So.
How do we decide things? Why, easily! Of course! As easy as you please and are able. Do all you wish and are able to do. If others wish to join in and you wish to have them - do! A pleasant and powerful arrangement! Who will this system frustrate? It will frustrate those who want to decide what others are to do. In other words: the tyrant. But this is beautiful! To frustrate the tyrant is our goal and dream, we will kill if need be to achieve this. Don't worry, need won't be (assuming the system holds up, fingers-crossed).
What then is tyranny? To constrain the liberty of another to do as they please and are able, without being able to show the compelling necessity of the restraint or prohibition, is tyranny. To destroy, defile or confiscate the property of another (such as one's own anything; a work of creation, a personal possession, a minor child, any property of one's own including especially one's own body) without being able to show the compelling necessity of the deprivation, is tyranny. Tyranny expresses in other, small ways as well, but these two are great.
What kinds of tyranny are there? The most common kind is usually called democracy. In theory rule by the people, democracy is a dream, an ideal filled with wonder and first concocted under the severe mental illness or social disorder driven idea that arguing over and voting on the minutiae of life could or should be a focus and pursuit for most people's lives. This is the ideal of democracy, mind you. That the people must have the say on decisions. But since it is manifestly obvious that people want the direct exercise of no such say, most systems that name-check the ideal bump the decision-work up to select delegates, for almost all aspects of rule. This, too, is arguably democracy: it is inarguably the peoples' will that it be so. The people's will, come to governance, is very clear: "I don't want to do this. Somebody else needs to do this! Can we get someone qualified?"
People believe they have a right to expect select delegates to do a good job. To handle minutiae decisions according to general principles laid out and campaigned upon, together in bodies of those who have volunteered and competed to provide such service, under the understanding that these servants shall be orderly, well-regulated, checked and balanced.
Hit and miss, in practice, that. But the theory as it has developed is still better than the actual ideal of democracy itself. Because people - sane people, intelligent people, well-balanced people - do not want to spend strife to decide what others are to do. Public service is a horrible job that attracts horrible people because the goal and practice itself is irredeemably sick. Those who throw themselves selflessly into it not for power, but to be the means to protect others from its abuse, are the greatest heroes modern society so far knows - and we do not know them. These heroes are legion, thankless, and mostly go nameless, and - they are always far, far too few.
Leave aside the huge world of gears, levers, where corporate machines and metamilitary entities engage in good-natured brinksmanship for amusement and gain, with only droves of human lives at stake. Leave aside the world where democracy is - well, all I've said above, yet remains undoubtedly the least of all so-far-enacted evils, at the level of national governance. Give democracy a chance. Let ideal system meet ideal world.
What is democracy, in an ideal world where humanity is what it is in all things human-scale, yet where corruption above that scale is not an issue, and where abuse of power is an idea such as to chuckle over?
Democracy is the tyranny of the tiny minority of people who enjoy the process of canvassing, campaigning, proselytizing and political finance over all of the vast majority of people who quite naturally have higher priorities in mind, such as: human life. The agonies and joys of those they know. Their next meal. Being able to function. Whether to keep trying when efforts to connect are met with scorn, rebuff, unease and ridicule. Disease and death too close to home. The act of sex, and all that that entails. Sports team oh no! You don't love me anymore. Oh my god it is so beautiful - you did that? What do you mean fired! What is that engine noise. You are the most beautiful woman I ever hoped to meet; you remind me of what - the rest of my life could be. God, this wine.
Do you want to argue with me and convince me some idiotically trivial thing with no bearing on what is true, good, important in life is better than another trivially idiotic thing of nigh-but-not-quite-identical relevance? GOOD! Welcome to the tiny minority! Be the tyranny you wish to see in the world. Rule in small ways over the lives of all those who refuse to lower their well-placed priorities to your fucked-up priorities, to the point where merely in order to "have the say" you say they must (so as not to be deemed apathetic, sheepish, complicit in the unjust), it would be necessary for them to do as you do: scream and chant over the distinctions they today (with their eyes on the fact that they have an actual life) can barely even see. Democracy is yours.
Well, yours and everybody else's who enjoys that sort of thing. Have fun with that. Don't get shot by anybody you're trying to make do things! Try to be one of the good ones. Please.
And fuck off while you're at it, would you? I mean, if you please. If you'd be so kind.
2 comments:
Well put. I agree.
Exception: Democracy, or something like it, might work on a really small scale. Like, a small town ... a guild ... something like that. Where everybody all knows each other. Not that you won't have leaders, but that the leaders will have to know everybody and actually pay attention to their concerns at some point. I understand that small hunter/gatherer/agricultural villages work this way. The problem with nation-states is that they're just too darn big.
The problem with having a country full of a bunch of little, democratically run villages is that those villages then usually start fighting EACH OTHER.
I guess the problem is that human beings are sinful.
I don't have a good solution to this, I'm afraid. It does occur to me that having an aristocracy, but one that has some very high ideals and a very demanding idea of their own duties, might not be as dumb as it looks to us Americans. Snobby, sure, but with a chance of being benevolent. A sense of being held to a standard higher than themselves, and some sense of responsibility for those they govern.
Well, I do sincerely maintain that Democracy is the best system yet put into practice for large-scale. "Representative Democracy," such as we've got. People choose people to choose by lot what the common lot shall be, on each little miniscule issue. For most of us, this gets democracy out of our hands and faces, and lets us concentrate on the truly more important things. The machinery in theory leaves us with remedies when faced with abuses and corruptions - the poor state of function is our fault, not the system's.
For a better system, people should "care more" - not about democracy, nor about the issues to be decided, but about quality control: the ruthless weeding out and prosecution of corrupt elements both within government, accepting illegal benefit, and without government, offering it.
Democracy - the wrangle over "what others shall do" - the law; taxes, funds and allocations - is after all a smelly, petty, quaint business with only the charms of the grotesque to recommend it. We shouldn't have to do more with our governance than to see and strictly expect that it is kept in line. Not "keeps itself" - is kept. Who watches the watchmen?
Everyone within the fortress walls. Or if we do not, then they may be prison walls. It is we who decide whether they are our warders - or our wardens.
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