Professor Shortling's Treatise on Political Systems
Notes for one of the lectures
There are basically only two forms of government that have ever been effective in human history: Monarchy and Oligarchy. There have been other systems, such as communal rule, matriarchy, and anarchy, that have been tried, but they never succeeded for long. (Well, matriarchy worked in a tribal system for many centuries, but then transformed into Oligarchy, and was the Granny Witch really not a Monarch?) You have to regard these two categories as strictly generic, could just as well be called Alpha and Beta, because they are not restricted to Kings and Senates. Monarchy, by my definition here, includes kings, emperors, pharaohs, dictators, 'great leaders', presidents, and El Supremos. Oligarchy means senates, parliaments, politburos, revolutionary committees, and ecclesiastical synods. The latter (oligarchy) also includes that most effective but still defective thing called Representative Democracy. That is the issue to be discussed here.
Why Is Democracy a Scam?
(because it requires politicians)
Given large populations and a complexity of different agendas in which many citizens have no interest, the only way to handle a democracy -- rule of the 'people' -- in which the subjects have any say in the way they are governed, is to have a delegate system. In that way groups of people with a common cause, or a guild of professionals controlling one aspect of normal life, can select a spokesman to act for their interest in some legislative body. Hurrah, perfect government, rule by law and constitutional rules! None of this Monarchical vagary. Everybody protected by a fair and reformable system -- if you don't like the law change it (if you can't, flout it -- but that reaction, admittedly, has nothing to do with the form of government, which even Monarchs have discovered to their cost).
There are some fallacies in this ideal form of government:
- Anybody who wants to be a delegate or representative is theoretically taking on a thankless job, not well paid, with plenty of hassles dealing just with conflicts among the constituents. Therefore, the only people who seriously run for office are doing it for motives of attaining power, priviliges, or riches (this is where the 'guilds' come in -- advocate a free market in lead with minimum taxes but screw the consumers of lead who need cheap and efficient plumbing, or the farmers whose land is polluted by the detritus of the mines -- this makes for a dedicated legislator who is not really a representative for anybody except his contributors -- money, not votes, which are just something that can be manipulated to get into office in the first place).
- Any debate is a power struggle between different interest groups, and regardless of their respective merits (they all have their good points as well as bad), somebody is going to lose out. The delegate is either caught in the middle of a dilemma or has been bribed by one of the parties ahead of time. In either case, no 'rational' decision will be made. In a democracy as opposed to a monarchical ukase system, the result will be a compromise that really satisfies nobody. You can depose and assassinate the Tsar for bad government decisions, but you can't get rid of the whole senate when they are just as idiotic.
- Your candidate has only your own interests at heart, and he/she is an idealist who supports motherhood, family, patriotism, and job security. Come on, grow up! Do you believe any of this bullshit? And the ones who most support this, and are even effective at it, turn out to be the most hyprocritical when it comes down to what they actually get up to in their own lives. (No animadversions on any particular presidential administration, because they ALL have had their scandals, as has been the case from the establishment of the republic of USA.) Do not expect a politician you put your delegating trust into to be anything less than a normal selfish human being; the fact that he/she runs for office even eliminates one aspect most people have except certain types of criminals -- i.e., a conscience.
- Most representatives started out as either lawyers or special-interest lobbyists Does that automatically make them crooks? Of course not. But people in those professions don't think like you and me (I hope) in their intellectual processes. As humans, they are just as much subject to greed, lust, and duplicity as anybody else, and in fact their position in power leads them into really stupid behavior sometimes because they think they are above it all. Buoyed up by the swell of all that anonymous support that got them into office, they think they are not subject to the tides. They are above suspicion and even if they have to admit guilt think their supporters will keep them afloat (unfortunately right in so many cases).
Why This Page Now? Folks who have visited the Grobius web pages already know my opinions about church and state. But I forced myself to watch -- as when younger I threw grasshoppers into spider webs to see what would happen -- Connie Chung's interview with Gary Condit. She did a marvellous prosecutorial examination of this blatant and obvious obfuscator. This guy is SLIME, no question about it, except that one wonders why he has been reelected over and over for 23 years. He probably was not directly involved in the disappearance of Chandra Levy, but the way he avoids saying he had any sexual relationship with her is sickening and unconvincing. "Did you have an affair with her?" "I have been married for 34 years and I am not a perfect man, but I cannot comment on that because the Levy family specifically asked me not to and we all have the right of privacy."
