From: Damien Broderick (d.broderick@english.unimelb.edu.au)
Date: Sun Jul 02 2000 - 23:28:13 MDT
At 05:37 AM 3/07/00 CEST, Waldemar Ingdahl wrote:
>What a bizarre argument!
>You're saying that [...] people are too weak, stupid and
>evil to understand their own best, and value such things.
Hang on. Can that be what I meant when I said (on another thread):
>If they were sufficiently outraged at this interpretation of the social
>contract, they could *vote in a new team* ?
I'm offering a shockingly glib retort, I know, since we all know that
elections in representative democracies aren't terrifically representative
or democratic. What's worse, there's a strong suspicion that the Western
political and economic tradition has indeed produced a populace that is, at
the moment and through no real fault of their own, `too weak, stupid [and
in some cases evil, or at least fatally corrupted] to understand their own
best'. (I developed this suspicion myself by talking to a few of them, and
by looking at what they find most entertaining on television and in clubs,
and what they eat, and so on; not a pretty sight, sadly.) Hence the need
for enlightened people like us < coff coff > to show them to the way to
resolute self-determination, optimistic knuckling down, all that good stuff.
Still, there's a lot of leeway even now for people to look at the world,
think about how things are (and maybe even how things could be), and vote
with their... vote. And via their option to engage in activism inside
political and extra-political bodies. Must we ignore their general wishes,
as manifest in the status quo, because they are too weak, stupid and
corrupted to understand their own best? In a sense, yes, since we wish to
change their current opinions. By persuasion. But if they remain
unpersuaded, what do you advise? Doesn't the marketplace of ideas tell us
what they have selected, and does that not make it Good? (Not a chance, pal.)
Damien Broderick
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