Democracy is failing citizens across the West, society is polarising, and the achievement of your goals in the future is becoming increasingly uncertain. No, ‘the people’ cannot be trusted to make the right decisions.

Since Trump gloriously restricted CNN and the BBC’s press access, The Washington Post, The New York Times and other rags have come out boohooing the fact that democracy isn’t working for them. Rather like when a child accuses another of cheating when they are losing, the lugenpresse would have us believe that a democracy which doesn’t work in favour of their leftist ideology isn’t democracy at all. So, after Brexit and Trump, drowning in leftist tears, and with nationalists doing so well in European polls, I must be head over heels with democracy, right? How wrong you are!

The bien pensants are so ingratiating when they not only defend democracy but do so because ‘the people can be trusted to make the right decisions’. Setting the majority of people aside for one moment (bless them), democracy is, even on paper, the worst political system there is. Churchill (also grossly overrated) was wrong when he said that it was the worst, except for all the others – chortle, chortle. No, Aristotle was right – democracy is simply the corrupted form of a republic, just as tyranny and oligarchy are, monarchy and aristocracy. Except, with the rule of many, indeed the rule of a majority, there are greater and more plentiful opportunities for corruption.

As celebrated as it is, democracy pits every conceivable group against the other, destroying trust in whole nations, let alone communities. Classes are divided as the political class offer the working class more of what the middle class are producing, all the while introducing yet another competing group of immigrants to replace a now dependent working class in the labour force. At least if a king becomes corrupt, you can assassinate the rascal; aristocrats can potentially hold others in check; but, democracy is the cancer of political corruption.

What makes democracy all the more dangerous, however, is that there is no meritocracy to it. People have decision-making power by virtue of falling out of their mothers and not dying for 18 years. We wouldn’t wish to employ someone on those criteria alone, yet the overwhelming majority religiously swear by these criteria in politics, not just for themselves but for every country! And, well, if it’s good enough for the overwhelming majority…

Bringing the zombified masses to question their beliefs about democracy is nigh impossible; and it is precisely for this reason that large-scale democracy is so destructive – people are simply too simple for democracy. For years I have been trying to convince others of the truth of Hoppe’s Democracy: The God That Failed – that such a system degenerates society by offering everyone, from the working to the political class, a quick grab of power or resources with no concern for the long-term, no thought for heritable interests etc. In that time, I have come to learn a lot about the general psychological condition of Westerners. I now understand why people won’t change their minds about democracy and why political responsibility should be relinquished from them, for their own good.

Let’s just look at three general psychological traits of the masses: Low IQs, the Dunning-Kruger effect and Haidt’s Elephant.

For whites/Europeans, the average IQ is 100. Albeit, we have a greater representation among the gifted and intelligent than East Asians, whose average is several points higher. Sounds good, so what’s the problem? It is a small, absolute minoity with IQs above 120, i.e. who can gather and infer their own information, let alone the smaller group who actually do. With that in mind, we must look at the Dunning-Kruger effect; that is, despite ‘lack[ing] the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments’, as one study put it, people assume their mental abilities are greater than they are.

More significantly, when they cannot grasp thinking which is above them, they assume the more intelligent are incompetent and trust instead in their own judgment. This renders the masses unable to select the best representation and, worse, vulnerable to deception and exploitation from those smarter than themselves (perhaps one of several reasons democractic offices seem to attract sociopaths).

But, how can the masses be awoken from their slumber? Haidt’s increasingly popular analogy of an elephant and its rider is a fine way of describing the political defensiveness we are all prone to. Our ideological baggage, especially in our subconscious, is the elephant we (hopefully, with some control) ride around on. Overcoming this beast has to be a gentle process of listening to others’ beliefs, acknowledging the good in their intent, shared aims and, thus, giving them the opportunity to be civil and to reciprocate. There is no guarantee they will change their views of course, but you stand a better chance than charging at them, on the offensive; the elephant will reel, the defences will go up and your views will be stubbornly dismissed.

On the large-scale, masses can be manipulated by the self-interested and sincere alike. In Le Bon’s The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, he noted typical traits of the mass mentality: ‘impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgment and of the critical spirit, the exaggeration of the sentiments’ etc. Hitler made good use of this understanding, swaying the black and white emotional thinking of the masses and completely curtailing Haidt’s Elephant. Such a strategy is open to all and so I candidly employ it with you now.

We share the same wants and needs: security and freedom for ourselves and our loved ones, and the wherewithal to make enough money for leisure and other personal goals. Now, we both need a society that’s stable enough to make this a long-term reality. Traditional systems of government with aristocracies and monarchies did just that; those who ruled had the incentive to not rock the boat or rush to implement lots of new policies, because their children had to inherit the responsibility after them. People were mostly left in peace and the classes weren’t in an endless political war with each other but rather respected each other as kinsmen with a shared vision of liberty, property and the rule of law.

Democracy is failing citizens across the West, society is polarising, and the achievement of your goals in the future is becoming increasingly uncertain. No, ‘the people’ cannot be trusted to make the right decisions. If we want a high trust society and a prosperous future, we must first humble ourselves and trust in the natural hierarchy of tradition – the old order of aristocracy. What trust can we have in a subversive political class who claim to represent us but instead emotionally manipulate us to serve their own ends and those of wealthy interest groups? Down with democracy, up with the noblesse oblige!

Originally Published at The Warden Post