by Steve Harris on September 26, 2002

American politics will perhaps never achieve the degree of honesty our founding fathers envisioned, because their vision wisely did not embrace democracy as we know it. Their vision of democracy was limited to those who make the daily leadership decisions that keep society going: those who owned the farms and businesses, and ran the churches and military.

In the last decade, we’ve seen The People swindle themselves by believing that the categories of good and evil communicate vital information. Someone labels Iraq evil, and they go to war; someone complains about the war, and they label the president who called the war good as evil.

In theory, having your peers get together and decide “as one big happy family” what should be done is an emotionally fulfilling plan. If we all make the decision, we’ll get it right, and there won’t be much dissent – everyone will be “represented.” However, the truth is that since the dawn of language, it’s been trivial for leaders to manipulate the average person.

Think about this. Joe American isn’t a “bad” person or a “good” person, but an average person. He works forty hours a week, fifty with commuting time included. He trusts his newspapers and teevee. With family, shopping, home repair, children and entertainment to look after, Joe’s a pretty distracted guy.

He’s not going to think critically about everything he reads, but will make a conclusion based on how it hits him at the moment — and of the Joes of the world, only one in ten can even hope to make such decisions, if given education and time. This is where Joe is susceptible.

Like a good hacker, a government knows the first step in any attack is to set up fake data that can later be referenced in order to compromise the system. Think of it is a mental trojan horse, or a virus: they literally upload a binary logic into his brain.

First it’s “good” and “evil.”

Next comes the ol’ Cold War canard, about how America is “free’ and “democractic” and this is therefore better than any other system on earth and therefore they all hate us.

Joe “Voter” American thus feels empowered when the decision is presented to him in a simplistic, binary way. “Well, who wouldn’t want to get rid of these horrible people?” he thinks. “I’m with the good guys! Let’s go get the bad guys!” he says – thus social control is instantly implanted and effected at the same time.

The New World Order will involve crushing any dissidents before we’re informed, because of the decisions “we” make now. The NWO gets its power because it can fool we, the people, by using this good/evil logic.

The discerning reader can now see why I, and many more thinkers and writers of late, have begun to speak up about democracy in the media age, referring to it by an older appellation: tyranny.

When we strip away the pretense, and the social justification, and the corporate-governmental-theocratic manipulation, democracy means “the mob rules” and does the bidding of its masters, who are pursuing only profit. We don’t need to blame corporations or government; we need to blame ourselves, or rather our lack of control in that we allow an undifferentiated Crowd to make decisions for us.

The only thing “wrong” with this is what doesn’t get done as a result. No collective action is taken to make civilization more intelligent, to protect and nurture the environment, or to plan for a sustainable long-term future.

The dead white males that are currently fashionable to disregard had a solution for this. When they spoke of democracy, they didn’t mean that everyone could vote. They meant that only men of a certain age who were powerful enough to be familiar with the workings of power should vote. These were those who had been required to survive and endure in a business environment, and who had seen the root process behind it. They are not as easily fooled as someone too young, someone who has not forged their way in society yet, or someone with a built-in compassion overabundance as a result of biological programming for child care. They were hardened and could make difficult decisions independent of “bad’ and “good” programming.

So today, when they trot out a symbol – a “successful” black female enfranchised empowered voter – to tell you that it’s time to kill the brown man in Iraq or a white man on ruby ridge, think: It’s not.

Consider what you support carefully. And consider turning off your teevee and shutting down the instant popularity contest we call “democracy.” Before it’s impossible to make that change.

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