Brainpolice : Majoritarianism

What Is Democracy? Part One: Democracy Is Slavery

Brainpolice — Sun, 16 Mar 2008 05:57:00 GMT

This is part one in a three part series: democracy is slavery, democracy is impossible and democracy is liberty.

Democracy Is Slavery

By the phrase "democracy is slavery", I refer to the tyranny that inevitably arises from the principles of majoritarianism and communalism. One standard definition of democracy is rule by the majority. Rule by the majority is fundamentally in opposition to the liberty of the minority, and the individual is of course the greatest minority of them all. The logical implication of the principle of majoritarianism, viewed as an ethic, is that superiority in numbers justifies decision-making over others. The group with the largest amount of people in it may control and subjugate all other groups, all other individuals not within it. To use a common phrase that accurately describes majoritarian democracy, it reduces to "might makes right". Majoritarian democracy creates a master-slave relationship in which the masters outnumber the slaves. The range necessary for a group to become a majoritarian ruling class could be anywhere between 51% and 99% of a given population.

Numerical majoritarianism, a subcategory or altered version of majoritarian democracy, is somewhat different in that no true majority is actually required. One does not have to exceed 50% in numerical superiority in order to rule over others. The numerical majority could theoretically be constituted by anywhere between 1% and 49% of a given population. In practise, it actually reduces to a minority ruling over a majority in terms of the overall population of those involved. Numerical majoritarianism creates a master-slave relationship in which the slaves outnumber the masters. The more groups that are involved, the smaller the numerical majorities may potentially get, and conversely the larger the dominated or subjected group may potentially get. Most examples of democracy in action are cases of numerical majoritarianism, although democracies could be said to vary between exercises of both pure and numerical majoritarianism interchangably depending in the particular situation in question.

Democracy is slavery because the minority, most importantly the individual, is forced into an association with and subjected to the decision-making power of the majority that they did not explicitly consent to. I define slavery quite simply as involuntary servitude and forced association, a state of affairs in which one or more individuals imposes decision-making from above upon one or more individuals against their explicit consent. Under democracy, whatever positive obligations that the majority wishes to impose on the minority must be lived up to regaurdless of the consent of the minority. The majority exercises decision-making power over social and economic life of others. Certainly a man is no less a slave if they have a multitude of masters rather then one master. While in monarchy the individual has one ruler or is the subject of a tiny familial or noble aristocracy, in democracy the individual has more of a plurality of rulers. The majority exercises shared or quotal rulership over the subjected individual. Democracy increases the amount of rulers. It could conversely be said that it reduces the amount of subjects as compared to monarchy, but this does not solve anything and the subjects are only reduced by the creation of more rulers.

It is important for one to realize that, as a principle seeking to justify authority and decision-making, majoritarian democracy, wether it be constituted by true majorities or numerical ones, is blind or neutral to the logical or ethical nature of the preferences of the majority in question. It justifies whatever decision is made by the majority, regaurdless of wether or not is right or wrong based on any independant ethical criterion and regaurdless of wether or not it makes any sense at all. In an exercise of majoritarian democracy, anything from murder to theft to rape to kidnapping could theoretically be given sanction, so long as the group approving of or engaging in such actions constitutes a majority. To reduce majoritarianism to the absurd, using the principle of majoritarianism on a small scale, if there are two men and a woman and the men want to have sexual intercourse with the woman and she does not, the two men are allegedly justified in raping her. Or, to use a large-scale example of the absurdities resulting from the principle, 51% of a population may allegedly legitimately murder the other 49%.

Majoritarian democracy fails the criterion of universality in ethics because the respective majorities and minorities are not held to the same basic standard of ethics. It functions as a defacto justification for the majority or group being able to get away with doing that which the individual or minority may not do. In short, the majority is exempted from being subject to the same ethical criterion and responsibility as everyone else. This is logically inconsistant if ethical principles and rights are supposed to apply to all individual human beings, if the individual is our standard of sovereignty. Using the law of universality as our criterion, even if it is one individual against everyone else in the world, it still is not just for even everyone else in the world to enslave, plunder or murder the individual. "The community", "the majority", and the deceptive phrases such as "the will of the people" and "the public good" cannot legitimately be invoked to justify tyranny. These terms function as obfuscations and illegitimate apologetics for the subjugation of people.