(Yeah, the Levy lawyer unfortunately made the understandable comment that the family doesn't want to hear what she was involved in, they just want to find out what happened to her.) Same answer four more times. The evasiveness of this ratlike person even beats Bill Clinton's testimony about Monica Lewinsky for sheer 'sincere lying'. Connie Chung and Ted Koppel have to be given credit for being impartial in delivery but implying extreme skepticism and contempt at the same time. Good-oh. When Condit self-righteously said he had fully cooperated with the police and given up his 'civil liberties' it was almost laughably transparent cant. And he was very dexterous in turning the Washington police chief's accusation that he was obstructing justice into an implication of persecution and incompetence by wicked slanderers. There is a form a lawyerese where the following sentences are identical in meaning (if not connotation): "If you say I asked this person to commit perjury, that is an absolute lie"/"If you say I told this person to commit perjury, that is the absolute truth". If this guy doesn't lose his seat in Congress, then there is little hope for Representative Democracy. In Britain, at least, although their politicians are just as sleazy as ours, he would be forced to resign in disgrace.
-- (August 2001), and yet another NYC mayoral contest coming up, this time without a single person who has any personality at all (just advocates of raising taxes yet again to pour even more into the corrupt school system, where there are more administrators with MBA's or whatever than there are schoolteachers). In the Grobius system, nobody would pay any taxes dedicated to education at all -- it is a parental responsibility entirely and only parents should pay for it. Give 'em tax breaks, sure, but don't make me pay for the wasted effort of educating your child, who couldn't care less anyway. You wouldn't pay for their name-brand sneakers etc. if you also had to pay their school fees, so in a sense tax-payers are subsidizing fast food emporiums and jeans stores. Yes, money for good teachers and schools is critical to the future, but it should not be wasted on dullards. So there! Strict examinations, strict discipline -- that's the way to go, and don't waste time on drop-out jerks. Teach your kids on your own time to be politicians and natural liars -- it's easy and cheap because most people are born with the instinct and only have to be shown how to be convincing (which most adults know how to do). One doesn't have to have the ability to fool the whole world; only to gull some of it will provide a decent living, and literate/scientific education is mostly irrelevant to that. All this from a non-Fascist Libertarian person: legal drugs but no entitlements.
-- (August 2003) Here is a betrayal of a sort. Bloomberg in NYC and Pataki as governor of NY, arbitrarily banned smoking indoors in any environment. This was NEVER mentioned as a campaign issue, nor put up as a referendum. They just went and did it, riding roughshod over the councilmen, senators, representatives or whatever to get the laws passed (no doubt threatening them with a cut-off in bribery pork funds). That, to me as a smoker, is CRIMINAL misrepresentation, grounds for impeachment or recall; yes, I'm in a minority, but I don't think the majority of non-smokers would actually have gone so far as to criminalize the class of smokers in such a Draconian way, and besides, even if only 25% of the adult populace smokes tobacco, the majority of people who hang out and work in bars does. When I go outside with my bartender and half the waitresses to have a smoke, we laugh and bitch about it (it is summer now), but what is it going to be like next winter? If tobacco is a legal product, smokers should be accommodated with places they can smoke in. If if is banned by the government as a drug, that's a different matter. Not that it would stop me, any more than the laws against marijuana scare me out of having an occasional toke. Government has no right to enforce social standards at all. Gay marriage? Fine, give married same-sex couples the same legal rights as anybody else. After all, who cares except the puritans? I have the right to leave my estate to my cat in my will if I want to, at least so far, and NOBODY has the right to say I can't. In fact, I'd marry my cat Hideaway if I weren't already married. (Well, I can see that the IRS would not let me claim her as a dependent, even if sometimes the vet bills become a hardship -- there is a common-sense aspect to public law after all, and I will accept that.)
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Does Grobius Vote? No. Grobius feels that his intelligence and knowledge entitle him to more than just a unit share in a ballot, which would be useless in effecting any political policy. On the occasions when he has voted, it has been for a candidate with a cause who has no chance of winning, or a 'joke' candidate like the runners from the Silly Party in Monty Python -- i.e., the negative vote, "Fie on both your houses." Learn this lesson: As an elector, your only value is as a VOTE, your personal opinions and concerns are of no interest to the politician except insofar as it can elicit a Vote when something in the campaign jargon appeals to your particular policies. And if you vote for somebody on the basis of that particular appeal, know that you will ultimately be betrayed, unless you own that politician via campaign funds, blackmail, or family connections.
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