Montesquieu observed that different political systems have different internal motivations, an engine that drives the people in it. He used the term principle as the thing that gave the system energy. In aristocratic systems it was the desire for honor that drove people to act. In a republic it was virtue. Instead of serving a man who was the manifestation of the state, the republican man served the institutions. He respected the office, not necessarily the office holder.
The principle of liberal democracy appears to be morality. The language of this age is drenched in moral claims. The mantra of the age is diversity, inclusion and equity, which is shot through with sentiment. How much diversity is a good thing? There is no limit, of course, as diversity is a good in itself. Equity is a purely subjective term as it means distributing resources based on the needs of the recipients. The people who make that decision are those who are at the top of the moral hierarchy.
In addition to echoing and updating sentiments from the beginning of western racialism (liberté, égalité, fraternité), the point of these sorts of slogans is to communicate civic piety between the speaker and listener. Alone they are just echolalic babbling, but when spoken or written for an audience, the speaker feels virtuous, as she assumes the listener, upon hearing these code words, will see that the speaker is pious. These terms are about signaling and confirming piety.
The problem with this is morality needs authority. In a theocracy, like in Iran, this problem is solved with Islam. The mullahs are the defenders and chief promotors of their form of Islam, so they sit atop the moral hierarchy. They provide the limits on democracy and a scale against which to measure piety. Similarly, Puritanism provided the moral authority for the early settlers in what is now New England. They had democratic societies, bound by Scripture.
Liberal democracy does not have or tolerate a belief outside the fingertips of man, so it cannot rely on established religion for moral authority. Instead, it relies upon the marketplace to provide that authority. The will of the people is formalized in elections and the marketplace. This is why the most powerful people work to make sure their opinions seem to reflect popular will. Rigging an election or faking a public opinion poll makes perfect sense when placed in the framework of liberal democracy.
The god of the marketplace has always had one very serious flaw. If Herodotus is to be trusted, the Persians were the first to notice this. They saw the Greek marketplace as nothing more than brothers lying to brothers. The seller misrepresented his products in the hope of fooling the customer. The customer misrepresented his interest in the hope of bargaining down the price. The spirit of the agora was deception, which makes the god of the market a fickle liar.
We are seeing this playout with the Covid vaccine. A mass vaccination campaign requires public trust. After all, letting someone put something in your body that you do not understand is a leap of faith. In a high trust society where the people believe the rulers have their best interest in mind, this is not difficult. In a low trust society, the rulers must search for external sources of authority. In the case of Covid, they have paraded out hundreds of experts from medicine and science.
The problem is those experts are products of the marketplace. They work for pharmaceutical companies, the political system, research outfits supported by the Chinese communist party and so on. These experts are fully democratic men in that they are products of the marketplace. They represent the interests of whoever is paying their salary at the moment, not the interest of the people. We can no more trust them that we can trust the salesman at a used car lot.
Because we are now fully democratized people, we are conditioned to assume that everyone is a product of the marketplace. Their interest in the truth is meaningless as the truth is what the market says at the moment. They are either making the market or following the trends of the market. In the case of Covid, everyone looks at the experts and wonders whose interests they are representing. The moral authority of liberal democracy turns out to be a cynicism without limit.
Something Montesquieu never mentioned, but that is relevant to this age, is the relationship between the principle of the system and its durability. John Adams famously said in a letter to John Taylor, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself”. A republic, it seems, does not do much better. The one Adams helped found was quickly dashed to pieces by his descendants. Monarchy seems to be the most durable, having been with us since the start.
The reason for this is democracy has no room for religion, while republicanism tries to contain religion within the civic institutions. Aristocratic systems, even without religion, reflect the reality of the human condition. They begin with the assumption that there is always someone one charge. The question is how that is decided and blood turns out to be the most predictable. There is no debating lineage. It is far from perfect, but it seems to be the most stable of mankind’s political systems.
Of course, just about any political system can work in a high trust, competent society, which means a homogeneous society. Both of those qualities are inversely proportional to diversity. Liberal democracy, as we see, places diversity as its highest goal, which is why it eventually murders itself. It burns the social capital built up by the preceding system until that fuel is exhausted. It turns out that liberal democracy is the sign that a people are finished and are ready to shuffle off into the history books.
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John W. Campbell, the long-time editor of “Astounding Science Fiction”, later, “Analog” said that the best form of government was a benevolent dictatorship. I’m sure a lot of words were written around this but it was long ago and I’m pretty old.
How do you make sure you get the benevolent part?
Armed society is polite society.
How to keep get the benevolent part?
A philosopher king without the wealth. Limit his income. Give him a “comfortable income”, but no more. No investments, multi-million dollar book deals, speaking fees, loans, gifts. Money turns benevolence into malevolence.
