The Democratic Delusion

by David Sims

THERE ARE notions, popular with Americans, that I would dispute. One of them was put forth by Thomas Jefferson, an otherwise sensible fellow who became fond of the silly idea that the common man represented a reservoir of wisdom that would nudge the country back into its true course, if it were to go astray. Which is nonsense. Common folk are no such resource, and their votes constitute no such restoring force. You don’t get wisdom by summing mediocrities, and most people throughout all the ages have been mediocrities.

Democracy is a stupid idea for the simple reason that the wisest people are always outvoted.

Imagine that you took apart two old-fashioned pocket watches and scattered their parts across a pair of tables. To one of the tables, you invited a hundred people, randomly picked off the street, and told them to vote democratically on how to put the pieces back together again. To the other table, you invited a watch-maker. At which table would a working watch most likely be reassembled first?

However, there’s a come-back argument. For a system of government other than democracy, who chooses the leader? That is, who ensures that a statesman is invited to assemble policy at the national table, and not some blowhard politician whose only talent is talking magnificently about himself?

No, not the common people. They aren’t wise and are no proper judges of wisdom in others. If you leave the choice of leadership to them, they’ll pick blowhard politicians almost every time. That would be true even if blowhard politicians and wise statesmen occurred among the candidates for high office in equal numbers. Of course, the real situation is even worse, since for every wise statesman who comes along, there are about a thousand blowhard politicians.

Democracies have no internal method of choosing a direction for their overall progress. By themselves, their behavior is entirely thermal, random motion about an inert center of mass. People in democracies don’t choose their actions with respect to any particular philosophy or morality, although they might try to justify those actions by such standards afterward. Instead, their choices are made according to the fashion of the day, or by the whim of the moment. By impulse. Which is to say that whenever a democracy moves toward some goal or other, it has been hijacked through the use of propaganda by those who control the mass media, and the goal probably entails eventual expense or trouble, or both, for the gullible voting masses.

Although the people might have a faith in popular sovereignty, this is an illusion. The media bosses can start wars that the people will be coerced to fight in, even though the people have nothing to gain from victory. The media can instill in their national audiences a general moral paralysis, such as passivity in the face of an imminent danger like a foreign invasion of their territory. Or a corrupt tolerance of evil. Or even a corrupted sense of what evil is.

The United States is a good example. It was founded as a constitutional republic. But predators, notably the House of Rothschild, corrupted it into a democracy under their leveraged media and banking control, until it became, in practice, a corporation whose political leaders were mere temporary administrators. The real executives of Corporate USA were a number of very rich Jews who pulled the puppet strings.

It might turn out to be a good thing, in the long run, if war should determine which countries are the best ruled, with victory going to the more wisely led countries most of the time. People would sooner or later learn their lesson regarding the pursuit of power by those wannabe leaders who are ambitious but unworthy. Or, rather, the people who survived would learn that lesson.

From a divine point of view, it isn’t all that important how many countries don’t learn it in time, and fall as a consequence. From a cosmic perspective, it isn’t important how many people are enslaved or exterminated. What matters is that natural selection would tend to preserve those countries that did learn rapidly enough, and the arrangements that those countries had made for the marriage of wisdom and power would be preserved along with them. I could speculate about what those arrangements would be, but I would only be guessing.

That’s why liberals are foolish to sneer at tradition. Traditional mores and culture are usually well-culled adaptations for the people among whom they evolved. What even the greatest minds would be hard put to contrive through planning, nature brings forth by the processes of natural selection.

Including war. Survival is the greatest school, and Death is its best teacher. But no living thing graduates, ever. The beneficiaries of nature’s lessons aren’t individuals, but races, which endure so long as they pass the tests and which prosper by how high they score.

For anyone interested in betting with the odds on his own survival and that of his country, I’d give this advice: if you want to be on the side that wins in the long run, you must first recognize that what decides struggles is power and the skill with which it is put to use.

* * *

Source: David Sims