Counter-Currents
Image courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.
1,064 words
Democracy may not be the silliest idea concocted by man but, for anything larger than a small town, it is crackpot. It consists in the idea that a public, on average knowing almost nothing, can choose leaders in popularity contests among provincial lawyers who know little more and are required to know nothing, except how to get elected.
In a democracy, this ignorance is both a protected quality, such as motherhood, and a valued resource. By common consent, the ruled do not look too closely at the mentality of elected rulers, and the rulers speak solemnly of the wisdom of the people, who have none. Reporters will ask, “Senator, what are your views on Afghanistan?” but never, “Senator, where is Afghanistan?” or “Can you spell Afghanistan?”
To plumb the depths of democratic puzzlement, we might, by means of polls, ask how many voters can name three cities in China apart from Beijing, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. Or how many can even name those cities. Or how many know even one date in Chinese history, or can name a single province. Yet, they know that China is perfectly dreadful and dangerous.
Ask what countries border on the Caspian or Black Sea. Or, seriously, how many have ever heard of the Caspian. In today’s politics, these are not quiz-show trivia, but influence Washington’s choice of our next war.
See how many have heard of the Minsk Accords. If they have not, they lack a hamster’s grasp of the Ukraine war. What they think they know probably comes through CNN and MSNBC, assiduous hawkers of the not so.
You can buy Greg Johnson’s The Year America Died here.
Gallup: Twenty-one percent of Americans believe the Sun revolves around the Earth.
Fifty-four percent of Americans read below the sixth-grade level.
A good bet is that the lower third in intelligence of the population know nothing at all of international affairs and exceedingly little of national. Given the appallingly poor schools in the cities, another good bet is that the proportion of blacks cognizant of international geography or politics is vanishingly low. Since Latin American cardiac surgeons and system programmers do not swim the Rio Bravo to pick oranges in Florida, the Hispanic percentage is unlikely to be greatly better. Taken as wholes, none of these three groups is remotely qualified to vote.
From the New York Post: “Representative Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) stunned attendees at a high school solar eclipse event Monday by claiming the rock-solid moon is a ‘planet’ that is ‘made up mostly of gases’ — before adding she still wants to be ‘first in line’ to learn how to live there.”
I suggest sending her. She is the former top Democrat on the House Science Committee’s space subcommittee.
From the Annenberg Public Policy Center: “While little more than a third of respondents (36 percent) could name all three branches of the U.S. government, just as many (35 percent) could not name a single one.”
From FOX News Baltimore:
In reading, 628 Patterson High School students took the test. Out of those students, 484 of them, or 77%, tested at an elementary school reading level. That includes 71 high school students who were reading at a kindergarten level and 88 students reading at a first-grade level. Another 45 were reading at a second-grade level. Just 12 students tested at Patterson High School, were reading at grade level, which comes out to just 1.9%.
While people who read political columns online are likely of above-average intelligence, I wonder how many who rail against capitalism, socialism, fascism, racism, and terrorism can define the words?
I recently checked the bios of the members of the House Committee on China to see how many read, write, or speak Chinese. None. Thus do we make policy regarding the most important foreign country on the planet.
A friend, a former US Senator, once estimated, dead serious, that 90% of the Senate doesn’t know where Myanmar is. If you and I, dear reader, do not know this, it probably doesn’t matter. The Senate engages in foreign policy.
It is important to note that intelligence does not by itself confer the capacity to vote. I know people way into the upper percentiles who do not have the time or the interest to worry about foreign policy, for example. There are engineers, neurosurgeons, mathematicians, journalists, musicians, and artists whose minds just don’t run in political directions, especially involving obscure countries on the other side of the world. Neurosurgeons have families who merit attention, journals to read to keep up with their fields, perhaps a hobby or two, and don’t have much left over to worry about a new Russian pipeline across Mongolia, wherever that is.
People I have met of IQ 190 or better, maybe four (of whom I assuredly am not one) have had the memory and analytical capacity to, I think, approximate an understanding of politics, history, and so on. These people are so rare as to be almost nonexistent. The rest of us at best can know bits and pieces.
For example, my knowledge of Caucasian politics consists entirely in the fact that Washington wants to put military bases in Georgia to help surround Russia. I am blankly ignorant of Congressional and state politics, agricultural policy, or much about what BlackRock is doing around the world. There is too much to know, and too little wit to know it with.