We’re so divided that the principles they say they hold as the highest—“diversity, inclusion, equity,” are actually what most of us consider among the most damaging to society. The same with institutions. I’ve noticed among family and friends, the CNN viewers are all enthusiastic about getting the “vaccine.” They completely trust CNN (“the most trusted name in news!), while the opinion here and even among most normie-cons is that they’re the enemy of the people. The middle ground is disappearing quickly.
> Something Montesquieu never mentioned, but that is relevant to this age, is the relationship between the principle of the system and its durability. John Adams famously said in a letter to John Taylor, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes exhausts and murders itself”. A republic, it seems, does not do much better. The one Adams helped found was quickly dashed to pieces by his descendants. Monarchy seems to be the most durable, having been with us since the start.
An interesting thought experiment is to imagine the American Republic decided to be a monarchy instead, with a King in charge of the country and Dukes/Barons in charge of their respective states with an aristocratic House of Lords in charge of representing the general population.
We would have likely been less free in the classic enlightenment sense, but we would probably have not gone off the crazy train nearly as often in our history.
Didn’t stop England from heading down our same path.
3
Good point, the West has devolved into Mob Democracy everywhere, regardless of where they started.
I was going to say the same. In fact it could be argued that England is further down the crapper than we are, particularly with respect to the covidian nonsense .
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England is still 90% white & 85 native. 👍
The collapse of trust should be viewed positively, no? The current system does not deserve trust and has not merited such for a very long time. Until recently, people and conservatives in particular had a misplaced trust in a system hostile to them. Distrust came much too late, but better late than never.
You wrote yesterday the elite vacillates between sociopathology and fear. The second prong only materialized after trust collapsed. Our focus must be to exploit that distrust and make the elite at a minimum uncomfortable and, preferably, live in abject terror.
Despite my pessimism, it has become obvious the elite grossly overplayed their hand with BLM/Antifa terrorism. There are likely to be scores of state-sanctioned black and white communist deaths, finally, this summer. While welcome, this is hardly sufficient. Those who manipulated the mentally I’ll and low IQ cretins also must feel fear, and it looks like that could happen at least around the margins. As insignificant as it is, the backlash against the NCCA’s trannyism and its J@w parasites shows the states have limits. The Camp of the Saints option has devastated the Biden Regency. There is a strong chance corporations may feel previously unimagined reprisals, both legal and extrajudicial. The Covid fraud, particularly if deaths increase from the vaccine, may accomplish what most of us assumed would happen only with an economic collapse or humiliating military loss, both of which are possible.
This isn’t to make the case for optimism but an acknowledgment oppression has limits. Things will get much worse, but the limits of state tyranny have come into view.
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One can only hope.
ਸ਼੍ਰੀਅਕਾਲਸਹਾਇ।।
On the brighter side of things, it turns out that scientists’ obsession with matter and becoming has led them back to the idea that being is primary. No, this is not an advertisement for pantheism, panentheism, or process theology. Nor has anyone discovered a good reason to believe in the God hypothesis of Abrahamic religion. Rather, science indicates that we need to cast aside the assumption that the cosmos is an evolving, 3D thing with a single, present moment. Instead, past and future are the subjective designations of conscious beings who neglect the unity of all moments—past, present, and future.
The scientists’ materialism, too, has lost its luster, but there are millions and millions of sensualists (including most Protestants) who aren’t ready to hear the painful truth about existence. Maybe this explains shrill demands to trust the Science™. They know that science has falsified the crudest form of materialism.
Anyhow, here is a summary of four ontological positions which I think can be defended coherently:
God? False.
Materialism? Probably false.
Presentism? False.
A Single Law of Existence Subject To No Willpower? True
And contrary to the nihilism of science nerds and other materialists, the cosmos can never not be. The Big Bang was not its moment of birth but only a chaotic boundary in the past, and there will be no cold, dark death of the whole.
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Panentheism is correct.
https://mobile.twitter.com/bijjaichhand/status/1128599391168647170
A New Tomorrow (cont)
Yes, trust matters.
If you are the lone wacko that just committed a heinous crime, there’s a good chance that LEOs will track you down & make you pay. This is a case where asymmetry favors the State. And this system works fairly well in a civil society in which most citizens are law-abiding and crime is relatively rare. And for this to continue to work, social trust must be high and honest citizens must be comfortable cooperating with LEOs in the common cause of social stability. But that calculus changes dramatically when government becomes tyrannous. When the State becomes the Bad Guy, the asymmetry flips 180 degrees. Now its tens of millions against thousands, and when the LEOs are on the wrong side of the fence, all they hear is crickets. A disenfranchised citizenry can become a fog that blinds the tyrant, and that is no trivial thing. Be the fog.