There is a lot of confusion around the concept of Democracy. People use the term when they mean all sorts of different, often contradictory things. Again, I would like to be very upfront about where I stand in regards to actual democracy, by which I mean demotic governance structures in a technical sense, as well as “place holder” democracy, which is the Occidental tendency to use the term as a catchall for whatever we expect the noble savages to adopt after we cease carpet bombing them with JADAMs or pornography or NGO/Nonprofit soft power shock troops: it is an intentional deceit intended to keep the vast majority of thinking people pliable to the occupation regime, be it in DC, Detroit, or Dublin. I strongly assert that both conceptual and practical Liberal Democracy, regardless of the success level of implementation, is a maskirovka1 behind which a coordinated managerial elite keep unworthy and incompetent bureaucrats in power. It sucks, I hate it, and I want it to go away2.
Because it is often the case that good and reasonable men of sound mind and expansive intellect maintain the delusion that demotic governance structures can work in perpetuity if built and maintained properly, I would like to explore the concept of demotic governance a little more deeply because it is my contention that they will always result in the pile of lies that is Liberal Democracy, regardless of how they are started or maintained.
The popular perception is that the Greeks invented democracy, similar to how many believe Adam Smith invented capitalism or Karl Marx invented communism. All three of these memeplexes are inevitable artifacts that occur naturally from iterative communal experience. That is, they are properties of Society3 that just happen on their own, meaning they are "emergent." There are lots of different names and facets to them, and it's best to think of them as tentacular horrors beyond your comprehension that can do both useful and terrible things. The point is, you will never get rid of the tendency towards demotic structures, just as communism isn't going anywhere, no matter how many helicopter Groupons get handed out. Likewise, capitalism is a word fabricated by leftist retards to disparage the body of actions and habits that are necessary for wealth creation. You could kill all the communists4 or all of the capitalists and within a generation, they would be back in some small way because, again, it is an artifact of society. They inevitable emergent phenomena arising from human proclivities and reactions. But I have actually conflated demotism with the other two to make a point. It is more precisely correct to say that the demotic impulse is one of a cluster of responses to a repeated and persistent situation that endlessly arises.
Picture yourself as a caveman. You have a cave-woman that feeds your cave-kids. You have fellow cavemen who are all your cousins or siblings. You are most likely pre-lingual, because the most important things5 about your existence are givens. Your limited vocabulary is pointed almost entirely at describing terrain where you saw prey or artifacts of climate that you have been taught imply the expectation of atypical6 weather. One day, while you are doing caveman stuff, a bunch of jerks come running up from the valley to kill you and take your stuff. If there are more of them then you, the most likely outcome is the end of your tribe. The fact that they surprised you does play a factor in the outcome, and the fact that they are a group of cavemen on a cave-mission while you are a group of cavepeople in a state of cave-relaxation plays a factor. If you want to keep your cave-stuff, you must fight for it. If you want to survive and win, you must fight together. If you want to enjoy your stuff after the attack, you must come through the fight intact. All of these, and many others, are factors of WAR.
War is the father of us all. This is not some silly confabulation demanding we worship war as a god or something, it is just a very simple memetic package that delivers the necessary payload that war is upstream of everything in society and modernity. Every single thing7. War is the conduit by which the Potential becomes the Actual. When you accept this, you can see the fingerprints of war, warfare, and war-like thinking on everything in modern society. This is mostly a good thing, but I am a founding stock American that's heavily white identified so I cannot fathom, nor do I care to countenance, cry babies that don't like war or violence being pervasive elements of society. It doesn't mean that the traditional approach filtered through a war-like lens is always the best approach, it's just usually the best approach, with “best” meaning some combination of easiest and most likely to succeed.
When we look at modern politics, we see the terms and concepts of warfare sprinkled all over it, like campaign and contest and resources, but it's more than a terminological connection, it is a DNA layer connection. The whole thing is not only treated as a type of warfare, it is literally a proxy for warfare. We remember the Greeks for their democracy, but I'm willing to put $100,000 of Peter Thiel's money on a bet that there were multiple instances prior to the Greek Example. We don't know about them because it's a really dumb idea unless you have the right culture and genetics to go along with it8. The concept of democracy, from the perspective of a primitive and war-like society is completely laughable. That would be like getting caught in a gunfight, and then asking the person who's coming to kill you to count how many bullets they have, and you count how many bullets you have, and whoever has more bullets will just be the winner of the gunfight according to everyone, and then act like they did actually win the gunfight in literally everything afterwards. You would die with their laughter ringing in your ears.
