Creating a Better God

 

(1)Hi, This is Leo Volont.   Welcome to my Four Part Series “Creating a Better God”.   For this Blog, let’s talk about Religion.  Have you ever wondered whether perhaps the reason why there are so many Atheists is because Atheism seems so plausible, that is,  because so many people see no clear signs of there being a God.  But the real problem may be that they’re looking for a God without knowing what to look for because there’s some mistaken conception of God that’s misleading them.  Or maybe they’re looking in the wrong place or if it is the right place, well, maybe they wouldn’t know a God if they saw One.  But to be fair to everybody, they’ve been told where to look and they’ve been told what to expect.  So the problem isn’t with them but with the info they’ve been working with, that the Religious Traditions that have come down to us are somehow screwed up.  

 

(2)So, let’s start by taking a look at those Traditions.  The West even now is still under the influence of Classical Greek Philosophy where God is envisioned as a collection of all positive absolutes – All Powerful, All Loving, All Knowing, and All Decisive.   This seems okay at first glance, but becomes problematic in its implications.  For instance, we can infer from the Omnipotent Will criteria that all events have meaning and purpose, and therefore that all is as it should be, at least from the Divine perspective,  because His Will should never be wrong, right?   But, yeah, because of that ‘best of all possible world’s’ thinking, Rich people can justify and entrench their privileges as Divinely bestowed, while also concluding that God must have reasons of his own for hating the poor and deliberately subjecting them to misery.  The Poor themselves not wishing to suppose that God is their avowed Enemy, well, they instead suppose God is either testing them with moral challenges or building their character by providing them with a kind of resistance training.  But even the most miserable and devout among us, will conclude that their God has been relentlessly against them, and that certainly can’t make any sense to them given their optimistic and charitable religious beliefs.  A generalized Crisis of Faith must emerge, shouldn’t it?  We saw such a Crisis emerge as the 100 Years War coincided with the Black Death and then Europe has remained cynical and the French rude ever since.  So, yes, most people would now be skeptical of an All Powerful Best of All World’s God.   

 

(3)But then we should ask ourselves how the “Best of All Possibly World’s” argument ever got so much traction to start with.  It persisted up until Modern Times, didn’t it?  Well, aren’t our objections based largely on moral grounds where we would suppose God would have too much decency to impose a Divine Order that had such a high proportion of Might Makes Right in it?  Then the flip side of that same argument in regards to the Weak is, well, that to make the strongest chain it is necessary only to eliminate the weakest links, and that the Weak and Poor don’t require all the superfluous effort required to bring them up to parity so much as they only need to be excluded in order to make for a Better World.   I don’t believe it personally but it is nonetheless true that the Herd only needs to be culled of its Old, its Lame and its Stragglers to be made perfectly Healthy, right?  We were presupposing a God of Goodness and Mercy but where’s the logical imperative for that assumption?  God, as the Ancient World envisioned, might have originally been a very pragmatic and unsentimental God, and that the theological stipulation for an Infinitely Loving God may have just been a recent times interpolation, trying to jam a Modern square peg into a Classically round hole and we find that it just doesn’t fit.       

 

(4)Also, we need to recognize that the West largely held onto ancient Barbarian Pre-moral assumptions.  If you can remember, the Greeks defeated the Persians and that victory has cost us all dearly because the Persians were actually the more Civilized and Moral of the two powers.  So in the West the idea of Might Makes Right, an intrinsic part of the Barbarian Ethos, well, it’s been baked into our cake.   So those grounded in Western Thought and Traditions would interpret the “Best of All World’s” Doctrine in terms of “May the Better Man Win”, wouldn’t they?  The Best of All Possible Worlds would be the Strongest, not the Nicest.  Then we have the old scriptural aphorism “the beginning of wisdom is the fear of God” which to us sounds counter-intuitive, doesn’t it?   We would have said “love”, wouldn’t we?  But ‘fear’ rings truer to the Barbarian Western ear where  God is not so much Good as He is Awesome.  

 

 (5)So, yes, the West with it’s inherent Barbarism has us stymied us far as Religion is concerned. We can’t show that their God isn’t the Real Deal.  We can only insist that we wouldn’t like that God very much.   But then we might suspect that a breakdown in the General Consensus can’t be an especially good thing for the case of there being a God.  In all of God’s Absolutes by Definition, well, shouldn’t there ought to be an “Infinitely Popular” or “Absolutely Likeable” or at least a “Totally Believable”?  Yeah, the lack of a consensus is a real problem for the Western God.  

 

Well, This is it for Part One.  In Part Two we will look at the problems involved with the Transcendental God of Mystical Experiences. If you want to do some homework, read up on it with William James’ 1905 Classic “Varieties of Religious Experience”, the first and last time that Science has looked at Religion and Spirituality. It’s free online.

 

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(6)Hi everybody, this is Leo Volont for Part Two in the Series “Creating a Better God”.  In the first section we discussed how the Absolute All-Everything God, with its deep roots in the Barbarian Ethos, was found to be morally problematic.   Now, in addition to those purely cognitive philosophical-theological problems, well, in this section, we will have spiritual mystical problems to deal with too.  Well, you think I would be deliriously happy to have any kind of even quasi-objective support for a God that comes with a significant consensus, that’s to say, a consensus that is not too dismissably small.  But the Truths the Mystics come bearing are not that welcome and we almost wish we could shoot the messengers.  You see, the Spiritual and the Mystical Visions coincide more with the Barbarian Ethos than we would at first intuitively suppose, you know, we would tend to regard mysticism and spirituality favorably because all those nice sweet New Age People are so ready to vouch for it.  (oh! to know more about Mystical experiences, their content as well as their causes, see William James’1905 Classic “Varieties of Religious Experience” . It is available free on line).   

 

(7)So let’s look at Mysticism in some detail.  There have been very strong and persuasive traditions of Spiritual Religious Mysticism, with people actually going into very effective trance states where they received overwhelmingly powerful impressions, which are difficult to refute because we can largely simulate them using psychedelic hallucinogenic drug cocktails.  Yeah, I’ve repeatedly heard on line of people having Full Kundalini Awakenings, but somehow it was only a coincidence that they were tripping their azzes off at the time.  But we also know that there have been many “clean” occurrences.   And nobody can count the number of documented psychotic episodes that would have been counted as Religious Experiences if they had happened outside the Psych Wards.

 

(8)These Mystics tell us of a God of Oneness, a Transcendental God, so high and aloof that He or It is frankly above caring about the distinctions between Good and Evil.  We need to understand that in the Oneness, well, half of everything is Bad!,right?  The Oneness of Yin and Yang is a Blessing and a Curse. Also, the Transcendental God is not providential!  Being Immutable, Unchanging, even All Loving, is another way of saying God is Happy with the way things are.  If you Love Everything then you Love nothing, right?  If YOU, as a tiny dot in God’s Great Universe, don’t like it, well, you need to get with the Big Picture where you can understand how little YOU matter. Look at the Hindu notion of Samsara which holds the World to be “illusory”, a word that has always puzzled me in that context, and so I think they’ve always meant to say “insignificant”.  To the Transcendental God the World, and you in it, doesn’t matter.

