Abstract: A reading of the solutions proposed to save democracy, with the view of Societarium, an ontological theory of human society. Be careful not to poison her even more with direct participation which is already causing her to die. On the contrary, let us amplify the extent of the hierarchy so that everyone finds a place there.
Sommaire
Decisive year?
On the threshold of 2024, “a decisive year for global democracy”, books are multiplying to try to save it. Philomag thus echoes two therapeutic works, “The people’s agreement – Resetting democracy” by economists Mike O’Sullivan and Pierre-Charles Pradier, and “The Two Powers – Direct democracy to the aid of representative democracy ”, by senior civil servant Gilles Mentré.
“Global” democracy does not exist and never has existed. Its arrow of globalization has already been reversed for many years. Indeed, it is not a question of knowing whether more humans live under a democratic regime but whether these regimes, “totalitarian” when seen independently, have increased their collaboration towards truly collectivist management, that is to say on a planetary scale.
This is not the case. The arrow points downward. Democracies eaten away by populism isolate themselves. 2024 is not a pivotal year, just a very broad measure of the state of the arrow, given the number of upcoming elections. It is very likely that its inclination will have become even more pronounced. Where does it lead? Towards transitional anarchies then a puzzle of rival autocracies. It is the cycle of political regimes already described more than 2000 years ago by Plato, which nothing has ever seriously stopped, and the Democratic page will have been one of the thinnest in History, much thinner than that of Feudalism or Monarchy.
The medicine of charlatans
What do O’Sullivan, Pradier and Mentré argue to help our suffering contemporary democracy? Direct democracy. As a doctor, I am in disbelief. Basically it’s injecting more poison into an already heavily poisoned body. Or bloodletting an anemic patient. Democracy is being treated by charlatans who have no idea of its physiology. We are still in the Middle Ages of political medicine, in full obscurantism. And if the authors see direct democracy more as “not intended to replace representative democracy but to recreate the conditions for its adhesion”, this always aggravates the poisoning since representative democracy is already sick of direct democracy. When everyone has joined it will be dead, there will no longer be “everything”. But what is this dramatic diagnosis based on?
You know that in matters of therapy, in medicine as in politics, the most important thing is to understand the inner workings of the body to be treated. Diagnosis alone is not an explanation; it is the description of the disorder versus the normal state of the physical or legal person. The image of the person is upside down, bedridden. To straighten it out, you have to go down into the complexity of your physiology to the place where it bifurcated, creating the start of the pathology. This is where we must act. If it is the right place, the image at the top is corrected. Diagnosis is a macroscopic measurement, and therapy a microscopic action.
Social pathophysiology
If the patient is a society, what is its micromechanism? The voter, right? If society is sick, it is the voter who has changed direction. You are not going to save a bedridden democracy by proposing to the voter to continue their pathological path, just as you will not save a pneumonia patient by proposing that bacteria continue to proliferate. If you do this, society will perhaps not die, but it will certainly have lost its democratic organization. Complexity is bottom-up organization; It is not celestial ideals that shape a society, but the ideas present in each of its citizens. The result of their assembly is unpredictable. If this swarm of ideas changes you obtain a radically different global system, as history has demonstrated, which has brutally chained together anarchies, tyrannies, kingdoms and republics.
Why are our dear authors blind and ready to further poison their patients? Because they are stuck in their time. Making a diagnosis and proposing therapy requires scope and complex height. A doctor makes terrible self-diagnoses; when he suffers the consequences he ends up asking for help from a colleague, who climbs onto the essential belvedere overcoming his problem. It is even better that he is not a friend, that he remains entirely independent from the doctor’s opinion of himself. But our authors do not have this independence. They are stuck in the egalitarian ideal, in the idea that every judgment has the same value as another. They seek less to convince than to say that everyone must exercise their conviction. Their books are excellent reinforcers of individual power…and guillotines for collective power.
A hell of a fake friend
I showed in Societarium how Equality is a false friend of Liberty and Fraternity, the only two true fundamental principles in the human person. These principles of individuation and solidarity confront each other in a very personal way in each of us, resulting in a fundamental Inequality between citizens and not an Equality. That is to say, Inequality is the real engine alongside the other two in the micromechanisms of society. Equality is an ideal, a signpost indicating that social organization is heading in the right direction. It must not be a falsely ontological principle, replacing its opposite which is the true natural one, in the influence exerted on social processes. Yet this is what the authors do by sanctifying the egalitarian ideal, and by enclosing themselves in the tabernacle.
