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PostSubject: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeWed Oct 07, 2015 9:18 pm

It goes without saying that democracy no longer exists, made irrelevant soon after its inception in modernity by the vast differences in scope of acting potential and information as well as intellectual differences between those who "vote" and those who "rule". Democracy only works if there is a relative homogeneity between those two camps, that is only if the rulers really do emerge naturally from the masses. That has seemingly been the case now and then in US presidential history but the overwhelming situation is that leaders are not from the masses and never were, and even if they were we are supposed to assume the corruption in the system breaks down such connections quickly for those who are elected.

There is the alternate question of to what extent the voting masses are worthy and able to choose their leaders, but I'm not fond to focus on that right now. Representative democracy or republicanism is simply a form of oligarchy and direct democracy is the only legitimate alternative. But most people don't want the kind of responsibility, and we leave things to "interested experts" so republicanism is the realistic choice- therefore democracy is a sham whereby people vote to appear involved in a process they really have no involvement in, but what they do gain is by that appearance of involvement and interest the elected leaders and managers of the system are under moderate pressure to keep up similar appearances that they have the will and interests of the voting majority in mind. So long as both appearances are functioning a little reality seeps through the cracks and forces a relatively small but not insignificant degree of responsiveness and anticipation from the system, keeping it lightly moored to the needs and whims of society at large.

The real crisis of democracy is as Hardt and Negri say, that globalization and continuous global war interrupt the voting power by delegitimizing nation-states in the global scale, thus even an effective farce of voting can only produce leaders of national apparatuses who really have a limited and somewhat dependent role only when it comes to the realities of globalism, economically and politically. Capitalization is still largely tied to nation-states and this is maybe the only thread holding these two contradicting systems together, but it is not a thread that can be bolstered by democracy.

Given the social networking going on we might imagine an evolution from distinct voting to a more ubiquitous kind of "aligning", where each person is valued to certain ranges and degrees of importance to various projects, tasks or opinions, expressing his alignment as part of his persona or online social profile. Weighing issues and values against each other would leave each person to reflect his feelings and thoughts in his alignments for or against given proposals and options. Then a direct measure could be taken of the feeling of any group of people and political decisions made accordingly. No need to go to a voting day, just adjust your Facebook profile alignments to X number of current issues and upcoming decisions, and computers will track and feed that data into government policy makers. But the idea also illustrates the absurdity of the whole idea that voting can accomplish anything realistically in the complex world we live in today, decisions are made all the time and the parameters shift, thousands of competing interests vie for powe and funding, the real decisions are made by experts or people sitting in the right place at the right time, thousands of such decisions in politics and corporations every day, all of which lead to the continuity and growth or decline of the society.. No way any kind of "vote of the people" could be sufficient to such a society.

Politicians are therefore merely keepers of one entrusted interest or another, elected simply for their ability to facilitate one group over another but inevitably not responsible for anything truly important. Advertising money is spent only to get one person over others elected so a narrow agenda can be furthered. Democracy has no place in such a world except to maintain the illusion of interest and concern, such illusion as functions to hold the larger image of society together as a kind of collective, mythical hallucination. A hallucination yes, but a necessary and "good" one-- the problem is, that the collective myths aren't able to keep pace in complexity and depth with global-capital apparatuses and the increasingly technologized-specialized administrative requirements. The situations are now too complex with too many players, the hallucinatory myths of collective democratic society can't be good any more because they can't be coherent, no one seriously believes in them anymore so their goodness crumbles like ancient gods whom no one anymore has faith in.
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PostSubject: Re: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeWed Oct 07, 2015 9:34 pm

And yet democracy continues to be widely valued and acts as a flagship idea, we must somehow apparently find a way to make democracy relevant in the contemporary world. To some extent democracy functions so well because we already know it is meaningless, it becomes a scapegoat idea for our own necessary ineffectiveness in a world that left us behind a long time ago and really has no interest in us at all, except perhaps as consumers. But humans care about other humans, and so we want our social power to mean something, and the myth of democracy only gets stronger as the reality of it becomes more and more impossible.
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PostSubject: Re: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeWed Oct 07, 2015 9:49 pm

To take democracy seriously as even a mask is whaat I call Platonic ethics... Our politics cannot be to use it anew, but to be brave and inspire bravery in accepting both the shamhood of it and the continued validity of the best feelings which make of it a flag.

Human, instinct, concrete have to be shown more important, determiners of law rather than consequences. History is behind us, neither inexistant nor tyrannical.