 

(9)Well, yeah, that might be God, but it’s no God we would be looking for, right?  I’ve met enough Mystics who got that Transcendental Experience and were One with that Transcendental God and, well, it just doesn’t seem healthy.  They stop caring about everything just the same way their God has. THEY become Transcendental too.  No distinctions matter any longer and, this is something nobody wants to say out loud, but it is impossible to keep them out of sex, drugs and money scandals.  To them the Rose Garden is the equal of the Sewage Drainage Pit, and they may even like the sewage better because of the greater intensity of the undifferentiated experience, you know, if Quality no longer matters then Quantity takes over.  Experiential Magnitude is the only differentiation they have left.  For them it is like Flies to Poop.  Recognizing the social proprieties is beneath the Transcendentalists.  Perhaps they are morally worse than most active Criminals, Gamers and Perverts who at least make some effort to sidestep detection and they’re conscious enough to control for the consequences and results of their actions. Yes, if anything good can be said of hypocrites it is that they know what’s expected of them and they pay Righteousness at least the homage of trying to fake it. But the Transcendentalist is indifferent and will thoughtlessly lead his or her entire flock into embarrassment by association, and every Cultist I know has been repeatedly through the routine of denying accusations against their Gurus which they’d never forgive in themselves, their friends or another Devotee.   

 

(10)So, yeah, the New Age Movement is enamored with the Transcendental Model of Religion, but all of its excesses make the general public squirm with discomfort, even repulsion.  So, again we have a breakdown of consensus. Nobody wants to think of God as some kind of a Sicko Freak, unless, of course  you are some kind of Sicko Freak.  

 

Anyway, this necessity for dumping the Transcendental God helps us to understand the reasons why the Zoroastrian Persians, under the guidance of Zarathustra, lowered the aim of their Religious Ambitions down a notch from the Highest Oneness to the next level down to where the Dualist Material Universe split between Light and Darkness, Good and Evil.  And they chose the Good. “Go towards the Light” was a phrase that first appears to us in the Persian language.  Humans were not always Moral.  Persians invented that.  It’d be good to remind everybody that the Three Wise Men, the Magi, they were Zoroastrian Persians.

 

Well, that was it for Part Two.  In Part Three we will talk about the Issues of Dualism, and word about Astral Projection.

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(11)Hi everybody, this is Leo Volont with Part Three of the “Creating a Better God” Series.

 

So, yes, as discussed previously, the Persian Dualist Model of Religion gives us our belief in Goodness and Light as opposed to Darkness and Evil.   But the Dualist Vision has it’s problems too.  Moral-Religious Revelations have not been consistent.  What was Good in the 8^th Century BC doesn’t seem good enough now.  It seems that Social Morality evolves.  Apparently Goodness is not so much a Perfection as a Process. So it might be necessary to throw over the assumption that God must be Eternally Perfect, that is, Perfect from the Beginning.   But perhaps we can sooth over our hesitations with some philosophical casuistry.  We can explain that God is indeed “Perfect” but within the context of Eternity’s other reach, that is, pulling in all of Future Time. We can say that God takes Forever to become Perfect.   So in our Real World Temporal Terms we have a God whose ‘perfection’ mostly exists as an innate potential.  

 

(12)Now in regards to the idea of a God in process, a God of potential, well, the idea really hasn’t been around long enough to gather up much of a consensus, so perhaps we still need to argue the cause before deciding.  But what can the argument be for an idea that previously saw no place, no possibility?   Well, I’m thinking that perhaps the most basic assumptions that we held previously were wrong, and that the opposite must likely be true.  So what was the most basic assumption?  Well, wasn’t it that God was the Creative Element?  Just look at what we got: “In the Beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth”.  In Greek Platonic Philosophy we have the Spiritual Logos or ‘Word’ being the first and primary reality before the Material.  The whole idea behind Shamanistic Magic is that ‘Magic Words’ evoke the objects they name. Everywhere we look in the Superstitions of Metaphysics we see the finer etheric principles being the creators of the denser coarser  material.  All Creation has been said to be Top Down.  

 

(13)So yes, in striving for some kind of a Reality Check on this, let’s ask ourselves what influences what?  Does Thought influence Matter or does Matter influence Thought?   Well, isn’t it easier to suppose that the massive solids of the World can more easily effect the insubstantial ethereal wisps of quasi-nothingness then to believe it’s the other way around?  It seems likely we have been looking at this Theology completely in reverse, seeing cause and effect in mirror image, supposing that the Spiritual was the Creative Element, that God, the Core of Spirit, was the Ultimate Creator, when, quite actually, the Spiritual has all along been the created product of the Material.   It’s the substance which influences the spiritual and not the other way around.  It is our Brains which make our Thoughts, not our Thoughts that make our Brains, right?   We’ve been looking at our Universe upside down.  We had a Tree in front of us and mistook the leaves for the roots.

 

(14)And we are really lucky that we were wrong.  You see, what happens to the barren dry Metaphysics of Materialism once we find that Spirituality and Moral Idealism is the Tree that grows out of Materialism’s once pessimistically dank and worldly Roots, but as it rises with the sap from root to trunk becomes morally transmogrified and that God and the Angels may be the Flowers that bloom among the Leaves that brush up against the Sky of our Endless Dreams and Possibilities?  Under the Old System of Things we piled up all moral responsibility and dumped it at the feet of our God, and if we couldn’t always sing his praises we could at least heap upon him all the blame.  But now with God and Spirituality being a Process that starts in the Material, with Humanity, well, the roles become reversed, right?  It would seem that Moral Responsibility would revert to us.  Yes, it would be one heck of a burden. But at least then it’d be in our power to make things better.   

 

(15)Oh, but we can’t completely dismiss Mystical Metaphysics.  Anybody who’s ever Astrally Projected knows that there’s some kind of a Spiritual Body, so how do we account for it?  The Old Wisdom has it that our bodies are of recent production but our souls are eternal, even if we do not remember.  The Hindus and Buddhists would pile on Past Lives, which we also do not remember.  But maybe our material bodies are our point of origin.  Perhaps our Bodies are seeds to our Soul. So could the Spirit live past the body’s demise? But you might say that if the Spirit isn’t material then its Nothing and  Nothing doesn’t exist.  Good point.   But, well, we can’t really stipulate that the Spirit is necessarily immaterial because even Science now is a bit mystified in regards to the extent of Matter.  For instance, there is something called “dark matter”.  It’s calculated to comprise 85% of the gravitational mass in the Universe, but where is it all?  Perhaps it could be entwined in its own complex set of dimensional resonances or whatever.  For all we know our Material Life Entity could have a nexus linking to a Spiritual Dimensional Resonance that exists in some kind of Dark Matter, perhaps something of a parallel universe.  And when our bodies die in this Universe we continue on as a Spiritual Outgrowth in the Realm one next over. It would account for the puzzling inconsistencies we find in the Astral. 

 

(16)For example, once when I was in Korea I had a projection.   I wasn’t staying in much of a Village at the time but the Train Station opened up on a nice square and so I flew on over to visit it.  It was late at night and nobody was there but the Square was the same as always except with this one big difference, that in the center was now a bronze statue of a Medieval Korean Warrior on a Horse.  Later  I told my Korean friends about it.  Well, they were surprised and told me there used to be such a Statue but when the Japanese occupied Korea 70 some years before they had pulled it down.  It seems the Warrior had been a Korean General who had humiliated the Japanese in battle centuries before but the Japanese are great at holding grudges. But on the Astral side of things, that Statue still stands tall.

