Not the End Of History? Democracy vs Authoritarianism
A short introduction to the critical arguments Ideological Endpoint Winston Churchill wrote "It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried". These days, however, the vast majority of Western intellectuals no longer see democracy as a sort of necessary evil in the way Churchill did. Instead, today’s thinkers are generally passionate supporters of democracy. In 1989 Francis Fukuyama famously summed up his euphoric modern viewpoint with an essay entitled "The End Of History": "The notion that mankind has progressed through a series of primitive stages of consciousness on his path to the present, and that these stages corresponded to concrete forms of social organization, such as tribal, slave-owning, theocratic, and finally democratic-egalitarian societies, has become inseparable from the modern understanding of man... [We may be in the process of witnessing] the end of history as such: that is, the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." Not only is liberal democracy now generally believed to be by far the most enlightened form of government, it is also believed to be by far the most economically successful form of government. Therefore, on material grounds alone, it is believed that the masses will eventually rebel against any other system, making democracy the only sustainable form of government. We have the critical idea that mankind's evolution toward democracy on ideological grounds has accompanied his evolution toward democracy on pragmatic economic grounds. Democracy is the endpoint of mankind's search for material progress just as it is the endpoint of mankind's search for justice and virtue. The most ethically advanced system is also the most economically powerful system. However, the widely accepted claim that only democratic systems can thrive is being increasingly challenged by the economic success of authoritarian China and Singapore. Orthodox Western thinkers still see the success of China as an anomaly that can not last. For example, Alan Greenspan has said that he believes corruption is endemic to the authoritarian system and this will eventually cause economic growth to stall. Failure comes about becuase corruption prevents the Darwinian process by which wisdom triumphs over ignorance, so corruption is a cancer that eats away at the ability of society to respond successfully to the challenges of life. Indeed, economic historians point out that many regimes in the past, eg Russia under Stalin and Italy under Mussolini, showed initially high growth rates after adopting an authoritarian model and then fell into decline. Singapore, however, provides a very strong counter argument. Transparency International publishes a corruption index in 180 different countries. New Zealand and Sweden tie for 1st place closely followed by authoritarian Singapore. The USA comes in at 18th place, Italy 55th, China 72nd, India 85th, Egypt 115th, Somalia 180th. A few semi-orthodox Western thinkers claim that whilst democracy is the most enlightened form of government, it does not necessarily outperform authoritarianism economically. Perhaps the level of corruption endemic to the authoritarian system has been overestimated, perhaps other economic factors benefit from authoritarianism. For example: Robert Kagan, foreign-policy analyst at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, has said: “We lived under the illusion that economic success required political liberalisation. All the [democratic] optimism of the 1990s rested on this assumption. Now it appears that the causality is less certain... The old struggle, the one that long predated the Cold War, has returned.” (Although it goes beyond of the scope of this introductory article, for political scientists this argument violates Seymour Martin Lipset's legitimacy axiom, separating performance and worth is unscientific. Plato might say "wisdom conquers ignorance eventually", or "the Gods favour the worthy". The Sophists (atheist poets) might say "history is written by the victorious", or "might is right, weakness is wrong"). It's still very much a nascent movement, but a third group of Western heretics, drawn primarily from the world of financial markets, rarely from journalism or politics, are arguing that the spectacular economic success of "The China Model", which has been sustained for almost 30 years now, and which dwarfs the achievement of emerging democracies such as India, demonstrates that authoritarianism can, in fact, deliver much higher levels of economic growth than democracy even in the longer term. These heretics believe the West needs to learn from China, the West needs to reform democracy, making it more effective. Although Warren Buffet has not called himself a heretic, he has said that he prefers to invest in authoritarian China rather than democratic India because the Chinese government "can get things done". The majority of Americans oppose the stimulus package put in place to mitigate the credit crisis, if democracy was more populist, and politicians