Hope and Democracy? I s**t on Hope and Democracy (redux)

All things considered, nowhere near as formidable as some principles backed by a dash of bloody-mindedness

There's a post over at Craig Murray's blog which has a stab at a reasonable summary of the current plight of the UK and which ends with the line 'I see no hope'

A moderately interesting discussion ensued in the comments underneath, on the subject of the impending national implosion and the nature of hope and democracy.

That was until Craig's devoted trolls got stuck in and people started calling each other c*nts

Personally, I've maintained for a long time now that, just on a mathematical basis alone, the UK is economically and therefore probably socially fucked for a fair while into the future.

Whilst, on the face of it, that's a pretty pessimistic point of view, I'd argue that living through some kind of unpleasantness is the only way the majority of people will realise that they've allowed the significance of their own lives to be devalued in exchange for some cheap junk, both physical or psycological

So, I believe that there's a good chance that 'things' will eventually get better but only after some serious interim grief

But this 'hope' thing?

People who need hope to get by run the very considerable risk of losing it

Should someone only do what they believe to be the Right Thing if they expect success at the end of it?

Or should they do it because they believe it is the Right Thing to do?

I'm all for picking my battles and only getting into fights that I expect to win, at an acceptable cost. That's on one level. On a higher level, if you think in terms of a war that you believe to be worth fighting, rather than the individual battles which make up a war, the fight justifies itself, regardless of the expected outcome. As long as you've been true to yourself and done the best that you can, hope doesn't come into it

If the analogy with warfare seems too melodramatic, think about commercial pilots flying stricken aircraft. If you've ever heard a crash tape there is something uniquely spooky about doomed aircrew working through their recovery routines right up to the moment their plane hits the ground. But however unnatural that behaviour might seem to be, would you rather, as a passenger, have people who behave like that up front or the kind of people who'd take time out on the way down to say, or think, 'gosh, I hope we don't crash'

Bollocks to hope

Spivs like this are in the hope-peddling business...




They are also in the democracy-peddling business

There's a lot of discussion in the Conspirasphere about the nature of, and possible replacements for, the existing money system

There's a lot less discussion about political systems

Which is understandable, given the way that such crucial subjects as economics and civics are misrepresented in our schools

We've all got a lot of catching up to do, and the money thing has been uppermost in most people's minds, but the political system is actually more important as it dictates who controls the money supply

The prevailing narrative goes that democracy is the least worst system available to us and, with the fall of communism, there are no viable alternatives on the table

Cobblers

A little while back, I was supervising a group of young kids; four girls and three boys. They were working on a project that required a series of decisions to be made. And it didn't take too long for the girls to decide that the best way to reach those decisions was on the basis of a majority vote, which they called for regularly. I enjoyed the comedy frustration of the boys for a little while before imposing a somewhat less democratic system of government

Without some constitutional basis which lays down invariable principles, democracy is open to becoming the tyranny of the majority over the minority. Or in the case of most British parliaments in recent years, the minority over the majority

And the mob is very easily bought off with some bread, a few circuses and a dash of cynical fear-mongering

Democracy, fuck yeah!

Plutocrats absolutely love unconstrained democracy. That's why they've got soldiers forcing it on people at gunpoint around the world

It's worth remembering, as many Conspiraloons already appreciate, that the founding fathers of the USA set it up as a Constitutional Republic, not a Democracy, and they thought things through long and hard before doing so.

Admittedly, many of the founding fathers were genocidal slave owners but, perversely, they do appear to have created a system which had the potential to work against their own class interest.

This is not normal, was probably not wholly intentional, and is unlikely to be repeated on a regular basis

Now, here's the tricky question

How do you impose a set of fundamental principles on a society which establish the rights of the individual and minority groups in such a way that they cannot subsequently be removed by the 'democratic' majority?

How do you do that in a democratic way?

And what's to stop the plutocrats imposing their own, deliberately flawed, set of allegedly fundamental principles?

I only mention this because I suspect it might become an issue at some point in the not too super distant future

.