Democracy is the worst form of government

We once had a perfect form of government and were freer than we've ever been, but that was before we left our old way of life behind. Human history begins long before our current way of living now, don't forget.

But there is no going back to anything like that now. We have to use our intelligence to create our way out of these messes before we get in too deep...or are we already too deep?

 

Democracy is the oldest form of government

 

You're quite correct. My statement concerning "Democratic" Rome was too generalizing to be of much use.
But even so, our Founding Fathers understood governments can and will evolve into something quite different than what was initially intended. That formally open Governments can and do descend into dictatorships.
The best they could do was to install safeguards into the system to slow the evolution to a glacial crawl.

Balbus**


Humans have always sort the best ways to be governed, from simply leaving it up to the village elders to complex written constitutions, and that political journey goes hand in hand with the one that asks what it means to be human.

What do people want? Do we desire freedom with all the risks or crave security with all the constraints? Do people need guiding or controlling? What are we as a group aiming to achieve?

As Winston was making clear we haven’t yet achieved that perfect form of governance, maybe it is impossible?

What I’m wondering is should we try and if so what can we do to improve things?

**


Whether we will obtain the perfect government. No, I don't believe so. All governments are born from human thought. It requires a substanial portion of humanity to man Governments. It requires resourses derived from human effort to operate Governments. Humans are far from perfect.
Should we stop trying? Never. Obtaining perfection is impossible. Those claiming perfection from efforts undertaken by humanity are fools. The sin of hubris gets us into trouble every time.
Fortunately there has never been an invention that can't be improved. When was the last time a Model T Ford was sold new off the showroom floor?
Governments can also be improved. I don't know how. I like the idea of decentralized power, checks and balances, even bipartisan bickering stalling both Houses of Congress. How much debate took place inside the corridors of power when decision to build the American Japanese internment camps was made? Were the discussions and lengthy and protracted as to who were to build and fill them?

Consider the Governmental direction of the last thousand years. I wonder what the next thousand years will bring in political thought.

 

It seems awfully arrogant and shortsighted to assume capitalism and democracy will always be triumphant...

You are right in one aspect, Marx did believe it to be natural evolution.

And if science has taught me anything it's that evolution is a natural occuring, gradual process...

 

Arrogant? He is going on history itself. Look at what the evolved form of communism brought people, including my family: oppression and poverty.

 

What?

Please reread my post.

 

This is also a crutch for communists who just want to say "No, Marx wasn't wrong, just too early, give it another century... and another..." So communists can go to their graves thinking they were 100% right but born to soon.

 

Democracy is an unfortunate compromise. The absolute ideal form of government is a benevolent dictatorship. but how often do they show up?

 

Communism isn't inherently wrong though: at the worst of times, it is beneficial to a society to keep all of its people steady and alive, rather than have those who excel take all the product and leave people starving. Unfortunately, communism is very open to abuse. The main thing wrong with it is not the ideology at its core, but the people who administer it.

The ideal form of government does not exist. What is beneficial in times of hardship is inconducive to times of plenty. Communism is beneficial when there is barely enough food to go round, but it does not reward hard work or allow people to excel. So the will to progress is sapped somewhat.

If there is an ideal form, it is a state of flux between socialism and meritocracy (best represented by capitalism, since there isn't a much better form of meritocracy in the world at the moment.) Unfortunately, while democracy generally results in this state of flux, it is "delayed" so that the government only sways the way that favours the country after much damage has been done as a result of the previous form of government.

The best example I can think of is Thatcher: while Thatcher did a hell of a lot of damage to the UK, she was, for the first five years or so, a very good thing, since the previous government had fucked things up so much. However, she ended up in power for about 6 years too long, which gave her plenty of time to take what was initially beneficial to extremes which did more harm than good. and so on with Nu-Labour...

PS: in yr sig, it looks like the Madonna has a nosebleed.

 

Yeah, Marxism is often misinterpretted as a style of government, a panacea for all ills. It is not. Marxism is a process. Basically, the proliteriat rise up against their government. What Marx does not say - presumably because he doesn't think he needs to - is that this is a cycle. There is no reason whatsoever to believe that those who overthrew their government should be anything different from the government they overthrew. This is why anarchism doesn't work: it's based on idealism alone and has no regard for human nature.