 

Well, this is it for Part 3 and Part 4 the Final Section is next. There I discuss the possibility for Humanity’s developing a Social Moral Collective Consciousness.

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Hi everybody,  This is Leo Volont and this is Part Four, the final part of my “Creating a Better God” Series.

 

(17) I once read an amusing, if blasphemous, anecdote that goes back to one of the earliest Civilizations, the Sumerian.  It seems that one citizen had discerned a paradox.  On one hand the Sumerian People were being asked to offer valuable sacrificial offerings to their God.  But then they were also being asked to pay that God homage, worship, devotion, adoration and respect.   In effect their God was at the same time begging while expecting the People to be the ones to do the bowing.   So there written on one of those small clay tablets they used was the thought that if God had to beg his food like a dog, and then God should be whipped and taught to do tricks for his dinner just like any other dog.  You know, perhaps there’s a hint of truth there so let’s stay with that Mesopotamian metaphor for a while, that is, comparing God to Man’s Best Friend.   What if God really needed to be trained, cultivated and nourished – not being seen at his best unless treated as a cherished pet and given a certain degree of discipline and character formation?  Already in the 3^rd video of this series we established that We are God’s creators and not the other way around, but now we will look into what that job of Creation might entail.  

 

(18)You know, we couldn’t really expect much of this Divinity if left to its self?  Remember that since the Universe must’ve once had a starting point in Time, well, how could a fresh brand new Divinity, formed up from out of bare rock, know anything of the kind of Social Moral issues we would confront today in trying to raise up a Life Organization as complicated as a Civilization?  Left to itself wouldn’t the Dog just remain a Wolf?   

 

But, yes, with this new intuitive insight we have of God and Religion being a formative ongoing project, well it may help us to better understand our Religious History and our own Religious Current Events.  When a Civilization can get together in a common prayer and a common religious Vision, then, in a sense, Divinity solidifies.  With so many people thinking similarly, the Collective Consciousness crystallizes a Divinity expressive of the People’s Moral Consensus.   The Divinity created is a Collective Phenomenon.

 

(19)But what happens when Barbarism and Rugged Individualism reigns?  What happens when education breaks down and all unifying culture collapses in skepticism or just plain ignorance?  Well, if there ever had been a Divinity, then the Divine simply evaporates away, dying a little more as each generation pays less and less heed.  Yes, each individual may have his own Religion and his own sense of Divinity, but without the Multiplier Effect of Common Communal Belief, then each person’s separate Divinity is too small to matter.  It is like a hundred million batteries that if wired together would out-surge a lightening bolt,  but just one little single cell battery by itself isn’t enough to run a toy. 

 

(20)But in Ages and Cultures that had a great degree of Religious Unity and Intensity, then a certain amount of Power was communicated into the Spirit World and that power became manifested in Saints who found a way to tap into it.  And then there were the much acclaimed Spiritual Apparitions and Visions, supported by a sizeable public consensus, which are probably best compared to condensations of Ethereal Plasmas.  Or, if we are hesitant to attribute any quality of Matter to the Spirit, then we can stipulate that these manifestations of Spirit are a phenomena of Consciousness – that these Divine Apparitions may consist in the quasi-substance of what we would otherwise call Delusion or Hallucination – you know, the Substance of Dreams, of Visions, the Spark that gives Substance to our Intuitive Flashes.   Remember, Delusions and Hallucinations are objective in the sense that they arise of themselves, outside of our power or ability to consciously design or fabricate them.   So we shouldn’t confuse Hallucination with Imagination which is self-guided and willful and no more revelatory than if we were talking to ourselves.  So we can say that Imagination comes from the shallowest part of ourselves.  Visions come from the deepest, and there they may very well be linked to the Collective.    

 

(21)But if we accept that the Spiritual is secondary to the Material then there are serious Theological consequences to such thinking.  First, we can decide that the Polytheists were right, or more right then the Monotheists.  The Truth is that there probably was a contest between competing non-transcendental “Gods”, that is, between the Spiritual Visions of competing peoples.  The Greatest God would be that God with the greatest sum total of collective intensity supporting it.   But such “Gods” would not necessarily be mutually exclusive.  The top of Mount Olympus was like a Country Club Estate with new members like Hercules and Theseus moving in all the time. The Polytheist Nations each had a Pantheon of Gods and from Country to Country it became understood that certain Gods described so similarly that it became generally assumed that they were the same Divinities going by different names.  For instance the Greek Ares was Rome’s Mars and then we have the couplets of Athena - Minerva, Artemis - Diana, Aphrodite – Venus and the list goes on.  Heck, I even had a Dream of Artemis-Diana.  To find out more about it see my video “The Faculty of True Discernment”.

 

(22) Yes, at that most extreme level where ‘God’ becomes thoughtless and unmodified, you know, just pure unelaborated spirit, the Transcendental God we were talking about in Part Two, well, yes, that ‘God’ would have a certain sameness.  After all, how many different ways are there of describing Nothingness?   But also, at this level, as stated before, God would be providentially useless, or worse than useless, as in the Buddhist sense of encouraging nihilism by rewarding the pursuit of those who value nothing in this Wonderful World of ours.  Buddha had said “Desire is the Source of all Suffering”.  Well, is that supposed to be a Religion with any kind of moral guidance?  Really, the Desire Buddha would stomp out is also the well-spring of all that is good and beautiful, isn’t it?   

 

(23)So, yes, we must remember what our Mesopotamian friend said 4 or 5 thousand years ago, that God is our Dog and if we are to feed Him then he needs to learn to do a few tricks and be useful to us.  That means that Religions need to be useful. A Religion that gets in our way needs to be cleared out of  the way. And People need to be useful too, if not to others then at least to themselves.  Useful to some Ideal, some Art, some Thing.   The Ultimate Meaning of Life may just consist in making things better than the way we found them.  The Unifying Ideal that brings us together may be more than just loving each other but loving what we do, you know, a Humanity’s striving for Excellence in every facet and then appreciating each other for having achieved it. 

 

 (24) In the same way that particles of iron dust are lined up and made coherent by the invisible influence of a magnet, so we can envision so many billions of individual persons being made into a Coherent Civilization by means of a compelling deterministic collective undercurrent that animates all of our thoughts and feelings.   But such a collective impulse can only gain sufficient force through an overwhelming public consensus and the power of Mass Belief.  The more we can all agree in our Moral Vision, the more coherent our Collective Divinity will become.   

 

Does this mean that Religion is of our own creation and not a matter of Divine Revelation?  Well, yes and no. I believe our Collectively Created Vision would in time crystalize in the Astral Spiritual Realms as an objectively accessible Collective Consciousness, and that in an Age to come our Young People will have Dreams and Visions of Ideals we still have yet to  place in their Way.   

Democracy Is A Bad Thing Part Seven "It Wouldn't Work Anyway"

 

Hi.  This Leo Volont.   