followed public opinion, Buffet points out that the American economy would have been completely destroyed. Tony Blair worries that immoral capitalistic populist journalism is making the public increasingly irrational, jeopardising growth. Blair has said "The role of modern media in modern democracy is an issue every senior politician I know believes is ripe for debate. Yet it is virtually un-debated... Every walk of life involving power is now subjected to regulation except one: the media." In the same way, heretics focus on two things: encouraging leaders to ignore populist opinion, and making public opinion more rational by regulating freedom of speech. Finally, a group of ultra-heretics, often inspired by Confucius and Plato, go beyond a gentle toning down of populist democracy and populist journalism, and instead advocate radically clamping down on these allegedly destructive influences. They consequently advocate full paternalistic authoritarianism. They not only reject democracy and a free press, they also reject Western liberal morality. The "New Eastern Philosophy" is specialist and elitist rather than populist and egalitarian, it also rejects individualism in favour of collectivism, and it rejects ideological morality in favour of pragmatism and philosophical rationality. Advocates claim the link between virtuous government and economically successful government remains. They believe that "liberal democracy" is not only not the most economically powerful form of government, it is also not the end point of man's ideological evolution, it is even a backward step from Western 18th Century Enlightenment Idealism. These heretics claim that "New Eastern Philosophy" is the most advanced system, and, driven by China, we are on the cusp of a new philosophical era, a sort of Age Of Enlightenment Part II. Ethics & Metaphysics In the West it is widely believed that all religions are essentially the same under the hood, that all religions believe in sacred individual human life, free will, faith, emotional warmth etc. Although Christianity is in decline, Westerners have not started rejecting the sanctity of human life and championing cold rational power instead of warm emotional love. In fact, many people claim that Western liberalism is closer to the true essence of divine goodness than, say, devout 19th Century Christian societies. Even though many politicians have technically abandoned Christianity, they claim progressive human rights are the most advanced expression of Christian goodness. Again we have the idea that liberal democracy is the end of history, the most perfect expression of the divine goodness which underlies all religion, morality, and philosophy. Yet Eastern philosophers claim philosophical truth is bifurcated, for every archetype there is an opposite, and both positions are arguable. This is not the Jungian idea of the shadow, which is the perverted version of a personality. It is the idea of the yin and yang duality, the idea that truth can be approached from alternate perspectives. So Chinese philosophers call the Western idea of virtue simple minded, they say truth is found is the pragmatic harmonious blending of antithetical positions. God can not be love or beauty, God must be power & love, or good & beauty. What are the two forms of religious philosophy? The Western and Eastern, or Hebrew and Greek, or Semitic and Aryan. Judaism, Christianity and Islam are all primarily Semitic perspectives. Pythagoreanism, Taoism, Buddhism are all primarily Aryan perspectives. Imagine a father and a mother caring for their children. The mother nurtures her children, she protects them from harm, she treats them as equals, she lets them play freely. The father, on the other hand, encourages his children to climb trees even though they may hurt themselves, he is concerned with the evolution of his children, he doesn't see them as equals, he makes them work. In one case we have the Christian model of God - the loving shepherd who tends to his flock. In the other case we have the Eastern model of God - the Philosopher King who cares about the evolutionary advancement of humanity not individual suffering. Maternal religions typically have a utopian paradise which every worthy individual achieves at death, paternal religions typically have a cycle of reincarnation in which individuals are gradually perfected by painful challenge. Notice that to the mother the father is a head in the clouds tyrant who does not care about freedom and suffering. But to the father the mother is a down to earth fool who does not care about truth or growth. Often we associate the maternal model with contentment, freedom, egalitarianism, individualism, emotion, subjectivity. Often we associate the paternal model with suffering, responsibility, elitism, collectivism, rationality, objectivity. In fact describing the difference between the yin and yang is complicated by the mixture of energies contained in every psychological concept. For example, what does the word "pragmatic" mean? We can call the mother a pragmatist because she focuses