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A Substitute for Civil War |
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Let's see. We're having a birthday party and half of the children want to go to the zoo and half to the park. So we separate the two groups, give them sticks and let them fight it out. Whichever group wins, can make all the decisions. Would you do that? Well, why not? That's multi-party democracy. Firmly separate your population on the basis of some ideology and let them fight. In a Multi-Party Democracy, there is no room for cooperation or consensus. We don't talk; we fight. I win, you lose. That's the system - inherently based not on harmony and consensus but on conflict. It's the cornerstone of the democratic system that the 'winners' control everything and the 'losers' are totally marginalised. In Western political society there is little apparent concern for the losers. After all, they are the losers and their wishes are unimportant - even though they often form 60% or more of the population. Western multi-party democracy is the only government system in the world designed to disenfranchise, isolate and betray at least half of the population. Perhaps that's why sometimes 70% or more of the population doesn't bother to vote. If we wanted to separate our population politically into two ideological 'parties', the logical division would be a gender separation of men and women. Or maybe a sexual division - the homos and the heteros. That should make an interesting election campaign. Unfortunately for democracy, the deliberate cleavage of our societies - for purposes of politics - was done according to perhaps the most infllammatory of human characteristics, an irreconcilable simian-theological divide, creating two factions perpetually at each other's throats. We have many names for the ideological teams: Liberal-Conservative, Labor-Capitalist, Democrat-Republican. We sometimes refer to them as the Left Wing and Right Wing, or Socialists and Corporatists. But the division is more sinister than these names suggest. This ideological rift that has been created for the sake of politics is really between the ideological left and the Christian right - between the pacifists and the war-mongers. And it appears that, though I make no claim to Sociological credentials, human society, at least Western society, will automatically cleave along these lines if given a fertile chance. What sane person would consciously divide a population based on this ideology? What would possess us to make that choice? It is not easy to explain or understand the causes of the often vehement enthusiam with which many Westerners embrace their political convictions. It often seems as violent and passionate as some Europeans or South Americans embrace their football teams, frequently resulting in physical violence. We can conclude only that this separation, this cleavage of people according to their propensity for war-mongering must involve some of the deepest and most primitive instincts and emotions of the human psyche. And how to account for what appears at least superficially similar instinctual and emotional responses to team sports and religion? The combination of whatever is here, is not only potentially explosive, but essentially mindless - a kind of yearning herd mentality with a propensity for violence. It is clear that politics, in the Western sense, is seldom guided by reason. Reason can accommodate and withstand discourse; ideology on the other hand, cannot. Politics, religion, and team sports have a common root in the Western psyche. None can be discussed intelligently for very long; all raise violent emotions, all suffer from ideology that is blind to fact and reason. All of the primitive psychological attractions of Western democracy exist in Western religions. People don't join a political party from a commitment to good government, and they don't join a Western religion to learn about God. In both cases, they do it to join a 'winning team'. Sadly, the more flaky the religion, the greater the psychological need of the converts to be on a winning team. It is that search for acceptance by the unwanted, for guidance for the lost and uncertain, that attracts them. Hence the Democrats and Republicans. The ideological separations serve not to do good, but only to create conflict. And that conflict is not the same as what we might term 'healthy competition'. Political conflict is exclusive, sometimes vicious, very often dishonest, forcing people to go against their own consciences and the good of the nation for the sake of the party. The ideological rifts inherent in party politics have been introduced into Western government - either naturally or by design - solely and precisely because they induce the conflict so necessary to any team sport. How can we have a competition if everyone is on the same team, just trying to get the job done? The inescapable conclusion is that Western democracy - politics, in fact - exists not to select good government but to permit the peasantry to participate in a primitive, socio-theological rite of competition, conflict and victory. A useful substitute for a civil war. In the individualistic, black and white Western societies, the multi-party democratic process is in no way intended as a method of problem resolution. It is instead consciously contrived precisely because it creates the problem, setting the stage for open conflict and a 'law of the jungle' political battle. The conflict resolution portion of this masquerade is the forced voting, which appeals to Westerners because it is the only system short of physical battle that can resolve the issue on an all-or-nothing basis, creating the winners and losers these societies need. "The People" are lured into choosing sides, engaging in battle, then forced into a patently unfair resolution by voting. The losers have been browbeaten, bullied, propagandised and hoodwinked into believing and accepting that, because they are the losers, their wishes, rights and welfare are now irrelevant and they must remain silent. To the victor goes the spoils. You lost the war; I set the terms. The winners, sated with the thrill of victory, are now also irrelevant, and the elites - and the parties they control - continue to remain in charge as they always have, while the people believe they are supreme. In fact, 'the people' are merely cannon-fodder in a pseudo-religious battle, joining the team, supporting, paying, protesting, yelling and screaming and, finally, voting. But then the game is over, everyone returns to their senses and their jobs and lives, and the elites continue with their agenda of controlling the government and running the country. Nothing has changed. Many people will tell us - often, at the top of their lungs - that the multi-party government system is about "freedom" and "choice" and is "real democracy". But the multi-party system is not about freedom and choice, and it is not about either democracy or government. It's about social conflict and competition, about playing in a team sport. In a multi-party democracy, the "game" is not good government but the election process itself. After my team "wins" the election, the game is over and we all go home. And we absolve ourselves of any responsibility for what "the players" - either the voters or the elected representatives - do after the game is over. And that is the reason Western government leaders, incompetent as they tend to be, are almost never held to account for their actions. In the Western world, it is 'politics' that is the attraction, not 'government'. I sincerely doubt that many people who are active in the political process give even a single thought to the quality of government that will emerge. Their only focus is winning the game for their team. The process has become so corrupted that Western democracy doesn't even pretend to refer to the quality of government that might ensue as the end result after an election. And this is because the end result is the process itself - the competition, winning the election, nothing more. In a very real sense, the medium has become the message. Is there anyone today who will argue that the Democratic-Republican system is a great thing for the US? Is this what produced the recent happy accord for the US Health Care Plan, or what is making the entire government today pull together to sort out its horrid economic mess? The US democratic system is universally recognised today (ignoring a few basket cases) as the most dysfunctional government in the world. One of the more distressing congenital deformities of US politics is that by the time all the special-interest groups - the lobbyists, senators, financiers, bankers and flakes have grabbed their share, nothing useful is likely to remain for the common good. The outcomes are preordained beause elected US officials are too busy looking after the interests of AIPAC, the Jewish lobby, the CIA, the US military, the defense contractors, the bankers and the big multi-nationals, to worry about the people and the nation. The welfare of the voters unfortunately doesn't enter into these discussions. If they did, do you think the US government would have spent 7.7 trillion bailing out the banks instead of the people? US-style Multi-Party Democracy is a formula for waste, inefficiency and corruption. It is the one form of government that will guarantee decisions will be made to benefit private interest groups instead of the country as a whole. How did the supposedly-great concept of participatory democracy descend to such a pathetic level? The fundamental issue is that Western democracy changed its objective from selecting an outstanding leader, to one of winning a game in a team-sport competition. That is entirely the fault of the introduction of multi-party politics into government, and it is too late to reverse course; we cannot return to the beginning and start again. To do so would require a social upheaval equivalent to a popular revolution. And any Western government would viciously put down any such attempt. In spite of all the propaganda to the contrary, no Western democracy would permit 'the people' to actually gain control of their government to the extent of intelligently hiring managers to serve rather than ignorantly choosing masters to rule. Return to Index |