ZMan discusses some inconvenient truth.
One of the things about liberal democracy that is hard to see from the inside is how the system must be all consuming. The people trapped in such a system are forced to engage with it constantly. You are not allowed to live outside of politics. Everywhere you go there are people preaching the latest gospel, demanding you engage with it, usually demanding you not only have an opinion, but you have the right opinion. There is no escape from politics, because politics is everywhere.
The reason for this is democracy can only derive its authority from the general will, which must be expressed through public opinion. That is the basis of all democratic systems of government. Truth itself is fifty percent plus one. If people refuse to participate by not voting or not having an opinion, they must be assumed to be in the opposition to whatever is being proposed. Democracy off all kinds is a binary system where you can only be for or against the current issue.
Back in the days when nations had a real Ruling Class (in contrast with the kleptocratic posers the constitute the Crust in these degenerate modern times), certain people knew that they (and their offspring) would be called upon to Actually Run Things, and so felt under obligation to train themselves (and their offspring) to do so. Samuel Johnson’s famous dictum “Depend upon it, sir, when a man knows that he will be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully.” applies equally to a non-meritocratic Ruling Class — when you knew for a fact that you were eventually going to be called upon to run the country, you (or, more realistically, your parents) put some effort into making sure that you were ready to do so. Sometimes this worked, sometimes it didn’t, but (for example) Lord Chesterfield’s letters to his son Phillip demonstrate that it was never far from a parent’s mind.
When you know for a fact that child X would, at some point between age 18 and age 25, wind up with a seat in Congress, what would your focus be for educating such child? It wouldn’t be for technical competence — that would be irrelevant –but would inevitably focus on developing the child’s character, and that’s what pre-modern education was designed to do.
In a liberal democracy, however, the system is meritocratic, which means that it is intensely competitive — which means that success goes to the most competent predator. Today’s Crust is a matter of ‘Lions and tigers and bears, oh my!’ Today’s government is full of people who have been raised and trained to be predators, because that’s how you get in to start with, and advance toward the top, and stay on the top if you get there. Congress is, in attitude, a pack of hyenas. And anyone who expects a pack of hyenas to be able to cooperate toward a common goal is delusional. Every government employee wakes up with only one thought in mind: ‘What can I do today to make sure that I win and everybody else loses?’ This doesn’t get a lot done for The People; their role is to get shorn regularly and eventually slaughtered to support their Lords and Masters.
Read the headlines and tell my I’m wrong.
