Tag Archives: democracy

Zelensky Won’t Accept A Luhansk Vote to Join Russia

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Reuters reports:

LONDON, March 27 (Reuters) – The Russian-backed eastern Ukrainian rebel region of Luhansk said on Sunday it may hold a referendum on joining Russia, drawing a warning from Kyiv that any such vote would have no legal basis and trigger a stronger international response.

Zelensky, the heroic defender of the people, according to Western propaganda, states here plainly that he would refuse to recognize a popular vote to decide if the separatist regions should join Russia or not.

A vote in favor of Russia would be “fake,” for some reason. So much for Ukrainian democracy.

Rudolf Steiner On Why Plutocrats Love Democracy

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“It is interesting that the excellent statement was made in 1910 [by Francis Delaisi, La Démocratie et les Financiers, 1910]: ‘… that big capital has succeeded in creating out of democracy the most wonderful, the most effective, the most flexible instrument for the exploitation of the population as a whole. Continue reading →

Manmohan Singh Needs to Emphasize Discipline, Not Blame Democracy

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C. Gopinath, writing in The Hindu, blows away the notion that democracy can be blamed for slow decision-making and bureaucratic delays in India:

“It is easier for Dr Manmohan Singh’s to admit that we have bottlenecks in areas of roads, power and ports. Everybody knows that. It is also easy to blame democracy, for that is something we are not going to give up. The unintended message, unfortunately, is that we have to put up with these inefficiencies.

Other observers have chimed in, talking about a democracy tax or a discount due to democracy. The real problem is that we lack the work ethic that should drive us to excellence. Instead, the dominant ethic seems to be that the individual should do whatever it takes to get ahead, and forget about the rest of society. Look at the way we treat garbage (keep the house clean and dump the trash outside), drive on the road violating rules just so we are ahead, and so on.

Statesmen should not be finding excuses for lapses but challenging the people to new heights. The former President, Mr Abdul Kalam, continues to do a great job inspiring people with his vision for a prosperous future.

If Dr Manmohan Singh is looking for a theme on which to build his legacy, he should pick discipline. Nobody seems to be paying attention to it.”

Hans Hoppe on Citizens as Public Property

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Lew Rockwell cites some arresting insights from Hans Hoppe on the Constitution and on the ultimate nature of democracy and the total state:

“History bears this out. Hoppe dates the onset of modern democracy to World War I and following, and he has scandalized many by calling the U.S., the Soviet Union, and Nazi Germany all democracies, but he means this in his special sense: the people neither own themselves nor are owned by anyone. The citizens are public property and are said to all participate in their own governance understood as an elected executive state. This was a modern form of government that displaced the old form – and it goes a long way towards explaining the advent of total war and the total state.”

The Tytler Cycle

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“The average age of the world’s greatest democratic nations has been 200 years. Each has been through the following sequence: From bondage to spiritual faith. From faith to great courage. From courage to liberty. From liberty to abundance. From abundance to complacency. From complacency to selfishness. From selfishness to apathy. From apathy to dependency. And from dependency back again into bondage.”

— Alexander Tytler on the cycles of government

[Correction: I’m getting feedback that this quote exists in different versions and may not actually be from Tytler or may be attributed to him while being a pastiche from other individuals partly or wholely. No time to verify now, will be back later on this. My fault. I didn’t think to google it, as I’ve seen it quoted so extensively].

My Comment

Tytler misses a link here. Apathy leads to cowardice and then cowardice to.
dependency. Courage is a primary spiritual virtue – it’s part of effort or action.
You don’t have anything without courage. In religious teaching the opposite of love is never posited as hate, but fear.

Fear is the source of practically every evil that comes upon us. Selfishness stems from fear. Greed stems from fear….

We have become sheep because of fear.

That’s why I’m interested in trauma in childhood. That’s where we first learn fear and learn to hold it in rigid patterns in our bodies and minds. [Thanks to Kevin Duffy for the quote from Tytler]

Update: In response to a comment, I thought I’d add this here:

Most cyclical theories are simplistic in their broad outlines, but they’re useful when you look at them from a meta-theoretical level
By metatheory I mean the overarching narrative in which they are placed – i.e., what does the schematization of the theory say about the way that particular person or age reads history…

There’s Vico –  Age of God, Age of Heroes, Age of Men.
There’s the Greek republic-democracy-tyranny
There are the mahayugas and yugas (great ages) in the Hindu cycles (which are cosmic, not political)

Ravi Batra, who was the first economist to write extensively about a coming great depression (late 1980s), I believe, has a new book out which includes his cycles – he has an age of acquisitors followed by an age of intellectuals (I forget the exact name) and then a golden age..and I think it’s based on the varna (caste) system – which originally was not socially pernicious.

Correction: Robert Prechter predicted a coming great depression early on, as well. I’ll verify the dates….

On the Need for Wisdom in Politics

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A useful description of the importance of prudence or wisdom (sophia) rather than theory or formal education in statesmanship:

Following a discussion of virtue as a mean between extremes, Aristotle attributes to concrete action a higher degree of truth than to general principles of ethics.

The mark “of a man with high moral standards is his ability to see the truth in each particular moral question, since he is … the standard and measure for such questions.” (20) Ethics in politics, then, is not merely announcing moral postulates or retreating before the complexities of the world.

What matters, said Voegelin, are

not correct principles about what is right by nature in an immutable generality, nor the acute consciousness of the tension between the immutable truth and its mutable application (possibly even with tragic overtones), but the changeability, the kineton itself, and the methods to lift it to the reality of truth. The truth of existence is attained when it becomes concrete, i.e., in action. (21)

In classical and Christian ethics, the first of the moral virtues is sophia or prudentia because without adequate understanding of the structure of reality, including the conditio humana, moral action with rational coordination of means and ends is impossible. (22)

Voegelin’s characterization of the spoudaios (who sees the “truth in concrete things”) carries an important moral message for the democratic statesman. No amount of single tangible facts imparted through education can substitute for the type of experience that pushes great men to the limits of their human possibilities. The knowledge of the statesman grows out of the eternal laws by which man moves in the social world. The validity of those laws, the Aristotelian truth that man is a political animal, does not derive from “objective” facts in conformity with the mathematizing models of the natural sciences. The key to those laws of man lies in the practical wisdom through which the statesman elevates his experiences into universal laws of human nature. (23)”

— “Eric Voegelin and Reinhold Niebuhr on the Moral Resources of Democracy,” Greg Russell in Modern Age, Sep 22, 2006