What is Democracy?

Both the elite and many of their opponents have no idea what it is.

Sometimes it is necessary to go back to fundamental definitions. It’s especially necessary to do that in an era of Orwellian manipulation of language.

Orwell’s greatest insight was that the corruption of a society always begins in the corruption of language. Huxley’s was that pleasure and sensation are more effective tools of oppression, ultimately, than jackboots and torture chambers.

The parts of Orwell that seem most accurate regarding society today are the parts that refer to language and history and the written record, particularly the memory holing and constant alteration of history as it happens in a way that makes the mind of the populace as much a constantly re-written document as any newspaper article or edited TV image.

The parts of Huxley that seem extraordinarily prescient are those that refer to the soporific indulgence of pure sensation, to casual and communal sex and the encouragement of morality free sexual indulgence, combined with a pervasive drug culture and the pharmacological and industrial manipulation of emotion.

The two combine in the realization that once a tyrannical ideology has established control of all discourse, once they can redefine the meaning of words and link words to their opposites, they can control the basic emotions of the populace, rewarding some (the obedient) with a pleasure derived from conformity, and casting others (the disobedient) into a state of perpetual anxiety.

And they can present the most intensely sociopathic (even murderous) policies and actions as forms of protection and care, as offers of help and altruism, while defining resistance to those based on pre-corruption morality as social ills and ‘wrongthink’ that require eradication ‘for the greater good’.

Orwell would have looked at how we treat history and our classroom education and considered his views on the essential nature of tyranny vindicated. He would have understood what ‘decolonisation’ of the curriculum was. Huxley would have looked at the power of Big Pharma and the extreme fetishes of the average Pride festival as a confirmation of his warnings too.

Both would be right. Both described elements that are now commonplace in our society, and towards which all the power of business and government bends.

Those who are in love with our current tyranny are not in that position because they were browbeaten and cowed into it. They are primarily there because they were offered an inexhaustible dopamine hit of pleasure in the form of vanity. That’s what virtue signalling is about. It is the trained rat pushing the button that delivers the ecstasy of self-validation, the pure rush of vanity.

There are of course material rewards to it as well. The people who support the tyranny are primarily those who are economically and socially benefiting from it (as one would expect) and the people opposing it are primarily those who have been ‘left behind’ or whose interests are damaged or destroyed by the tyranny (again, hardly a revelation).

But this is why reactions to the tyranny, and the capacity to recognize it as a tyranny, largely divide on class grounds. The comfortable are bewildered by the views of the suffering, and the suffering are infuriated by the complacency of the comfortable. For all that the life of the average person is made worse by the Globalist policies and luxury beliefs of the elite, in the short term at least the life of the elite get even better as they asset strip their nations, preside over their managed decline, build up super volcanoes of debt, and open the borders to rampaging hordes.

We often underestimate how much the psychological rewards matter, because the same people are reaping short term financial rewards from the vast corruption at the same time.

But in a society that has lost its religious and cultural foundations, in a society that cast aside the solace of a real and Christian belief system, the vanity reward dopamine hit of considering yourself a good person because you support suicidal versions of altruism replaces the sense that you stand on a solid ground of established meaning.

That virtue signalling psychological reward is not a real thing. It’s a fleeting artificial emotion. It’s a sick mockery of the genuine connections of place and time, family and people, kinship and inherited religion. But its stuttering efficacy makes people all the more dependent on it, and all the more in search of the next hit. Just like a junkie with a real drug, the drug of validation requires ever greater urgency in its pursuit the less effective it becomes at really assuaging the essential emptiness of that person’s existence.

Progressive politics don’t work in the real world. But they don’t even work in terms of making those who support them genuinely happy. These people are riddled with unhappiness, anxiety and depression even as they, on demand, experience a fleeting, mandated Joy.

The lack of efficacy is not a thing which registers against the political choice, any more than the inherent hypocrisies and evil of it all register. A progressive won’t care that the cities his side rule are disgusting, destroyed, filthy and dangerous ghettos. He won’t see the flames and the squalor, the rubbish and the tents and the shitting in the streets. He won’t see either how empty and soulless he has become, and just how unsatisfying his life is in the service of demons.

No matter how successful, no matter how clean and together and rewarded he may be, he is after that hit in the same way that a crack addict is, with the same lack of regard for anything else. This is why the progressive globalist elite, with all they have and all they have stolen, are even more prone to suicide, alcoholism, drug addiction and depressive mental instability than most of the people they oppress, with the highest incidents of these self destructive traits coming almost as regularly at the very top of society as they occur with the homeless dregs at the very bottom.

Look at how many of the children of the elite end up killing themselves. The rates are pretty startling there.

The soul knows what is empty and unfulfilling, even when the ego does not.

I’ll admit that these psychological comments may appear a departure from the definition of democracy the title of this piece seems to offer. But I don’t think they are.

