Lesson 6

Democracy is Dreadful

Plato divided all human governments into three kinds: Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy. He judged democracy to be the least desirable. Plato taught that democracies degenerate into tyranny. He thought that the very best government was theocracy, but he considered that to be impossible. Plato was not a Christian. The Good News of God's Kindgom had not yet been proclaimed to the Greeks. See if you can guess who said this:

Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have every been found incompatible with personal security and the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.

This means that democracy is bad. Who do you think said this? Was it European royalty, a king or and aristocrat, someone with an interest in seeing the American idea of government fail? Or maybe a communist or anarchist? Actually, these are the words of the fourth president of the United States, James Madison . How could Madison, knowing the truth about democracy, support it and take part in it? One possible reason is found in the compact system of government. Membership in the state was understood to be voluntary. Did any of us ever have an opportunity to volunteer to be citizens of the state? Were we ever informed that we had a choice in the matter of obedience to human law? Keep in mind a distinction was made between human law and divine law. Only the former was subject to consent.

Today, the American legal system doesn't even recognize divine law. There is only human law which covers everything from murder to buckling your seatbelts. The idea of voluntary social compact between free and equal men living under God's rule has been replaced. Democracy was known to be oppressive and dangerous. If understood to be voluntary its many short-comings are of no consequence. It is a suitable association for free me. But compulsory democracy is suitable only for tyrants and their slavish subjects, for those who have lost the concept of freedom and equality.

Alexis de Tocqueville was a Frenchman who visited America in the mid-1800's and made a few interesting observations about democracy:

"The public, therefore, among democratic people, has a singular power, which aristocratic nations cannot conceive; for it does not persuade others to its beliefs, but it imposes them and makes them permeate the thinking of everyone by sort of enormous pressure of the mind of all upon the individual intelligence.

The intellectual dominion of the greater number would probably be less absolute among a democratic people governed by a king than in the sphere of a pure democracy, but it will always be extremely absolute; and by whatever political laws men are governed in the ages of equality, it may be foreseen that faith in public opinion will become for them a species of religion, and the majority its ministering prophet.

And I perceive how,under the dominion of certain laws, democracy would extinguish that liberty of the mind to which a democratic social condition is favorable; so that, after having broken all the bondage once imposed on it by ranks or by men, the human mind would be closely fettered to the general will of the greatest number.

If the absolute power of a majority were to be substituted by democratic nations for all the different powers that checked or retarded over much the energy of individual minds, the evil would only have changed character. Men would not have found the means of independent life; they would simply have discovered (no easy task) a new physiognomy of servitude. There is, and I cannot repeat it too often, there is here matter of profound reflection to those who look on freedom of thought as a holy thing and who hate not only the despot, but despotism. For myself, when I feel the hand of power lie heavy on my brow, I care but little to know who oppresses me; and I am not the more disposed to pass beneath the yoke because it is held out to me by the arms of a million men.

Those certain laws closely fettering the mind have been in place now for three generations. The chains of servitude which have bound us to the will of the majority were forged in the public classroom. In Lesson 5 it has been shown that indoctrination in America has become common place. Existing below the level of conscious perception, this long standing program of thought control would be righteously denied by most grown-ups. Yet, for one centralized government to extend its control effectively over a vast land area inhabited by people from diverse cultural, racial, religious, and political backgrounds, there must be a uniformity in fundamental presuppositions and loyalties. Without this uniformity of thought nation-states cannot exist. Indeed, thought is the substance of their existence.

In order for democracy to work it demands unquestioning faith in the majority from its adherents. Demos is the supreme being of the American civil religion, democracy.

Some grown-ups are fond of saying that America's government is a republic not a democracy. This is not true. God is America's King. Republic is just another word for the state. Another Frenchman, Jean Bodin, believed that men should be ruled by kings. So, just before 1600 he made up the word sovereignty and wrote a book about it to help humbugs control people's thinking. He said:

"The state, the republic, is a lawful government of the several households composing it. The state arises when each head of a household, each pater familias, acts in concert with the others... At the head of this group of house-holds is the sovereign (the king), the administrator of the republic, whose task is the proper government of the households composing the state."

The, in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, , Macmillan, Volume 1, page 326, we learn:

Bodin's whole political philosophy rests on the doctrine of sovereignty. Sovereignty is defined in the Republic as '...the absolute and perpetual power of a Republic, that is to say the active form and personification of the great body of a modern State.'

Find America's present government on the spectrum. Find Bodin.

Man's Rule (Democracy/Monarchy) (Republic/State)

God's Rule (Theocracy) (No State)

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