>Jan:
>
>I know one thing for certain: it's not you and people who harbour such
>ideas, going to save the world, you just make things more difficult for
Jan has political ambitions and provides a good study of the political
character. We notice at once that the political character can not actually
admit the Titanic is indeed sinking, because that would put him in the
untenable position of having to supply a solution -- which he obviously
can't do.
The democratic process is best thought of as "government by popularity
contest". And since, as Lord Russell (and many others) have pointed
out, the certainty of a lie is more popular than the uncertainty of the
truth, the democratic process selects for the best liars.
In our society, the political character must excel at lies -- excel at
doubletalk and "doublethink" -- in order to win his popularity contest:
"His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublethink. To
know and not to know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while
telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two
opinions which canceled out, knowing them to be contradictory and
believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate
morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was
impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy, to
forget, whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back
into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then
promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same
process to the process itself - that was the ultimate subtlety:
consciously to induce unconsciousness, and then, once again, to
become unconscious of the act of hypnosis you had just performed.
Even to understand the word 'doublethink' involved the use of
doublethink." -- George Orwell, 1984
In our society, the function of the political character is to not to
actually solve problems -- our Founding Fathers reserved "problem
solving" for the moneyed-class.
Madison even went so far as to boast that "the true distinction" between
ancient regimes and the proposed experiment in government "lies in the total
exclusion of the people in their collective capacity."
http://dieoff.com/page168.htm ]
In our society, the function of the political character is to simply
reassure and calm the common herd animals with soothing,
meaningless sounds.
To paraphrase Marx: "Democracy is the opiate of the masses."
Jay
