For some time now, Western powers have been tearing about the planet like colonial missionaries on acid desperate to dispense their unique insights of how best to organise human communities.
Democracy, they convincingly eulogise, is the least worst way you must all live. It is the thinking person’s ersatz religion that justifies the elimination of the actual religion that brought us to this point of clarity! Can’t you see?
No?
Then we will show you, godammit. At the end of a gun (or under a drone). We will redraw your borders into laser-straight lines, televise the murder of your leaders, fund the mass, pointless slaughter of your reproductive age men to then privatise your lovely land and resources with our public-private (whatever) “finance” companies.
Liberal democracy, we are told, is the enlightened form of government. It is the only rational, intellectually coherent way to form a collaborative society. That’s a scientific consensus, by the way. It is The Science.
Fact.
What they fail to tell you – and maybe you need to live or work abroad for some time to truly appreciate this – is that many, many nations outside of the anglosphere are fully aware of the Western form of democracy. They understand it, both its pros and its cons - better than 99% of those unthinkingly living under its deceptive comfort blanket. But they choose not to arrange themselves in this manner. They actively make this informed decision. They take the view that democracy’s bad incentives and false promises are more dangerous than their more honest confrontation with how power is wielded.
They have a different culture. A pre-existing way in which they like to live, be it a monarchy, an openly one-party system or just that they see corrupt power-politics as a matter of fact around which they must navigate.
Me? I take the obvious view that those that seek power are inevitably those that should be least trusted with it. In an idealistic world, I think a form of anarchic libertarianism could be an excellent, natural law-induced state of equilibrium.
*********
Google the definition of the word “anarchy” and Oxford Languages provides two very different (arguably, opposing) definitions:
1) A state of disorder due to the absence or non-recognition of authority or other controlling systems; and
2) The organisation of society based on voluntary cooperation, without political institutions or hierarchical government.
If you investigate the Greek roots of the word, you will see that its original meaning was 2):
An- = without
Arkhos = ruler
Interesting that in most people’s understanding its primary meaning has come to be 1). In whose interests might it be to elide those two very different definitions of the word?
I would encourage you not to dismiss anarchy – in its true meaning - out of hand. There are a number of deeply thoughtful “anarcho-capitalists” whose foundational principles of self-ownership and non-aggression are difficult to counter.
*********
Heresy, many of you might say!
But take a moment. Take a closer look at the leading lights of Western Liberal Democracy…we have a demonstrably senile old man – under suspicion of multiple cases of corruption and who has fathered, let’s say, “a wrong ‘un” – in charge of the most powerful military in the world and currently using his civilians’ lifeblood money to perpetuate two forever wars far, far from their borders. He is refusing to leave office despite being visibly incompetent (possibly incontinent).
At the same time, over in the UK, you realistically had no opportunity to vote for anything other than the uniparty. If you agree that there are four overwhelmingly important issues for the public, being:
· Wars;
· Net Zero;
· Immigration; and
· Tax and spend economics,
then it made no difference for whom you voted. Zero. Mainstream commentators were straining at their Sunday morning microphones to implore citizens not to vote for anything but the main parties. A protest vote is a vote wasted – grit your teeth and banish from your mind the uncleanliness of supporting brainless policies that were directly counter to your morals and the flourishing of your children.
UK democracy requires that you vote for the things you don’t believe in!
So, 40% of the electorate decided (or were so disengaged as) not to vote.
But then, in addition, there was the vote-to-representation farce:
Reform (one of the only parties to diverge on the above three issues) gathered 4 million votes and was rewarded with five seats.
The Liberal Democrats managed a lesser 3.5 million yet were allocated 72 (x14 the number of Reform) seats.
Hmmm. Them’s the rules. That’s how democracy works. In the United Kingdom, anyway.
It’s a rigged game, but the fact that you know it is rigged somehow negates your right to say so.
And then there was France. Also a “democracy”, albeit under a completely different mechanism for transmitting those votes into power:
Hmmm…so who came first, actually came third. Is that right?
I wonder how that would go down in the Olympics or a World Cup…I was going to say in a fight-to-the-death fencing tournament and having a corpse beat the only person left standing lays bare the nonsense.
You simply cannot argue that the public opinion is reflected in the halls of power.
And yet everyone simply wafts away objections. This is the game we are so proud of. The Science of human governance that we not only dare not question, but also must ram down the gullet of the unenlightened.
As soon as The Establishment sees or hears something that might challenge its entrenched tyranny it bleats some ghastly gaslighting garbage about it being a “danger to our democracy”.
As so often, wisdom begins in definitions and the characterisation of the concept of democracy is being tortured (most probably waterboarded) and stretched to the point of rebellion.
Decrepit leaders, low participation rates and alarming underrepresentation of large swathes of the populace is no basis for peaceful, fair governance. Taxation without representation has caused some serious strife in the past.
Let’s refine this product before we export it.
Democracy may or may not have been rightly deemed the least worst form of government when it was under constant, fierce scrutiny by an informed electorate.
As things stand, I fear that scrutiny will likely be replaced by mutiny.