Divine-right monarchy for the modern secular intellectual
21st March 2010
Mencius Moldbug is at it again.
Here are three words that will permanently cure you of democracy – if any three words can. Imperium is conserved.
That is: no form of government can be defined as un-government or self-government. There is always a government; there is always a process by which this government makes decisions; this process always consists of the decisions of one or more human beings, and no other party or force. Therefore, either you rule, or you are ruled by others. Typically the latter. As Maine writes in Popular Government: “democracy is a form of government.” In other words, it lacks any spiritual connotation; like any form of government, it can only be judged by its results.
The democrat, who is typically also an aristocrat, thinks or allows himself to think that, by dethroning the king and transferring the king’s powers to an assembly, he is destroying the sovereign imperium. But he is not; he is only dispersing it.
A Bourbon Gulag or a Tudor Holocaust are entirely inconceivable. Even St. Bartholomew’s was a peccadillo by the standards of a Marat, a Lenin or a Mao. Why? Because imperium is conserved. A stable monarch has no reason to massacre the Jews or shoot the Old Bolsheviks. Being stable, holding a monopoly of power, he has nothing to fear. Stalin and Hitler did. Hence, tyranny results not from the concentration of imperium, but from its dispersal.