Democracy is generally a garbage liberal enlightenment ideal to begin with. Representative democracy with separation of church and state, what, you think these valorous ideas came out of Christian minds holding tightly to the classic Greek philosophy? Hardly. More like Rousseau, Voltaire and the Jacobins.
First of all, you must consider the makeup of the Hellenistic world Aristotle came from: city-states were much smaller and therefore democracy looked different. Even Aristotle recognized that democracy coincided with high polarization in a society between upper and lower classes, which is the foundation of the classist materialist philosophy causing us so many problems since the 19th century.
Aristotle endorsed what he referred to as a polity, but even his discussion here was rife with ideology and poor in practical ways to implement it. It always comes down to how you maintain the 'quality' of your leadership. The question, of course, always was and remains to be how a society authentically disincentivizes corruption and runaway power-seeking in a way that can be embedded in the system so that it becomes an autonomous property of the structure.
To me, if history has taught us anything, there is no feasible way to do this. Rather, that desired property of a nation is not a property of either the People or the State, but a property of the RELATION between them, and it is something that must always be actively maintained. The only sure way to maintain leadership quality is via the willingness to hang the bad apples from trees, long before they accrue the level of control that puts them out of your reach for doing so. But oh how we do love to forget the brutish parts of life in the world, and become mollified into the narratives wherein we trust our governments and see our societies as unities with shared interests and universal moral strategies. The idea that any society requires sheep dogs is real - the kind of people who today are maligned for bursting the fanciful little bubble of the drooling masses. Our sheep dogs are labeled terrorists.
The issue with democracy is that it is easily undermined by a divided or ignorant population. Once a single demographic of the undesirable or the easily manipulated gain the right now hold a voice, the perks of democracy fade. Democracy is the best form of government for free and intelligent men. Every single issue should be held to vote by "land owning men of good character" who hold no debt, I'd even argue harsher voting regulation that this. There should be no congress, there should be no president. There should be no tax imposed, no war declared, no public issue settled and no law created without the consent of 3/5th majority of voters.
America would never had gone down the path it went down if our "representatives" were not corrupted by greed, personal agenda, corruption and manipulation. The issue with representative republicanism is that a crypto thrives. They put on the mask of a hard working man's man, then while nobody is watching pass all sorts of nonsense. If every voting man had a direct voice, things would be much different.
As far as a dictatorship goes, who would be selected to lead and how would the people know if he, or God forbid she (see the risks we take here?), isnt a crypto his self?
Our sheep dogs are labeled terrorists.
Media should be completely decentralized, non profit, open, transparent and regulated by threat of extreme punishment. Lies and misinformation should be punishable.
by a divided...population
Ah, and therein lies the crux of the problem. When we talk about a single demographic, assuming we mean an ethnic one, have we actually eliminated the possibility for division? This issue of how we cut the joints between the categories in a population is everything, because even within a racially homogenous population, there is still categorical division by success outcomes (roughly, class distinction). The only means of eliminating this division is the so-called equity solution that has us chasing our tails today.
So the problem, at the outset, is how philosophically to state our prescriptions for what joints are necessary and tolerable within a population, where they should be, and further, how to manage the apparently natural tension that exists between those who have more than others. The vast utility of religion to this end cannot be underscored, and so anything which would trivialize the central role and impact of religion in a society will make the class problem more salient. It's interesting that something like Jordan Peterson's pseudo-religious approach to describing a hierarchy in society, though it doesn't strictly appeal to God but to vague metaphysical reasons for such a hierarchy, is attempting to explain the predicament of class.
Every single issue should be held to vote by "land owning men of good character" who hold no debt
Just to highlight some of the contingencies that arise, the class of people that corresponds in this country with what you've described above would primarily be Boomers. Of course, there are diligent upstarts in the younger crowd who have bought land and homes outright, but the general predicament today sees that the majority of debt-free landowners are probably people of 50 years and older. Perhaps this doesn't sound like such a bad thing, but let me offer another consideration.
Consider your own situation (financially and economically). I'm not here to qualify it. It doesn't matter what it actually is because this question is a relative one. The problem is this: there are far more landowners in the country today than there were in the middle 18th century, largely because our system for a time sustained the growth of a large middle class, but with time the total number of people who would qualify to vote (according to your criteria) ought to grow in a society that is prospering, right? So whatever your situation is today, which we take to qualify you as a voter, the value of that position ought to be diluted with time if things are improving per capita. This is also tied up with technological progress. With sufficient time, we'd find that the voting base of the country would have become more diverse in terms of intelligence, with less intelligent people gaining the ability to vote on account of being land owners.