on the babies needs in a practical way, or we can call the father a pragmatist because he ignores moral ideology and focuses on intellectual analysis. We can call the lover un-pragmatic because she is dreamy and emotional, we can call the intellectual un-pragmatic because he lives in cloud cuckoo land. Which religious model makes more sense? Yin metaphysics famously fails to account for the problem of evil, so the yang model of God is much more fashionable. But which makes for a better society? You decide. The more interesting question is what makes a person change sides? Perhaps the child of the authoritarian father rebels against his violence and stupidity, whereas the child of the libertarian mother rebels against her poverty and immorality. It's not just about ethics, Eastern philosohpers claim that complex problems in economics, and even games such as Chess & GO, resolve into these bifurcated psychological paradoxes which are grasped by the human mind intuitively and "aesthetically" (eg see Artificial Intelligence & Chess Aesthetics). Roger Penrose controversially claims that aesthetic paradoxes reflect holistic quantum physics effects and cannot be modelled by a "Turing Machine". Does economics really rely on aesthetics? Margaret Thatcher, for example, advocated libertarianism based on the perception that 1970s Britain had become lazy and people needed to get off their backsides and onto on their bikes. In other words her economic models interfaced with prevailing psychological issues, so there is no right or wrong algorithmic solution, the economy must be analysed philosophically not mechanically, and kept in harmony with prevailing human psychology if it is to remain healthy. What is the psychological challenge in the 21st Century which policymakers need to address? New Eastern Philosophers believe it is not so much the laziness that Thatcher focused on in the 1970s, rather it is excessive individualism. In fact Thatcher, they say, erroneously mistook the problems of laziness as the source of Western failure, whereas laziness was just one of the many symptoms of the deeper individualism issue. Not only that, like any medicine taken in excess her libertarian reforms eventually ended up doing more harm than good by increasing individualism. Individualism is both anti co-operative and anti expertise. So political and economic policy making needs to pull or push society toward both greater co-operation and greater technocracy. Socrates described individualism as the key psychological factor in the collapse of Athenian democracy in 400BC. As the Athenians gradually lost their faith in the Dionysian religion, their idealism collapsed and they became increasingly individualist. Instead of answering moral dilemmas by imagining Aphrodite or interpreting Aphrodite's beliefs in Homeric Poetry, they built parallel arguments and voted by democracy emotionally and instinctively. Yet like a child in a sweet shop their choices reflected their base nature and society degenerated. So Socrates tried to teach the new non-inspirational reasoned analysis of aesthetics developed by Orphic philosophers such as Pythagoras. Pythagoras, for example, studied the effect of music on human personality, and then made the critical link between psychological outlook and real world effectiveness (which Hobbes failed to understand), bringing together pragmatism and ethics, thus solving moral dilemmas rationally and objectively. New Eastern Philosophers say we are in exactly the same place today, the new philosophical era emerging today is the proper paradigm shift toward the sort of advanced understanding of human nature and its physical world consequences Socrates taught. According to the Ancient Greeks this paradigm shift is the true transcendent "end of history" moment described by the story of the Cyclopes and Atlantis. Liberal Democracy At the heart of Liberal Democracy we have two key moral concepts: (Moral X) Individual contentment - e.g. socialism, wealth redistribution (Moral Y) Individual freedom - e.g. capitalism, private property (XY commonality) Individual worth - eg egalitarianism, sacred individual human life In practice Moral X and Moral Y are contradictory, for example wealth redistribution contradicts private property. We can think of successful liberal democracy as the popular harmonious reconciliation of the opposite ideas of socialism and capitalism. Why "contentment and freedom" specifically? The Eastern philosopher begins with the Western model of God, so the maternal side of the duality, then subdivides the way in which a loving mother nurtures her children by the yin and yang again, then tries to describe these two resulting psychological vectors in language which resonates with his readers. Because these concepts are like onions which can be described at different layers, the philosopher must choose something appropriate to his audience's depth perception. For example, one could say that a person's problem is money (physical), debt (causal), excess spending (behavioural), show off (emotional), insecure (psychological), looking for love (philosophical) etc. The onion layers extend back from something you can hold in your hand and easily see right down to the most difficult Form of all to comprehend, namely the nature of God. Words also contain different energies in different circumstances, so the Eastern philosopher tries to choose pairs and patterns that will help the reader to grasp his perspective. In summary, "contentment and freedom" is not a very enlightened description, but it is the description intellectuals today tend to use, and it works well enough for this discussion. One of the huge mistakes of liberalism is to imagine that these so called rights somehow represent goods that enlighten society. Consider Christian philosohpy: dividing Christianity into X and Y forms, we have the Catholicism of Saint Francis Of Assisi and the Puritanism of Martin Luther. Imagine a child being cared for by its mother, a loving child must learn to love what the mother provides not lust for more, the more loving the child the less it needs it's mother to provide. Saint Francis Of Assisi leaned to find bliss in comfortless poverty, Martin Luther leaned to find bliss in freedomless labour, they each self developed by conquering their denial of one of their 'rights'. Each side of the duality has advantages and disadvantages depending on the external challenges involved. For example, the Medieval Ice Age demanded a dramatic swing toward the hard working side of the duality, hence the Reformation. Likewise, to bring up a healthy child a mother must apply these goods in the right mixture and the right quantities, and to do that perfectly she has to read the nature of both her child and herself. For example, if she spoils the child with too much comfort it might become lazy, and if she spoils it with too much freedom it might become immoral. Liberal democracy also includes the idea of an unelected elitist institution, such as a constitutional court, which imposes restrictions on democracy. For example, voters can choose how much redistribution they desire, but they can not violate "progressive human rights". Human rights are not rigorous intellectual axioms, just as the boundary between contentment and freedom is subjective, so human rights depend on the interpretation of judges and politicians. Indeed, liberal democracy in America has changed profoundly since the 1950s. There are two reasons liberal democracy includes an unelected elitist institution. Firstly, it acknowledges the problem of human selfishness, a problem which can create a "tyranny of the majority". Because the masses are corrupted by self interest, they impose immoral decisions on minorities. Secondly, the need for some degree of elitism acknowledges a practical gap between the idealistic egalitarianism of modern Christian morality and reality. Liberal morality allocates equal worth to every individual, but in any real world application individuals have very different capabilities. The sum of individual opinions is not an effective way to make complex decisions, elite skills are more important. So in the same way that there is a choice between the degree of socialism and capitalism, there is also a choice between the degree of elitism and populism. Modern liberal democracy, as championed by Francis Fukuyama, and practised by Tony Blair, is an "elite representative democracy". Far right movements in Europe and America are beginning to reject the elite liberal constraints placed upon them, believing the elite to have failed, and currently advocate greater "populist democracy" and greater "direct democracy". Radical movements in the early 20th Century, both on the right and the left, also threw off the shackles of elite leadership by initially embracing greater populism. Yet the essence of these new movements was cohesive not liberal, and as they matured they embraced greater collectivism. The communists focused on the failing of contentment seeking, namely poverty. The fascists focuses on the failing of freedom seeking, namely immorality. Note these movements are the Jungian shadow archetypes of Catholicism and Puritanism respectively. In Ancient Greece philosophers contrasted the ultra-elite democracy of Sparta with the ultra-populist democracy of Athens. Spartan officials were elected for life from a pool of screened candidates. So popular opinion about current affairs had minimal influence on decision making. Athenian politics, on the other hand, had direct democracy and elected generals, ensuring that decision making closely followed popular opinion. In Ancient Greece it was widely believed that Athenian democracy had gone too far (many today say the same about Californian democracy). Intellectuals across Ancient Greece, including in Athens itself, believed the people had turned away from idealism and had become self indulgent, immoral and irrational. At its height Athens was the superpower of Ancient Greece, but critics said her success was not down to the goodness of her people, but rather their insatiable appetite for wealth, which was often extracted from