Utilitarianism could be seen as being linked to democracy in terms of the old and common maxim "the greatest good for the greatest number". Using this as a criteria for ethics could be used to justify majoritarianism because the precise definition of the term "good" is left up in the air so that whatever the majority happens to consider to be "good" is sanctioned. Afterall, the majority is "the greatest number". The majority may certainly benefit and gain utility, wether it be in a purely psychological and emotional sense or in terms of material and physical well-being, prosperity and survival. But the criterion for justifying it is arbitrary and inconsistant, especially when terms such as "happiness" are employed. The means toward obtaining the utility are not taken into proper consideration. The end of utility or happiness for the majority is used to justify the means. What is not addressed is that there is a burden of proof on the majority to justify their means. The burden of proof always lies with those who assert authority, and a mere numbers game does not constitute a sufficient justification for authority. If explicit consent is used as a criterion for the burden of proof, then democracy and utilitarianism cannot ethically legitimize anything at all. It functions as little more then majoritarian hedonism. In the absence of explicit consent, democracy as a general principle is nothing but an arbitrary apologetic for slavery.

The idea that one has a right to participate in and have decision-making power over other people's private relationships against their explicit consent is fundamentally contradictary to the concept of individual sovereignty and free association. A sovereign individual is one who is free from the imposition of 3rd parties of people, including majorities. Noone else has an abstract entitlement to decision-making over the individual and the private relationships that they enter into. Only the individual has legitimate authority in decision-making over their own person. The only alternative to individual sovereignty or self-ownership, as Murray Rothbard once pointed out, is either for another individual to exercise decision-making over their person, which would create a master-slave relationship in which one person rules over another, or for the collective or everyone to exercise quotal ownership or decision-making over eachother's person, which would create an absurd scenario in which everyone attempts to own a quotal share of everyone else. Since this is practically impossible to realistically enforce, the communalist alternative, in practise, reduces to the first alternative of individual rulership, only in the name of the community or collective. Democracy is somewhere in between the two extremes of individual rulership and the mutual and universal slavery of everyone to eachother. Democracy is as close to the communalist ideal that a society can get, reducing to some combination of pure and numerical majoritarianism in which there is a mixed and somewhat dynamic network of master-slave relationships.

Democracy is Impossible

Brainpolice — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 06:54:00 GMT

There are many good arguements against democracy. The most standard of these arguements is primarily an ethical one: that it is unjust for a majority to be able to vote away the rights of a minority. For if democracy is defined in terms of majoritarianism, it must be dismissed as being inherently incompatible with a universal application of rights to all human beings, since it implies that any larger amount of people can legitimately force their will on any smaller amount of people. This makes democracy nothing but might makes right, cloaked in egalitarian rhetoric. The ethically and logically consistant position would be that if it is wrong for an individual to do X (such as murder), then it is wrong for a group to do X. However, I intend to take a bit of a different approach to argueing against democracy here.

The ideal of political democracy is that of a government controled by the people as a whole. The idea is that by expanding access to the governmental apparatus to everyone, wether that be through voting or through eligibility for holding political office, we will get rid of exploitation of men by men. This is supposed get rid of the special privileges in society, converting everyone into more or less a state of "equality under the law". But this idea is ridiculous. The government is not actually directly controlled by the people. Ownership by the government, in practise, amounts to ownership by an oligarchy, for the people do not in fact directly control the government. The people who actually constitute our government, in practise, are the politicians, bureaucrats, policemen and soldiers. Another related class of people are a small band of private interests who ally with the government for special privileges in exchange for political support. Combined, those are the real, albiet unjust, owners of "public property", which is stolen from "the people" in reality (including workers and the poor in general).

The only remotely good thing that democracy does as a system is get rid of the monarchal king. But this move in itself becomes meaningless and negated by the proceeding steps in the transformation towards democracy. Democracy may indeed get rid of the king, but it replaces the king with a plurality of rulers (which for all intents and purposes can now function as multiple kings). But think about what this actually does. We have gotten rid of the special privilege of the king, and replaced it with a special privilege to an even larger band of men.

