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How Democracy Destroyed The World
Why persistent failure to think about the way we govern ourselves has led to inevitable catastrophe
Everyone knows the fairytale: democracy is the best-possible form of government. It represents a mythical beast known as “the will of the people” even though such a unified will is in fact totally impossible both logically and practically. It supposedly permits ordinary citizens to turf out governments they don’t like and install governments that seem to have a fractionally better chance of being less inept, despite the fact that representative democracy in reality engenders a professional coterie of politicians who simply rotate places from time to time while nothing fundamental changes.
Meanwhile, thanks mainly to rules imposed unilaterally and entirely anti-democratically by far-sighted individuals in the years immediately following World War II, Western citizens have enjoyed a period of peace and prosperity utterly unique in human history. Instead of recognizing how anomalous this situation is, and working hard to protect it, ordinary people have come to believe they have rights but no responsibilities — not even to themselves, as the present obesity epidemic clearly demonstrates. Ordinary people are so infantilized that they perpetually squeal over the most minor inconveniences while refusing to take personal responsibility for anything at all. Governments thus are now regarded as quasi-parental organizations the responsibility of which is to continue to swaddle citizens in a mixture of delusional thinking and endless economy-distorting handouts of various kinds.
And this isn’t an accident.
At its core, representative democracy is a market in votes. Politicians compete to buy votes from ignorant gullible citizens by promising as much metaphorical free ice-cream as they can while also pandering to prejudices and mistaken beliefs, most commonly those of the mythological/religionist variety. It’s a race to the bottom, with the (temporary) winner being whoever appeals most to people who know literally nothing whatsoever about any matter of importance and whose intellectual capabilities can politely be described as “exceedingly modest.”
