Experimental Politics
Sometimes — not all the time, mind you — I think of the centuries of experimentation with politics and come to conclusions that are not particularly congenial. Humans are messy, and their social structures are messy, and the fictionalised idealisms of some forms of sociology and cultural relativism do little to change that.
Humans are good people sometimes, when there's nothing at stake or when too much is at stake. In between, there are mixed reviews. If all humans are corrupt, then democracy differs from authoritarianism only in the number of people who tacitly or outspokenly support corruption.
In the US, you pay the officials and call it 'lobbying' or 'political action' or 'supreme court fiat'. In Indonesia, you pay the officials and the US calls it corruption. In Atlantis, you pay the officials and it's called 'market adjusted salary'. (God alone knows why it is legitimate in Atlantis to peg ministerial pay to the highest professional and business pay rates while deliberately ignoring those whose pay rates drop due to economic climate. Maybe they should peg ministerial salaries to the salaries of dustmen and taxi drivers.)
All politics is experimentation, a trade-off between the solid state and the gaseous state. In a solid state, everyone is repressing everyone else, whether or not they admit it; in a gaseous state, everybody runs around acting busy and doing work on the environment, but not much else gets done as diffusion takes its toll and entropy reaches its zenith (everyone else's nadir).
I think mankind is fundamentally ungovernable except by force. Reason doesn't work simply because the majority of humans would rather not reason. Education doesn't work as a backstop because unless there is an economic payoff for it, the majority of humans would rather not be educated either.
This conclusion doesn't make me happy. And I'd rather not be governed by force. But I suppose I'd rather be governed by the fascists I voted for than the fascists I didn't vote for. Sieg Heil, Demokratie!
Humans are good people sometimes, when there's nothing at stake or when too much is at stake. In between, there are mixed reviews. If all humans are corrupt, then democracy differs from authoritarianism only in the number of people who tacitly or outspokenly support corruption.
In the US, you pay the officials and call it 'lobbying' or 'political action' or 'supreme court fiat'. In Indonesia, you pay the officials and the US calls it corruption. In Atlantis, you pay the officials and it's called 'market adjusted salary'. (God alone knows why it is legitimate in Atlantis to peg ministerial pay to the highest professional and business pay rates while deliberately ignoring those whose pay rates drop due to economic climate. Maybe they should peg ministerial salaries to the salaries of dustmen and taxi drivers.)
All politics is experimentation, a trade-off between the solid state and the gaseous state. In a solid state, everyone is repressing everyone else, whether or not they admit it; in a gaseous state, everybody runs around acting busy and doing work on the environment, but not much else gets done as diffusion takes its toll and entropy reaches its zenith (everyone else's nadir).
I think mankind is fundamentally ungovernable except by force. Reason doesn't work simply because the majority of humans would rather not reason. Education doesn't work as a backstop because unless there is an economic payoff for it, the majority of humans would rather not be educated either.
This conclusion doesn't make me happy. And I'd rather not be governed by force. But I suppose I'd rather be governed by the fascists I voted for than the fascists I didn't vote for. Sieg Heil, Demokratie!
Labels: Politics
etched with acid at 8:52:00 am
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