...
> 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.
>
you describe a present that the majority of
people are rightly sick of and stay away from.
This means, that they are ready for a more advanced
level of democracy where people compete with their ideas,
and winning doesn't mean more power and privilages, but
a betterment for everybody due to finding the best options.
People could gain the esteme and status in society by
demonstrating their usefulness, rather than demonstrating
their wealth and power.
Any other but in a democratic system there is an incentive
to keep privileges, obscure information and play the lie of
the powergames.
Only such futher progressed democracy will expect people to act
like intelligent beings.
The present one treats them like herd animals, and humans have this
habit of conforming to expectations, whether low or high.
Eva
> 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
>
>
>
>
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