Democrapathy
In honour of this week’s democratic circus across the pond, I’m reposting this account—lightly overhauled—of why democracy is useless, ruthless, irresponsible, coercive, cretinizing, selfish, destructive and inhuman. I’ll offer a discussion post soon if readers want to offer counter-arguments.
The vast mass are these middling souls. They have no aristocratic individuality, such as is demanded by Christ or Buddha or Plato. So they skulk in a mass and secretly are bent on their own ultimate self-glorification.
Apocalypse, D.H. Lawrence
I’d be surprised if there was anyone reading this who votes, and even more surprised if there’s anyone who is going to vote in the upcoming game-show between the two faces of death the system offers, that of the professional class and that of the elite class. What’s more, a mere argument is not going persuade anyone against making such futile but superficially reassuring gestures, even if—especially if—they are unable to give a coherent reason why they vote, which is usually the case. Nevertheless, here is a mere argument, or rather eight brief objections, not against voting in specific elections, which matters next to nothing either way (and of course can very occasionally do a little mitigating good1), but against the tyranny of democrapathy itself.
Democracy is useless. Whoever you vote for, the government will get in. Even for the handful of people who are allowed to vote and whose vote actually matters (i.e. registered, law-abiding citizens in swing states), voting changes nothing, certainly not the system itself. All an election does is change management’s necktie. You can’t vote for a change of system, you can’t vote for a change of the professional management class and you certainly can’t vote for a change of technology. Once it was possible to vote for someone outside of the management class, you might at least positively influence the system, but those days are long gone. Now, although the ballot box is open to anyone, only an institutionalised mind can ever be elected, because only institutionalised minds can rise through the institutional structures of the major parties. Such minds cannot even imagine acting independently of the system, which is how, like the journalists who fawn over them, they can imagine themselves free.
Democracy is ruthless. Democracy is not for you, it is for the system. The technocratic system, the vast, hyper-rational machine that we now live in (and as) demands democracy. Under duress, totalitarian politburos and absolute monarchs are preferred to democratically elected governments (and you’ll note they all work together just fine), but concentrated power possesses the enormous disadvantages of being, at least potentially, capricious. An autocratic king can listen to his people and make exceptions; democracy never, because it is essentially a technique, a rational means of managing the mass, of turning moral decision-making into a balance sheet, of manufacturing an illusion of accountability and of preventing those who are forced to conform to its demands from acting in a threateningly irrational manner. This is why democracy reduces man, to the average. Within a rational democratic system it is impossible, undemocratic, to think for yourself, decide for yourself or do things in your own way. The manageable average rules, because it is so easy to manipulate, like all democratic outcomes; you can never be sure that a vote isn’t rigged, but you can be damn near certain it is when it needs to be.
Democracy is irresponsible. The system, under optimal conditions, prefers the distributed power of democracy to the concentrated power of totalitarianism and monarchism because nobody can possibly take responsibility within a democracy. Take any serious problem in today’s world and then try and find who or what is responsible for it. Everyone you can reasonably point your finger at can reasonably point their finger elsewhere, at the party line, at the demands of the market, at the will of the people. As Kierkegaard complained, ‘in a people’s government who is the ruler? An X or the everlasting blether: whatever at any moment either is or has the majority, the most insane of all determinants.’ Barry Long was more forthright, ‘It’s forbidden for anyone to be responsible in a democratic society. Because only in that way can the masses be protected from having to face up to the unhappiness on earth.’ To test the truth of this, try taking responsibility, in your life, for the world around you, for your own unhappiness. See what democratically happens.
Democracy is coercive. Henry David Thoreau noted that ‘voting for the right is doing nothing for it. It is only expressing to men feebly your desire that it should prevail. A wise man will not leave the right to the mercy of chance, nor wish it to prevail through the power of the majority. There is but little virtue in the action of masses of men.’ Quite right, but what is the mass to do with Thoreau’s wise man? If ninety nine people vote to tear down Walden woods for fuel and furniture, what is to be done with the one man who votes against the decision? He must either be ignored, exiled or, if that’s impossible, violently coerced. ‘Democracy,’ as Oscar Wilde taught us, ‘is the bludgeoning of the people by the people.’ Democracy, let us not forget, was the means by which Hitler and Mussolini — who both had enormous popular support — gained power, and then coerced the undemocratic minority. Democrats must coerce dissent because in a democratic world, there is nowhere else for holdouts to go. The only ‘moral’ solution is to provide minorities with defensive ‘rights’ — professionally managed abstractions which can be (and will be, and have been) taken up as offensive weapons by those minorities as soon as they get a sniff of power.