So at that point someone says, "We need to become more strict." So perhaps from among the landowners they select even more elitist groups corresponding with higher and higher economic status (higher income, higher net worth, higher status, whatever) until the point that you find yourself becoming disenfranchised as population grows and overall wellbeing in your nation increases. In turn, someone then says, "After a time, the game has to be 'leveled' or 'normalized' so as to always maintain the relative distribution of class," - now you've got a situation where in order not to dilute the voting base, you basically tell everyone that no matter how hard they try, and how far they climb, they'll be running something like the Red Queen's race, i.e. running in place.
In other words, their absolute wellbeing might be increasing with time, but their relative status in society will remain the same. And here we encounter the trouble: people judge their lives not in absolute terms, but in relative terms.
As far as a dictatorship goes, who would be selected to lead and how would the people know if he, or God forbid she (see the risks we take here?), isn't a crypto his self?
This reminds of me Mel Gibson's The Patriot. I really enjoyed his character, Ben Martin, in this film because he is one of the few representatives in South Carolina who resists fighting the war against the British. He says,
"Would you tell me please, Mr. Howard, why should I trade one tyrant three thousand miles away for three thousand tyrants one mile away?
This is a legitimate question. In a representative democracy, those who serve as representatives are thrown into a kind of game where they are incentivized to patronize the values of as many people as possible. It's this very competition for the vote of one's constituency that corrupts the politicians before they've set foot in office. Although the situation is helped greatly by an ethnically homogenous society, there are still joints that we can cut between groups in an all-white society, between economic and job classes, each of whom have their own conflicting interests.
As I see it, the corruption of one man is easier to track, to notice and to quell than corruption that is diffused across a few hundred people, where blame can be passed on and where partisan politics can bury it. Any politician today has an appeal to his political opposition as to the reason for his failures.
Media should be completely decentralized, non profit, open, transparent and regulated by threat of extreme punishment. Lies and misinformation should be punishable.
Given what I said above, who is in charge of regulating this, who decides who gets to own and operate what? Who decides what constitutes true media? Even a political system comprised of the most intelligent men in a society will have reason to dispute this, namely because of the democratic principles that gave them their office.
I'm not saying I've got a perfect solution. I don't know that there is one.
What do you Catholic boys have to say? Democracy or dictator?
It's simple as this...
How long did the monarchies of Europe, good or bad as they were, reign?
How long has our precious system of "democracy" reigned genuinely, without being propped up by those who reap the suffering of those under said system?
Better to be able to blame one and replace him than have to blame 50% of a nation and cull millions.
Well I’m of the opinion that St. John of Kronstadt has this figured out; in hell there is democracy; and in Heaven, a Kingdom.
I promote Absolute Theocratic Monarchy, wherein the king is anointed as such by the Church, and ideally promotes the Symphonia of Church and Crown.
This has been the historic norm for European people groups since the Incarnation of Christ. It’s the default, and I see all else as deviation from that ideal form.
So in either case - democracy or dictator - we’re seeing errors. But I think the error of democracy is the more severe.
In a way, this is a prudential matter. Yes, both heaven and the Church use the monarchist model (although I find it ironic that affirms the supremacy of this model for Heaven and the State, but as an Eastern Orthodox rejects this model in its temporal-hierarchical manifestation where the Church Herself is concerned, since he rejects the Papacy), but there are others who cite Aquinas' argument that just law and just government require the consent of the governed to argue that the republic is the ideal model.
For my own part, I consider any model, be it political or economic, to be totally unworkable outside the moral order, and so I treat "the state must adhere to the moral law" as a given before making comparisons. Which of course means "the state, as body, must be animated and informed by the Church, as soul"; i.e. there can be no true separation of Church and state. But by doing this I'm basically saying "only the ideal forms are worth conparing", which is obviously more of an idealist attitude than a realist one. Nevertheless, if adherence to the moral order is given, I'd prefer a monarchy - more efficient, appeals more to our natural sense of things, and its simpler. Give me a moral king over a moral congress aby day.
The corollary of this, of course, is that an immoral king, as tyrant, and an immoral congress, as oligarchy, or an immoral demos, as anarchy, are all terrible and, as I've said, unworkable. If we are taking into consideration the probability of moral failure, or the consequences of moral failure if it happens, then I think we've already missed the mark. We simply cannot pretend that we can make a system, political or economic, function unless it is wedded to the moral order. And so I compare the systems given that they are grounded in Truth, and as such, prefer monarchy.
It's this very competition for the vote of one's constituency that corrupts the politicians before they've set foot in office.
