Evil is ofttimes described as banal, at least to modern understandings. But if we examine the political and social enterprises of the last century, the adjective that springs to my mind is that of being mediocre. The very worst type of leader is not one that makes the wrong decision, but rather he who makes no decision at all.
Democracy gives the citizen credit for the air which he breathes rather than his accomplishments. By virtue of him coming into this world and making the most unremarkable achievement of surviving until his eighteenth year, the citizen is deemed worthy of participating in the decision making of the nation; or at least he is given the illusion of doing so. As the old saying goes, if your vote really did count then they wouldn’t let you cast it. Or, it is not the voting that matters but the counting.
Civic nationalism takes this one step further and removes the hereditary inheritance of the nation state and replaces it with a willingness to cross a border. When a border is crossed in one direction then it can be abandoned in the other, perhaps when the host nation has been sucked dry of its founding principles and thus no longer harbors the attraction that it once had for citizenship shoppers.
Democracy gives onto the citizen the illusion of participation and thus renders him lazy and uninterested as to his political fate. Witness the general lethargy around the nations of the West as their native populations have been steadily replaced under a banner of multiculturalism. Immigration on this scale is war without banners. And yet every four years or so the citizens of the nation will awake as they move once again to elect a new leader. Much public heartache is put into this most holy of democratic ceremonies. Great emotional enthusiasm greets the election of the one on their side, while an equally abject state renders despondent the poor citizens who cast their bet on the losing side.
And yet, their happiness or dejection are ultimately meaningless, for in the scheme of things nothing will change. Because the democratic leader is not a leader at all. Rather, he is a seeker of mediocrity through moderation; a vacillator who fears above all else having to make a decision. But this state of anxiety is ultimately nonsensical; the democratic leader is a leader who faces no consequences for his decisions. At worst he will lose the following election. At the very worst he will lose his seat, but he will never lose his head.
The disposition to make a decision and stand by the consequences is not a requirement for democratic systems of government. Rather, it is the ability to remove responsibility from authority. This process then attracts the scoundrel, and in this habitat he prospers.
But ultimately, leaders and politicians are the short term manifestations of democracy in action. The longer term belongs to the unelected and unaccountable public service; the bureaucracy that selects its own and moves towards its own end goals. The evilness of democracy rests not with its leaders but with its bureaucracy. Every bureaucracy in every western nation is left wing. It is not these bureaucracies that are in thrall to leftist movements; rather, it is the nations that are in thrall to their bureaucracies. The bureaucracies are the state. Politicians are merely the actors upon whom the general public can focus their attention. In comparison to the bureaucrats, the politicians are card carrying members of having skin in the game.
Think of the most modern example of an oppressive regime and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea normally comes to mind. But compared to western democracies, North Korea is open and honest. The citizens of North Korea know that they are slaves, whereas the citizens of democracies believe themselves to be free. As Vox Day quotes one of his readers on the subject:
“It is amazing how a conglomeration of these little lies, slipped in below your awareness, almost subconsciously, blinded us completely. We would see pedophile rings, and idiots in power, and public graft, and organized riots, and rumors of a vast surveillance state, and the richest people who were all new billionaires that all got their money off a chance clever idea while no multi-generational old-money family starting with billions, ever stole their idea and their fortune before they ever made it, creating multi-generational dynasties with so much wealth they were undefeatable. We even see an eerie exact rerun of pre-WWII Germany. And we saw all of that, pointing to a shadow dictatorship just out of sight which was lying to us, and rerunning a global plan for world war. But what we believed was we lived in the freest country in the world with privacy, and the people in control of the government, and elections, and it could never really be taken from us. And in reality, we never had it to begin with.”
In a similar vein, James Higham ponders while the UK police are so deplorable at this moment, one of many current examples.
“That behaviour of Plod though is soooo melodramatically OTT, so decidedly bullyboy compared to how they act towards the street thug groups, that one has to ask who the hell is directing them? It has the same element of intransigent thuggery that Barnier and his Marxist unaccountables display.”
Street thugs and criminals are in it for their own benefit. In other words, they are no threat to the state. But the one thing that the democratic bureaucracy fears more than any other is the average citizen waking up and realising both that the game was a con and that he has nothing to lose by attempting to change it. Plod is not only following orders to protect the state – it is the state.
The Western affliction of the past few decades for spreading democracy to the rest of the world was merely an attempt to snare others in the same trap, to share the misery all round. That it hasn’t stuck is testament to its own weakness. We live in evil times where men are enslaved while told that they are free. The various state reactions to the virus crisis demonstrate that under a democracy the average man has no rights at all. The Australian state of Victoria is the perfect example of this in action. And many of its citizens publicly cheer their own imprisonment.
The North Korean citizen would behave this way because he has no choice; the alternative is death or worse. The Westerner behaves this way because he has been conditioned since birth to believe the soft lies of his own incarceration. Perhaps banality is the right description after all.
Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill. You can purchase Adam’s books here.