Amerika

We are all familiar with demotism — the phenomenon described here back in the 1990s as the symmetry between voting, buying, and popularity — but how many know of the deme, or the localized variant of a species?

As our dictionary will tell us, the second definition of deme refers to a cultivar, landrace, subspecies, or otherwise genetically isolated group:

1: a unit of local government in ancient Attica
2: a local population of closely related interbreeding organisms

Before the term demotism was coined in its neoreactionary context, we described it here as a parallel in allowing popularity to choose what is seen as the utilitarian “best” choice, existing between consumerism, democracy, and social popularity:

Modern society is based on a greed empowered by individualism, or the placing of the individual above all else; this is the result of underconfidence on the part of a large number of our people, and their political empowerment allowing them to misappropriate resources to ensure individualism takes precedence over any other thought or value. Consumerism, democracy, and media/popularity are the means by which we make decisions.

Demotism of course leads to rule by tyrants who are not elites in the sense of higher quality, but elites in the sense of champions of the people who say what a plurality want to hear and therefore, gain power:

In our modern society, elites exist because of the purchasing and voting power of the masses. These elites are relatively new, and have nothing in common with the old European aristocracy, the previous “elite” that the left targeted during revolutions in France and Russia, among other places. These elites occur because they created a product that the vast majority of people wanted. These products do not necessarily correspond to what is best for the population; in fact, there seems to be an inverse relationship. Coca-cola, McDonald’s, wasteful SUVs, cigarettes, plastic junk, pornography… all of these make millionaires, and those millionaires are our elites.

When you allow the utilitarian idea that what is best for most is the best choice, you end up with a surrogate method of determining that, namely asking people what they think is best. They generally do not know, so settle on whatever compromise offends the fewest and seems to offer easy benefits.

This happens in products, where people buy Coca-Cola for a huge markup on sugar and water, in politics where they vote for anarchy with subsidies, and in socialization, where whoever says something witty but uncontroversial commands attention and therefore gradually inches up the hierarchy of that group.

Demotism ensure high cost and low quality because groups of people defer to averages instead of excellence; demetism on the other hand requires that one do best for a group defined by culture, the ethnicity that produces it, continuity of founding with future, and those who make those happen.

In a demetist society, elites are chosen by how well they exemplify the culture, its people, and its traditions in a flexible sense; they are not trying to recreate the past, but create the conditions that made the best of the past, leading to a stable civilization and thus the “best life” for everyone.

As Late Stage Democracy winds down in failure, we humans are looking at an increase in binaries between noticing reality and upholding social conventions based in the current political system. You can have free speech or diversity, but not both, for example.

Part of that process involves us choosing between the deme and the demos. We either choose our best exemplars and make them lead, or we go utilitarian, pacifistic, and pluralist and choose whatever novelty or trend has come our way that fascinates the most.

Naturally the demotist society exhibits bias toward the current, which is why as democracy becomes more unmoored, people chase after Hail Mary passes and distractions as a means of making it through the night in the belief that the new thing will fix all the other things.

On a more practical and realistic level, it makes sense to simply keep what has worked for the majority of times, and ignore both novelty and glitches in otherwise working systems that are used as pretexts for revolution.

Nothing will exist without failure; Utopia does not exist. Even the best of things will fail. However, over time, we can see that some methods work better than others, and demotism will never choose those, but demetism will.

Tags: deme, demetism, demos, demotism, late stage democracy