WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN IN GOOD DEMOCRACIES?

Mencius Moldbug, who writes the blog “Unqualified Reservations” (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com) wrote an entry on the last day of January entitled “How I Stopped Believing in Democracy.” He begins with a conversation:

The other day I had lunch with an old friend, Erik, whom I hadn't seen in a few years. Erik is five or ten years older than me, has a philosophy degree from Berkeley, writes Internet standards for a living, and is generally a very stable, responsible and successful guy, unlike of course yours truly. He lives in Germany and is married to a German, and his politics are quite solidly progressive.

I was confident that I had informed Erik of this blog. But I think it got lost in a long email. So I had the rare opportunity of really solidly failing to explain the point of UR.

"It's a neo-f -," I said. "Um, no, it's not really a neofascist hate blog. I just call it that sometimes to shock people. It's a, what it is, is an anti-democracy blog."

"An anti-democracy blog. Well, that's certainly..."

"You've got to admit, it's an under-served market," I said.

"Well, I'd certainly agree with that."

"Yeah," I said. "It was actually about a year and a half ago, I decided I didn't believe in democracy anymore. It was great. Just like deciding not to believe in God."

"More like deciding not to believe in God about 250 years ago," Erik said. He actually said this. I don't believe I've cut a single line from this exchange.

In fact, I had actually never thought of quite it this way. But yes - disbelieving in democracy in 2008 is a lot like disbelieving in God in 1758.


Mencius ends his reported conversation there, so that’s where I’ll pick it up, though my background is so very different that we may end up entirely talking past each other. Still, I think it’s useful for me, even if no one else likes it or “gets it.”

Mencius and his friend were referring (I think) to the idea that God at the time of the founding of this country was a kind of Big Principle good for arguments and not to be contradicted, if needing a lot of explanation. Just so is “democracy” now a sort of motto that no one dares contest, but that is getting rather shaky. Mencius reports that he was taught to nearly worship democracy, partly because his parents worked for the State.

Personally, I was taught that democracy was pretty faulty, but the best idea anyone had come up with so far. In truth, the best government is always a benevolent dictatorship, except that the dictators have a way of drifting into malevolence, if not meaning harm to most people, still tending to choose a scapegoat somewhere -- like Jews or Native Americans or Illegal Immigrants --which is one of the seemingly inevitable problems with democracy as well. After all, it’s pretty tough to be “for” all peoples of all kinds in all situations. One must choose one’s occasions for benevolence. The other problem, of course, is that once someone gets power, their grip has to be pried off -- like, say, Bush, Kennedy, or Clinton in a democracy.

Going back to the comparison, Mencius says:
What's amazing about the whole God thing is that people actually used to believe in God. Almost no one believes in God today. The most they are willing to give Him is that he "exists." Perhaps there is a Heaven and maybe even a Hell. But before you find people who actually believe that God actually uses His alien black-magic superpowers to actually affect events on Earth, you have to scrape pretty deep in the barrel. We are all deists now.

Before this change, there was an entire branch of philosophy called theodicy, whose goal was to figure out how God and evil could coexist. Doesn't it strike you as completely and utterly obvious that the answer is "they don't"? Why didn't all these incredibly smart people - Aquinas and Leibniz and Pascal and so forth - just consider the null hypothesis?

It certainly continues to be a major problem for theology that God is supposed to be good but at the very least allows the world to be a place full of cruelty and wickedness. “Free Will” is one big defense, but surely a murderous tsunami or earthquake doesn’t have a will at all. Strictly speaking, it cannot intend murder -- humans just happened to be there. The only way to give up theodicy is to give up the theos, as Mencius suggests. Luckily, this is not a problem for religious systems that don’t center, as all the Abrahamic religions do, on the Chief of the Tribe: Jehovah. You can say “science” is one of those religious systems if you want to -- I won’t object -- but what I’m thinking of is Buddhism, Taoism, the frames of mind that simply accept that really bad things happen, as do good, and human free will is mostly limited to a response -- if one has survived with the courage and energy to produce one.

Mencius suggests: I think the answer is that when you really believe in God, the belief that God is good and makes good things happen is completely woven into your cerebral cortex. If you were to stop believing in God, you would instantly solve the problem of explaining all the evil things that have happened in the world. You would also instantly create the problem of explaining all the good things that have happened. For which your present explanation is that they happened because they were good, and therefore God wanted them to happen.

I’ve mentioned before that the UUA kit for discussion groups that is entitled “Why Do Bad Things Happen?” ends in a unit on “Why Do Good Things Happen?” And I think I’ve said before that in my opinion “good” versus “bad” are human concepts imposed on what simply happens. Often the good is hard to sort from the bad or it depends upon who you are or maybe the real consequences aren’t clear for a decade or so. It’s crude, but the tractor hat that says “shit happens” may be the closest we can get to truth.

Then Mencius has his most useful insight: And there is an even more upsetting observation, which is that the process of explaining why democracy isn't perfect is remarkably similar to good old theodicy. Perhaps we could call it demodicy - the problem of explaining how democracy can coexist with evil.

If we’re such a great country, why do we convict innocents, neglect whole cities like New Orleans, cheat whole tribes by mismanaging their assets? Why do we have street people and starving people? How can we invade foreign countries on false pretenses and destroy whole economies for our own profit?

Here’s my “why” -- because the controlling ethos of today’s democracy (can you doubt it while listening to the news?) is not “protection of the minority” but rather “winner takes all.” And why is that our ethos? Because we don’t go to church anymore -- we go to the coliseum where the overwhelming need is to win, win, win!

Mencius again: For example, the first thing I remember from my first year in Maryland was something called a "pep rally." For those of you who did not attend an American public high school, a "pep rally" is basically a straight ripoff of what Albert Speer did at Nuremberg, except that (a) it is indoors, (b) there is not quite as much fire, and (c) there is less saluting, more screaming, and about the same amount of chanting.

If you are an American raising kids abroad and you want to reintroduce them to your country, I highly recommend this sort of shock-and-awe approach. Having to deal with an American high school was not pleasant, but it gave me a certain respect for America: it exists. Once you go to college, you are no longer in the real America. You are in a fortified outpost of future America, which has been planted in the real America to enlighten and assimilate it. Respect is not on the menu.

Yes. Win. Dominate. Number One. Forget respect. Who can respect losers? What the college-educated don’t realize is that now they are the losers. This is part of the demodicy. College is meant to train people to believe that if their college sports team is the top, nothing else matters. In case you didn’t “get it” in high school. As for the classes? Forget Free Will. The government will tell you what to teach so we can be Winners in the World -- BEST.