But what if you had this discussion before the gun fight started? What if, when you sensed trouble between you and whichever ne'er-do-well we are using in this example, you set up a meeting and sat down to talk? If you're sitting in a nice wood paneled study with a crackling fire in the hearth and a purr emanating from the languid cat sitting on your armrest, you might be significantly more inclined to consider the “bullet counting” option. There is actually a lot to recommend it when you are amongst men who understand your way of thinking, who have gone through similar experiences, and who want similar things because you and they can fathom the cost of the perpetual contest for territorial & resource control. You may also see how making concessions in one area gives you options and opportunities in another area if the “bullet counting” system becomes regularized.
This is the one simple trick of democracy: It allows you to gamify the war. It allows you to walk through the battle without having the actual battle. It is a fascinating way of keeping people alive and things unbroken while still changing sociopolitical dynamics, introducing innovations, or fighting down bad ideas. But the only way it can work is if the people sitting fireside are all on the same page. What destroyed Greek democracy, what destroys every democracy, is the extension of the franchise to people who cannot or will not understand what is actually at stake. This is why the franchise is always restricted at the beginning of every demotist configuration9. It is not because evil white men like to demean women or coloreds or foreigners, rather it is because those elements of society have no bearing on warfare from the warrior’s perspective. You can try to construct some frame that, because women sew or because slaves carried stuff or because migrants exist, they deserve to be counted as part of the army, but the fact remains that in most cases the slaves and the womenfolk get folded into the army that comes along and beats the army they were previously associated with, and the migrants just wander off to the next society dumb enough to allow unfettered ingress by foreigners. If you don't get executed at the end of the battle, or hounded to the ends of the earth, you probably weren't part of the army. Spoils of war are not soldiers.
So we run into two substantial issues with the neat and clean democracy hack:
The franchise has to be restricted to the people who are perfectly able to fight otherwise, but fully understand that we are collectively deciding not to
It must always be remembered and understood that democracy is the peaceful option, the opposite of the conflict option
In most of my thinking, I tend to focus on the first one, the restriction of the franchise, but as I've gotten older, I am starting to think it's actually the second one that is the larger problem with modern demotic structures. When people start thinking that the political process is an actual battle, they start doing something that is very human: permit themselves endless justifications using tainted rationality for doing awful things via doubtful methods to achieve questionable outcomes. If we are back with the cavemen on the side of the hill fighting for their very existence, or if you're in a trench somewhere, or if you're in the map room getting 5 minute updates of the seed corn of your ethnos being burned to cinders on the front lines, you will also start permitting yourself endless justifications in this fashion, and you should if you want to win against long odds. Transporting this tendency to every election, regardless of what’s at stake is a recipe for elevating the worst of society to the highest of positions and making terrible methods permanent.
If you are an actual American, and an intelligent human that is aware of What Time It Is, you have struggled with the fact that “Democracy within a Republic” is no longer viable for our country. You have probably tried to think of ways to make it work, whether it is paper ballots or restricting the franchise or any other thing10. This is another very natural human tendency: desperately holding onto the things you love even when you know they are gone. It would be foolish to say this is dumb, even though we all know it is, because we all do it no matter how dumb it is. But persistent dumbness of any type cannot be tolerated in the ruling elite; to be an elite in power means you sacrifice some aspect of your normality and humanity11. If you want a democracy to actually work, then it must be the case that if you are physically , emotionally, or spiritually unfit for actual battle, you don't get to participate in the franchise. That is the only way the system can work without becoming a process by which certain factions of elites bribe everybody in the system to get predictable outcomes in their personal favor.
Officially unofficial bribery is precisely what democracy inevitably evolves into when you take it out of the hands of the people with the guns under the table. This is because it will always turn into who can bring more bodies to the voting booths, which turns into who can bring more dollars to the ones coordinating the bodies going to the booths, which turns into what institutions can maintain the status quo of the dollar coordinators in charge of the people who bring more bodies to the voting booths. At some point both the bodies and the voting booths become impediments to the whole system, and you start getting bureaucrats and technocrats and journalists overpaid morons with undeserved social cache coming up with complicated reasons and rationales for why those things need to go away. This is where we find ourselves in 2024. Anyone who has a political science degree from before 2019 should know that mail-in voting represents not only the highest potential for voter fraud, but in most cases it is the main vector by which modern elections are stolen. There are any number of complicated and/or complex schemes or plots that would require deep conspiracies, but mail-in voting is so easy, Sub-Saharan warlords can do it.
