This is a follow-up to my posting Humans Can Become Inhuman, which no one seems to have understood. In it, I pointed out that humans have frequently acted inhumanly towards their fellow humans – treating them as though they were a foreign species – and killing them ruthlessly in large numbers – as described in another posting Much Worse Than the Holocaust.
The proper attitude is to regard these incidents as regrettable exceptions to the onward march of human progress. My attitude is that they were only the tip of a much larger iceberg – one where human society was in the process of turning against itself – of becoming not only inhuman, but anti-human.
I hope this makes my position clear. It should be obvious that I am paranoid – but I think my paranoia is reasonable, given the circumstances. Part of this reasonableness is due to theory behind it – which I will now outline.
First of all, social inequality has been part of human society since the beginnings of civilization. A few always got the most – and the people that supported these few, who made things actually work, lived comfortably – and the rest (the vast majority) barely survived. This was life.
The modern world had different ideals. It was in favor of egalitarianism, of making life good for everyone – not just for a few. What a shocking idea! But strangely enough it had power, and changed the way the world worked. For one thing, it changed the way people looked at the world, and made Science possible. But above all, it introduced (or re-introduced from the ancient world, actually) the idea of humanism – which stressed the importance of the autonomous individual – or in contemporary terms: human values.
This development soon forked along two lines – humanist values became liberal values – which were opposed to a new complex of technology-assisted totalitarianism – in American called conservatism. This is the new power which has taken over the human race. Its ascendancy has been gradual – over a hundred years in the process – and so subtle few have noticed it. Its takeover greatly accelerated after WWII with the introduction of Television, Computers, and the Internet. This new world seemed so superior to our human world, we concentrated on it – and even became hostile to the human world we had loved before.
This was a very complicated process, but it results can be easily summarized – humans have been eliminated – or actually, so greatly weakened as to become negligible. From being all-powerful they have become powerless, or helpless. Liberalism, the movement that supported them, became powerless also. How did this happen?
I believe it was the overall impact of technology, which seemed to be more wonderful than anything human. The simple fact that humans were the ones who made all this technology was conveniently overlooked. Technology itself became the new god – especially when it was allied with the power structure – which quickly made it part of itself. This was a new kind of power – much more powerful than any before it. It could control people, using the social sciences – as though they were putty in its hands – or puppets moved by invisible strings.
People themselves became nothing. Human values ceased to exist.
The Party System Has Been the Curse of Democracy
I am tempted to make that statement even stronger: the party system has destroyed democracy. It is a parasite on democracy and diverts precious social resources from it. Instead of concentrating on finding the right people for the job, enormous energy is used by the parties in their own interests. They take power away from the nation and make it weaker.
Of course everyone asks “How else can democracy work?” For people in the age of the Internet to ask that question only shows how helpless and ignorant they have become. The only answer can be that “Democracy, in most societies, simply doesn’t work very well – and America, the slave of a two-party system, is proof of that.”
That fact that Americans think they have a democracy – and their democracy is the right one for other countries, such as Iraq and Afghanistan – only shows how little they know – of their own country and of other countries.
America did not begin with a party system. The Founding Fathers referred to them derisively as factions – and thought it in poor taste for a man to campaign for public office. The proper man, such as George Washington, would be obvious to the electorate, and he would accept the office out of a sense of public duty – not in order to increase his personal power.
Thomas Jefferson, a very complex person, could not resist this temptation however, and formed the first political party in order to become president – to the complete disgust of John Adams. All the rest has been downhill.
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