If we ignore exceptions and degrees, the public can be regarded as a vast, semi-comatose polyp that knows only whether it is comfortable or cold and wet and has enough to eat. If the economy is good, people will vote for incumbents, whether these have any responsibility for the prosperity or not. If wars can be fought without inconveniencing them, in places not actually within their visual horizon, they will pay scant attention. They will not concern themselves with education as long as their children get good grades, however unrelated to anything learned. Their interests are local, though they can be stirred up over this football team or that, this Trump or that Biden, or morality plays about police brutality or the righteous heroism of Ukrainians.
Taking into account the aforementioned poor education, controlled media, and American anti-intellectualism — Americans seem to dislike the obviously intelligent — and you have a polity utterly incapable of anything approaching functional democracy. Rev the people up over the Super Bowl or morality tales about Ukraine or Russia and they will do anything desired. Roll over. Bark. Beg. Nothing to it.
Enjoyed this article?
Be the first to leave a tip in the jar!
* * *
Counter-Currents has extended special privileges to those who donate at least $10/month or $120/year.
- Donors will have immediate access to all Counter-Currents posts. Everyone else will find that one post a day, five posts a week will be behind a “paywall” and will be available to the general public after 30 days. Naturally, we do not grant permission to other websites to repost paywall content before 30 days have passed.
- Paywall member comments will appear immediately instead of waiting in a moderation queue. (People who abuse this privilege will lose it.)
- Paywall members have the option of editing their comments.
- Paywall members get an Badge badge on their comments.
- Paywall members can “like” comments.
- Paywall members can “commission” a yearly article from Counter-Currents. Just send a question that you’d like to have discussed to [email protected]. (Obviously, the topics must be suitable to Counter-Currents and its broader project, as well as the interests and expertise of our writers.)
To get full access to all content behind the paywall, please visit our redesigned Paywall page.
18 comments
What Mr. Reed describes can all be explained as CIA blowback, initiated not coincidentally, during WWII. Some may see it as a fine example of poetic justice.
People don’t even need to read the manual these days, it is second nature.
The field manual was declassified significantly to other changes in 1963. It is now open source and available on the Homeland Security website.
https://www.openculture.com/2015/12/simple-sabotage-field-manual.html
The CIA did not exist during the Second World war. The OSS did. Well, I, a foreigner, should correct Americans in this matter?
Chalk one up for the foreigner. I realized the CIA came later after I posted but forgot to change it since it made such a minor difference.
My two favorite examples of Congressional dumbassery are:
1) Hank Johnson of Georgia asking a Navy Admiral if he thought the island of Guam was in danger of tipping over (how the Admiral answered that with a straight face, I’ll never know), and:
2) Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (America’s Rosa Luxemburg) dismissing record low unemployment under Trump by saying, “That’s just because everyone is working two jobs.” Uh, no dear, that’s not how unemployment is calculated.
What is the true treasure of a race or a nation? It is the generic heritage of that race or nation. A resource such as a gold mine is piffling compared to golden genes.
Who is the rightful owner of this treasure? It is the mass of people who are the owners of the golden genes. It is not a minority of plutocrats, aristocrats, and kings who are the true owners of the genetic character of the many.
The fake stewards of the true treasure of the race reveal their illegitimacy by the way they act. They readily pollute and destroy this priceless treasure that they are not the true owners of. They act as if they are squandering someone else’s treasure, and they are.
Democracy is morally well founded because it assigns ultimate right to the true owners of the priceless treasure of our genetic heritage.
Democracy as itself is not bad. The modern “democracy for all” is bad, because it is abused and misused. But it still can be fixed, however for this big restrictions are needed, also, not everybody should have right to vote.
It’s one of history’s darkest ironies that democracy, the supposed government that most empowers ordinary people, seems to be the most impervious to change and the most resistant to what citizens actually want.
VDare’s James Kirkpatrick, from his Intro to Esoteric Trumpism.
For Whites, every form of government is a disaster when it is taken over by antiwhites.
Or, seriously, how many have ever heard of the Caspian.
Or, for example, have they ever heard of the historical names of Caspian Sea, or how the peoples living there call it and why, and what has it to do with Khazars?
Democracy may not be the silliest idea concocted by man but, for anything larger than a small town, it is crackpot.