neighbouring states. The Athenians themselves were notoriously afraid of hand to hand combat, her military strength depended on mercenary armies and sea power. So the Athenian citizens effectively controlled a tyrannical empire that expanded across Greece. Eventually it came into conflict with Sparta, which was nowhere near as rich as Athens, but was widely regarded as the most virtuous state in Ancient Greece. The Spartans were bound together by an incredible communal idealism which made them unbelievably brave and disciplined. They despised materialism, selfishness and populism, they were the psychological antithesis of the immoral irrational individualist Athenians. The Athenian philosopher Plato considered the Spartans to be most idealistic people the world had even seen, although he did complain that they were too hung up on traditional moral interpretations of virtue and needed more philosophical radicalism. The Peloponnesian War was very much the Ancient World equivalent of the First and Second World War. It drew in all Greek states, it lasted many years, and resulted in appalling and unprecedented bloodshed. It was considered to be a war between populist tyranny and elite idealism, and it is said that the Gods rejoiced when Athens was eventually destroyed. Individual Rights vs Collective Good The real killer issue in New Eastern Philosophy, which shocks Western minds, revolves around morality. Their moral principles come out of the tough paternal instead of the nurturing maternal side of the duality. At the heart of traditional Chinese morality we have two principles: (Moral A) Respect - e.g. piety, obedience (Moral B) Responsibility - e.g. elitism, benevolence (Moral A + B) Collective worth - e.g. paternalism, individual life is not sacred In actual practice the difference between Western and Eastern morality is not necessarily enormous because real life mixes the paternal and maternal essences. Nevertheless, in order to grasp the ethical duality readers should try to imagine the opposing positions in the starkest possible colours over the course of the next few paragraphs. So the Westerner says "The Chinese Government banned parents from having more than one child and moved 1.4 million people out of their homes to build a hydro electric dam. China doesn't allow free speech, it locks up political activists. The Chinese Government does not share my respect for individual liberty, nor individual suffering." To which, the Chinese Politician shrugs his shoulders and replies "Americans are spoilt ideologists, Chinese people are hard headed pragmatists who treat government as a game of GO not a naive fluffy religion. Playing GO takes skill, non-experts can not contribute. Likewise the Chinese people accept that experts are better able to decide what is effective and what is not in government. Therefore political activism has no place in China, because experts call the shots and populist ideological debate is judged both worthless and dangerous. Do you think we could implement a one child policy or move 1.4 million people out of their homes to build a dam if we allowed popular debate? Of course not, yet these decisions were correct. The Chinese people know how our system works, and as long as we keep delivering the goods they are happy to let us call the shots, we don't have tanks on the streets or walls around the country to stop people emigrating like the Soviet Union, North Korea or the bad old days of Mao. In the West your pop stars and journalists sing or write whatever sells, but undermining government in China is illegal. That's our system of government, it's a paternalistic elitist system, but unfortunately there is always a small minority who can cannot resist breaking the laws of society and must be locked up." However, this answer does not satisfy advocates of liberal democracy. Why? Because it doesn't matter how hard headed the Chinese masses are, liberal democracy demands a minimum standard of liberal morality, and Chinese government policy falls short of this standard. For example, in Afghanistan stoning adulterous women is the prevailing moral philosophy. But the West doesn't see stoning as subjective choice, rather a sort of clear objective evil which is always wrong for all people in all possible circumstances. The West went to war to liberate the Afghan people from their medieval government, regardless of its popularity. Tony Blair dreamed of building a liberal democracy in Afghanistan, making stoning unconstitutional. In the same way, the West complains that China is violating human rights. It sees these human rights as fundamental progressive moral principles which all government must either adopt, or have forced upon them. So the question becomes: Is China like the Taliban, a failing cesspit which needs pushing around? Or is the West wrongly pushing its own subjective moral choices onto China? Westerners often claim that the sort of individual freedoms outlawed by the Chinese government are vital to innovation and truth. But this is a pragmatic argument over functional effectiveness, not