Premises of the Dark Enlightenment
Posted on 2014-02-19 by esr
Complaint the Third: Democracy is a failure. It has produced a race to the bottom in which politicians grow ever more venal, narrow interest groups ever more grasping, the function of government increasingly degenerates into subsidizing parasites at the expense of producers, and in general politics exhibits all the symptoms of what I have elsewhere called an accelerating Olsonian collapse (after Mancur Olson’s analysis in The Logic Of Collective Action).
Of all the the premises of the Dark Enlightenment this is the most most critical for this is the mechanism (described as the power vacuum up-thread) which allows collectivism to grow to the the point where it threatens systemic collapse.
The historical predecessor for our current system of government was Athenian democracy. Their system lasted for 178 years.
Plato (427 or 428 BC - 348 or 347 BC) lived during the Athenian democracy. Plato in his most well known work the Republic points out all of the problems and pitfalls regarding living in a democracy, including its injustice and the oppression of the individual under the weight of a democracy that dictates at the whim of the majority of citizen votes.
The most chilling praise of democracy that I have ever read is that of James Anthony Froude.
Democracies are the blossoming of the aloe, the sudden squandering of the vital force which has accumulated in the long years when it was contented to be healthy and did not aspire after a vain display. The aloe is glorious for a single season. It progresses as it never progressed before. It admires its own excellence, looks back with pity on its earlier and humbler condition, which it attributes only to the unjust restraints in which it was held. It conceives that it has discovered the true secret of being 'beautiful for ever,' and in the midst of the discovery it dies.
...
A centralized democracy may be as tyrannical as an absolute monarch; and if the vigour of the nation is to continue unimpaired, each individual, each family, each district, must preserve as far as possible its independence, its self-completeness, its powers and its privilege to manage its own affairs and think its own thoughts.
The founding fathers were well aware of the potential dangers.
At its birth, the United States was not a democratic nation—far from it. The very word "democracy" had pejorative overtones, summoning up images of disorder, government by the unfit, even mob rule. In practice, moreover, relatively few of the nation's inhabitants were able to participate in elections.
Specifically the founding fathers built a government with multiple safeguards against democracy. They built a government which
1) Lacked the ability to directly tax the population (no authority to tax income).
2) Had only one of its two legislative branches directly elected (The senate was appointed by state legislatures).
3) Did not have a fiat currency (gold and silver was money).
4) Did not have a central bank (no FED).
5) Did not allow direct election of the president (president was to be selected by the electoral collage).
6) Only gave the right to vote to landowners (called freeholders).
7) Gave most power to the states.
Gradually over time each of these safeguards has fallen. When Benjamin Franklin was asked what form of government the constitution of 1787 had created, he replied: "A republic, if you can keep it."
He reply has traditionally been read as a warning against monarchy, but it could just as easily be read as a warning against democracy. The Dark Enlightenment argues that we are failing to "keep it".
It argues that the republic is decaying into democracy and that democracy is a failure.
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Non sequitur for me. Crypto-currencies are many things but they won't annul the theories and efforts of Marxists (even with proper anonymity, quite the contrary in fact), as they strive for equality (as a result! "From each according to their ability, to each according to their needs") and total(itarian?) transparency.