Ancient Greeks used the democracy (which was much different than modern one) only as local self-government form in πολιτεία; and when the Greeks got bigger states, like Macedonia, they used the monarchical form of government.
morality tales about Ukraine or Russia
Well, fairytales about Putin as defender of the white race belongs to the same category.
Not worth wasting brain space on a bad faith Russian farce like Minsk (Russians broke both Minsk agreements btw). How many have heard of the Budapest Memorandum, which Moscow violated in 2014? Wherefore there was no reason for Ukraine or any other country to take further negotiations or ‘accords’ seriously with Putin’s rogue regime.
Not even close to a ‘fact’. How ignorant or flat out delusional must one be to believe that Washington, rather than Moscow, is the threat to the sovereignty of Georgia? Why would the U.S. even care about a tiny country in the Caucasus? (It doesn’t. But Russian imperialists sure want that region back under Kremlin rule.) Oh poor Russian Federation–it’s only a giant transcontinental empire spanning Eurasia as the largest landmass of a country on earth–Washington has it surrounded on all sides!
–it’s only a giant transcontinental empire spanning Eurasia as the largest landmass of a country on earth
Poor Russia was always attacked by everyone, you from the west, we from the east, that’s why it defended itself and increased its territory tenfold. Moreover, all the conquered peoples joined Russia completely voluntarily, because this kind and fair Russia saved them from their aggressive neighbors and guaranted them free and peaceful development in the Great Empire of the Earth. Only bad Poles did not undestand their happiness to live under soft and nice Russian boot and fought against. And also bad Finns. Niet Molotov, niet Molotov – how they could be so ungrateful, Comrades Stalin and Kuusinen just wanted to bring them the whole hapiness for all workers and peasants. Well, some would die in camps, and some because of famine during the collectivization; but everything because of the Great Cause.
But when seriously, the author still is correct. The people in the West do not know anything about Russia, Eurasia, Caucasus, Ukraine, Central Asia, and their opinions are formed by the lying media, only be some these are Western liberal media, and by anothers – RT, Novosti, TASS and other remnants of the huge machine of the Soviet desinformatsiya.
In 1919, men had their hearts in the right place, but their heads up their asses when they gave women the right to vote. Women’s opinions are valuable and should be considered, but their emotional outlook should not form public policy. Now, no politician can be elected without appealing to women’s affinity for victimhood.
In 1971, the twenty-sixth amendment compounded the idiocy of the nineteenth, and granted eighteen year olds the right to vote. Hey, like that dude is going to legalize pot and cancel my college loan. Awesome!
Not the women are the biggest problem, but the people, who live solely on social assistance; they do not pay taxes and are completely dependent on the state. They will therefore always support any government authority that promises them more social assistance without demanding anything from them in return.
The system should be simple – if you don’t pay taxes, you don’t vote. As for education, there should be some kind of educational qualification to weed out completely uneducated people. But this will never happen, because uneducated people, people on welfare, alcoholics, drug addicts, perverts, criminals, etc. are the main electorate of leftist parties and the globalists behind them all over the world.
My point is that the welfare state itself came about due to the compassionate female element in the electorate. And yes, now the recipients of government largesse will certainly vote for more.
Regarding suffrage, I would go farther than you and deny the vote to anyone who takes more from the government than he gives. That would include not only welfare recipients, but all government employees: bureaucrats, military, and officeholders, who may pay taxes, but they are all paid by the government and would always vote for more recompense and a larger government. The only exceptions to this rule would be that a federal employee could still vote in state or local elections and vice versa. For example, a cop or fireman could not vote for mayor of the town where he works, but could vote for president, senator, and congressman.
[Democracy] consists in the idea that a public, on average knowing almost nothing, can choose leaders in popularity contests among provincial lawyers who know little more and are required to know nothing, except how to get elected.
Another definition:
Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half the time. – E.B. White.
There’s lots of funny definitions compliments of H.L. Mencken:
https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/h-l-mencken-on-democracy-government-and-politics/
Odd that Mencken’s not so daffy definitions are to be found on the AEI site, not to mention that elsewhere on their site the AEI puts in a good word for democracy.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what’s for dinner.
@Bizarro: Yes, that’s the best definition yet.
Comments are closed.
If you have Paywall access,
simply login first to see your comment auto-approved.
Note on comments privacy & moderation
Your email is never published nor shared.
Comments are moderated. If you don't see your comment, please be patient. If approved, it will appear here soon. Do not post your comment a second time.
Paywall Access
Lost your password?Edit your comment