Morons: The Best Proof Against Democracy

 

DEMOCRACY, oh how we love it! Practically everyone knows this word, especially in the West. Democracy is synonymous with freedom, and the form of government common in the West is referred to as “liberal democracy”. In America, we are told we live in a representative democracy (i.e., a republic) and this is what makes us awesome. The American Left rallies behind the Democratic Party, or the Democratic Socialists of America.

It seems everyone acknowledges that democracy is cool. Rule by the people, as it literally means in Greek, is the most logical because every individual has their rights, and every individual deserves their voice in government. Even from a collectivist perspective, the whole collective – which “the people”, a collective noun, represents – deserves to be involved in matters of administration/political deliberation. However, not everyone is on board with this political system, to many’s surprise.

Indeed, democracy has been criticized for as long as it has existed. The earliest VIP critic of democracy was the famous Greek philosopher Socrates. Socrates, as told by Plato, was talking with a man named Adeimantus and asked him, “If you were heading out on a journey by sea who would you ideally want deciding who was in charge of the vessel? Just anyone or people educated in the rules and demands of seafaring?” Adeimantus said the latter, and, “So why then,” responded Socrates, “Do we keep thinking that any old person should be fit to judge who should be a ruler of a country?” Socrates’ disdain for democracy would come to a head when a democratic vote by the Athenians condemned him to death for “corrupting the youth of Athens” (which, considering the Greek’s tolerance for pedophilia, was a really big charge).

Even the Founding Fathers were opposed to democracy, which is why they ultimately established a republic. In the words of James Madison in The Federalist no. 10, “[D]emocracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.” Thomas Jefferson was similarly opposed due to the prospect of a “tyranny of the majority”.

Down to the modern-day critics have persisted. Democracy is not merely criticized by authoritarian ideologues, but by more liberal ones, especially anarchists. Hans-Herman Hoppe is the most noteworthy modern anarchist critic of democracy, describing it as “[allowing] for A and B to band together to rip off C, C and A in turn joining to rip off B, and then B and C conspiring against A, and so on” (Hoppe 2001, p. 104).

All anti-democrats have various arguments against democracy, and they mostly come down to the tyranny of the majority/mob rule, logistical issues, etc. The best anti-democratic treatises I know of are Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed (see Hoppe 2001) and Mencken’s Notes on Democracy (see Mencken 1928), especially since they are from libertarian perspectives and not authoritarian ones (such as Mussolini’s “The Doctrine of Fascism” or Moeller van den Bruck’s Das Dritte Reich).

The argument against democracy I’d like to present in this article is a simple one, and shadows of it can probably be found in certain anti-democratic works (such as the two suggested above). It has most certainly been promoted on a popular level, in certain social media posts I’ve come across. Those posts, namely, are what have inspired me to write this article.

Democracy is subverted by the observation that, plain and simple, morons exist. A moron is, per Merriam-Webster, “A foolish or stupid person,” or, per its historical and more professional use, “A person affected with mild intellectual disability.” It was coined in 1910 by the American psychologist and eugenicist Henry H. Goddard, who derived it from the Ancient Greek “μωρός” (mōrós), meaning “slow”, “sluggish”, or “dull”. While I acknowledge the sensitive nature of the word, especially due to its origins in a pseudoscientific eugenicist, the word has become desensitized in modern culture and simply means, “A foolish or stupid person.”

The issue with morons and democracy is, per the nature of democracy and the moron, the moron is a dêmos (commoner) and thus is a sovereign in the democratic system, just as you or me. In other words, the moron has the same political power (vote) as me. The moron on a democratic cruise would be just as heard as the experienced seafarer, to take from Socrates’ example.

One might assert, “Well, the experienced seafarer,” or, to be more realistic, the public intellectual, “can tell the moron why he is right by explaining his knowledge.” That would be true if we, again, were not dealing with a moron. A moron is, again, “a foolish or stupid person”, a person intellectually infirm and therefore too dull to understand what the intellectual was saying. Not every moron is like Forrest Gump, charming and smart deep down, and even Forrest would prove my point: In his famous saying, “Stupid is as stupid does,” Forrest conveys the wisdom that one’s actions define their intelligence, and a moron could certainly act smart at times (for example, a child with low-functioning autism could be academically inept but excel in understanding the mechanics of Pokémon), but who is to say they will act smart when it comes to democratically deciding the fate of millions of other people?