Youtube and the hipster youth largely does this, but lacks the balls to internalize the lack of need for what we might call State, the abstract mother-spider of abstract determinism. Even US libertarians... They all let themselves value comfort over effectivity for fear, let's NOT bullshit ourselves here where it is most essencial not to, the poverty and seeming chaos of the third world; the Hell you are condemned to if you loose your grip on abstractatarianism (or so you think, comfortable in your ignorance). This is not a critique, the first world fucking rules, but its own freedoom lies in its debulllshitizaion. To grow up, in terms of accepting the power of the world you and your forefathers have spawned: so glorious, so powerful, and so globalistic.
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PostSubject: Re: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeWed Oct 07, 2015 10:10 pm

The secret is that we don't need democracy to have a democratic world. Though rater pollacracy, the power of the many, than of the masses; the separation of man from man needs to be implicit in the code for it to work well.

Democracy never was the issue in the west. It was secularis, freedom from Church, and spending money on science, finding science awesome. That is Europe n a nutshell. This gave us our power and our money an all the worlds chocolate coffee an spices to make an Olympos of wealth on Earth on which the notion of democracy was revived: rich patrons share the responsibility of the state fairly among each other. Constitutional and Parliamentary democracy is a system of a far advanced global order, post-Socialist really, English through and through and yet with a constitution; the constitution is the protection of the representative democracy from itself. It might as well be abolished. Technocracy has more merit, if the premises are set right.
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PostSubject: Re: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeWed Oct 07, 2015 10:38 pm

Agorocracy: The rule of the debate
Logocracy: inevitable pathos of logic, pleasure of truth, Hegels spirit that travels west (and crossed the Pacific recently)
Plutocracy: deep power of few ancient forces, sex/money dymanism
Deimocracy: the rune of fear
Democracy: The sham, the flag, the American Navy teardrop on the tarmac
Kratocracy: The Pentagon, and Russia, strength as justification of power, the maturity of a country that survived its imperialism without losing international grip.
Theocracy: Ancient politics of ethics
Aktineidolocracy: The rule of the ray, the projected image
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PostSubject: Re: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeWed Oct 07, 2015 10:54 pm

Democracy is revolutionary... Even in England. It is Ideacracy with reins, so the idea of ideacracy. Absurd... But an effective counter to abusive, tiring tyranny, therefore unanimously chosen in America to supplant monarchy, tho monarchy was briefly tried in parts of New Granada (modern Colombia) and I think was the Great Columbia project of some Chileans to make a new Incan empire... But none survived long faced with the ruthless deopressiveness of democracy. We bitch and whine about it still, but it saved us. To respect it, I hold, we must neither ignore nor supplant but overcome it: accept its fruits in full.

In Europe, which was remade in America's image after teh hollocaust (tribute to democracy that its ideologies and philosophical traditions where thence reborn), democracy is a reminder that kings were overthrown forever, a kind of "if you want out, think of a new one, but we doubt you will because you are old and like wine too much."
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PostSubject: Re: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeWed Oct 07, 2015 11:13 pm

I was lying down thinking about all this and I realized after a kind of blackout that time is money, that the philosopher lives in eternity because he can't care about money, even though he is drawn into time by debts and such matters. A chief political aim is to create debtless space to dwell outside of time. Student loans are the evil of our time. Humanity must take place under patronage. Hipsterocracy? If it provides, why not? They are fair minded and bearded. But life in the business of profit is the life of 'losing time' all the time.
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PostSubject: Re: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeThu Oct 08, 2015 9:39 am

I've always looked at money as time, it is only valuable to me because it can buy me time or space, and the ability to have experiences. Life wants to push up and away from the lowest of its requirements, this is why both capitalism and hedonism is so absurd, as if the lower needs of food drink and pleasure were somehow an end-goal of life-- they are not, these are merely basic needs such as water, we merely require to have enough of it to sustain the possibility of higher things. Life is like this, it stabilizes a lower pole to push into existence a higher one. Capitalism represents vanity of dissociating the meaning-giving impulse to a lower pole than is appropriate to it, either in profit-seeking or consumerism behaviors. As if man were merely an animal in the wild spending all of its time between sleeping either searching out food or fucking; that's basically all man is supposed to be under a capitalistic system.