Democracy is cretinizing. What does the the will of the majority mean in practice? It means, of course, the lowest common denominator, ‘the law of matter and brute force,’ as René Guenon wrote, ‘the same law by which a mass, carried down by its weight, crushes everything that lies in its track.’ The unhappy supermind will always vote for that which is easy and painless to realise, which is crudely obvious to the senses, which is familiar, reassuring and provides an immediate, material return. The difficult, the painful, the subtle, the strange, the hard-won, the slowly realised, the radically joyous and the threateningly strange — in short, life — finds few supporters, few customers, few voters, and so, where democracy reigns, so does death. Death and more comfortable morgues. Look around. What happens when profit, success, mass-appeal or the party-line determine which books, films and works of art get made? The death of culture. What happens when democratic upvotes, democratic retweets and democratic shares determine what can be seen in discussion forums? The death of social life. What happens when writers and artists depend on donations from their democratic fans in order to keep on producing work? The death of truth. The truth gets murdered, as Socrates, an early critic of democracy, found to the cost of his life.
Democracy is selfish. Politicians have to be self interested. Just as the principle motive of charities is raising money, so the prime concern of political parties is getting elected, leading to one of the most fatal weaknesses of democracy, its inherent short-termism. The future, along with the natural world that has to live there, takes second place, and must take second place, to getting into power. At the end of the congressional day, when the media turns its cameras off individual politicians (and their sex lives), the party is an institution, and like all institutions within a technocratic market-system it inevitably prioritises its own survival and self-interest over the welfare or needs of the people it is supposed to serve. This, the iron law of institutions, guarantees that just as the only teachers, doctors, lawyers and journalists who can succeed are inevitably the most obedient, so the only politicians who can succeed are those who put the system, and their position within it, above the needs of the people.
Democracy is destructive. The democratic system (both capitalist and socialist) demands poverty, famine, the ruin of the natural world, pollution, sickness, madness, war and natural disasters, all of which are essential for the system to function, allowing surplus to be profitably dumped, enhancing consumption and demanding development, economic activity and more security. Freedom, along with health, self-sufficiency, peace and unitary consciousness are all threats to the bottom line and must be stamped out. This is why, to take this week’s election as an example, no matter who you vote for, big business will continue to benefit, censorship will increase, more pretexts for further totalitarian control will be manufactured, wars to secure control of dwindling natural resources will continue (Israel will continue to be supported so that it can menace oil-rich states), workers’ rights will be further eroded and the population of America will continue to go out of its mind. Even a genuinely socialist party led by an alternate-reality Bernie Sanders (i.e. one with principles, intelligence and balls) would be constrained by the monolithic technological-market system, by the insanity of the system’s professional management class, and by democracy itself.
Democracy is inhuman. Democracy is inhuman, which is why it is so boring, so stressful and so stupid, and why those who preach democracy across the political spectrum, are, for all their good intentions, leading their flock to hell. Think of all the people in the world who support ‘democracy’ — is that a crowd you want to be part of? They’re democratic, great; but are you? Is your family democratic? Are your friends? Is your bed? You might occasionally take a vote to reach a quick decision, but do you actually live democratically? Does anyone? Does any thing? No. We cooperate. Sometimes, like pigeons and bees, we might reach an unspoken, informal consensus through something resembling a vote, but this is not a democracy any more than apes dancing in the rain is a ‘religion’ or same-sex bison mounting each other is ‘homosexuality’. Animals, like humans, engage in democratic acts, but there is no such thing as a ‘democratic’ animal, because democracy is an institutional practice, and animals can no more form institutions than they can make or enforce the clichés which bind them.
These objections are, as a totality, unanswerable, which is why they are never seriously considered or addressed. Defenders of democracy either blab about expediency, or tell us it’s the least evil system — it destroys nature and human nature, but why the fuss? at least it’s comfortable — or they say we’re just not doing it right. According to this latter view, if the electorate are sufficiently ‘educated’, they will vote the right way, freeing themselves from democratic tyranny and the spectre of demagoguery. This entirely religious belief — like saying if we had enough priests doctors we wouldn’t go to hell get sick — focuses on facts in order to occlude the truth that indoctrination is not a fact that can be nicely learnt in nice schools, or given to us by brave and honourable journalists, but is, like health, a way of life, or rather a way of unliving.
The ignorance of the masses, in other words, is inseparable from a technopathic, demopathic system which keeps them dull-witted, stressed, constantly at odds with each other and bored to death. Voting for different leaders, even doing away with the hated leadership class, does nothing to change that system. Conversely, if that system collapsed, if we could lead a radically different way of life, so that the preconditions for ignorance no longer existed, the preconditions for democracy — for all tyrannous, fixed hierarchies — would vanish with them. If, to put it another way, we found ourselves living naturally, without the sickening, mediating effect of domestication, and all the evil influences of industrial society, then life would cease to require democracy for anything but trivial decisions. Such a society, which is on its way, would then be anarchistic, the only alternative to the tyranny of democracy.
See also The Myth of Democracy in 33 Myths of the System.
And for the only meaningful alternative to democracy:
This piece is an argument against democracy, not against ever voting. If, for example, Trump or Harris were guaranteed to close down Israel, initiate a low-energy Roosevelt style new deal to the working population and lighten the burden of technocratic oppression, then obviously it would be worth dipping your fingers in the ballot box.
Big if.