Frances to posters... This is an intriguing topic, and for me the solution might best lay with semiotics and signs. It might be fair to say that closed dictatorial systems do not care what members think or do in private, because the system can control members in public by force via any means; but that opened democratic systems do care what members think and do in private, because members can think and do as they freely want in public within reasonable limits. The role of "convincing persuasive propaganda" is therefore much more important to the polity in democracies, if the system wants to "expressively" win over its members. It is also likely that closed homogeneous systems will stagnate and thus decay, while opened heterogeneous systems will overlap and integrate and thus grow.
William wrote... No system is a guarantee. Fascism does indeed exploit the narrow self-interest of groups, as we see today. Saul wrote... Though representative democracy can be the vehicle to autocracy - in that there are many forms of representation - and fascism finds these to be useful. William wrote... Democratic pluralism is anarchy. Nihilism is anarchy. A direct democracy leads to tyranny. A representative democracy is a safeguard against tyranny because it protects the interests of the minority, or pluralist interests, without enabling each to cancel the others. Joseph wrote... "As Nietzsche understood it, nihilism, even radical nihilism, is compatible with democratic pluralism; it is in fact the philosophic expression of the leveling of all hierarchies of value, a phenomenom that takes the political form for modern democratic culture." ---The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (1995, Moses) Do you agree with Dr. Moses' comment?
