Democracy
15th June 2012
Freeberg at his best.
Progressives have a strange relationship with the time stream, just as they have a strange relationship with that word “democracy.” Just as they seem to define “democracy” as “everyone does everything my way, whether they want to or not” — they speak of future events as if they have occurred in the past. More specifically, they speak of them as if it is entirely responsible & safe to forget all about probability.
Specifically, if anything bad might happen, then it definitely will happen, and by God we’d better get cracking on heading it off. No time to waste!
Normal people with fully working brains, see “democracy” as what it really is. It’s an exchange. We’re all going to give up a lot of control, now, so that later on we can say “right or wrong, this was the decision of those who took the time to participate.” It does not make the final outcome more correct, or even more virtuous, nor is it supposed to. It solves no problem at all, other than the complaints that might properly be aired, later on, that so-and-so was not consulted.
The greatest value of ‘democracy’ is what the Don Draper crowd would call buy-in. Those who are affected by a decision feel better if they were consulted, even if they didn’t come out on top when the decision is made. That’s why the Founding Fathers were so on about ‘taxation without representation is tyranny’. They didn’t necessarily have things go their way; but they felt entitled to input.
Whatever problems you have that are related to resentments about this person or that person not having a say, will be addressed, and all the other problems will not be. All this is self-evident to those of us who see democracy as what it really is; those of us who are not brain damaged.
Indeed. Democracy doesn’t fix all problems, or guarantee the best result — all it does is guarantee that everybody is more or less okay with the decision.
June 15th, 2012 at 20:35
Democracy’s only big virtue is that for certain societal configurations as regards the distribution of military power, a vote accurately predicts the outcome if a revolution were held on the subject. This removes the incentive for the losing party to seek an appeal to arms in most cases, because the conclusion is foregone.
However when you have a society where segments have much greater military power than electoral power, you have an unstable situation, nullifying the one virtue democracy DOES have.
June 18th, 2012 at 13:04
Jehu, we call such societies ‘dictatorships’ or ‘oligarchies’, not democracies. Such regimes merely pull the window-dressing of ‘democracy’ around themselves in the hope that the sham will keep the proletariat quiet. It may have feathers, but if it doesn’t swim or quack, it’s not a duck.