When the franchise is universally extended, it is an inevitable race to the bottom. Certain countries get to that bottom faster because their founding stock is more inclined to cut corners or be comfortable with bribes or live in squalor and pretend it's a Utopia12, but it is the inevitable end of all demotic structures that the in-power elite will offer baubles on the National Holiday of the Sacred Vote to the citizens for their holy participation in the theatrical casting of pebbles into the Right Side of History jar. You can see this in real time in Brazilian elections if you need a concrete example. One party will announce they are giving out a new microwave to “the good guys,” so the other party will announce they are giving out a toaster oven, and then the popularity of the items becomes the actual contest. What started as a political contest to decide who was going to be given temporary leadership over society has turned into a competition between consultants and advisors to see who has the better network of connections to the decision makers within a bureaucratic apparatus pointed at running campaigns, facilitating elections, selling appliances, and rubber stamping “legality.” Entropy is thy god13.
The early American founders were well aware of how asinine the concept of democracy was. Political parties was actually illegal in lots of places initially, and totally taboo in all places after the US Constitution went into effect14. There was a window of time where elections were these rowdy things that could very well become actual battles, indeed in some cases they did, because popularity and attendance by the enfranchised couldn’t be guaranteed. In a local election in Philadelphia, in the 1790s if I recall correctly, some politician or political agent decided they were going to play the dirty card and, using surreptitious means, coordinated what was in all actuality a political party. This managed to upset the incumbent and generally caused chaos across the city. From that point forward, political parties in American politics spread like a virus. Once one side deploys parties, you either have to mirror the choice or you will be destroyed15.
Political parties collect the individual shards of power16 in a demotic structure and forge a rough hewn crystalline lump for someone to carry around and threaten people with, temporarily. Imagine every enfranchised person has a little crystal the size of a grain of sand. This is the shard of political power. There is not much you can do with a grain of sand all on its own. Millions of grains can be used in a sandblaster to ablate pretty much anything. If you accelerate them up to a few percentages of the speed of light, you can punch holes in pretty much anything. If you can make them radioactive, you can alter physical reality directly and disproportionately. On their own, the individual grains of sand mean practically nothing.
How many people do you think it might take for you personally to do any of the things I mentioned with sand, metaphorically speaking? If you want to destroy something manually, you would have to collect hundreds of thousands of people with the sandblaster method. If you wanted to turn a few people into radioactive individuals you would need access to powerful and rare methods to initiate the metamorphosis. And if you want to use those grains of sand to punch holes, you need some way to “accelerate” them. I think this metaphor works very well describing how political power works within a demotic system. Notice that the agents of the Democracy Artifice inculcate the delusion that the most important thing a citizen can have is “their vote” from a very early age and in perpetuity. If you get involved in actual politics, by which I mean volunteer for a political campaign and go past the door-to-door efforts or other make-work positions17, you will be bombarded with commentary about how voters are stupid, votes don’t really matter, it’s actually a good thing that candidates say the opposite of what they mean, and the people involved in the “political process” as operators are actually the best people for the task. This is ubiquitous across parties and at every level. Don’t take my word for it, go look at this abomination for yourself.
Political parties, and the subsequent bribery, are the inevitable destination for all demotic structures because it’s the culmination of a thousand little contests for efficiency and efficacy within the arbitrary confines of the artifice. When you shatter power into that many pieces, the only way it becomes valuable is in the aggregate18. While the popular rhetoric may extol the virtues of “one person, one vote” or “everybody is a part of the process,” the reality is that only the people who can gather the shards into usable clumps have any real agency. Because all human systems are now mechanisms that use money for fuel, bribery is inevitable. This is what influence peddling, lobbying, gerrymandering, campaigning, all of the critical “-ings,” are about. It’s a swampy mess of actual struggles for influence with arbitrary challenges to the fabricated process of “wining the votes.”
And this is a feature, not a bug. This is always the goal, because no “fox” long tolerates control by “lions.” Once the State of War is suspended, the Priests and Merchants chafe under the dominance of Warriors, and “democracy” is the perfect trojan horse for toppling their rulership19. It is introduced as a method for warriors to rule without grievous losses, and once it “works” for a bit the advocacy for extending the franchise begins, and it does not end until every bit of actual power has been made unusable by anyone but the chosen few of priestly managers of power.
маскировка - the use of various deceptions and denials to mask true intentions
Here is another piece that focuses on the deceitful aspect of Liberal Democracy with a bit more granularity:
Another term beset by confusion, misuse, and abuse. Society is applied human coordination. It is the creche of creation, the wellspring of flourishing, and the pearl of great price; worth dying for, worth killing for, even worth surrendering for. Civilization is only possible through Society, and Civilization is the highest collective morality on the material plane.