The question of democracy is, for me, one of the whole system and world itself, democracy may be interpreted narrowly as voting and representative-responsive governance but the real heart of the notion of democracy involves the deep earthiness between one human and another. The technical-administrative stuff like voting and legislating are only positivistic and somewhat illusory representations of that more real nature, the same nature in fact that still lies as the impetus for capitalism. "Too much democracy" used to be the cry, now today it is "too much capitalism", the political philosophers never miss a beat to seize upon a utilitarian opportunity. But I'm not concerned with any of that, which is why I don't much value Zizek although I do enjoy him. He's like the jester who reminds us with absurdity of behavior what we really ought to be doing instead of taking in endless comedies.

Man will need to define his values and goals if he is to become democratic. A society of mindless consumption and shirking responsibility inevitably becomes time-destroying, full in debt, as the void is filled in by the lowest common denominator substance (the same as with the "hedonic"). Capitalism can force man to see himself in a way inspiring shame. So maybe something of the resistance to entropy embedded in life can rise up through the human world that world perhaps becoming a little more conscious, conscientious, and enduring. In any case the values expressed today are not going to be the values expressed in 100 years from now.
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PostSubject: Re: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeThu Oct 08, 2015 3:19 pm

Yes, I agree - they crux of this nasty situation that must die at one point, either by consuming all its resources or by growing weary before that, is the belief that democracy and capitalism belong together, and worse, that their belonging-together justifies consumerism.

In fact consumerism destroys all the energy of democracy as it mediates man to man through product, which is a death, and it destroys the energy of capitalism as it allows the love of matter to be expressed in consumption first and production as a derivative, making existence subservient to its consummation, gradually reducing it to a non-dimensional point.
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PostSubject: Re: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeFri Oct 09, 2015 3:07 pm

Democracy needs to remain vague and abstract, once it becomes too 'material' and associates to specific acts and governing structures such as the voting booth then democracy is robbed of its real power. The real power of democracy lies in its expressing directly the relationships of power that obtain between a people and the ruling structures to which those people are subjected. Democracy as a concept aims to identify and draw into reality these real relationships, to render the dynamic as open as possible. Democracy is thus a concept of the limits and of limitation, and consequently can in theory work or apply to any number of quite different economic or political systems.

Thus consumerism is a symptom of a disease in that process of democracy in the real meaning of the term 'democracy'; the fact that the relationship between man and power, his own and the limits of his own, is collapsed to an inexpressibility and impotent before the reality of those actual relations. No amount of legislation and governance can undo the natural systems and relations that obtain between people, groups of people, and formatively within societies. Our modern consumerism is antithetical to democracy because it stems from a corruption of the whole idea of democracy, a corruption that is quite in line with what Marcuse called technological rationality and the one-dimensionalizing of human society, affairs, thought and feeling.
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PostSubject: Re: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeFri Oct 09, 2015 3:18 pm

Also, this idea that no amount of governance or political systems or theory, and no amount of imposed force, can really undo the natural relationships of power and potential between man and ruler, is also well captured by Value Ontology in the concepts of self-valuing and valences of value.

Against the attempts to remove those deep-earth relationships, democracy stands as a powerful idea. But one that again cannot fall victim to becoming confused with various specific forms of administering one democratic process or another. This also explains how the call of "too much democracy" comes from a narrow conceptualizing of what democracy represents.

The next stage we really need to understand these relationships themselves, which democracy is pointing toward. They are deeply daemonic and world-exploding, and I think VO has a good role in helping us get a better handle on them.


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PostSubject: Re: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeFri Oct 09, 2015 3:23 pm

Would you agree to call democracy an instinct?
As it transcends or simply does not require or effectively control the real mechanisms of power transference, and orients directly on the status man<->power, and makes of some men loyal and other men those to whom one is loyal, whch requires that certain signals continue to be given off. Democracy as a narrative it sets the terms for loyalty, and in man, narratives have replaced instincts...?

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PostSubject: Re: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeFri Oct 09, 2015 3:30 pm

Consumerism would be the slackening of the instincts, the requirement of less subtle signals and the absence of real tension. Consumerism is, in the tight logos of power, only the transference of the democratic relation, where man feels himself responsible as a watchdog for his loved masters on whom he relies (civilian military was essential to the introduction of modern democracy, as in Greece, full democratic/capitalistic membership of the penteosiomedemnoi club meant you were allowed to fight along your fellow citizens, soldiering as a privilege) to an oligarchic system where the sacrificial element of power is regulated through professional contractors, without the citizens carrying any responsibility.  We also consume our wars now. They no longer consume us - we consume everything, so as to not have to deal with it qua life; but life nonetheless seeks its own wars. Philosophy becomes necessary as war is internalized.
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PostSubject: Re: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeFri Oct 09, 2015 5:02 pm

Fixed Cross wrote:
Would you agree to call democracy an instinct?
As it transcends or simply does not require or effectively control the real mechanisms of power transference, and orients directly on the status man<->power, and makes of some men loyal and other men those to whom one is loyal, whch requires that certain signals continue to be given off. Democracy as a narrative it sets the terms for loyalty, and in man, narratives have replaced instincts...?


