html