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CHAPTER IV: THE DEMOCRACY PROBLEM
I have already described the problem of freedom in the last chapter. Now it's time to do the same with democracy. That is much easier thing to do, since I am definitely not the first one to notice problems with democracy. Many people have already criticized democracy in the past, including great minds and famous philosophers like Socrates and Plato. Socrates has compared a democratic society to a ship where the crew votes on every decision including the navigation and so the ship crashes and sinks. Plato criticized the democratic society as a society of selfish people who only follow their own interests and do everything only for their own self-gain, without taking other people's interests nor the interests of the society as a whole into account.
I agree with both arguments and I don't really have much to add. I don't even go to vote now. I have not cast my vote for quite few years now, and I don't expect it to change anytime soon. People always tell me that "If you don't vote, then you have no right to complain afterwards". Not only I think that is not true, I actually think they have it backwards. I think it's the other way around - It is the people who did go to vote who has no right to complain afterwards. Why? Well, if you vote for a political party and this party wins the elections and then they use their newly gained power to do something bad, then you are responsible for it, since you are one of the people who allowed it to happen. Now I hear you ask: But what about the people who voted for a different party, one which lost the election? Well, those are guilty too. Why? Because by the act of voting they have legitimized the whole election process. Their party lost, but by casting a vote for them, they have legitimized that loss and helped to legitimize the victory of the other party. Think about it. If only 10% of the population votes and then one party wins with the gain of 60% of votes, then it means that they only gained the trust of 6% of the population. They still won, but their mandate is very weak. On the other hand if 100% of the population votes and then the party wins with the gain of 51% of votes, their result seems weaker on paper, but their mandate is actually stronger than in the previous case, since 51% of the population expressed their trust to them, instead of 6% like in the previous case. In other words - The more people goes to vote, the more legitimate those elections become. So even if you voted for a party that lost the elections, you still helped to legitimize the mandate of the party that won the elections. So if you went to vote, it is actually you who has no right to complain.
Of course there is more arguments against democracy than this. One of them being the fact that a single individual cannot change anything. Common counter-argument is that "the masses can change things and masses consists of individuals, so individuals do have power to change things". But in reality this isn't a counter-argument at all. It doesn't change the fact that a single individual has no power to change anything. Many individuals isn't the same thing as a single individual.
And lastly there is the argument that points out the fact that democracy is self-defeating. Countless times in history happened that democratic system was used to install a dictatorship into power. Democracy was used to destroy democracy. I believe that these cases aren't just few random events, but an inevitable result, a path that all democracies follow and an endpoint where all democracies inevitably end. I believe that democracies always develop this way. It is a unstoppable evolution of all democratic systems. No checks and balances can't prevent this. It is the nature of democracy itself to evolve in such a way that in the end it will destroy itself. Democracy is just a self-destructive as pacifism. I originally wanted to write an entire chapter about pacifism and how self-destructive it is, but thinking about it now, it seems to me that