a timeless moral ideological argument. If it is true then the West will lead economically, and China will fall behind. It could easily be wrong, perhaps the masses are easily led astray. China does not say to the West: we insist you embrace paternalism, we think your economy will perform better if you do. In other words, the West does not insist that China adopt its liberal principles because they really believe it is a pragmatic choice with positive economic benefits, but rather because they believe in liberal morality, and anything that violates it is a sin. During the 18th Century Western Enlightenment Philosophers began advocating reason instead of faith. They rejected the Christian religion, and began building a new religious movement called "Deism". They also rejected morality, they rejected dogmatic definitions of good and evil, and instead advocated pragmatic utilitarianism. So their focus on rationality destroyed their traditional Christian moral attachment to individualism. Instead of individual liberty and individual suffering they championed "the greatest good to the greatest number". France was the epicentre of Enlightenment philosophy, and some of the famous names we associate with it are René Descartes, Voltaire and Auguste Comte. Voltaire hated the small minded "bourgeois" aristocracy, the "idiot" masses, and the antediluvian Catholic Church. The new philosophy was ultra-radical, and the existing power structure was discredited by elite resistance to it, creating an ideological vacuum, and culminating in a sort of sociological nervous breakdown accompanied by violent revolution. Napoleon Bonaparte eventually became Emperor of France. He claimed to be an elite utilitarian, although today we generally think of him as a self obsessed thug. Napoleon was defeated by the British, a country that championed moral idealism not utilitarianism. Enlightenment philosophy gradually died, and today Western philosophers completely elevate liberal morality over pragmatism. Yet is liberal morality really the "end of history"? Even if Napoleon got it wrong, does that mean Christian morality is really the most advanced belief system? Plato rejected moral dogma in favour of intelligence. He said wisdom is the single righteous goal of government out of which all good things, such as riches, flow. Wisdom is a transcendent "itself-by-itself" Form, which means its bifurcated faces converge rather than blending by paradoxical opposition in the way the psycho-aesthetic principles of contentment and freedom, or respect and responsibility, do. In other words, the aim of government is not to blend wisdom and ignorance, but rather to seek wisdom alone. Plato, like Confucius, was deeply paternalistic and believed in carefully managing cultural forces to promote both cohesion and intelligence. The two faces of wisdom are "selflessness" and "resourcefulness". Just as the goal of enlightenment is not a blend of wisdom and ignorance, it is not a blend of selfishness and selflessness, but rather selflessness alone. In Plato's Laws he explicitly states: the goal of government is to stay focused on collective good, never individual good. He says inequality should not be seen as lack of wealth which the government should target for the sake of individual suffering. Instead inequality promotes greed, pulling the poor away from wisdom, damaging the collective intelligence of society. So New Eastern Philosophy not only rejects the individual freedom and individual contentment of ideological capitalism and socialism, it rejects even the utilitarian materialism of scientific socialism. Inequality should not be determined by considering liberal morality, or even communal wealth, rather by optimizing communal wisdom: balancing the greed that inequality promotes, and the lack of motivation which excessive equality promotes. But, by Lipset, wouldn't wisdom always produce the maximization of communal wealth? Wealth is but one of the fruits of wisdom, it can not be targeted directly because it is not monotonically correlated with wisdom, and the goal is evolution not nurture anway. Is Western individualist morality wrong? Is the West beginning to feel the sort of existential angst famous in Enlightenment France? In America the Tea Party are beginning to reject "political correctness", in Europe the far right are beginning to reject "multiculturalism". Are the masses in the West beginning to sense the failure of liberal morality and the importance of pragmatism? Is the West on the verge of psychological breakdown? Will the period that follows be as violent as the French Revolution? When the New Eastern Philosopher gives this speech, his Western opponent reacts in horror. Are you serious? Do you expect me to believe is some sort of spiritual evolution in which rejects individual human rights in favour of communal intelligence? This is the most insane and dangerous idea I ever heard! To which the philosophers replies: But that's the point - the ideological evolution of society - the "end of history" - human perfection - enlightenment. Did