I'm going by Churchill that democracy isn't that great, but the best form of society we have found so far.
In that sense I love democracy with its flaws, however, I am strongly looking for something better.
Follow me through some thoughts about democracy to the apocalypse now and beyond. :)
According to Plato when a democracy decays, chaos of the extraordinary will follow, he calls it anarchy. His terminology of anarchy has nothing to do with modern theories of anarchy, but it gives the term the bad taste. Just saying, most people don't know this.
The democracies worldwide are decaying, we've had them for so long. It became apparent to leaders of democratic states, that in order to rule one needs the majority of votes, so it is no longer about representing what the majority wants, but about getting their vote on election day.
For that reason, the individual is not asked anymore what he or she wants, but it is told what they should want. This is called manipulation. If manipulation is done with enough money behind it, so to say efficiently, the manipulated individual finds herself more and more in the situation that they are wondering: "wait a second, but that's really not what I wanted." It happens over night. Hidden so to say.
Manipulation tactics became so very tricky, even the most educated and smart person can hardly detect them. So many fall into conspiracy theories. It's a mess. Did the UK police let the rioters loot in the beginning without doing much, so that they would grab their opportunity nationwide, and then have the folk come up with the voice "we want more police and more laws"? Common, England knows about their criminals, they've had them under control for a long time, longer than a lot of British expected.
A democracy is certainly not based on the smartness of people, because it evaluates an average. It is based on the average smartness of a country. In a way that's rightfully so, because democracy wants to guarantee some sort of equality, and an unsophisticated person did not chose to be born that way, neither did a person with an IQ of 140+. let's meet in the middle. Education? Oh well, it gets tricky with that. Of course one could educate everybody, but is that really wanted?
It is unfortunately much easier to make a dumb person believe, that an outcome is exactly what they wanted (while it was not) than it is to convince an independent smart thinker. Independent smart thinkers are hence a threat to democracy and not encouraged. In a dumb democracy, that is. A smart democracy would recognize that exactly those people are needed to protect and further it.
But that makes a party potentially lose power. Yes, they are originally supposed to loose power periodically for the better, that's why we have election periods of 4 years. We need to change up our rulers. We know, that if somebody is in office for too long, his or her own power starts eating them up. This traditional democratic concept has decayed however.
There is a concerning correlation between the amount of money a candidate was able to raise for his campaign and the result of the election. You can look it up, the dude with the most campaign spending money wins. So what does this tell us? As a person running for president, you need to make those happy, who give you the most money. If money would be somewhat equally distributed, this would be O.K. but it is not.
If the average person could decide, fine, I'll give candidate x 10% of my income, and all my pals are going to do that as well, this way we are having a chance to outdo a big corp, who spends 1% of their income to support a candidate. We can't do that, because we don't have the bucks, even if we throw them together.
So we need to hope, that the big corps have the same interest that we do. They however don't by default. They never wanted to represent the folks, they want to increase their profit. That's what they do, it doesn't make them bad, it just makes them companies and not politicians.
It is not democratic though, because a few money givers are deciding who allegedly represents the folk, while the latter does not even remotely have anything to do with the primal purpose and motivation of a corp. He's a politician and not a sales man.
The politicians are maneuvering themselves into a very silly position now. They have to pretend to represent the folk, while they know they are depending on "the few". This is called oligarchy - a hidden form, and Plato also provides great theories about what happens to oligarchies. They decay in a very nasty way, because the few are not controlled by anybody other than themselves, and sooner or later the best amongst them turn bad. It is not healthy to live with a continuous power high and no equal opposition. We do not periodically change a corp after 4 years.
In the meanwhile the politicians have to "sell" their folks, that they are! represented. They need to tell them, what their opinion is. How do you do that? You manipulate people.
There is a fine line when it comes to manipulation. One can be ethical, and help people find their own opinion by providing information and education. In "good" advertising, that is how it is done. You list the facts and stress the positive ones. If you don't have facts or your product is neither better nor worse than another, then you create an image and sell a brand that represents a certain dream. For products this is working well.