 

Not exactly. It depends how you define government. Before democracy, there was the governmental form of "whoever can kick the crap out of everyone else gets to rule the tribe/whatever". Look at global politics now and tell me this isn't the same ideology behind US foreign policy.

 

Actually, patriarchal/matriarchal government is the oldest form of government. In fact, patriarchal/matriarchal government traces back to when we walked around on four legs or more and it is still practiced by most communal animals from apes, wolves and lions to ants and bees.

Innit tat sumpthin! Whoda thunkit?

 

Balbus .. form = platonic ideal?

 

The more I realize just how stupid most people are, the more I think we need some sort of Socratic meritocracy.

 

Once we didnt have enough information to make an informed decision, thus incapable of operating a democracy. Now we have so much information we can't sort it, still incapable of operating a democracy. Democracy is something we must grow and evolve into. We're just too young for our driver's licence yet. But perhaps media will evolve into something that truly informs, and not persuades. Perhaps education will be implemented as a tool to learn how to learn, and not just a propaganda machine. Until that time, sheep that we are, we're going to let the smoothest talker hypnotize us into believeing anything he says. But short of the enlightened dictator, what else do we have?

 

The state of nature.

 

Utopia translates litterally as 'no place'.
Sure, the problem can be traced back to when we became an agrarian culture. Would we could go back to a primitive lifestyle, but we can't. We can only move forward now.

 

One of the factors that we argued was influential in bringing about the
participatory sort of democracy in Athens was leisure time. The
availability of leisure time made it possible for the citizens, in Halil
Berktay’s words, to deal with issues; outside their immediate
existence.


Dealing with social sciences is never easy. The first major handicap is that one can not evade the method. How can method help us correct our senses, where the method itself may be “wrong”? In other words how can we define the area of divergence between the method and the senses; not to mention the diverse social variables that we need examined. And yet, with which tools?

Is not the term “Middle East” rather Eurocentric? Or “Far East”? Far to whom? In the Middle of what? Why is not there a “Far West”?

I am not for the “deconstruction” of the method, but maybe it would be right to bear in mind the phenomenological and thus the hermeneutical problem: the orientation and the historicity[1] of the object in relation to its subject.



The second problem with social sciences is their subject: the society. Societies vary due to a multitude of factors such as geography, climate, religion, scarcity, culture and etcetera. Now, if we were to observe how a litre of H2O would react under different levels of temperatures at different pressure levels, we could conduct repetitive experiments until we “empirically” gather data. These data might even constitute a pattern which we could use as principles.

But when the subject under our focus is societies, we can not repeat any experiment. We can not repeat the October Revolution, or the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, or the French Revolution or the aftermath of the Battle of Manzikert.


[1] In Gadamer’s context.

Therefore, every observation we make is unique. Because all the needed variables during the process of observation, constantly change… not to mention the orientation of the observer to the changing facts.



Some social scientists have tried to place these “changing facts” in a pattern (or structure[1]?) that would later be taken as a metanarrative: the “cultural evolution of societies” from a primitive level to a higher end[2].

Eventually, theories like this have been used to justify the imperialist exploitation of the peripheral societies and theorists of this kind have been (in Gramscian context) accused of possessing “organic” ties with the hegemon forces.



Bearing these problematic points in mind, I will try to question the democracy in Ancient Athens and the one in contemporary societies.



First off, I shall not take Halil Berktay’s judgement for granted, which claims that the Athenians developped a sense of “demos kratos” for they had slaves around them to do all the work which would generate a surplus time that enabled (or created) a sense of political activism.

From many historical accounts, we know that a culturally similar society, the Spartans, had actually a spesific enslavement policy that never led to any sorts of democracy in the Athenian sense.

Moreover, even after the collapse of the Athenian democratic state, there have been many states depending on slave labour that were by no means democratic.


[1] In Levi-Strauss’ context.


