On Democracy

Democracy is failing. Everywhere. Right now. Before our very eyes. In real time.

Democracy is dying fast. Because democracy is based on personal responsibility. And people do not want to have anything with responsibility. They shun it. They are afraid of it. They are always ready to discard it. People are always ready to let others be responsible in their stead.

This moral abdication from responsibility, this cowardice is the greatest plague devouring our day and age.

If people do not have a stake in the fight, they don’t care. If they do not care, they vote with their asses. And when they do, democracy goes the way of the dodo bird. Out of our lives, into the annals of history.

Case in point

I have recently run an experiment.

I placed an object of great responsibility and power in the hands of my wife. This was not the first time she had this object under her direct control.

And yet, when faced with this responsibility, she declined it. She felt too scarred and it weighed too heavy on her: literally and mentally.

Again, not the first time.

And that’s when it struck me.

A great deal of people do not care for, and do not want to be responsible for themselves.

They are not adults. In the same sense the word is still defined in the dictionary.

They are for all intents and purposes, wards of the state.

They gladly give up their rights as free men and women in exchange for the promise of security.

But the state cannot guarantee the security for 99.99% of the people.

What happens, the state takes away people’s rights and freedoms by virtue of bans or confiscations or taxation or interdiction. All in the name of a hypothetical promise to protect them.

And when it cannot deliver, thus breaking the social contract, instead of relinquishing the freedom it took from the people, the state doubles down.

“I need more of your freedoms! Gimme more and I’ll do a better job next time” says It.

It’s that easy. Because people are that dumb.

Any other contract would become null and void when one party didn’t abide by its terms.

The social contract is a chimera dreamed up by people who destroyed the old world order of kings and potentates.

They called themselves men of reason. Yet somehow, their Revolutions destroyed something that worked badly but allowed some social mobility and freedom.

Only to replace it with the omnipotence of State that tramples down the rights of men with even more ease than the old kings.

To quote The Patriot (2000):

Why should we replace the will of one tyrant 3,000 miles away with that of 3,000 tyrants one mile away?

Well, this is precisely what we did.

And now we reap the rewards.

Consider this…

Back then, people were responsible for themselves.

Now the state “takes care” of us: annuls elections, bans guns, takes people’s kids away, taxes people into the poorhouse, controls every aspect of our lives, telling us when, how, where and why we should go to work or when not to.

But hey, democracy works.

Democracy is the biggest lie invented by tyrants to give the people the feeling they have agency in their lives without actually allowing them to exercise it.

Fuck this!