Category: Politics, Power, and Governance

CRITIQUE OF DEMOCRACY

By Tim Abbott

—“Democracy leads to tyranny. Democracy is drunk with the concept of freedom. As result the rulers must flatter the citizens, must please the citizens. The teacher must entertain the desires of the citizens. What results from this is the demagogue. The supreme flatterer, captivates the imagination of the majority of the citizens. Eventually this person becomes a tyrant.”—From the Republic

An oligarchy disenfranchises its own citizens. Democracy emerges from the oligarchy. The poor rise up in revolt and easily topple the oligarchs because the oligarchs were unwilling to invest in a good army. The democracy is established. It has four qualities, it affirms freedom, privacy, equality, and diversity.

The democratic individual is the son of the oligarch, who is the father. The oligarch tells the son to be frugal. “All those things you say you want you really shouldn’t want. Don’t spend money. Devote yourself to the same pursuit I’ve devoted myself, mainly the pursuit of money.” The son knows the father is very wealthy. The father is unwilling to invest in education of his own son. His son is therefore undisciplined. His son is intoxicated in unnecessary desires. The desire for food when hungry, the unnecessary desire is courtesans, perfumes, art. The democratic son of the oligarch is wild at heart because he has been deprived of every pleasure even though his father could provide it because he is very wealthy. The son goes out to the city out on the streets and there he is exposed to chaos, desires and he becomes enthralled by all of them. This is the genesis of the democratic individual. Above all else the democratic individual is whimsical. We know why, he hasn’t been educated. The democratic individual above all else is hostile to all forms of authority.

The paramount value of democracy is freedom. An authority of any form is a threat to freedom. A democracy is a youth culture, it is hostile to an elder, to authority. In a democracy, teachers start to fear their students. Students are so undisciplined so hostile to authority that they can sometimes threaten teachers. There are many schools in the United States where teachers are afraid of their students, where students have to walk through a metal detector. Parents in a democracy have a hard time discipling their children and if the children are obstinate enough the parent may simply give up and allow the children to do what they want. This all has to do with in a democracy freedom has such value.

Our own democracy is a youth culture. The image of a young person is dominant in our media. Everyone wants to look young, thin, hate the idea of wrinkles, nothing is worse than looking old. Surgery, injection of drugs, all to prevent looking old. There is such a distaste for authority and tradition that there is no compelling reason to simply value the old only because they are old, in fact it is exactly the opposite.

To harken back to the parable of the cave. It is emphasized that the parable of the cave has to do with our own education and implies a great deal of pain. The prisoner at the bottom of the cave is shackled and must be liberated. The prisoner has been sitting in darkness for a long period of time, the prisoner must get up and look at the sun. This will be painful to get up after sitting so long and it will also be painful to look at the light after being in darkness for so long. The pain reflects the difficulty of learning, the student has to challenge conventional wisdom in order to think for themselves. This is the exact hard discipline that is missing in a democracy.

Democracy is excessively egalitarian. Isn’t that a self evident principle in our own society? If a person is wounded they should be treated, but if someone is chronically ill and has no hope of being restored to a healthy productive life they should simply be let go. Some human beings are more valuable than others, some human beings deserve medical treatment and others do not. A 90 year old man with Alzheimers is simply not equal to a 30 year old man who is healthy and strong. A doctor in our system, the objective is always the same, life and more life. There is no distinction between a life and a good life. All human beings are not equal, some are better than others.

Democracy is formless, chaotic. There is no stable conception that regulates us all and gives us a sense of what is a good life. There is in short too much freedom. Young people should not be given the choice to maximum their options, they should be told what to do.