Because its the psychology that controls the political reality. It’s been said that politics is downstream of culture. That is true.

Both are downstream of psychology.

The re-coding of language is the reordering (or deliberate disordering) of the brain. It’s the replacement of the organic and real definitions of things with the synthetic and ideological definition of things, and that must come before you can get away with truly radical alterations of society.

Tyrannies have to distort language and have to fuck with the mind of the populace before they win, or else nobody would support them.

They do this first by setting aside the natural and organic definitions, the commonly understood, shared understandings of what things are, both the most natural things (like what is a man, or a woman) and the ordering principles of a society (what Democracy is).

What was the commonly understood, organic definition of Democracy?

It was simply this “the rule of the people”. Demos.

And the Demos were a particular group in a particular place. A group with shared language, culture, religion, ethnicity and law. A group distinct from other groups. A group with a patria, a land, a place which was also a shared loyalty based on shared qualities and shared ethics.

A city can be such a place where the people live and are defined within the boundaries of that place, or a nation can be this mix of unique setting and a unique people with shared characteristics. But a nation without shared characteristics (without a defined and exclusive People) is just a place with no meaning, the government of which is just an arbitrary set of powerful bandits who happen to have acquired ultimate authority.

Again, people know this psychologically, because the family, the original ethnically defined nations, and the sense of kinship within those nations, are not artificial constructs or arbitrary consequences of one Robber King being more successful than another in the distant past. They are much more things which evolved out of the innate way human beings think when not being subject to ideological perversion of the natural instincts of Man.

How our brains work naturally and organically led to the formation of nations.

And those nations being different to each other, with the rights of a specific People having priority in one place and not another, was also a natural consequence of how our brains function (primarily, in-group and out-group affiliation).

Understanding this is vital to understanding the current corruption of the meaning of Democracy, whereby the exact opposite of the rule of the People is described as defending Democracy, and attempts to reassert the true democratic principle (the primacy and ultimate authority of the People over their government) are described as assaults on Democracy.

Others have noted recently that when progressives and Globalists talk about Democracy they mean things that are opposite to its true definition. They transfer the meaning of Democracy from the People to the Institutions. When doing this, it becomes the duty of the people to obey the institutions rather than the duty of the institutions to obey the people. But those institutions are not the things with innate value. They are only practical mechanisms for translating the will of the people into specific actions, devices by which the desires of the people may be first ascertained and then enacted.

The institutions (whether a Crown, Parliament or Senate, whether a King or a President, whether a Department or a Ministry, and ALL their agents from a judge in a court to a policeman on the streets) are not innately worthy and innately powerful. Everything they have is borrowed solely with the consent of the people, and to serve the purposes of the people.

A good government is more like a bicycle than a cyclist. It should not be deciding the destination, the People do that. It should be solely a mechanism for making the journey easier. A bicycle with a mind of its own, and controlled remotely by someone else and deciding to lead the rider off a cliff, is a thing that should be scrapped.

Quite frequently I argue as much about what Democracy is with people as opposed to the current tyranny as I am, as I do with people who support the current tyranny. Invariably, those who know that what we are now living under is a tyranny but who resent the word Democracy even in its original meaning are Americans.

This derives from the fact that the Founding Fathers misapprehended what Democracy is. They frequently described it as the absolute rule of the majority. They noted that a pure Democracy would allow a majority to do whatever it pleased with the minority. They spoke about the dangers of the rule of the mob and regarded the idea of a universal Democracy with patrician horror.

They were right of course that a majority doing everything it pleased to anyone else would be a form of tyranny. They were right that a mob ordering or enacting executions (as with the French Revolution) was a different thing to a People rising against tyrannical abuses (as with the American Revolution) but they (perhaps as Enlightenment thinkers heavily influenced by the French) got what makes the difference wrong in all manner of ways.

There is nothing in the core of Democracy that says that the “rule of the People” must be a tyranny of the majority with absolute licence to do anything. Democracy is simply the instinct that the People are in charge….NOT the specific mechanisms chosen to enable that.

It’s true that Democracy manifests through things like elections, though the principle of one person one vote, through the mechanism that began with an Athenian tallying of differently colored stones when questions are put to the people and through the selection of representatives to enact the will of the people.

But the spirit of Democracy is not in the mechanisms chosen to deliver it, it is in the idea that the People have the ultimate say. Kings have been elected, and often were in both Ancient Greece and Anglo-Saxon England. Sparta was a militaristic tyranny with two elected Kings. Athens became a mercantile, naval imperial Republic with colony cities and conquered cities forced to support it whilst being the place most associated with the word Democracy. Ancient tyrants were often elected to power. Rome had a system of representatives of the people (and more regular votes and elections than we have) while both an oligarchic Republic with a still powerful nobility AND as a vast Empire with a series of autocratic Emperors (some of whom were extremely benign rules, and some of whom were insane tyrants).