There might not be a difference between a Toyota and a Volkswagen of the same size, but one makes you exotic and believe in the myths of German engineering, while the other provides you a cheapo safe car that doesn't support the American economy, but hey, advertisers know what they are doing, you will be happily driving it. For politics it's unfortunately not that easy.
I stated earlier, that education logically is not in the best interest of a democracy and its stability, if one wants to be on the safe side. The independent thinker might indeed come up with a better alternative eventually. That change is not wanted. What do you do as a politician? You sell change. Keep them all quiet, and then you do what you need to do to feed your oligarchs. That must in deed suck for a politician.
It sucks big time for the folks. Eventually it will dawn on them, that it became their job to increase the profits of the big corps.
One simple solution would be to have all politicians and parties start out with an equal budget for their campaigns. But that is not happening. Even if it did happen, free market hits again, and corp x could go ahead and say "Print your flyers with me, market price for a flyer is 10 Cent, but I'll give it to you for 0.0001 cent."It's their free choice to do so, and it's a type of hidden monetary support. The question of transparency becomes value.
So what could be a solution? Convincing the big corps that they need to change? How do you do that? You decrease their profits, if you don't agree with their opinions. You stop buying from them. Now that is a seriously big step, and very hard to explain to the folks. Why should I buy a TV for 1000 dollars, if I can get it for 500? Plus I don't even know what opinion my chosen corp is having. It becomes really messy.
One hint can be, that companies are acting politically, but they don't have any need to convey their actions like a politician at least should, even if they don't. Transparency is the key. Us, the people need to step in for transparency. If a big corp supports let's say a racist organization or movement, we need to have the right to see that, so that we can deduct, if corp x supports racism and candidate x, let's not vote for candidate x (given we are not racists) and lets not buy the product any longer.
It is very complicated, and it is not. Right now, there is a big movement going on against transparency. Of course there is, it changes the system. And though "change" was sold to us as Americans, we can hardly see it and most of us feel betrayed. We can assume that it was actually never really wanted by the oligarchs, but only by us. We have been outnumbered, not by the amount of people but by the amount of money. We start calling it corrupt, like a recent Rasmussen study proves with 46% saying our government is corrupt - and I have not heard anybody say anything to this harsh evaluation. It's not necessarily corrupt, it could be, it's certainly not what we trusted in: democracy.
The worldwide incidences are used to make people believe that we should be against transparency. Transparent channels of communication are used by looters and terrorists. Let's close that down. People who want to make things transparent are criminals, they are hackers, they are enemies of the country like the wikileaks. There is a huge machinery starting to roll up, that is called: Let's tie our own chains a bit tighter. Let's hide.
I do have criticism for the pro-transparency wing too. It's called privacy. Of course I am a defender of privacy, individual, and within reason for States. The argument of privacy however is used against the good cause. Patents are private and you can't steal them, while we already know, that open source politics provide better solutions. See Linux.
We want privacy on facebook, we want to stay non-transparent for corps, so that they can't use our data for advertising and offer us products we might like better than others... If we want them to see and hear our wishes and dreams, why not all the way? If the pro-transparency wing pulls the privacy argument, it's not going to go well. I'm predicting. There is a non-sequitur in the equation, if it's not illogical all together. That needs solving or a straightening out regarding coherence. I can't want x and non-x at the same time. Mess.
The unveiling of it all has a Greek word for it and it is called apocalypse (apo-calypsein=lifting the veil).
So then, let's decide what kind of apocalypse we want. The religious one? Final battle and that stuff? The back to the stone age one? Maybe we can just lift all veils equally. I'm not having a 1984 paranoia. Big brother won long ago when it comes to knowing us. I want to know big brother and make friends with big brother. I want to know it all, and I'm willing to not hide myself.
Big brother oppressing is not going to change a thing, if he doesn't have to, but he needs little brother. Yup, big jump here from democracy to lovy dovy brother reunion... I want you to think, and act, yourself, together with all :)
Cheers.
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