Motus Mentis

4 Comments

1. Joseph A. says

   Thank you. What, in your opinion, has caused our current state wherein democracy is sacred? Is it the result of 20th century propaganda (internal and external) against our totalitarian competitors? Or is it, rather, a dominant element’s becoming ever more dominant in our regime . . . a sort of working out of a political logic? Or something else?

   Posted October 11, 2020 at 12:29 am | Permalink
2. Malcolm says

   Joseph,

   That’s a good question. Here are a few things that might be part of the cause:

   1) The more the government does, the more important it gets in everyone’s life, and so the more concerned everyone gets about having a vote. (Of course, as the number of others with a vote increases, the more one’s own vote shrinks in importance toward infinitesimal significance.)

   2) The more homogeneous a society is, and the more it is a community of family units (rather than atomized individuals), the better it is able to represent the citizenry by households, and the less it breaks down into tribal factions fighting over a place at the trough.

   3) The less educated people are about the history of democracies and republics and monarchies — and, in particular, about the liabilities of democracy that the Founders grappled with — the more appealing raw democracy becomes. The obvious attraction of “sovereignty for all” is no longer balanced by an understanding of how poorly naked democracy provides for wise government, and how quickly it can collapse into mob rule.

   4) Increasing inequalities of wealth are a powerful motivator of popular resentment, even if the overall standard of living is steadily improving. Democracy gives the ordinary person a sense of power against the oligarchy, even though oligarchies form under every system.

   Curtis Yarvin once wrote:

   Just as pornography can stimulate the human sex drive without providing any actual sex, democracy can stimulate the human power drive without providing any actual power.

   So we can think of democracy as “power porn”. And look how popular pornography is!

   I hope this helps.

   Posted October 11, 2020 at 1:45 pm | Permalink
3. Chris Nord says

   Thank you, sir.

   This is the best essay on the topic I have ever read. I am sending it to all the lunkheads I know who just don’t get it.

   Posted October 12, 2020 at 8:24 pm | Permalink
4. Malcolm says

   Chris Nord,

   Thanks very much! I hardly know what to say.

   I tried only to articulate things that were well understood at the time of the Founding, and are largely lost today.

   To get an overview of the difficulties of democracy, I recommend to you Sir Henry Sumner Maine’s essential Popular Government, and the writings of Curtis Yarvin, a.k.a. ‘Mencius Moldbug’. For the latter, I recommend you start here.

   As for the Founding itself, I highly recommend Thomas West’s The Political Theory of the American Founding, and Forrest McDonald’s Novus Ordo Seclorum: The Intellectual Origins of the Constitution.

   Oh, and good luck with those lunkheads. They can be awfully hard to budge, but it’s good — and important — that we try.

   Posted October 12, 2020 at 8:38 pm | Permalink