Most FUNDAMENTAL REASON For DEMOCRACY: BETTER THINKING

WE ARE TRUTH MACHINES and democratic debate is our prophet. Thus, it’s never optimal for a society when a small oligarchy is in command, monopolizing power, knowledge, and more generally, thinking. Because, overall, it makes this society more impotent, ignorant and stupid than it would be, should We The People have Power (Demos-Kratia means People Power).

Oligarchies do not just monopolize power, they monopolize knowledge, thus fosters ignorance. Then oligarchies leverage this ignorance and this impotence, to advance stupidity some more, because so doing they make their power more secure. Arguably, to have a small oligarchy in command is even diabolical: l’enfer c’est les chefs! This is exactly what “plutocracy” means. Translated from the Greek, plutocracy is evil power.

As the world is now a village, any subdistrict of the village living under dictatorship is bad for the rest of the village. If nothing else, oligarchism is a bad example, encouraging other regimes to get more dictatorial. This is what happened when the “Axis” consisting of Japan, Italy and Germany was formed in 1936. It encouraged the fascist military coup in Spain, and encouraged all those keen for dictatorship, for example Stalin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, and countless future third world tin dictators. Oligarchism is also called “democracy”, an abuse of language, as in “representative democracy“, a contradiction in adjecto.

A recent example of oligarchism using its power? The Chinese dictatorship, an oligarchy calling itself the Chinese Communist Party, delayed the alert on the danger of pandemic that the coronavirus COVID 19 represented, by at least one month relative to what would have happened if the pandemic had started in an advanced democracy, with semi-free media… Chinese dictatorship servants (also known as “employees”) actively suppressed whistleblowers with advanced medical knowledge, who tried to alert authorities and public about the enormous danger. This certainly caused the death of millions, as the virus was not contained, and became uncontrollable without megadeath,  impacting severely the world’s socioeconomy (causing in turn more death and destruction!)

To defeat the enemy, one has to know enough about the enemy. And a world without enemies can’t exist, because our opportunities keep on creating them, whether we like it, or not. Just having billions of human beings around is an aggression against the balance of the biosphere, and create enemies (for example the coronavirus; or the greenhouse gas crisis).

Ignorance comes from not knowing facts. In the most acute form, ignorance crystallizes itself by clinging to dogma: a rigid set of beliefs is supposed the know-all, be-all, can-all. This is what happens with any tribalism or religion, even when the religion is the cult of a leader… such as Stalin, or Xi… Or G W. Bush, invading Iraq.

Ignorance by the many is never safe for the many. Secrecy can rarely be justified on the part of those entrusted with power. Generally secrecy enables those in power keeping their power… And sometimes they will do anything not just to keep that power, but to exact vengeance on all others alive, in the name of their reduced fate.

We are a world village. Our primary objective, of we the many, should be to make the world less painful, safer and better for all, and that requires debating well, to find better solutions. And debating optimally requires optimal information. Also debating everybody with everybody gives their chance to the most unexpected ideas, the more people take part in it.

This capability of getting ideas from all over, to enrich debates maximally is the deepest, most fundamental reason for democracy. The more democracy, the more a people is forced to learn to think by itself, including forced to learn how one suspects, and gathers the most important facts. Once again, it’s not just a matter of choice, national preference, but of safety of spaceship Earth we all live on.

Some will say that democracy rests on fairness, a deep property of primates’ ethology, their natural behavior. This is correct. Yet, even deeper than that, fairness, by giving every mind a chance to explore with maximum freedom, is what enables primates’ societies to find out how to exploit reality better. In other words, to find out truth. So once again, truth itself is revealed to be the soul of what animated us all along.

People-Power doesn’t necessarily entail anarchy. It is a number of famous fascist Greek philosophers, led by Socrates, who imposed that idea. Those fascist philosophers were loved by autocrats thereafter, precisely for artfully promoting that error (because it justified tyranny thereafter). Socrates’ problem with democracy was partly unwitting. But certainly Plato and Aristotle deliberately hated democracy (Aristotle was a core product and instigator of the Macedonian dictatorial plutocracy)… although both profited from it (as democracy enabled them to teach).

People-Power can be organized in a number of ways. Naturally People-Power government is more complicated than the fascism of a few which we enjoy today. This is easily checked by looking at the organization charts of Athens and the Roman Republic.

As it is, we are not governing ourselves, the plutocrats are governing us, through their corrupt servants.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2021/01/31/hedge-funds-and-financial-bandits-financed-biden-the-list/

Patrice Ayme