Yes face in profile
Things like “nationalism” or “why Ukraine isn't a real country” or “why feminism is plot between betas & spinsters to overthrow Chad and ruin Stacy” aren't relevant to your Need Hierarchy.
D A N G E R O U S
This is why the idea that we could live in some kind of pacifistic and modern structured society is so laughably stupid.
Selective Breeding and the Birth of Philosophy is a very interesting book. mayb u reed
It is never logical to seek everyone’s opinion when an important decision needs to be made. It is best to have one man make the decision if haste is the primary goal, and it is best to have a small group of the most capable men make the decision if holistic success is the primary goal. The only time you would ever want everyone’s opinion is if the primary goal was to never have the decision get made.
A giant wall made of synthetic diamond and open to the public at all times; a unique device purpose built to etch tally marks that represent the recorded votes, moving along like the dune crawler from Star Wars (RIP); a large wall in DC for federal elections, walls in each state capital, walls at the townhalls; the tallies are just slightly larger than microscopic; every election can be audited forever.
I have zero sympathy for the women in pants suits who cling to this idea that because it's been multiple generations of using ballots over bullets we have to pretend they are “warrior equivalents.” Women have no place in war, so of course they have no place in politics. War and Politics are the same thing by different means, so If you acknowledge that women don't belong in one, you have to accept that they don't belong in the other. And before the eggless spinsters reading this at the NSA get into a tizzy, the same applies to at least 70% of all males.
Or unavoidable. When I first courted the concept of future disaster, my greatest skepticism arose from an inability to imagine the “serious people” that I thought were somewhere out there making decisions and doing things and being serious. Surely they would not bear witness to more red flags than a teacher’s union townhall and just… let everything fall apart. Once people forget what “good” tastes like, they get comfortable with the thought that everything has always been “bad.”
This is a diversion, but I think it’s a very nice illustration of how progressivism/liberalism/socialism is just chaos dressed up in policy & process. People seem to have a hard time recognizing entropy if there aren’t burning barrels and stray dogs tearing at corpses. We have a simple and robust method that gets horribly mangled by the forces of intentional entropy: “hold an election to decide between 2 candidates” becomes “create a sprawling process of part- and full-time employment for an ever escalating number of friends, allies, and dependents that forces elaborate constructions of polls, rallies, product placement agreements, tabloid warfare, and fabricated energy.” It may not seem like it, but this is entropy, and it’s bad for our grandkids.
America has always been ruled by cults of personality
Assuming you keep playing Democracy: the Super Serious Game. If you get up from the table and walk away, well…
I have been working on a Theory of Political Power for a long time. I think I'll have something worth reading in a few more decades. Stay tuned.
Political campaigns are like Hollywood films, rock festivals, disaster relief efforts, and every other coordinated, terminal, event-based human endeavor: they have their own little cultural hierarchies, their own jargon, the whole panoply of rationalizations for why the bad stuff they do is necessary, and, most importantly, why their personal role is so small they can’t possibly be held responsible for the consequences they directly contribute to.
my pun game is on a level you cannot fathom
Priest==Fox; Warrior==Lion; Merchant==Pig
At some point the war will be won, and you will need to gamify it again lest you tear the division of labour asunder every decade or so. All this emerged for a purpose, and we should not lose sight of it. There's only so many 1848s (or Reformations, etc) a society can take.
Next time, I propose The Game of War v 2.0: he shall vote who shall subject himself to and survive a game of Russian Roulette with 1% chance of death.
Great piece. I lived, a long time ago now, in South Africa. I didn't have 'the Vote' there. Nor did the vast majority of the population. This led me to believe that having the Vote was a Great Thing. After all, suffragettes got all bloodied up by race horses and shit. People were prepared to die for the right.
And that's kind of the thing really: anything worth dying for has to be something that you can keep, or that no one can take away from you. That seems to me what your extended Caveman metaphor very capably demonstrates.
I regret to say it took me another thirty years of voting (in a different country, that one where the Bank Of England is based) before I finally wised up to how I was being bullshitted. I still turn up to polling station because I suppose I feel I owe it to the suffragettes and the Nelson Mandelas, but that Holy Narrative is wearing thin too.
I am long past fighting age and I agree: that means I have no real right to a say in anything much. If someone comes along to relieve me of my Cave Stuff, fuck it, let 'em ;-)