Amerika

Quotations and memes thrive on the internet because they capture the gist of some issue or another in a quick way that people can understand and remember. As many know, the quotation attributed to Voltaire, “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize,” thrives on the net.

Although the original quotation was from another source, it still resonates with us because your actual leaders will not tolerate much criticism. They will accept criticism of lower parts of the system, but not themselves, nor the system itself, as one study of the Soviets tells us:

There is an unwritten rule in Soviet publications, both military and civilian, that you can criticize, but not generalize. What that means is that individual screwups can be identified and castigated at length, but for political reasons it is unacceptable to make general criticisms applying to a whole institution. You see, a critique that pointed to an all-pervasive condition would ipso facto critique Soviet society as a whole, and thereby the Communist Party, which oversees every aspect of Soviet life. It is a thin, but to them a philosophically important, distinction. In fact, when individual malefactors are named, the system as a whole is being criticized, but in a politically acceptable way.

When Larry Bond and Tom Clancy wrote that passage, they were observing a truth of all centralized systems: the real power cannot be criticized because that would debunk the system, but instances of its work can be attacked in order to urge it to avoid those problems and theoretically do better.

(Note to the curious observer: criticizing problems without pointing out a working alternative rarely makes a system better; it just adds layers of bureaucracy to “manage” those problems, which takes the system even farther from having real goals and therefore hastens its decline).

That quote, by the way, comes from a White Nationalist who makes the classic mistake of assuming that the real power is deliberate and not opportunistic:

And so we go on inventing Voltaire. Another dictum that has recently gained wide currency on the web is this: “To learn who rules over you, simply find out who you are not allowed to criticize.”

Now regularly attributed to Voltaire, this saying seems to originate with something written in 1993 by Kevin Alfred Strom, an American neo-Nazi Holocaust denier, and not a man who obviously exudes Voltairean wit and irony. But once you become an authority, it seems, all sides have a claim on you.

It would be so convenient for the system if there were a shadowy group of easily identified people who are causing all the problems, and we could just murder them and be safe. Life is more complex: power systems attract opportunists who exploit them, and equality just makes that easy.

A healthy system operates like your kidneys, brain, or natural selection. It filters out the useless and keeps the useful. Your kidneys clean the blood, your brain considers every idea and (ideally) rejects nonsense, and natural selection keeps the functional and eats up the dysfunctional.

You will find that the Left entirely opposes this filtering. They want “good to the good, good to the bad” so that they as individuals are safe from consequences, sane people want “good to the good, bad to the bad,” and mainstream conservatives just want everyone to get Jesus and a 401k.

But who rules us? Conservatives deflect on this issue because they do not want to confront it. We are a type of democracy known as a democratic republic, based in liberal democracy with civil rights and a mixed economy.

In this society, the voters rule. If there is election fraud, they have a duty to stomp it. If there is a bad candidate in office, they have a duty to support alternatives and then vote out the bad candidate. If government is bad, they need to find someone who can clean it and then support his allies.

The voters rule us. They always have. Leftists like to pretend that this is not true and that we are ruled by a shadowy oligarchy, which is a handy way of describing lobbying; conservatives like to pretend that somehow “the system” took over without the voters approving its stalwarts like Clinton, Biden, and 0bama.

As is common in a dying society, you will find lots of people willing to make excuses so that they can blame a scapegoat, but very few people willing to own up to the fact that democracy has failed because people in groups make bad decisions and it destroys them.

Unfortunately for us, we are stuck in the modern deception, which is that if you “inform” someone and they sign on the dotted line, it is their problem if the results turn out horribly, not yours. Democracy by virtue of being popular is a type of adhesion contract:

An adhesion contract exists if the parties are of such disproportionate bargaining power that the party of weaker bargaining strength could not have negotiated for variations in the terms of the adhesion contract. Adhesion contracts are generally in the form of a standardized contract form that is entirely prepared and offered by the party of superior bargaining strength to consumers of goods and services. Adhesion contracts are commonly used for matters involving insurance, leases, deeds, mortgages, automobile purchases, and other forms of consumer credit.

Because adhesion contracts do not afford consumers a realistic opportunity to bargain, the consumers are often faced with adhesion contracts on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Under such conditions, the consumer has little to no ability to negotiate more favorable terms. Instead, consumers cannot obtain the desired product or service except by acquiescing in the form contract.

In other words, as long as the fine print is there — even if the consumer does not read it and cannot understand it — the presumed equal individual is assumed to have understood it fully and have accepted the bad results that are sure to follow.

A more sensible society, instead of basing its morality on method, focuses on results: did this turn out for good, or bad, in the past? If it will end badly, as part of the custodial relationship with the civilization and voters, it is our duty to stop them from toddling into suicide.

The bad wins every time because it is simple. Bad says that it is not bad, but something else is, and there is a path to fixing everything with this one simple step that involves Bad being in power forever. Good tells you that there is nuance, nothing will fix everything, but we can work toward quality and good.

It is time to impeach the voters. They have failed in every major area. A herd ruling itself is therefore not a viable option. Unless we get away from this system of democracy that drives everyone insane and makes them stupid, we are headed further into the tunnel of decay.

Tags: democracy, kevin alfred strom, liberal democracy, voltaire