you think it would be easy? Don't you think it is a rather more convincing vision than liberalism? Western minds struggle with conflict between liberal morality and communal good because of their individualism. Individualism is also the source of Western conflict between moral dogma and pragmatism. Attached to the notion of individual worth, they refuse to believe that truth is that which enables objective functional effectiveness, not unjustified subjective intuitive emotive opinion. Power Corrupts In 1887, the historian and moralist Lord Acton wrote: "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely." Up until the 1970s, before it became popular to think of liberal democracy as an intrinsically enlightened philosophy, advocates of democracy considered Lord Acton's 'power corrupts' principle to be the key justification for democracy. This is why, of course, Winston Churchill considered democracy a necessary evil. Even today, in a debate between authoritarianism and democracy, democrats generally open their argument by quoting the power corrupts principle. Democrats believe authoritarian systems invariably detach from benevolence, becoming tyrannies. What is this power corrupts principle really saying? One way to understand it is: Any individual given unrivalled authority over his fellow man eventually stops making policy for the general good, and begins to focus on himself, his family, his friends etc. Interpreted in this way, and looking at history, the statement is not strictly true. There are several examples of benevolent despots in history, for example, Fredrick the Great, King of Prussia 1740 to 1786. Fredrick the Great did not believe rulers should do as they pleased, instead he believed a King should devote himself to the betterment of his people. He was an idealistic intellectual, and he transformed Prussia from a relative backwater into an intellectual, artistic and military super power. If we think of corruption as a selfish, rather than a selfless, motivation, then what we are really talking about is greed. Poverty tends to make a person more greedy, so the poor commit more crime than the rich. In times of economic hardship, crime rises. Within hierarchical professional bodies, such as the police force, corruption generally decreases with increasing expertise. Plato suggested senior government officials should be rich old men who had lost their interest in money. Confucius believed the ruling class should live in non-materialistic "clean poverty". Yet in theory, an all powerful man should be less greedy, because he wants for nothing. Perhaps Lord Acton simply believed, like the Ancient Chinese Legalist Philosophers, that human nature is intrinsically selfish, and anyone given the chance will take what he can, so the more power a person is given the more he takes. Yet this focus on individual corruption is far more relevant to Western rather than Eastern models of government. Around two thousand years ago the Chinese Legalists focused on the corruption issue, they set out to design an incorruptible government. In order to achieve this they emphasised written law, leaving as little room as possible for discretion. Yet they failed. Rigid legal systems become dogmatic, but dogma constantly fails in specific cases, becoming tyrannical or corruptible. For example, modern financial regulators are now moving away from rules based regulation to more principle based regulation. Regulators could say that "financial institutions must prevent information asymmetries". This is an objective, transparent written principle, but it's not a conventional written law that can be judged and voted upon by a jury of non specialists. As Plato points out in the Laws, the simple belief systems lawyers attempt to create are doomed to failure by their attempt to express philosophical principles in mechanical terms, at best they offer only approximations, and they are in need of constant revision. With the failing of Legalism, China switched to Confucian Government. New Eastern Philosophy follows Confucian Government, it focuses on the creation of a perfect ruling intelligence trained in objective philosophical analysis - it rejects as unenlightened both dogma and democracy. New Eastern Philosophy also rejects the idea of a Western style ultra-powerful President, it does not seek ruling intelligence in a single individual, it instead advocates a collective technocratic government. (Plato's Philosopher King is a good self-development concept, not a practical organizational structure which takes account of specialist skills). Remember we said "any individual given unrivalled authority over his fellow man is corrupted". A collective does allocate an individual unrivalled authority, instead it allocates individual experts authority only within their own sphere of expertise, and because decisions generally cross multiple spheres, multiple experts come together collectively in decision making. As an organization becomes more collective, the chain of command becomes less rigid. For example, the human brain does not have a