Tell you what, I'll get to all of that tomorrow and and rework that whole democracy post of mine, and whip myself and the Germany forum into shape...
Still got some housework left to do, so I'll log off for today, cheers and have a good one
@Joe Shearer et al!
Right, so a few things that need to get cleared up:
“The other thing is that a government represents an easy picture of a different country and the beliefs of the people that live within it, even though it isn’t representative of everyone. One can far easier identify the good or the bad based on what the government does, and if there isn’t an effort made to find out what those opposing the government think, then an opinion remains largely invalid.”
What I mean by this is how an outside observer will judge a different nation, especially if it’s a democracy. They will, most likely, not posses more than a surface level knowledge about this country, however presume that a democratic political system will be representative of it’s people and the government the ultimate incarnation of this representation.
This goes in opposition to an authoritarian state, where the government imposes itself upon the people and therefore cannot be considered a legitimate representative. An outside observer will be aware of that and become cautious and suspicious of this government.
Now, if a democratic government pursues unethical or unlawful policies, and remains supported by its voters, then our observer will be tempted to judge accordingly to his or her perceptions. Yet that is an easy path for the observer, and does not consider the opposition in the country or the domestic opinion that cannot ever be accurately portrayed by a five-minute news story – therefore the opinion is (largely) invalid due to too many unknown variables that haven’t been adequately addressed.
But here we run into the problem of the human condition… People, by and large, aren’t prone to making themselves understand the world better, it takes too much effort to do so. Within them they(most at least, some exceptions apply) know that the world is a highly complex place, and to get a better picture of it all, one will need to educate themselves. And the volume of material that must be learned is perceived as enormous, intimidating, overwhelming and insurmountable, frankly most won’t ever try to picture it all. This scares a lot of people, especially since many tend to be insecure about being perceived as stupid, and due to that they’ll take their initially formed opinion on a matter and stick to it. Doesn’t matter if the opinion is wrong or needs adjustments, it’s what they have and it’s easier to pretend that it’s correct than to actually get it correct.
To bring about some validation to your opinion though, you’ll need to revisit and revise it over and over, you’ll need to be introspective and critical of yourself, you’re going to need other perspectives and a basis of ever-expanding knowledge, you’ll need contrast – not adherence to a single belief.
People are, by nature, argumentative and confrontational, they’re stubborn and prideful, they see admission of flaw or fault as an admission of defeat and therefore weakness. Since the insecurity within oneself means that you cannot allow others to be perceived as such, it leads to a hardening of the fronts on all sides, of echochambers and mudslinging that undermines any and all actual debate. If you cannot overcome this within yourself and within your community, then you and it will always be doomed to failure(Fate and the universe can also interfere, but we’ll leave those aside for another time, shall we?).
To summarize, an outside observer of a different nation will judge according to their knowledge and easiest source of insight, which most often is the representative government. This initial judgment can and usually does become the final verdict, which in turn makes it harder to change and overcome a belief, no matter how wrong it is. Due to it being largely wrong, it can’t be considered valid.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“Henceforth a nation shouldn’t be identified by it’s leaders and governments, but by it’s history, culture, traditions, art and peoples in this sense and to a certain degree even the geographic boundaries.”
This ties in with what I said before, where the fundamental structures of a nation are more important than a temporary leadership.
But here again the lack of knowledge throws a wrench into it all. It is not hyperbole when I say that the average familiarity with geography doesn’t reach beyond the horizon. Most people can name a handful of states on a blank map of the world, and then tell you only the superficial knowledge they have about those. History is another one such crux, traditions and culture are known mostly in their bastardized versions, it’s art is compared and contested with the domestic counterparts which goes against the idea of “art”, and it’s peoples aren’t understood in their language and habits. In this sense, it’s an indecipherable enigma.
The way to combat against and solve this is, once more, by learning and experience. But the volume of learning and experience it would require is too intimidating, and we’re back at the human condition.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
“But back to democracy, and whether or not it was a successful system. … … … So, in this sense, democracy was successful, but it didn’t stick to the values and principles that should make it a viable political system.”
To elaborate a bit on these examples:
Roman history, though I’m not intimately familiar with it, has been perverted into a fantasy setting by our modern popular understanding of it. It gets glorified, it’s achievements are exalted as extraordinary in every conceivable way, the world saw no such empire before and since then, history holds no equal, and so forth.
Among the many things that tend to be overlooked are the millions upon millions of slaves that built all these great achievements, the thousands of individual cultures that were subjugated and bulldozed into the ground by the marching legions, a society that was so unequal in it’s social and economic structures, it’s frankly unbelievable that it worked that well. It was first a republic, and then an empire constructed upon thousands of untold tragedies.
British history has been much the same, its Nation and Empire built on a foundation of suffering. Best to start I think is by the way they treated their closest neighbour, Ireland. From the initial colonization, up to the horrors inflicted by Cromwell, the creation of the plantations, to the devastating famines, and in modern times a thirty year long, dark and terrible conflict in “The Troubles”, British power has been a source of plentiful hardship for its next door neighbour. Then came the colonial adventures Britain is actually famous for, the 13 colonies over the Atlantic, various possessions in the Caribbean, and the many, many slaves that were abducted and put to work in the New World, not to mention those that were born into and died in slavery. Then the EIC set to work with bullying India into submission and robbing it poor, while radicalizing the ethnic and religious differences that plague the successor states to this day. Then the opium war, with it’s noble justification of making Quing China the national equivalent of a heroin junkie in the name of profit, came about and they succeeded in that. Then the conquest and subjugation of the natives in Australia and Africa, again in the name of profit, had it’s big show.
And Britain’s most successful colony has a history that once again showcases the depth and depravity of humans acting in the name of a higher power. Native Americans were chased ever more westwards, chinese and eastern european workers built the industrial basis, and the profit accrued from black slave labour allowed for it all. The political system itself had the Roman Republic as it’s inspiration, and the way these two Empires acquired the power they now hold/held is remarkably similar, history does rhyme indeed.
The purpose of my (bad, boring and lackluster) history lessons here was however to highlight the similarity that was the political system. The Roman Republic, Britain(emphasis on post-cromwell) and the US have all had various forms of democracies as their political systems. They emphasized the virtues of their representative systems and considered themselves above the authoritarian alternative. But truly representative of all the people living under it none of them were.
All also had the benefit of being geographically relatively isolated. Britain as an island, the US between the oceans and without powerful neighbours, and Rome as a power so dominantly looming over Europe, Anatolia and the Mediterranean coastlines, that none else could match it on the battlefield.
So all of those states were secure and relatively wealthy, it was possible for them to be “democratic”(with a myriad of asterisks) and for their contemporary times, they were able to survive and thrive.
Democratic rule there must, due to that, be contrasted to states that did not hold these geographical benefits and had to rely on military might to keep their countries working, which had to have a permanent ruler or ruling dynasty and which forged their cultures around these beliefs and not the various ideas of freedom otherwise encountered.
I did not do this topic justice, many books written specifically about it didn’t, so it’ll need more than a new paint job, should I ever revisit it.
www.indiatoday.in