Very good analysis but I wonder how you would see it if you were able to abandon this belief that democracy is a thing at all, in the first place. It would seem to me much more likely that the oligarchy that supported, fomented and financed the overthrow of the reigning european monarchs didn't then turn around and relinquish that power to some sort of utopic representative government of the people. Wouldn't it be more likely that they never did relinquish this power and that the "democracy" we have come to know is nothing but a charade to manufacture consent and to throw the unsuspecitng public's support behind a representative that has already been chosen for his allegiance to the real power structure? I have a hard time believing that any popular/populist movement could ever gain enough momentum, and clout, to actually storm the royal palaces and guillotine the regents and then form an effective government. I'ts much more likely that these regents posed the only effective counter balance to forces that were always there scheming for total power and that that these powers are gradually revealed in the slow corruption of intermediary political structures betwen monarchy and tyranny. Even if a good democratic government could temporarily serve as a counterpoise to the hidden forces of evil and chaos, it would still prove ineffective in the long term, as a system that has to pander to both the real power strucures and the proletariat would essentially be filtering the rulers for hypocracy and even worse, psychopathy. In short, it seems we have a much better chance of getting a good ruler via succession than we do through voting, because the latter selects for psychopathy and leaves us with elected officials that have no power to actually effect any positive change.
I did not especially mean racially homogeneous (although it's a start) but more in terms of homogeneous expectation of outcome, ideology and national destiny. The division we see in the US today is less of one of race at this point, but of these differing ideologies and expectations. People seem to vote based on how they expect things to be. This is why the "free" healthcare and "erasing" college debt platform is so popular. It's completely infeasible, but that doesnt matter to the average voter. There is a large portion of people who believe that they can vote to just remove any obstacle or "injustice" that they perceive, and in doing so cast their vote for the most incidious creature that smiles on the tv and says, "if you vote for me, I'll make everything free and safe." Humanists vs realists is one of the oldest ideological splits in peak civilization, a good reference being the humanist woman who opened the gates of Rome to Alaric's plunderers. This circumstance only seems to come around when a civilization has reached a point where several generations have passed without hardship and luxury is common.
natural tension that exists between those who have more than others
This is a hard thing to combat, but under no system will you have all people having the materialistic equality unless everybody has nothing, or very little. There will always be an upper class and lower class, the good thing being that the population of the lower class always outweighs that of the upperclass.
Every single issue should be held to vote by "land owning men of good character" who hold no debt
As far as this statement goes, I believe it would be almost impossible to implement in today's society. The men that match this criteria are mostly college graduates who have never turned a wrench. The division we see now would be close to the same. Fancy well off humanists vs poor realists. I think you'll find that the middle class doesnt own much of any land, it all belongs to the banks. Those who own land in this country are poor rural folk who inherited their land and the upper class who could afford to buy land outright without a bank loan.
So perhaps from among the landowners they select even more elitist groups corresponding with higher and higher economic status
There would have to be some sort of gauge. Obviously restricting voting due specifically to economic status would just end with an oligarchy, "Good character" is something to work with, although the issue with this is who would define it? This question is why I do think civilization is past the point of no return. There is no longer anybody to trust. I think the articles of confederation and the anti federalists were correct in their convictions that a decentralized system and a focus on community level politics are the way towards protecting the liberties of free men. The power of many is great and the voice of a dozen can be drowned out by the voice of a million but a dozen voices out of a hundred can still be heard.
those who serve as representatives are thrown into a kind of game where they are incentivized to patronize the values of as many people as possible
The issue which arises here is it is enough that these representatives are fairly attractive and say things that a majority of their voters want to hear. Nobody of good character, land owning and working has time to keep tabs over what Rep. Jim Sheckleswest is doing when he has a massive team of lawyers writing 20,000 page bills every day to hide his agenda in, but they do have time to quickly skim over "Proposed 2% tax on beer for county road maintenance, expires May 2024." The good thing with this system is that if tax on beer becomes outrageous, the county can just vote to end the tax, and if the roads become to bad, they can vote to raise it.
Given what I said above, who is in charge of regulating this, who decides who gets to own and operate what?
I dont have a good answer for this and like you said I dont know that there is a solution either. Everything that has been discussed would have to be watched over, but who is there to trust? Maybe the news should just be regulated down to hobbyists with a printing press in their shed talking about the latest rumors and issues. All I know is that mega media corporations with slinky agendas and foreign investment should not be influencing voters at all.
There is litteraly nothing new under the sun. What Voltaire, Rousseau et. al. disseminated in France, they picked up from their voyages to the masonic lodges of England, These ideas that infected monarchist Europe must have been around far before then because even plato described the course from aristocracy to tyranny, via democracy. St Thomas also described how democracy was doomed to devolve into tyranny. More recently the Church described, in Civilta Catholica in 1890, how any nation that abandons the precepts of the Catholic Church, referred to here as mere Christianity, would inevitably end up being ruled by jews. So what Imean to say and what i am adding here in this edit, is that we have already had the most perfect system that could rule all men, the absolute monarchy in subservience to the Church.
You are too stupid to understand that only jews need dictatorship to control the population, since they are the minority.
Have you even thought about what you just said? Only Jews require dictatorships? What? So all other ethnicities just naturally fall into non-dictatorial forms of government if Jews aren't around?
You've got kingofwhiteamerica and ps to back you up, I've got this guy..
Incredible. With one comment you've shown your ignorance.
(post is archived)