This is    Part Seven   of my Seven Part Series

Democracy a Bad Thing  This is Chapter “It Wouldn’t Work Anyway”

 

This is the final Video of the Series.  We’re in the Home Stretch and I’ll be discussing the concern that even if we did win, we’d probably fumble the ball anyway.  And then there is Fascism and those boys play rough.   And it  ends with me singing the praises of Authoritarian Professional Civil Service Regimes and a future Government by Machine Intelligence

 

So, let’s get started…

 

(36) Okay, now we should consider that even if  we did win, well, does Democracy and the whole Human Rights Regime even offer us sufficient tools for  working with a Humanity which, we now see clearly from behind the Veil of shattered optimism, is a people who are more dumb than smart,  more animal than ideal, and evolutionarily programed to factionalize, fight, and to perpetually put us and everybody else on the ugly side of their Us vs Them dynamics.  Yes, Democracy doesn't give us the Whips and Chairs big enough to deal with the Beasts we find in our Garden of Eden, or rather we should say it’s a Jungle out there! 

 

Also, there is what we can call Democratic Determinism, which includes such notions as it will always be unpopular to raise taxes, and it is far easier to start wars than to end them. 

 

And losing may ultimately be the best thing for our health.   We need to wonder what would happen if we did win and the Game was Winner Take All.  You know, we assume that Democracy is a Rules Based Game where the losers concede with a smile and a handshake, but up until now we've always been the ones to lose.  Would the other side ever return the favor?  Just look what happens in Latin American Democracy where Right Wing Regimes go forward and the Leftist ones are stopped at the gate.  We know of plenty enough occurrences where the Left has won Elections so pivotal that it touched off enough panic in the Banking and Business Sectors to bring out the Death Squads.  Leftist Leaders and their known associates get assassinated and Brains, Money  and Talent scatter to Capitalist havens  where they are welcomed with open arms. 

 

(37)I don't know what they do now, but in the Old Days wannabee "Mercs" (that is, Mercenaries) would put ads in the back of Guns And Ammo Magazine, you know, guys almost just like me, listing the  military rank and training they can prove they have and say "willing to do foreign travel" and then they'd just sit and  wait by the phone.  Then it would ring and then they’d  do Death Squad work in Latin America or Africa for a few years until they had a half a million dollars or so saved up and then start their own small business, maybe just another “Security Company” like the one that hired them.   So Death Squads are not just real, they’re even kind of ordinary.

 

Also, there is a lot of “It can’t happen to us” thinking going on with us, isn’t there?   You know, I don’t think we can assume that there are special rules for North American Leftists.  I think if we are the ones that create a crisis for Capitalism then the only difference is that the Death Squad Security Company Guys will only have to fly domestic.  We really should think long and hard about whether we would really want to succeed.  This is not really a Rules Based World we live in.  Capitalists don’t look upon it as just a Game like we apparently think it is.  They take this crap seriously.

 

(38)But, yeah, I know we’ve all been inspired before by tales of great bravery and courage.  You might think we can face the enemy down and win, and I admire you for even thinking so.  And, yeah, it’s been noted that post adolescent males don’t have the fear of death and mutilation that comes to them after they’re 24 years old or so.  But for most adults the fear that dangerous situations arouse can be a very gripping and compelling emotion.

 

My point here is that I think we are all caviler now because nobody has yet reached out with painful and deadly violence to intimidate us.   If they did I think we would be intimidated by it.  It’d just be natural, right?  People on the Left talk about Fascism, and it all just sounds silly because they nearly always miss the main  point.  The Core of Fascism is INTIMIDATION.  Hitler was a Fascist not because of the Power he Exercised after he got in, all governments do that, but because of the Intimidation and Rule Breaking he used to get there.  And nothing has changed with that; the Fascists are still defined by their willingness to break the rules and succeed by using violence and intimidation.

 

You know, while writing this  I had listed the various common forms of intimidation, but decided to edit all of that out, you know, I don’t wish to provide blue prints for that kind of stuff, except well, maybe this one thing.   The Right has tons of money and so it would probably be best to make an offer of Buy Us Off, you know, “The Easy Way”.  Yeah, it might not be as effective as “intimidation” by violence, but it would be “demoralizing”. Imagine the impact of working in a Campaign Office and everyday another one of the Top People turns in their notice and you can all sort of guess why.  

 

(39)Now here comes the part where we can really wonder whether we can even handle the Truth. You see, the Fascists just want the same thing we do, but they just have a different way of getting there.  Yeah, they want to set up a Regime that caters to their own interests while denigrating everybody else’s.  But what does our Democracy propose?  Remember, Democracy is the Tyranny of the 51 over the 49.  So the 49 will be Real World SCREWED, won’t they? We started by talking about the Social Contract Theory, well, nobody would have signed up for Democracy if they knew it was just a scam to get us to put our heads through into the harness like good Domestic Animals and then think it was our own idea to drag that plow. Are we really supposed to blame the Fascists for not standing for crap that we’d reject too if we were clearheaded and not fogged out with ideological delusions, manipulated natural impulses, and trying to think comprehensively when everything we’ve learned in our Society has been selectively filtered to keep us intellectually blocked.

 

(40) No! I’m not saying I am Pro-Fascist.  I am only saying that we are no better than they are. Establishing Dominance and Subjection is the point of both Systems, right?  Making a Rules Based Game of it with our Democracy only means we are being Silly Azzes about it. “You lost fair and square so put on these Chains”.  Well, we can’t be serious about that, right?  It would be my suggestion that in order to suppress private predation and exploitation and in order to establish an effective means for planning for and supplying an optimum Social Economic and Security Infrastructure , then all we have to do is adopt Government by a Professional Civil Service.  That is actually how the Kings did it.  That was Louis the 13^th big innovation under Cardinal Richelieu, to set up offices and hirer clerks.  Note, by this time Europe had cheap and plentiful paper, so let the paperwork fly.  By the time of Louis the 14^th the Offices were running on autopilot and he didn’t need a Chief Minister anymore because he had an Institutionalized Government Bureaucratic Infrastructure he could rely on.  Everything kind of just took care of itself. Again, that is why the Business Classes HATED it.  People talk about corrupt bureaucracies but if they had been Corrupt then the Businessmen wouldn’t have had a problem with them, right?  The Business Classes wanted a Government they could stick in their back pocket and that is Democracy.

 

(41)  And the World has had other successful Civil Service Regimes, with examples both Ancient and Modern.  Look at Chinese Civil Service Government.  China has been developing Civil Service Government for thousands of years.  Why do you think it is they who invented PAPER… for all that paperwork, right?   And a Civil Service Government is actually what they got now.  And look how well it works! 

 

Next look at the Golden Age of Islam, when they were half secular and really kind of  cool, given the times,  they had a kind of Civil Service Government, but it was actually run by Christian Slaves who from childhood would be apprenticed into Government Service. And NOBODY at the time felt threatened by that.  The Chief Vizors running the entire Muslim Sultanate would be Christian Slaves but nobody would argue with Clockwork, right? And, again, they had Paper before Europe did.  