Presidential Neuron in charge, it is famously networked. Yet at the same time, a collective is not a democratic organization, it is about specialization not egalitarianism. In the human brain we do not see every neurone firing equally in a sort of democratic process, instead certain types of decision are concentrated in certain areas of the brain. Consider, for example, the traditional Confucian model of government. By about 600AD Chinese government had reached a stable form which persisted for the next 1,300 years. The Confucian Model of Government during this long time period relied on policy experts – the "scholar bureaucrats" or "imperial elite". The "Imperial Examination" was an examination system designed to select the best administrative officials for the state's bureaucracy. It was open to a wide cross section of Chinese society, the core of its syllabus was Confucian Philosophy, and those who passed it were appointed to the civil service. Whereas in Europe the military, the rich, the masses and the church all fought for power, in China the civil servant scholar bureaucrats enjoyed unrivalled authority. Some of them worked in the court as state officials, the majority remained at the local level. Becoming a civil servant was not a route to riches, it was an idealistic profession, akin to joining the priesthood, or the academic ivory tower. It was not a vertical power structure, it was a scholastic form of government, essentially China was run collectively by the academic elite. Today, China and Singapore are building a similar form of government; clearly scholastic and collective rather than a Russian style power vertical structure. We see this in the very low media profile of the leadership, also the extremely strong academic credentials of high ranking officials. Plato also talked about collective not individual leadership. In his Laws, he asks us to imagine a hive of bees. The hive's organizational structure is the collective but non-egalitarian system we described earlier (although not precisely like the brain example - the hive is more mechanistic than cognitive). In the hive individual bees are perfectly devoted to the communal good. How does this work with humans? Imagine government officials as a team of technocratic scientists, each scientist has his own speciality, there is no space for corruption both because of the team structure and the concrete purpose. So all individual imperfection is squeezed out by functional idealism, by rationality; creating the perfect selfless dehumanized machine bureaucracy. Imagine the queen bee as society, and rest of the hive as a government perfectly devoted to society's welfare. Plato contrasts the collective hive of bees with the individualist herd of animals. The hive and the herd are opposites. When the New Eastern Philosopher gives this speech about perfect hive like government, his Western opponent rolls his eyes and says: Are you serious? Do you expect me to believe in some sort of collective scientific philosophical selfless governmental nirvana developing in China and Singapore? To which the philosophers replies: But that's the point - the ideological evolution of society - the "end of history" - human perfection - enlightenment. Did you think it would be easy? Don't you think the collective bee hive is a rather more convincing structure than democracy? Democracy is the herd incarnate, the very antithesis of the hive. Each voter is purely dedicated to his own self interest, and the herd moves by the chaotic combination of all these countless selfish decisions. Charisma and violence propel some individuals into leadership roles. Western minds struggle with idea of benevolent authoritarianism because of their excessive individualism. Asian minds have a much stronger sense of community, so are less suspicious of authority. In Japan democracy famously spent 50 years electing the same political party. (Although it goes beyond the scope of this article, we have been talking about the ideal organizational structure which enables a sort of advanced philosophical version of Weber's expert bureaucracy inseparable from pure rationality and within which decision making is based on objective rules). Conclusion This short essay is designed to give the reader the fastest possible big picture insight into the critical debate between "liberal democracy" and "enlightened authoritarianism", or "Post modern Judeo-Christian relativism" and "New Eastern Philosophy". Whist this essay only scratches the surface, it does manages to present the key questions supporters of democracy must ask themselves: (1) Is government policymaking making about subjective individual moral rights or objective reasoned communal good? (2) Is it possible to build a benevolent authoritarian government? (3) What would the 'end of history' look like? A longer, and less philosophical, analysis of New Eastern Political Philosophy that will appeal to scientific types can be found here: New Eastern Philosophy & The Scientific Development Concept.
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