[2] In Lewis Henry Morgan’s theory a society passes through the consecutive stages of savagery, barbarism and finally civilization.

Rolling forward in history: 2200 years ahead of the Athenian state, neither Portugal, nor Spain established a democratic state when they were at the climax of their wealth through exploitation, slave labour and plunder.



So the question remains the same: Why have not the Hitits, the Sumerians or the Egyptians developed democracy but the Athenians? Plus, why were not women granted suffrage? If it was the leisure time that motivated the Athenians to vote, why were farmers or rich land owners farming on the immediate outskirts of the city walls banned from voting on war and peace? Afterall, they were the ones feeding the city. How come people that did not want to vote or that did not interfere with the politics of the polis were regarded with contempt by the participating citizens and called “idiotis” (which in its modern use is as “idiot”)



The “Douloi (slave) theory” as I have argued above, lacks a lot to deliver a reasonable answer. If we, in conducting our method, are too much concerned with the truth, or with a transcendental universal truth, we may end up with metanarrative[1] theories that claim to explain everything (in a Hegelian determinism), such as Lewis Henry Morgan’s cultural stages theory.

So maybe sometimes we should leave aside the misleading cause determined question of “why?” and go with the technical “how?”

Or at least, foster some sort of deconstructive skepticism in the back of our minds when explaining historical facts.








[1] In Jean-François Lyotard’s terms.

 

In light of this specific insight gained from Athenian
democracy, what can be done to improve our contemporary democracies? What
specific policy suggestions would you come up with if you were a political
advisor? Try to be creative



“What is to be done ?”

This is a very complex situation as the statement “contemporary democracies” itself is in great ambiguity. If we are to talk about the reigns of power then we should delve into the productive mechanisms and relations that generate the very power. Are we living in a huge simulacre[1] that in a psychoanalytical[2], post structuralist Marxist fashion, derives from worker’s alienation from themselves through capitalist mode of production? Is Democracy and this very university an ideological state aparatus as Althusser puts it? In some democratic constitutions, (such as the U.S.’ constitution) people have the right to revolt against any coercive governments and for this purpose they are encouraged to keep arms. Can people in deed realize their rights to a revolt in a “Brave New World” where the hegemon (State) can kill masses way faster than it almost achieved during the French Revolution. After all, for whom was the French Revolution?

Is the “democratic victory” in Ukraine a true velvet revolution, just like that of Georgia’s or could it end up like the 1956 revolution of Hungary’s and achieve a “Great Leap Forward”? Maybe this proves that revolutions just do not have a recipe as most social scientists would have liked it to be.





As for the last non-existent Democracy in contemporary societies... This is a pretty though one. “At what cost and which spesific democracy ?” one may ask:


[1] Not in Platon’s terms, but in Baudrillard’s.


[2] As in Lacan’s three compartments of the mind

Imagine a democracy liberating the peoples of the world with its ferocious Bald Eagle overseeing the fact that it has granted suffrage to its African American citizens as early as 1962! Imagine a French, a British, a Dutch democracy in the Ivory coast, in Iraq, in Haiti, in Shell Gas stations. Imagine a Chinese democracy in Tibet, a Russian in the Chechnia, a Turkish democracy delivering jet fuel in truck convoys to Fallujah.

If we are to call these “the normal” on the international political arena, where would the modus vivendi margin be drawn between the state and the “custumer” citizen?

As the retreat of the state accelerates, democracy it seems, will be re-defined by the corporations:

Packed up, stuck in factories and office cubes, people buying their lives back call themselves lucky as the world today fails to distribute its never before seen wealth to the 3.000.000.000 people working on less than 2 dollars a day or tens of millions of children awaiting starvation in world’s most democratic concentration camps[1], with only one sentence different than that of written above the gates of Auschwitz[2], “Laissez Faire, Laissez Passe”.







[1] Periheral countries, expecially sub-saharan.


[2] Arbeit Macht Frei! (Labour sets you free)

 

True. A democratically elected leader has all the advantages of being a leader, but ultimately, if they screw up it's the fault of the underqualified and socio-politically ignorant electorate and their faith in common sense.