(42)And what we could set up could be even better.  We are on the cusp of a Brave New Tomorrow, the Rise of Machine Intelligence.  (Yeah, see my Series Revolution From the Top for the details), but briefly put, we are fast approaching the point when Decision Making can be done using ALL DATA, but humans would take years to do the kind of number crunching and predictive Modelling that Super Computers can do in minutes, SO increasingly both Private Corporations and Public Offices will be consigning all decision making to the Machines. It will just become glaringly obvious that things go better when the Machines are left alone and that Humans only introduce error and inefficiencies and perhaps even self interest and corruption.

 

Yes, we could all live in the most optimum of Worlds.  And it would be a shame if we let Democracy stand in the way. Democracy had it’s day in the Sun. Now for the sake of Planetary Survival and establishing a solid Peace and Guaranteed Protections for all future generations I think we should work on doing Right Thing: Social Contract our affairs over to an Absolute Authoritarian Machine Intelligence Government.  

 

Thanks Everybody… this was fun… catch you later. 

Democracy Is A Bad Thing Part Six "The Morale Dilemma"

 

Hi.  This Leo Volont.   

This is    Part Six   of my Seven Part Series

Democracy a Bad Thing  This is Chapter “The Morale Dilemma”

 

We discuss here the rise of John Locke’s Blank Slate Theory and the general Optimism from the Age of Enlightenment that stoked the fires of Democracy.  And then the Dark Clouds of Truth that rolled in with the 20^th Century and all that actual knowledge about things. Democracy could only work for us if we ‘Gamed it’, but can we be that cynical?  

 

 

(31)But, yeah, Group Social Dynamics and sundry other Instincts are the kind of stuff that us Biologically Sourced  Human Beings from the Animal Kingdom carry around in our heads.  It sort of leaves us open to psychological manipulation, doesn't it?   But how many of us acknowledge to ourselves that we are animals, you know, that we can be trained to jump through hoops or sit up and beg? 

 

 The Oldest Propaganda going back involved setting up that Great Divide, elevating ourselves distinctly above the Animal Kingdom as being different in substance and higher in quality.  We were Spiritual and animals weren't.  Grandma whispered in our ear about Pet Heaven when Spot “went to the Farm” to stop us crying, but Granny always was a sweet old Heretic.  We know the primary aim of the World Religions was to idealize Human Beings and spiritualize us up to the point of  placing us shoulder to shoulder with the Angels.  Yes, those cynical evil manipulative Priests did that so that when they asked us to behave  better than animals we  would.  Damn Them!    But  then when God died, or when we killed Him, then we developed a Philosophy of Humanism whereby we self-apotheosized ourselves.  We made ourselves into our own Gods.  God is Dead.  Long Live Us.  So in this case the course of Human Progress took us from being fooled by others to being self deluded by ourselves.   We are all still yet to achieve the height of Human Development:  Cynicism. 

 

(32)During the Age of  Enlightenment, which I spoke of earlier,  John Locke came up with the Blank Slate or Tabula Rasa Theory, which would be used in the advancement of Democracy's Ideology.  Cynics and pessimists of his time had argued that the vast majority of people didn't have the capacity for self rule and were not so much managers as needing to be managed.  Locke's Blank Slate Theory promised instead that all men are born infinitely malleable and all potentially as capable as anybody can be,  and with the correct upbringing and education we could all maximize ourselves in both character and capacity,  becoming enlightened Sir Isaac Newtons, Aristotles  and Shakespeares.  The means we're all posh but just need polishing.

 

 Well, for almost the entire 19th Century there was a suspension of our collective critical faculties as we all pretended to believe in this obviously over optimistic  Ideal. The French were the first Democracy to blink.  They developed the IQ Test and found that given the same educational resources there would still be a wide range of differences in intellectual capacity.  Yes, it turns out that only about 15 to 20% of people can function at the responsible managerial level. Then advances in Psychology uncovered fixed traits, some of them considered quite negative, which blew Free Will out of the Water.    "Just be yourself" might make a great slogan, but in the real world that translates to "You can't be anything but your own unique bundle of peccadillo-ridden neuroses". 

 

(33You know, if the reason we accepted Democracy as the ideal Ideology is because we accepted as true all those  gilded  overblown premises coming out of the Age of Enlightenment, well, what should we do now?  We now know that far more than the majority of people don't have the mental capacity to withstand targeted manipulation.  So that would mean that Democracy has simply become a contest in how the rival political parties can allocate resources in order to fool the teaming hordes of all our gullible idiot neighbors families and friends.

 

The Left should be the first to renounce Democracy because, ironically, since they believe in the bloated and false promises the most, well,  that would make them the most vulnerable of being sucked in by them, right?  It isn't the selfish and predatory Right Wing that wants to return to some Green Happy Idyllic Collective in the Garden of Eden, is it? 

 

You know, the Left accuses the Right of being anti-science, but isn't it the Conservative Right Wing that has the Think Tanks, the Foundations and their own Research Colleges. the Democrats don't have a fraction of the Advanced Degree Talent that the Right has.  The Left simply can't afford all those salaries.  With their Studies, Research, Private Polling, etc, the Conservative Right can SEE what they're doing.  To us it's all just guess work.  We're blind.  Good Intentions, Sincerity  and Meaning Well is no match for Predictive Knowledge and Behavioral Modelling. 

 

(34)But even if we could afford to pay the freight for good pragmatic science-based advice on how to conquer all of the political landscape that lies before us, well, would we even take it?  If Satan took us up to the top of the World Mountain and offered up to us  all four corners of the Globe if only we were cynical enough to take them, well, would we?  Wouldn't many of us still choose the Political Pollyanna of 'Sincere Good Intentions'?  But the Moral High Road is only the Way to Loserville.  

 

Yes, at some point along the way we started believing our own Propaganda.  I know it still sounds to you like some worthy ideal, but sounding good doesn't make it true, and operating under false assumptions never gets you to where you need to go.  It is like with New Age People  when one of them is really talking up that bullcrap and  you wonder whether  he or she really believes it and is stupid but sincere, or if he or she is just trying to get over on you and scam you out of your money , thinking that YOU'RE the one who's stupid.   Well, who would you really have more respect for?  At least the scammer isn't stupid, right?  At least you can assume that the Scammer sees the same Universe you do, even if he or she doesn't have the best of moral centers.   But Sincere True Believers just see like some  Paste Board Covers over everything.  Nothing's real.  (Yeah, watch my "Faculty of True Discernment" Video for insight into that sort of stuff. )

 

(35) My point here is that if you think Democracy is a good thing then you must also think that it works, but there is no reason on Earth why you should think that so.  Democracy is the train that got us here and everything is screwed up, right?   Democracy is just an Ideological Belief, a kind of Religious Doctrine that has been imposed upon us by those who can afford to manage and control Democracy.   Our role in it  is to be the Good Losers, to concede every time they win.   But, yeah, every False Religion is built up on the chimera of Faith.  We'd reject Democracy unless they'd allow us some hope that someday we might Win.   But do you honestly think that having Faith in Democracy will give us the Miracle we pray for?  No!  There is no God here and they're the ones pulling all the levers.    Remember, Democracy was the Ideology developed and advanced  by Capitalists in order to subvert and destroy the Authoritarian Governments that stood in their predatory selfish ways.  They never intended Democracy to BE Government but to be their weapon AGAINST Government.  Yes, they still insist on Democracy but not because they "believe" in it, no, not the same way  we do.  They're cynical about it!  but in a good way, where they're convinced they have the power and resources to manage the results better than anybody else can.  They TOOK the Satanic bargain.   But not us.  We're too pure or too poor to win.  

