I take issue with all these “us” and “our.”
1 Like
Unpack it. Is there a problem with me referring to “us” as an entire species?
Athenian democracy was created by greediness seeking wealthy and land owning aristocratic barons as a way of rebelling against the king who wanted to be individual kings themselves.
It was a sinple task of convincing the peasants and slaves in rebelling against the king in the name of collective democracy.
After that the peasants got the massive delusion that their votes mattered and it was merely a simple task of aristocrats to simply bribe elected officials to get everything they wanted out in the open.
Just like all democracies Athenian democracy collapsed overtime because the greedy and wealthy aristocrats didn’t know when to stop pillaging or looting the state treasury bankrupting everything as they would steal just about all things not nailed down for themselves. Thus the massive illusion of democracy was politically born into this world from ancient Greek Athens.
Don’t mean to interrupt your little pamphlet here, but that never happened.
1 Like
A government is an institutuon. It is an “it.”
1 Like
You clearly don’t understand history.
But with a name like Mary-Poppins that checks out.
History is not understood. It is known or not known.
Socialist mumbo jumbo notwithstanding.
This particular history you do not know.
1 Like
If you were literate which I very much question you would see I was showing the history of democracy in a negative light.
I understand you’re mentally deficient, try to catch up.
Typical American libertarian worshipping the corporate boots on their throats.
Dime a dozen in this nation of ours politically.
Very embarrassing.
He’s a crazed libertarian Rand objectivist.
You’re not going to get any mental coherence from him other than his good boy worship of corporate authority. He’ll just quote Atlas Shrugged and then scamper off.
The only thing we are all equally endowed with is the right to kill, rape, pillage, and plunder. All other rights are conditional… if you can afford it, if you have the mobility, if you have the skill, etc.
Therefore, the only possible actual democracy is anarchy. Anything else under that name is a fraud (though Marx gets the closest).
1 Like
The kind of free for all you’re talking about is total chaos. That is completely unnatural and alien to human beings as even in the most primitive tribal environment there is leadership or social authority.
I do not expect to convince you, but I will try to add a few historical events into this discussion:
Prior democracy, Athens had aristocracy, where a few had the total control. By that time, kings were long gone. Also, slaves rebellion against a king has not been recorded.
Athenian democracy was born around 508-507 BC, primarily through the reforms of Cleisthenes, which replaced aristocrat-dominated rule with a system of direct, citizen-led governance. He reorganized the tribes inside the city and allowed all free male adults to participate in decisions.
The voters, poor and rich, decided for all matters. As Athens gained military power, the people got greedy and took advantage of their allies. To use your phraseology: by pillaging and looting the alliance treasure.
This democracy died due to loss in wars. The first blow was in Peloponnesian war, but it quickly recovered (not in terms of military power, only as a governance system). Funny enough, during this war there was a massive slaves escape, fleeing to freedom. The final blow to democracy was by Macedonian kings, Philip and Alexander, who conquered the Greek cities. That was the death of Athenian democracy.
Now, if you want to explain these events in terms of communist history analysis, it is your choice. Personally, I do not do that because I find it too simplistic and not representative.
1 Like
“The kind of free for all you’re talking about is total chaos”
Perhaps, but i was just answering the question.
There’s a reason why there has been so much scandal surrounding the definition and practice of democracy. It’s impossible… a meaningless word.
1 Like
You’re basically preaching to the choir, everything you said there I already knew.
But I do appreciate your indepth historical analysis which is rare on this forum. You’re clearly very intelligent and articulate, a rare thing these days.
I am a communist and Marxist, but I am also a supporter of autocracy. So, there’s that.
I am speaking from an anti democratic viewpoint, the majority of human beings are too ignorant for self rule. I have no faith in the majority of human beings to ever do the right thing, it’s only the minority of enlightened individuals that can implement change as it has always been, but that minority doesn’t have to be oppressive or tyrannical itself. I prefer a minority of enlightened individuals that are good stewards and protectors of this planet along with all of the people inhabiting it.
I like to believe we can do better under the right circumstances.
1 Like
@MrAuthoritarian thanks for the good words.
I accept that democracy is full of holes. The manipulation of the masses is too common, everyone with good rhetoric skills can persuade voters to do whatever.
Examining the history of different periods and regions, I could not find a system that I could say: this one is excellent. I have to study further the Chinese history, but from the few I have already read they also had ups and downs.
The reason I lean towards democracy is that it usually allows freedom of thought. At least, more than the other systems. Athenian democracy, from a political standpoint, was highly problematic. However, it is perhaps the only region in antiquity which is famous not for its military achievements, but for philosophy, theater etc. There were plenty of wars at that time, and yet the Athenian philosophical schools managed to open several paths in human thinking.
The other time in history where I find similar spread of diverse ideas was in the Enlightenment. Regimes, whose citizens experienced more freedoms, gave the opportunity to philosophers to develop different systems of thought. In a sense, Marx was a later product of this era.
To the topic at hand: Since I do not have high hopes for prolonged “enlightened” rulers, I prefer them to be replaceable. Even choosing bad rulers for me is better than keeping them permanent. Permenancy leads easily to uncontrolled corruption and arrogance.
The rich and powerful in democratic capitalism are at least replaceable. This does not make them better, it forces them though to try and keep a balance on how much oppression they can impose towards the masses. Even Elon Mask cannot directly convince everyone to vote for his favorite politicians, he has to follow other paths to achieve his goals.
That being said, I am open to suggestions on better political systems, as long as they guarantee freedom of expression and thought, even with ideas contrary to the government policies.