Something about how the relationship is "material" and thus allows it to be "represented", formatted in language and narrative-based, as I remember reading somewhere.. yes. But it is a hard thing to narrate these kinds of subtle tectonics and earth-relations, thus the huge number of strange and inconsistent stories and images man uses to orient himself within this larger daemonism, his own and that of the world.

To me, the idea of an instinct doesn't make a lot of sense, except to say that by instinct we mean a kind of automatic responsiveness pattern as stimuli-response, cohered with emphasis either on a genetic level, a biological-social level or a triadic sign level. Probably "instincts" can operate anywhere in that continuum of materiality capable of being 'programed' to become automatic-unconscous. Democracy as an idea and value does seem to touch upon this deep earth, but I don't know if I could call it an instinct. Well sure, it can be an instinct, yes, but too there are many counter- or non-democratic instincts also, thus the war and philosophical necessity you mention.

Man's inner life is so much ideal and constructed in terms of the images and signs his language and culture give him, each individual is a microcosmic selector and reflector of these ideas and larger realities, and he internalizes and reverberates them back out around himself; each reverberation is different and has different scope and intensity, the tectonics are almost hopeless to follow, which is probably why every political philosophy appears so hopelessly simplistic and crude. The ideas are still shitty.. but that doesn't mean we can't act on them, even act well, or formulate something capable of respecting or responding to a reality.

Personally I seek out the best possible ideas, and try to synthesize and maybe add something there. But in terms of real politics as philosophy, the kind of genius of a philosophical process taken place within the substances of the world rather than simply in one mind's concepts and feelings, I respect the possibility of that tremendously, for that would signify a kind of higher philosophy that not only completes the individual but also moves that completion outside of itself, not simply in a work of art or text but as actual world-substance and structure. I think the best of all human politics is unconsciously doing that, albeit not very well or very well organized. But the idea that it could be done consciously, as if the stuff of a people, a culture, a society, technology, economy, that all of this could become alike to the language and ideas we have in our heads, a pure philosophical project of construction and reconstruction, synthesis and anti-synthesis until higher daemonic realities birth better more complete consciousness.. I don't know, is such a thing even possible? Can a philosopher live his philosophy, I mean really? And in a way beyond a narrow single interest, but in true political fashion?
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PostSubject: Re: Democracy    Democracy  Icon_minitimeFri Oct 09, 2015 5:56 pm

Quote :
But the idea that it could be done consciously, as if the stuff of a people, a culture, a society, technology, economy, that all of this could become alike to the language and ideas we have in our heads, a pure philosophical project of construction and reconstruction, synthesis and anti-synthesis until higher daemonic realities birth better more complete consciousness.. I don't know, is such a thing even possible? Can a philosopher live his philosophy, I mean really? And in a way beyond a narrow single interest, but in true political fashion?

I think so. Its ultimateness makes it necessary, as the only idea of philosophical politics I can accept, and attempt. Therein is the key - what can I even try to bring about? It must be something I can respect, as deeply as I respect philosophy itself. At least, it must be able to stand beside it without crumbling.

Quote :
the kind of genius of a philosophical process taken place within the substances of the world rather than simply in one mind's concepts and feelings, I respect the possibility of that tremendously, for that would signify a kind of higher philosophy that not only completes the individual but also moves that completion outside of itself, not simply in a work of art or text but as actual world-substance and structure.

I think it can be done.  In very succinct terms, the ancient prophecies were premonitions to mans capacity to think himself out of his own illusions, with vivid visions of the sort of relief this would bring. I find substance in the attempts, especially in their persistent nature. And in substance I trust.  The will to arrive at a philosophical world-politics was always there, it was always what drove good simple people to vote for this or that mask of the opposite, and what drives a politician to do magnanimous things. A simple soul can feel the thrill of it, a politician with a heart can feel the drunkenness of it, and Plato - well he had some premonitions as well. I think it is the drug that drives history, and the heights wherein we live is the means to the high that coheres man in his ideal. We need only to explicate these heights downward by other means than verbal logic, which is for an elite type. We must in fact reprogram the instincts to an extent; relocate fear, and make a proper drive out of it.
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