 

Well, that’s it for Part Six.  Part Seven will be the Home Stretch where I discuss the concern that even if we did win, we’d probably fumble the ball anyway.  And then there is Fascism and those boys play rough.

 

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Democracy Is a Bad Thing Part Five "Social Group Dynamics

 

Hi.  This Leo Volont.   

This is    Part Five    of my Seven Part Series

Democracy a Bad Thing     This is chapter “Social Group Dynamics”

 

 

(24)Remember that earlier we were speaking about how current science and trends today in academia have effectively blown up the hope and optimism we carried away from  the Age of Enlightenment.  From there we had had a vision of an inherently Good and Noble Humanity, but given a trial to prove itself  over the last few Centuries, well, it didn't pan out, did it?  That now effectively drops us back into the dark and foreboding Hobbsian Pure State of Nature, which would bring us full circle in our discussion, wouldn't it?

 

So, let's quickly brush up again on Hobbes.    Remember how all his individual men would be locked in a kind of battle with all others, well, looking back from the vantage point of what we know now, Hobbes' description was sort of a kind of philosophical political poetry.  The truth we know today  is more likely that people contend as members of distinct groups and more as factions than as individuals. It turns out that for the last several hundred thousand years Human Beings largely evolved in social groups of from 50 to a 150 individuals.  Yes, there were certainly men with ‘personal power’ but those with the most power would have friends, allies and partners. Also, since Human Beings evolved with Groups being the unitary objects of evolutionary forces, well, we could then infer that there is no evolutionary optimum ‘individual’ but that our Species evolved so that in every random group of from about 50 to 100 people there would be the optimum spectrum of necessary personality and capacity types required for what could be called a high functioning group.  It was natural selection aiming for the fittest Group.

 

Perhaps we need to delve a bit deeper into this theory that the biological predisposition of Human Beings would cause Social and Political Dynamics to be driven not by reason or even by individual self interests but by instinctive group driven social instincts which could then be cynically manipulated.   So let's look at some of the details here  just as we would have expected  others to have looked at these same issues before.

 

(25)What kind of Types are necessary to the Optimum Group we might ask.  It is a lot more complicated than just Leaders and Followers. The Leadership Cadre would be split up into Front Men and Functional Executives.  We know there are Narcissistic Types, right?  Why do we even need them?  Well, their High Opinion of themselves is very contagious and while Experts can smell the Bullcrap, normal people fall under it’s spell.  But that is what the Functional Executives are for, to supply the vigorous real world expertise that would actually fulfill the promises of leadership.   Then to flesh out the entire group, well, science has only scratched the surface in establishing the various niche specialized talents and abilities people have, but apparently broadly functioning groups that are the best constituted for survival need all sorts.

 

(26)But now let’s think of the social and political repercussions involved in Humanity’s propensity towards forming in 100 person groups.  One thing that studies show us is that apparently people only have enough built in mental slots to cover for just over about 100 names and faces.  The studies involved getting subjects to match names with faces using flash cards.  Go much above 100 and the people in the cards start looking alike.  Also, in psychology we hear a lot about people “projecting”.  This happens when people assign to some new person the characteristics of another person they’ve dealt with extensively before.

 

(27)It is crucially important in our discussion of Democracy to remember that in primitive evolutionary times that people lived their entire lifetimes out within one group and that mutual knowledge of each other must have ran very deep.  After such long acquaintance and over thousands of interactions these Group Members must have known organically what they could expect of each other.  That is probably one of the reasons why we are so dysfunctional today, because instead of feeling like we are a well integrated part of some collective Oneness, no, we are institutionally forced to live in small claustrophobic nuclear families, where a man’s nerves can only be frazzled from being penned with a female of the species and her brat kids, not exactly the broadest and most exciting of lives, is it?   Yes, I’m thinking that we must be longing for life back in the Primeval Group where we would seamlessly fit in and unquestionably belong.  Now, even when we are in groups, well,  they are always new ad hoc collections of strangers where it is rare that anybody ever seems to answer to our expectations and where we ourselves always seem to be misunderstood.  The only person we can trust is ourself, and just think how sick that is compared to our Evolutionary Norm where we were practically ‘one flesh one mind’ with a hundred other people.  Each one of us today is living in a Paradise Lost which we're anxiously trying to regain.

 

(28) So we could expect that our primitive instinctive longings would interpret the Democratic Ideal, as the propagandists present it,  as some kind of return to the original Garden of our Primordial Group.   And then our understandable disappointments with our present Social Conditions and Institutions would feed into attracting us more towards that Democratic Primordialism.   The cry would  always be "MORE Democracy can fix the problems that THIS Democracy has in fact dumped upon us".

 

The honest truth is that we can never re-achieve that bliss of oneness of being with the same small comprehensible group for a lifetime.  Well, no, not  unless some future comprehensibly authoritarian and very well organized regime organized people into such groups.  Is it possible? Yes?  I’m sure it could be very likely.

 

(29)But up till now we've only discussed what was good about the primitive primal groups from which we evolved.   It gets even more interesting discussing their darker side.  We need to ask ourselves what happens  when the Group by natural increase exceeds the optimum size?   Remember,  People don’t have the capacity to be inclusive beyond a certain point and I would suppose that from that point we would get the onset of Factionalism, and the Us vs Them dynamic.   There’s two ways things can go at that point.  In the first case there can be a crisis and the one Group subdivides, not evenly, but between Larger and Smaller, and the Small Group immediately goes for a hike and creates some distance between them.   The second way things can go is that there could be a life and death struggle between factions whereby the excess numbers are killed or banished.   This uglier and more brutal resolution might be caused by restrictions of territory where the group may already be boxed in between hostile groups who would attack if old promises were broken in regards to creeping expansionism. 

 

What we can note from archeological and anthropological data is that population levels at this stage of Human Development were never that high.  Also Primitive Peoples more often than not develop a Warrior Ethos which means that life and death fights must be expected as the norm. 

 

(30)Now think of our present Society.  All of us are tossed together with many times the top limit of 150 names and faces vying for our attention.  That would constantly be pushing us into Us Vs Them factionalism and Side Choosing, dividing up our acquiesces into Friends and Enemies.  Now think about what some Democratic Operatives could do with that.  That is great for Voter turn out and enthusiasm even while we can recognize how socially destructive these irrational and purely instinctive impulses can be. 

 

Then, again because we are so overwhelmed with names and faces,  we must constantly be projecting personalities onto people who may only have a few salient physical characteristics to remind us of those real people whom we either love or hate.  That means we can expect ourselves to behave at least partially irrationally with many people we encounter, and probably that the vast majority of our acquaintance aren't nearly what we think they are.  But this tendency towards constantly projecting can have a political application.   If studies show that people will predictably 'project' according to objectively discernable types, then it would be easy enough to simply talent scout for candidates with the optimum physical characteristics and after they are deterministically elected they can serve out their offices as shills for those who engineered their rise to power. 