Difficult to dispute the sacred. Especially when it is confused with the truth. The sacred is to place equality in the existence, as an absolute value, of the citizen. Absurd. There is no absolute value. Equality of the right to vote is an approximation bringing together humans arbitrarily designated as “endowed with discernment to vote”, which includes those over 18 but not those under, which kicks out the precocious geniuses but keeps the old dolts. O’Sullivan and Pradier allow themselves to undermine the sacred by saying that there is no longer so much need for representative democracy because there are no more illiterates! Ah good ? But then that would mean that illiterates are not equal to literates? Wow, ugly hidden elitism!
Very clever in reality, these illiterates
Dear authors, you are right and wrong. You are right: The brains of illiterates are as busy as others, with things other than fine letters and therefore perhaps more with refining their empathetic intelligence? Less good in political philosophy, better in daily solidarity. You are wrong: Is the contemporary citizen who can read (with a declining vocabulary) more intelligent, more learned? Did he become an expert because he read O’Sullivan and Pradier? How did this knowledge fit in with others? In the same way as the authors or in an alternate reality? All this forms a beautiful ocean of diversity, for those who are in it, and of inequality, for those who take the trouble to rise to the level of the collective, without replacing it with their individual preference. Here is the truth, detached from the sacred.
By welcoming the rarefaction of illiterates, the authors indirectly applaud the rise of false scientists, of the dictatorship of stupidity. If all opinions are equal, regardless of their intelligence, the intelligence of the final choice is averaged. The illiterate had the intelligence to exclude from their competence subjects which required reading. They delegated their power to a scholar. And they were perhaps the most competent people of their time, because scholars tended to identify the limits of their knowledge much less well.
Represented by a dictator of stupidity
The situation is worse today. The “new knowers” are connected to unlimited knowledge, the Internet. Billions of new knowledge rich have entered the market, looking with condescension at those university researchers who admit the limits of their knowledge. “But ask me, dear friend, if you don’t know….” And these, the dictators of stupidity, are about to take the reins of the greatest democracies. Because they are the most representative… of the voter himself.
We are already immersed, drowned, poisoned, in direct democracy! There has long been no seal between voters and representatives. Certainly the language of voters has improved, but that of representatives has become poorer to match it. Everything is averaged. Society, as a global organism, has become stupid. It has eight billion “equalized” cells, and few neurons left…
Scratch the sky, chip away at the ideal, see the future
Which solution ? Start again from micromechanisms, put the inegalitarian principle in place of false equality. Structuring the organization of inequalities, which multiply with the number of individuals living together, through greater complexity. But make it the property of individuals and not of absolutist institutions. We need more hierarchy, but a fluid, dynamic hierarchy. Instead of flattening our social pyramid, because it seems impossible to climb, we must build skyscrapers, with elevators that go up quickly for those who have the means, and which go down for those who do not worry about their maintenance.
Populist anarchies work well in tribes, but all end up in the dustbin of history when they expand. Surviving requires society to become more structured and hierarchical. The cycle of political regimes is a series of structural ruptures. Each revolution takes root in a hierarchy incapable of reorganizing itself, of adapting to changes in morals and especially in the size of populations. It is not the hierarchy that fails but the rigidity of its existing form. Besides, another quickly takes its place.
Saving democracy is not collapsing its hierarchy through direct participation but on the contrary extending it, lengthening it so much that each of us will always see our skills recognized as superior to others… without placing them on the altar of the divinity.
*
The notion of *authoritarian populism* came and went in less than forty-eight hours. It was sold, however briefly, as a new democracy, of the people. At its’ center was a narcissist and egomaniac…who continues to capture the imaginations of illiterate and disgruntled people.
Astounding. He is a cheat, fraud and liar…was taught the finer points of those attributes, as a boy. His self-salesmanship is non-pariel, ergo, a *huge* segment of populace supports him, in spite of—or because of—his defiance of the rule of law. There are tens of thousands of authoritarian populists. We used to call these anarchists. Some said, Antichrist. That is OK. The spelling is not much different. Was Christ, or what he represented, an advocacy of democracy? I guess it was too early to tell…