No links to buy my books today, no fun pun title, not even any wutio nor whinging about being suicidal. No, this post is purely dedicated to the communication of one idea, namely that democracy is wrong.

In the interests of making that communication as successful as possible, ie. avoiding being drowned in a tsunami of hysterical rhetoric and bile, I'll start by laying out a few caveats.

Seems to me that since we stopped being a race of individual animals and stepped up to become inherently interconnected through abstract thought and communication, that our social structures have moved, slowly and overall, in one direction.

As we've gradually got to grips with our communicative abilities we've slowly moved away from the fascist dictatorships of religious and / or aristocratic rule, communism and / or military tyrants.

The elite at the top, the lucky few who have the knowledge and the skills, has swollen over time to include more and more of society. Now I freely admit that democracy may well be an entirely necessary step along this road.

It's the first instance where there is, in theory at least, a genuine attempt to allow people to govern themselves. One of the main problems with democracy however, is actually a much wider sickness, infecting many areas of our current culture.

I've written about end time thinking before, usually referring to capitalism. This is the notion that we are at the end of history, that we have arrived and that the systems we have today are final and everlasting.

The notion, somehow universally accepted within the mainstream, is that capitalism and democracy are not perfect but that they are the only possible ways of running our lives.

Six billion people, millennia after millennia past and more to come, and somehow we think there's just one single idea, one path only. Madness, utter madness.

So the initial proposal here is not that democracy is 100% evil, or that parliaments should be burned in favour of silly hats, but rather that our journey is not over.

There are still great and unimagined things over the horizon and if we ever wish to reach them we must keep pushing. It is my belief that democracy has several inherent and terminal flaws which should serve to drive us toward the next step on our journey.

What follows are descriptions of three major failings of democracy as a political system, real life examples to demonstrate the problems and then proposed solutions.

It should be noted that the solutions as posed are not practical suggestions of how to fix democracy today, but rather abstract ideas of how society would need to be for that problem not to be an issue.

Each of these solutions focusses solely on the ways on which the eligible voting population would need to be different. the reason for this is that, by definition, the burden of validity for democratic system lies with the people.

If such a political system is overrun with scumbags and tricksters, perverting it to their own ends and those of their friends, it is only because the voter in the street has given them the power to do so.

So here's the first of your three:

MOTIVATION

problem

It's important to note that none of this is about individuals. We're talking about democracy in the context of the human race and all of humanity's past and future. The nature of the system is on trial here and over such scale the personal intentions of individuals are evened out to become irrelevant.

No matter whether a prospective politician wishes to make the world a better place or line his pockets the question of motivation is the same. Neither wannabe MP can achieve anything without actually being in power.

Getting, and remaining, elected therefore must always be the single overriding concern of any politician.Whatever is required to stay in power, even if it is directly opposed to their core beliefs, must be done for the greater good.

example

I have long had serious doubts about democracy, ever since attending my local MP's surgery at age 18 and being sickeningly patronised, but it's the last year or so of working in local government (1) that has finally driven me to reject it utterly.

A common example of elected officials putting votes before anything and anyone else is when local councillors become involved in complaints from tenants.

Pretty much without fail the councillor will demand that some course of action be undertaken to appease the aggrieved tenant that will come at the expense of dozens of other tenants.

Nor is it uncommon that councillors insist that, when informing the tenant of the special treatment they are to receive, we make it absolutely clear that they are only being favoured due to the intervention of their current or would-be councillor.

At face value this seems counter productive as the councillor is actually reducing the level of service delivered to most voting council tenants.

This service failure however is too removed from the councillor's intervention for the two to ever be connected and the tenant's taking a back seat are left to assume that the council as a whole is simply failing them.

Of course this actually allows the councillor to tout for their vote too by promising to improve the situation they helped create!

I encounter the culture of 'look-after-my-mate-so-he'll-vote-for-me-and-fuck-everyone-else' on a regular basis, usually from councillors as there are a lot more of them about, but occasionally from MPs as well.

solution

As outlined above we can't really blame the elected for acting like this. They may have grand and noble plans to make the world a better place but if they don't keep the voters sweet they'll never be anything more than plans.

So what fundamental switch could we flick, what basic change could we make to our population to remove this stain from democracy's holy character?

Well if our population were, as a whole, informed and engaged; if we, en mass, understood the realities of running a country and appreciated that good things take time and commitment, then politicians would be given the room to devise and implement genuinely robust policies.

Also, those politicians who make their way solely by greasing hands would be recognised as the conmen they are and promptly ousted. Only those presenting practical, feasible solutions to our problems would be given positions of dominion over us.

More tomorrow...

footnote

(1) I work as an Assistant Information Officer in the Repairs & Maintenance Team of one of the Leeds City Council ALMOs responsible for managing social housing.