The usefulness of morons to aspiring tyrants is also well-known. The phrase “useful idiot” comes to mind, which describes those members of the masses that are not intellectually fortified enough to engage in all the mental calculations necessary to comprehend the consequences of an action. They are, instead, moved and inspired by loaded and carefully constructed language; they are susceptible to the mind games employed by political strategists. In my series about active measures I covered demoralization, and I think – to apply demoralization to this present discussion – we should look at how Yuri Bezmenov described the effects of demoralization on a person’s mind:

“As I mentioned before, exposure to true information does not matter anymore. A person who was demoralized is unable to assess true information. The facts tell nothing to him. Even if I shower him with information, with authentic proof, with documents, with pictures. Even if I take him by force to the Soviet Union and show him concentration camp he will refuse to believe it until he is going to receive a kick in his fat bottom. When the military boot crashes him, then he will understand, but not before that. That’s the tragic of the situation of demoralization.”

          So, not only are morons dangerous by the mere fact of being morons, but engineered morons, useful idiots, are an important asset of tyrants and are very easy to create. There is nothing wrong about treating 10,000 people as equal, but there is something completely wrong about treating 10,000 people as equally sovereign over the other 9,999. It is especially wrong when a hundred out of that group are carefully pumping out propaganda that makes 7,300 hate the remaining 2,600 – is this okay, however, since 73% is a supermajority in a democratic vote?

          I like Murray Rothbard’s comments on democracy and the inherent stupidity and danger in it:

“If ‘we are the government,’ then anything a government does to an individual is not only just and untyrannical but also ‘voluntary’ on the part of the individual concerned. … [I]f the government conscripts a man, or throws him into jail for dissident opinion, then he is ‘doing it to himself’ and, therefore, nothing untoward has occurred. Under this reasoning, any Jews murdered by the Nazi government were not murdered; instead, they must have ‘committed suicide,’ since they were the government (which was democratically chosen), and, therefore, anything the government did to them was voluntary on their part.” (Rothbard 2009, p. 10)

          Two comments can be made to further develop Rothbard’s point. That the Nazi government was democratically chosen is indisputable. In 1930, 18.3% of the German people voted for the Nazis, 43.9% of them did in March of 1933, and 92.1% of them did in November of 1933 (to object that the November election was following the Enabling Act, banning other parties, is to overlook the fact that 7.89% of Germans still were able to vote against the Nazis; it was still a democratic vote). Furthermore, the response that democracy is safeguarded via constitutionalism (i.e., a standard higher than the State that enshrines minority rights) is to ignore the inherent inefficacy of constitutionalism (as Rothbard explained in the chapter “How the State Transcends Its Limits” of Anatomy of the State [Rothbard 2009, pp. 30-43] or as did Garet Garrett in his article “The Republic Becomes the Empire”).

          Morons. The biggest threat to democracy and the great asset to tyrants. No sufficient explanation can be given as to why Forrest Gump should be able to empower the government to tax 20% of my income, or to eject me from my home via eminent domain. As myself and others (see here and here) have noted, American kids are getting dumb, moronic, and when you consider that some people want to lower the voting age our imagination of what such a world would be like is nothing less than nightmarish; kids who barely know the basics of American civics (what the Constitution is, what the Supreme Court does and how many Justices it has, etc.) and history (who signed the Declaration of Independence, when was the Civil War fought, why was the Civil War fought, etc.) are going to be determining the future of our civics and history?

          Every person is sovereign. Every person is the only entity active in their own body, and even if I have been brainwashed by the totalitarian, he will never enter my mind; the totalitarian must continuously exert himself upon my mind to keep it brainwashed; even then, he will fail, so long as there is an outlet (death is the ultimate one), as numerous North Korean defectors have proven. Being sovereign alone in my body, I own whatever my body does, all actions it takes, and even the socialist acknowledges this because he expects the evil capitalist to answer for his actions committed by his appendages, because those appendages and actions are owned by his mind. If I, therefore, own the output of my body, I own and am responsible for what I put that output into, whether that is a criminal act or material possessions. This is the basis of property rights (see Smith 2020), and no anti-capitalist collectivist (a term that encompasses socialists, communists, Maoists, statists, democrats, etc. etc.) has been able to sufficiently overturn it except by forcible suppression. So long as I own myself and am only responsible to who and what I sovereignly, voluntarily associate with, democracy is flawed and I am not equal to the moron.

 

 

BIBLIOGRAPHY

·       Hoppe, Hans-Hermann, Democracy: The God That Failed (Transaction Publishers, 2001).

·       Mencken, Henry L., Notes on Democracy (London, UK: Butler & Tanner, 1928).

·       Rothbard, Murray N., Anatomy of the State (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2009).

·       Smith, Carlton M., “The Right to Property.” Journal of Libertarian Studies 24 (Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2020): 143-155.