Democracy

Majority rule. Why should it take more than five minutes thought to convince anyone of average intelligence that this concept is absurd?

The individuals that make up society cannot be trusted to make their own decisions about how to live their lives, therefore, they need a government of other individuals to tell them how to live and force them to do it if they are unwilling. The majority of these individuals are, nevertheless, perfectly capable of determining who is qualified to make their decisions for them. This is the fantastic concept behind representational government.

Democracy is no more than formalized gang rule. It codifies the principle that the biggest gang is free to do whatever it wishes to everyone else.

On all fundamental issues, most people are wrong most of the time.

As a result of further research, the above is now amended as follows:

On all fundamental issues, most people are wrong all the time.

The academician’s method of research into such questions as the degree of correctness in the views of the general population would require years of eduction, endless controlled studies, gruelling analysis, and lots of government research-grant dollars. Then, the results of all the research would be inconclusive.

You and I, however, can determine the answer to this question with certainty and for free. All it will take is the one element usually left out of the academician’s method, thinking.

The first thing we will think about is, what are the fundamental issues? Most people have an idea what they think the fundamental issues are or ought to be, but any general agreement on what they ought to be is unlikely. For our purposes, we do not need to establish what the most important issues actually are, only what people might think they are. Some things people think are most important, for example, are religion, politics, and philosophy.

The next thing we need to think about is what different views there are about fundamental issues. Then, it seems, we will need to determine which views are true and which are false, and how many people hold each kind of view. Actually, we do not need to determine which views are true, only how many people hold views which are false, and that is surprisingly easy.

Take one example of something people think is a fundamental issue, religion. There are many different religions in the world. Worldwide, and within most advanced countries, there is not one religion that is held by a majority of the people.

Since the reason there are different religions, and often different denominations of the same religion, is because people disagree about religious truth. Maybe all religions are wrong. If there is one religion, or denomination of a religion that is correct, all of the others are wrong, and, if one does happen to be right, it is small minority of the people who believe it, and everyone else, that is, most people, are wrong.

This is always the case with fundamental issues. There is never a clear majority view in issues of politics, philosophy, economics, or moral principles. While it is possible everyone is wrong about all these issues, if any are right, those who are right will always be a minority, and all the rest, that is, most people, will be wrong.

The average level of intelligence decreases proportionally with an increase in the number of individuals. The majority is always stupid and the larger the majority, the more stupid it is.

If you take a random group of ten people, you may have a group of ten stupid people, or a group of geniuses, but most likely you’ll have a mix of intelligences with none exceptionally brilliant and non exceptionally dull. A larger collection will remain somewhat the same except that the lower end of the intelligence scale will grow faster while the upper end will grow more slowly, simply because there are more low level intelligences, statistically, than high level intelligences.

In very large random collections of people, the highest intelligences are very rare and the number of people at any level of intelligence increases as the level of intelligence decreases. At very low levels of intelligence, the numbers of individuals at each level decreases somewhat, but the numbers are still quite high, and even when the intelligence level reaches zero, there are still some to be counted.

There is not a single major advance in knowledge, science, or technology, which, if it had depended on a consensus, would ever have occurred. If the majority had its way, the average life expectancy would still be 40, or less, only one in five babies would survive, famine and disease would wipe out a third of the world’s population at least every seven years, and you would never have heard of America.

In those countries where consensus reigns in its purest form, that is, whoever has the biggest gang rules, the quality of life is just about that described above, for example, large sections of sub-Sahara Africa, and all countries dominated by the Muslim religion.

An election is nothing more than an advance auction of stolen goods. —Ambrose Bierce

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A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves money from the Public Treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the Public Treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy always followed by dictatorship. —Alexander Fraser Tyler

A government produces no products and provides no services. All the actual goods or services a government takes credit for providing or distributing it has confiscated from others who have produced or done them. The trick of successful government is to keep a majority of the citizens desirous of government by providing them with goods and services expropriated from the rest of society while not provoking those whose goods and services are being expropriated to revolt. As time goes on, those being benefited by the government and upon which the government depends, will increase in number and the level of their demands, and those being victimized by the government will seek ways to prevent the government from victimizing them.

This is when government policy becomes a matter of trying to limit the increase in its patron looters and their demands while bringing more and more repressive laws to bear on the producers to prevent their underground revolt. This is also the time when government becomes the most dangerous, when it is about to realize the game is up, and its continued existence can no longer depend on the gullibility and greed of the masses and endurance of the producers. Ripping off its mask and revealing itself to be what it is, the ultimate criminal organization, it does the one thing government can do, it takes total control by the only means it has, the use of unlimited force. This is democracy in action.