Patrick Gathara's essay — regarding "crumbling" democracy — is worth reading

© 2019 Peter Free

 

16 October 2019

 

 

Do you wonder why Stupidity routinely overwhelms democracy?

 

Cartoonist Patrick Gathara reviewed the causes:

 

 

For many, life is already a soul-sapping constant struggle to put food on the table and keep a roof over one's head.

 

[V]oters take short-cuts which include relying on someone else to tell them what is going on . . . .

 

Ilya Somin, a professor of law . . . notes that political supporters tend to behave very much like sports fans, less interested in the merits of arguments or how well the game is played than in whether their side wins.

 

Brought up on this fast news diet, voters believe that . . . "the world is a very simple place [requiring] very little knowledge to make an informed decision about politics".

 

This leads to the embrace of simplistic panaceas for complex problems, and a preference for "plain speaking" populist politicians, like Trump or Johnson, who disregard complexity.

 

[I]f the world is so simple, then fixing it requires no specialised knowledge.

 

Plato warned that "one of the penalties for refusing to participate in politics is that you end up being governed by your inferiors".

 

[T]he penalty for reducing democratic participation to mere voting is that you [in H. L. Mencken's words] will be governed by "morons".

 

© 2019 Patrick Gathara, Why democracy is crumbling in the West, Al Jazeera (05 October 2019) (excerpts)

 

 

The moral? — Humans are aggressively oriented herd animals

 

Herd mentality obviously limits cognition to low levels of discernible difference. If you're going to do everything together, you had better lazily think alike.

 

Under some circumstances, mental clumping is a survival-enhancing trait.

 

Under humanity's currently resource-depleting conditions, arguably not.

 

Too many of humanity's violently competing groups regularly miss critically important "whole body" survival facts. Homo sapiens is not notably good at discerning nuance.

 

With respect to democracy, successful polity depends upon homogeneity in outlook. Absent such, good luck.

 

Numerically small and more culturally homogeneous nations do better at maintaining perceived freedoms. This may be the most persuasive argument against cultivating societal diversity.

 

What that implies for species survival (as a comparatively peaceful whole) is not encouraging.