All ye dreamers,
Democracy, someone said, is that form of government in which everyone
has to put up with what the majority deserves.
Where it has failed, people call it Mobocrazy - rule of the mobs.
Is it the most moral form of government ? It would be so if the most
moral people are elected. Apperently, instead of the most moral, the
most manipulative, and in some places the most corrupt people are the
only choices that face the electorate. Even in the most successful
democracies there is only the choice between tweedledee and tweedledum.
The strength of these democracies comes not from the electoral process
but from the accountability institutions and from a free press.
In all democracies, money, ambition , influence, popularity, good looks,
debating skills, and gimmicks are the norm for reaching the highest office.
And upon assuming office the "supporters" demand their pound of flesh.
A cycle of corruption builds up.It spreads to the institutions.
Slow or fast, the system heads towards a functioning anarchy and
when it comes to the crunch - its everyman for himself or join a
mob - skinheads , brownshirts , brownshorts - the choice is yours.
A poet-warrior once proclaimed to his fellow warriors:
'The Incorruptible (Moral) will eventually rule ! '
Hasn't happened that way.
So how do the most moral people reach the top of the political ladder?
They dont. They dont want to. A moral person by definition is one
who is free from ambition , greed and fear. One who seeks DQ. And DQ
is available only to those who have stripped themselves naked of all
baggage - of all ambition.
A political paradox. The only resolution of this paradox is when moral
people are FORCED to undertake this task. Forced by whom ? By the lesser
morals ? A circle within a descending spiral.
Some societies resolved this paradox by a twin headed system :
A moral(dynamic ) head and a popular(static) head. The moral head
interviened only under unusual or dynamic conditions. The main job of
the moral head was to search, groom and force another person to be
the successor. This model was a success in small societies but becomes
insufficient for large, complex and technologically advanced societies.
So a quad-headed model?
Seems like this is going way beyond this months topic , so I will
wrap it up by a piece of poetry by someone who dreamed of an ideal
political state ( before you blow a fuse, this guy got a noble prize
for writing poetry that doesn't even rhyme):
"Where the mind is without fear,
and the head is held high.
Where knowledge is free,
and the world has not been broken up into fragments
by narrow domestic walls.
Where words come out from the depths of truth.
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection.
Where the clear stream of reason has NOT lost its way into the
dreary desert sand of dead habit.
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought
and action.
Into that heaven of freedom , my father
Let my country awake."
(the old man wont mind the copyright violation where ever he is)
A dreamer? you bet. Without dreams we are nothing.
Was it Shakespeare who wrote:' We are such stuff as dreams are made
of, and our little life is rounded by a sleep '
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