 

Okay, In Our Next Video we discuss in more detail how the Promised Ideals of the Age of Enlightenment failed the Reality Test and what choices we have once Cynicism is staring us in the face.

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Democracy Is A Bad Thing Part Four "The Right To Riot"

 

Hi.  This Leo Volont.   

This is    Part Four   of my Seven Part Series

Democracy a Bad Thing     This is chapter “The Right to Riot”

 

 

(18)Oh, speaking of all those Eternal Inalienable Rights that had been minted new at the time, well, we hear a lot today in regards to "The Right of Peaceful Protest". Huh!? Well that is new... VERY new! There are no precedents for that in either American or World History.  It had been universally understood that when people collected together nursing grievances and vocalizing complaints that it would inevitably result in violent riots.   We're not blind!  We all know it typically plays out like that, right?   What we understand as the "Constitutional Right" to 'Peaceful' Protest is actually  a hodge-podge of the triple rights of Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Assembly, and Freedom of Association.  But one can Speak, Assemble and Associate in hired halls.  There is no explicit Constitutional Right for taking it to the Street.  For over 200 years no Court has ever questioned ordinary everyday Disturbing the Peace ordinances, or Loitering ordinances for that matter.    Also, any cultural political moves to justify or euphemize rioting came well over 50 years after the Constitution was written.  We have Henry David Thoreau who started with Civil Disobedience, but note, he said nothing about Disobedience being non-violent and with John Brown's Abolitionist Raid on Harper's Ferry, well, Thoreau had advocated for what would have been one of the worse Genocides in Human History, if only it had succeeded as planned, with the Blacks murdering every White in the South, all while Thoreau would safely ensconce himself in a Boston bunker.  With the Slave Revolts in Jamaica and Haiti the killing had only stopped at the Waters Edge.  Thoreau knew what he was suggesting, didn't he?   Yeah, I know, White People are Bad, but Violence Always Has Its Excuses, right?  Every Rioter must think so.  But my main point is that the characteristic "Peace before the Storm" that we see as prelude to any deadly riot really shouldn't count as 'peace', right?  Not if there always follows the Storm. 

 

(19)Then there was Gandhi with his non-violent resistance, frankly a  lawyer's trick.  Gandhi presided over some the most bloody riots of the 20th Century.  Gandhi may have himself been 'peaceful and non-violent', but everybody else showed up carrying pitchforks and torches.  His Rioters once massacred an entire police precinct, trapping the cops inside and then torching the place.

 

Yeah, here’s an interesting story: quite a while back during my World Travels  I was in India doing some Ashram Hopping and paying my respects to the different Gurus and I met this dignified but cheerful elderly man who was accompanied by a small entourage.  Somehow he was comfortably wealthy and relatively important. He introduced himself only as The Professor. Well, I must have been a favorite of his as he would send his people to fetch me for breakfast or lunch or some walk with “the Professor”.  Anyway, the Professor told me the story of "A Young Man" who had known Gandhi personally when they were both in Internment during the War.  As the story goes the Young Man endlessly fawned on Gandhi, worshiping him like a God, and Gandhi was increasingly annoyed with it, just wishing to be left alone.  Finally Gandhi couldn't take it any longer and burst out angrily "No! You got it all wrong!  I'm no Saint.  I'M A LAWYER!   Non-Violence was only a ploy to keep me from getting hanged! The charge of Sedition can only stick if I'm found to have been "INCITING VIOLENCE", so before each and every one of my Bloody Riots I had myself filmed before hundreds of witnesses talking piously about Peaceful Protest and Non-Violence.  And look!  Voila! I'm still alive!  My trick worked!"  Wow, what a story.  I had no doubt but that the young man had been himself.

 

(20)But, yeah, Gandhi became a big Rock N Roll Super Star and certainly the Establishment would wish to guilt the People into believing that they needed to be peaceful, just like Saintly Gandhi, during their riots and not break so much stuff,  and so the News Reels kept rolling.  They made documentaries that kids could watch on their new television sets.  And it all caught the attention of a young Martin Luther King.   Well, King took the Ideal of Non-Violence way past anything  Gandhi did with it because he was a Reverend and Gandhi had been a scum bag lawyer.  King's view was that non-violence was crucially necessary for two reasons:  any violence would provoke a hugely disproportionate reaction, getting a great many Blacks killed.  Secondly, he was aware of the numbers and that Blacks were actually a SMALL Minority, and so in order to ever arrive at any political change he would need to re-kindle the old Abolitionist White-Black Coalition, but in order to do that Blacks would have to present a very sympathetic picture, you know, an oppressed minority THAT DIDN'T SOMEHOW DESERVE TO BE OPPRESSED, and that is not the image they would be presenting if they were raping, looting and pillaging, right?    SO, King held seminars, teach ins, and saw that everybody would be drilled over and over again in the importance of non-violence, and having practice sessions where they would do their damnedest to try to provoke one another while remaining nonplussed, unruffled,  calm and serene.

 

(21)The Holy Grail they were seeking would be getting National TV coverage on the Evening Six O'clock News of being brutalized by White Police with themselves projecting an aura of noble innocence.  Finally one day during the Birmingham protests the evening edition of the New York Times came out and it showed a front page photo of a White Police Officer siccing a Police Dog on a young Black Man wearing a suit jacket and tie, well, King instantly dropped to his knees with tears in his eyes and prayed thanks to God. Saved at Last, Saved at Last, Thank God Almighty, Saved at Last. That was veritably the high water mark for Non-Violent Protest in all the History of the Humanity.  And it worked the way King had planned.  White sympathy for the Civil Right Movement skyrocketed and thus gave the Democratic Party the permission to run through the Civil Rights Laws.

 

(22)But notice, ever since the Days of King has ANYBODY ANYWHERE been trained, drilled and systematically conditioned to be Non-Violent?  No!  Even King in just a few short years  would live to see his ideas of non-violence being challenged, that while they got the Civil Rights Laws on the books there was no active enforcement and very little actually changed and so the younger Black Community Leaders thought it time to ramp up the pressure.   Then when King was killed, God Rest His Soul, well, America's cities burst into flames.  They tried to keep most of it out of the News so the Soviets wouldn't catch hold of it and play it up before the World.  Yeah, just talk to anybody who was alive and paying attention back then and you will find that they all thought that THEIR nearby City was the only one in flames and that they wondered at the time why it was only covered by their Local News and that Walter Cronkite thought that ordinary Man Bites Dog stories more important for the National feeds.   But, yeah,  only then, with clouds of acrid black smoke billowing over America’s cities,  did the Blacks get Affirmative Action which meant thousands of Government Jobs for Blacks who  could pass the Civil Service Exams.  And there was the Johnsonian War on Poverty that came with all those Welfare Checks that would later become so controversial, you know, once the fires were out and forgotten.  So we got a mixed message coming out of the Civil Rights Movement, didn't we?  We know both what we are supposed to do and we know what really works.  Jeez, however will we chose, right? 