The Ancient world had both votes and slavery. Just like the early America with its noble declarations, just like the European nations of the Colonial era, just like the Soviet Union and the ‘Democratic Republics’ of the Soviet Union. Stalin presided over an awful lot of votes. It’s just that people who voted the wrong way were dragged out of the hall and murdered.

What this means on the most obvious level is that tyrants lie about what they are, and call themselves Democratic when they aren’t.

But with a deeper understanding it means that fundamentally speaking Democracy is not defined by the presence of the word OR by the mechanisms of votes and elections. It must be defined and inclusive of more than that to be real.

And people deliberately or by misapprehension forget the other things that go into the existence of an actual Democracy.

To be actual, it is confined to a specific People. This is how it originally arose, this is it at its most authentic and organic.

Transnational authorities, organisations and agreements are inherently anti-democratic because they impose authority from multiple Peoples that cannot be properly accountable to any one People. The EU is inherently anti-democratic because French, Belgium and German bureaucrats are ruling French, German and Belgian people who have not given their consent to it and because even if every German, for example, wanted one thing…if the wider EU wanted the opposite, it is the opposite which is imposed on the German people.

Anglo-Saxon kingship was more democratic than the EU because the elected kings were much more concerned with ruling in accordance with the interests of their specific People. On the whole, if they were bad kings it was not because they had no loyalty to their People and nothing in common with them.

What loyalty does a French bureaucrat have to an English, Welsh, Scottish or Northern Irish citizen? Absolutely none, and actually a great deal of malice….and it shows in how the United Kingdom was treated within the EU.

The spirit of Democracy is again that the People rule. How much can we be said to be partaking of Rule, if Rulers may do anything they please to us? Clearly this is a logical absurdity. Do I really consent to my representatives arbitrarily harming me? Of course I don’t. When I vote am I saying ‘do whatever you like to me, no matter how vile or unjust’? Of course not.

The Founders detested and misunderstood the word, leading to a misapprehension regarding this word in most Americans since, but their efforts to protect the People against over-mighty, arbitrary and unjust rule (whether from a King or a majority) actually express what Democracy really is, better than anything since.

It is a system of governance that exists to ensure that the People rule and that those with authority are prevented from harming the People. It comes with the understanding that it is the People (as a collective and as individuals) who have inalienable rights whereas the powers and privileges of their representatives are ALWAYS conditional, ALWAYS dependent on consent, ALWAYS abrogated and removable by an established record of unjust, treasonous, or tyrannical actions.

That is the beauty of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. They are the best expressions of the spirit of Democracy ever given, even though the Founders sometimes lost an understanding that Democracy is that spirit more than it is a mechanism.

Liberty is the possession of inalienable rights. Democracy is a method of governance designed for the protection of inalienable rights. Elections and votes are mechanisms for decision making that are supposed to preserve liberty and manifest Democracy. When liberty is crushed, that’s not Democracy. When votes are rigged, that’s not Democracy. When elections are stolen, that’s not Democracy. When the People are hunted and hated and oppressed by their own government, that government is not democratic.

It’s much more than one person one vote. It’s every person being more than any vote.

The Founders were moved by a Spirit whose name they did not fully comprehend, but which whispered every line of the Declaration and the Constitution to them. They could hear that voice because of the unique nature of their cultural and ethnic Anglo-Saxon heritage. The spirit of Democracy (and individual liberty, and especially constraint on the powers of kings or government and the idea that the People have inalienable rights) would not have moved them in the same way to the same ends without them being white men to whom things like the 1688 Bill of Rights, Magna Carta and the innate rights of a freeborn Englishman were felt in the blood and learned from the crib.

Today, people accept and support tyranny because they are not reminded of that kinship with a heritage of liberty, or because this awareness is redefined as ‘far right extremism’. But really it was a force which shaped the minds of the Founders to the point of fighting for their freedom and as psychologically important to their actions as the drug of contemporary vanity is to current elite betrayals of that heritage.

Any alleged Democracy that hates its own People has ceased to be a Democracy, by definition, since democracy is purely about the best manifestation of the power of the People and the dedicated protection of their inalienable rights. A majority of votes does not excuse a policy of treason.

That’s what most of us are living under, a continual policy of treason by an elite that hates its own People, and such a system (which retains the mechanistic forms of Democracy and none of the spirit) has no mandate to rule and no right to rule. It’s a treasonous usurpation, even when elected (and especially when elected with just 20% of the eligible vote, or when elected through unacknowledged electoral fraud).

All the things that the Founders said about the rule of Kings apply to modern ‘elected’ governments that got into power by fraud or by the consent of just a tiny fraction of the populace, most especially when these governments clearly serve interests inimical to those of the People they rule.

Servants of foreign powers, too, by definition are no longer legitimate democratic leaders. There is no power in the demos when the President or Prime Minister serves someone else.