Democracy does not get rid of privileged rulers. It replaces a system in which one person is at the top of the oligarchy with one in which multiple people are at the top of the oligarchy. Indeed, democracy does not get rid of oligarchy. A government (no matter what form), by its very nature, is oligarchal, and a government inherently creates a class division between itself and the populace. The political class is those who constitute the government and the individuals who ally with them for privileges (the tax-consumers), and the subject class is those who are ruled by the political class (the tax-payers). What democracy does is allow more people to become part of the political class, and hence it actually expands special privileges.

The theory of political democracy is wrong. The existence of "representatives" in itself drives a wedge between "the people" and "the government", for the control is not direct. This is what distinguishes "participatory" or "direct" democracy from what most people refer to as "democracy" (representative democracy, which is a sham). The theory of control by the people would only be true if we had participatory democracy, and if participatory democracy were actually put into practise, it would be an anarchy because it would have to be based on unanimous consent and direct control. Participatory democracy could not in practise continue being a government. There is no such thing as a government that is directly controlled by all of the people: they would all have to literally be members of it. Such a notion is absurd.

To add some criticism of the effectiveness of voting and political representation: it is physically and logically impossible for a few men in the government to realistically represent all of the people who voted for them or all of the people in the district or state in general. They are individual human beings, they can only directly represent themselves. It is impossible for one man to represent the diverse desires of an entire society, for all of the people within a given society vary widely and conflict in their desires in the first place. It would be impossible for one man or small band of man to even accurately ascertain or predict those desires. This is essentially the calculation or information problem applied to political participation and representation. As a consequence of the information problem, political representatives inherently must impose either their own will or the will of a special interest group onto the masses, even if every single person voted. In short, they must centrally plan in opposition to the desires of "the people".

The introduction of the institution of voting into society does not magically make the government more controlled by the people, nor does it necessarily make it any more voluntary. It first must be established that the casting of a vote in itself need not be one of enthusiasm, but can be one of resignation or as a reactionary mechanism against encroachment by interests that the individual dislikes or opposes. It also must be established that the mere act of voting is not truly binding on any politician. For all intents and purposes, a politician can run on a platform of X, and then do Y once in office (for example, see George W. Bush preaching about the virtues of non-intervention with foreign nations in the 90's and compare it to his actions in the present). One may counter that in four years or so they can get voted out of office, but (1) this is less likely than one may think due to the gullability of the voting populace (2) it does nothing to negate the damage already done in the time that the person does hold office and (3) it does nothing to truly legally prosecute politicians who break their oaths and contracts.

The demographic reality tells us that large chunks of many country's populations simply don't vote. It would follow that these people cannot be said to be "responsible" for things that came about as a result of voting that they did not take part in. One cannot reasonably argue that someone who has never cast a vote can truly be adequately represented. This rather large group of people, the non-voters, are technically pure subjects. But so are most of the people who do vote, because their votes do nothing but bind them. Both the voter and non-voter are binded all the same, for they are still subject to whatever the government decides. The typical voter has simply been given the illusion that they are in a better position than the non-voter. This is not the case - both are subject to the government's decrees against their will all the same.

Even if we do assume that the government can represent voters in any realistic way, we are almost never dealing with true majorities in a democracy. We are dealing with "numerical majorities". The idea that, say, Texas is a "red state" is absurd in the sense that the actual statistics show us something very close to the following: say, 35% of the eligible Texas population voted, and out of that 35% of the eligible Texas population 2% voted for 3rd parties, 15% voted for Democrats and 18% voted for Republicans. Thus, by literally considering Texas to be a "red state", we are projecting a rather small statistic (18% of eligible voters, which is probably 10% or less of the Texas population) into a generalization encompassing the entire population of the state. "The majority" or "the state of texas" is not being "represented". We are dealing with a rather small fraction of its population.

This is why I consider the very idea of political democracy to ultimately be a sham, an impossibility.