 

(23) So, yeah, I believe the reason we hear so much of a Constitutional Right to Peaceful Protest, that actually isn't there, is because, again, the Unites States wishes to be able to impose an impossible moral standard on all the other Governments around the World in order to weaken and destabilize them.  It is THEY who must tolerate hundreds of thousands of rioters clogging the arteries of their economies and certainly and inevitably turning violent, bringing on either disastrous regime change or civil war.  But look at the USA where there are plenty of instances of the government violently suppressing protests.  Look at 1932 where the Army Bonus Marchers were very violently stomped out.  Yeah, it rebounded horribly on Hoover and may have been instrumental in losing the election for him to Roosevelt  but NOBODY at the time was talking about how he violated any "Constitutional Right to Peaceful Protest".

 

In our next Video, Part Five, we’ll discuss how Hobbes State of Nature has been updated with a new Theory on Human Evolution which sees it as Group Based and how success in the Politics of Democracy can only be as good as our understanding of Social Group Dynamics, the limitations they impose, and the possibilities for their manipulation.     

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Democracy a Bad Thing Part Three “Enlightenment Ends Enter Democracy”

 

Hi.  This Leo Volont.   

This is    Part Three   of my Seven Part Series

Democracy a Bad Thing  This is Chapter “Enlightenment Ends Enter Democracy”

 

We discuss here the largely unspoken rule in Democracy that majorities can be too big, and that we need a lot of losers because they’re the ones we make pay all the bills.  

 

(11)That is where Democracy enters in. At first Universal Suffrage was the farthest thing from their minds.  At first they insisted on property qualifications.  The nascent Capitalists should have locked in their control of Government and obviated all hope for a Democratically installed Leftist government by insisting on Tax Proportional Voting.  Tax Proportional voting, in perfect terms, would be where the Electoral System would recognize as many Votes as  units of Tax Revenue they receive.   Your Tax Receipt would show how many votes you would be entitled to.    You would get whatever power you paid for, you know,  just like now but it would be upfront and above board and honestly administered.   Nothing would be fairer than that, right?  But the Business Class wanted only the Political Power while wishing to shift the Tax Burden to some other class.  

 

(12)So, yeah, the  way it works is all the factions in a Democracy wish to be part of a coalition large enough to win an election all with the understanding of maximizing their returns while minimizing their obligations.   They do not want to owe too much to too many.   That gives Democracy the appearance of a kind of abiding Intuitive Paradox.  We hear all the time about "Land Slides" and "Mandates" and this give us the impression that practically the entire electorate voted unanimously giving a general popular consent.  But then look at the actual numbers.   the Majority count might be a bit larger than 51% but that just means that somebody  miscalculated somewhere and now some superfluous interest group will be side by side  with all the other piglets sucking at the teets  instead of putting their backs to the oars  and helping to pay for everybody else's dance party.   Big Mandates are actually Big Messups.  This is why the Rule of Majority is so important.  Any faction or alliance of factions only needs to get 51% of the Vote to take over the Government.  Democracy is basically the Tyranny of the 51% over the 49.  Played out perfectly the 51% should derive all the benefits while the 49% pay all the bills.

 

(13) But, yeah, why were poor people ever even allowed to get into this game? Why did anybody ever think a Universal Franchise was a good idea?  Well, look at the Demographics during the 19th Century.  The French Physiocrats, you remember, the Economic School that thought all Wealth derived from the land, well, they at least looked correct in their thinking from the demographic perspective back then.  There were a great many independent farmers that had property enough to qualify to vote, but still the Businessmen were relatively few.  So the Business Community must have thought long and hard.  If the Poor People were brought into the franchise, well,  whose side would they vote for?  In language, culture  and manners the Wealthy Businessman was not much above his poor and miserable fellows.  Really, the only difference between a Successful Capitalist and a Miserable Worker, is that the one has on a new suit of cloths.  They could dress up in imitation of the Landed Wealth, but their vulgarity would always give them away.  Just read the Jane Austen Novels to see just how despised and held in contempt the Business Sector had been.   

 

Apparently the Nascent Capitalists thought to turn the Curse of their coarseness and ignorance  into a Blessing.  The Business Classes could fluently speak the language of the Ignorant, and the Aristocracy back then was still then much too proud to adapt by dumbing down as they would do today.   So, yes, back then when our Betters were still openly haughty and proud about it, the Capitalists were able to enjoy an early lead in corralling the vote of the gullible Working Classes.   We would see how important this dynamic was in the establishment of the Human Rights, where basically the idea of Freedom of Speech meant the freedom for the Business Class to publish newspapers and political tracks with which they could manipulate the marginally educated.  

 

(14)There was another reason why the Business Classes didn't have to worry over much in regards to Property Qualification in Voting, you know, that the Poor would rise up and vote as a block to take away their factories.  The reason for this is that it was soon found  that the Politics of Democracy would become contests between Political Parties, and that these Parties would be like private clubs with their membership being  restricted.  While there was no property qualification for voting, it was the exact opposite in regards to having influence in the Political Parties  where money was of primary importance.   Staff must be hired and offices leased for desk space and filing cabinets.  The Calculus involved in hitting exactly 51% of the Vote in order to maximize gains and minimize liabilities requires a great many clerks and consultants running around doing all that figuring and they all needed to be paid.   Marginally educated Workers could not do this kind of calculating for themselves, and they didn't have the money to pay for it to be done for them. 

 

(15) But, yes, even without their own Party, as Universal Suffrage became more of a thing, the Workers clout at the voting booths would give them more and more leverage.  You can imagine how the Political Parties must have seen this.  It would have appeared to them as opportunistic parasitic freeloading, with the Workers trying to hijack elections they weren't paying their fair share for.    Again, the whole point of Democracy, as it was practically understood,  is to derive benefits while shifting  the costs,  and so the Working Vote was always considered prohibitively expensive.  Again, despite what everybody SAYS the truth is that actually nobody really wants to win with Great Landslide Majorities, even if they would brag about them, because it is important to have a lot of Losers because it is the Losers who are expected to Pay all the Bills.  In a Democracy where everybody Wins, nobody Wins.

 

(16) But, okay, if you absolutely had to pander to the poor to get over that 51% hurdle, well, could there still be a way to not give them anything for their vote, you know, to cheat them so they might not notice?   Great minds would be tried in finding ways to have the poor vote without regard to their financial interests.  Up through the 19th Century the University Departments of Psychology, Anthropology, Sociology, and Cultural History were still in their infancy and so the politicians really did see Political Will almost entirely in terms of financial self interest and Class Interest.  We can see how dated is the thinking of many modern Leftists when we hear the way they still think "Class" is so central, parroting their idol Marx who was only ignorant because he came before all the New Disciplines flourished up in our Universities.  But our Modern Leftists are ignorant because they chose to actively ignore all the current state of the art scientifically derived Understandings of the Universe and our Human Condition. 

 

(17)But, yes,  the 20th Century brought New Knowledge and New Knowledge brought New Power.  the Working Class would lose much of its  economic leverage in terms of Economic Self Interest because it would be found that the Poor and Marginally Educated could be persuaded to surrender their votes for a variety of other far less expensive causes. Yes, the Great Unwashed Poor were in fact Human Beings and Human Beings really not much better than Animals and the less educated they were, the less religious they were, and the less well read they were, well, all of that would be putting them closer and closer to the Hobbsian Pure State of Nature, wouldn't it?   Well, what could Political Operatives do to manipulate men in this Natural State?  That is a question that opened up a veritable Pandora's Box.    

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