1 Like
I agreed with your statement about enlightened dictatorship, but i would also like to propose that having an enlightened dictatorship and just accept at face value that the majority of human beings cant be trusted with anything, is not the goal or the end conclusion.
In my opinion uplifting humanity would be mandatory.
The dictator should be working on a system that makes its own existence redundant.
The goal should be to create a world where a democracy actually would work because people are aware and capable of thought.
In my honest personal opinion, for society to function in a manner that would not collapse every handful of generations, the new generations would need to be exposed to controlled cruelty in order to understand the value of society they will be afterwards released into.
Ofc that cant be systematic and well known either because then the point gets lost.
Everyone should experience in their life the need to question the value of life. Everybody else’s and their own. The worth of food through the lack of food, the worth of security through the lack of security, the worth of freedom through the lack of freedom.
I firmly believe that any society that fails to force it’s people to experience the worst, will inevitably collapse under the weight of the best.
But thats just a personal opinion.
Point being: Problems like the 20’000 year old issue of history repeating itself due to human stupidity, should be resolved.
Thats because there is barely a single ideology, religion or philosophy that would explore the problems caused by excess, pleasure and “too much positive”.
Christianity taps into it, but never explains it. That entire line of thought is basically a “commandment” which you should follow “unquestioningly” because f u. Never explains anything, and because of pushing the entirety of it onto a position of authority, everyone instinctively rebels against it as well.
Some of the very few like taoism are almost exclusive in their unique nature of being both aware and trying to teach/explain, and you can absolutely rest assured that they were never implemented as a comprehensive system of governance.
The amount of problems with such a system are basically astrological.
It starts with the people/leaders who uphold it, who would need to be aware of the fact that they are working for their own elimination. If the goal is to uplift humanity, then inevitably you will reach a point where the leaders are a hindrance, not a benefit.
Honestly?
Personally i question whether its possible at all.
If you want to understand the larger overlying issue, then just look at the current system of being “civilized”.
Nobody really draws the conclusion that every function we have in our life is based on our animal instincts. Nobody faces the fact that we ARE animals.
Money, home, family, self actualization, career… all just wildly different names for concepts like resource, territory, procreation, competition
This topic is something you could probably write a series of books on. It stretches and branches across so many topics you could spend a lifetime on it.
You can easily oversimplify the issue with that: Freedom in and of itself just generates retarded people. Not only that, it generates them progressively and exponentially with each new generation.
See the issue with freedom has always been that you can just toss it at those who went through hardship because they do not require excess and know firsthand and intuitively where the limits are and should be.
And then their kids are born who never went through hardship, you sling freedom at them and instantly your society takes a dive off of a cliff, setting itself on fire while falling and turning around to make sure that they land head first on the concrete.
The point is: Freedom in and of itself is poison.
Every welfare society, every civilized society, every society that is “good” is in and of itself poison.
Not only human nature, but biology, and even our physical reality is based on duality, and we the living beings can only exist in the eye of the storm between yin and yang.
What gets missed always is that good is just as much of a poison as bad is. A problem made infinitely worse by our common sense instinct to escape the bad and work ourselves towards the good: security, safety, lack of need, excess, benefit etc.
But its poison.
Heaven and hell are both death.
1 Like
It seems too pessimistic for me to consider freedom as poison. The free conditions that our democratic societies have established for the citizens have improved the quality of life significantly.
Our problems in modern democracies are not even close to what our ancestors had experienced. Famines have been non-existant for long time now in western countries. Longivity even for poor people is expected, not by chance. Child mortality has been dropped significantly for all population. Working conditions are expected to be humaine, not like the slavery or the 15 hours per day during the industrial revolution of the 19th century.
These things became reality for many people, not only the rich and powerful. Of course the latter are going to have more luxuries and better quality of life, but the baseline for common citizens is not that tragic.
I prefer to see the glass half full instead of half empty.
1 Like
The only way democracy could ever work is if you had a population where the majority of people are educated, enlightened, and possess a philosophical/political mental disposition. Nowhere on this planet currently or in the historical past can you find this enlightened majority population anywhere.
You’ll also find that a majority of women beyond their basic primitive impulses of survival care largely about nothing beyond themselves. Women are the more gullible of the sexes in their emotional thinking and easy to train to believe in just about anything.
Liberal democracy is a failed experiment and as time goes on this will be abundantly made clear. Yes, I believe we should uplift everyone out of poverty and make society a better place for everyone. I just don’t think democracy is the means to achieve that.
1 Like
Its not any kind of ism.
I state it as an objective matter of fact.
Or do you argue that each new generation born into excess is incapable of valuing it the same way as those who died and suffered for it? Do you argue that it just gets exponentially worse with each new generation?
Correct. And this fact has given birth to a hundred new types of problems which are born out of the excess and high quality of life. Just think about the most ironic one of them all: Obesity
But thats just the tip of the iceberg and the simplest of them all because it doesnt even come close to the psychological and societal issues welfare has created. Things like the destruction of family because everyone is free to screw with everyone for no consequences and women can are borderline encouraged to divorce.
Or take things like depersonalization, existential vacuum, alienation and more.
This is the very reason why i said that both sides of black and white are poison.
Going straight towards the good does not make less problems.
If anything, it creates more extreme and fundamental problems which threaten not just the individual but the entire species.
I prefer to see the whole picture. An empty glass leaves you to die of thirst, and an ever pouring cup will have you drown inside your own home.
If that is to be avoided, then one should be specific and just say that the glass is 52.12% full.
2 Likes