Reflections on Democracy And Violence (part 1 of 3))

This essay is published at Unlikely Stories

(for parts 2 and 3, see blogs above)




   If Socrates and Plato and Diotina and all the rest of the folk at the party had simply eaten lots of food and wine and dope and spent the entire weekend in bed together perhaps Western Civilization wouldn't have been such a failure? —Philip Whalen

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1. Introduction

The second section of this article establishes a correlation, witnessed by evidence and the testimony of S. E. Finer and Stanley J. Tambiah, between democracy and violence, a correlation that is strengthened in the third section by John Keane and Robin Blackburn's observation that civil society tends towards violence; but correlation is not causation, and section three is dedicated to establishing a causal link between the Forum-type polity and violence. Insights have been borrowed from behavioural economics and the logic of relations to show that individuals confuse relations with qualities: being more powerful than others is perceived as a quality, and not as a relation. Hence, individuals are more willing to make sure that others are worse off than themselves than in being personally better off. Hitherto inexplicably internecine struggles, notably the First World War, are thereby explained. The irrational individual enjoys complete liberty in a democracy to play out his irrationality; in the Palace polity, a culture of subordination as well as a bureaucratic hierarchy and notions of kingship work to restrain his impulses. It is argued here that the Holocaust, for instance, was conceived of largely by civil society, thereby mimicking an earlier evil, the Atlantic Slave Trade. The pathologies of the Palace polity - assassination and usurpation - remain confined within the palace; the pathologies of the Forum polity affect the entire populace - and foreign peoples. In the course of the discussion, the difference between 'liberal' and 'illiberal' democracy is found to be vacuous.