Column by Mark Davis
Exclusive to STR
"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." ~ H. L. Mencken
Man, what a show. Is this great or what? The entertainment being produced by the ruling classes and performed by their middle management minions these days is epic. Politicians and bureaucrats, who themselves have been vetted by the ivory towers of accepted opinion since adolescence, have gone completely insane. Not a little insane, but totally crazy. The spectacle of it all is something to behold. A crisis of credibility for the state is on the horizon. And it could have all been avoided, but the establishment power brokers brought it on themselves.
The modern purveyors of universal thoughts were blindsided by barbarian voters who snuck in the backdoor; these self-righteous purveyors all had to go through the required selection process to acquire their position and status. How could this unlicensed outsider invade the realm of Big-Money Power Politics? Ain’t democracy grand? (Spoiler alert below.)
The late stages of every democracy in history has involved populist dictators who are resorted to in pending crisis, real or imagined. Donald Trump is not the cause of the mania sweeping the nation and the world, but a manifestation of the times we live in. The establishment elite are horrified and reeling from his election to occupy the “Highest Office in the Land” (Leader of the Free World, etc.). Trump is the ultimate working-man’s rich-guy and most of the electorate either hate him or love him. Either way, he regularly makes his bumbling, stumbling, fumbling attackers look like fools. If Party A says “Make America Great! We’re winning! Yea us!” and Party B says “America sucks! We’re losers! Boo us!”, then who do you think will win that popularity contest? The self-destruction of the Democratic Party and the “Never-Trumpers” in the Republican Party establishment, like the proverbial train wreck, is hard to turn away from watching. I don’t feel sorry for them one bit because they laughed at their only chance for a soft-landing: Ron Paul.
Trump continues “winning” and his popularity increases with every pathetic hate-fueled attack from the elite’s corporate media lackeys. He has proven to have the skills necessary to not just do the job, but get the job done; that’s a big thing to people use to seeing impotent clowns making excuse after excuse for years of failure to do what they swore to do. It really didn’t need to be this way.
Ron Paul offered up a sensible, well-reasoned and logical path to reel in the Imperial Federal Government along libertarian lines, giving rise to the Tea Party movement, but the establishment lackeys quickly commandeered it with funding and “leadership.” The Revolution’s message was morphed into “conservative” talking points while Ron Paul was marginalized and left standing at the gate of the Republican Convention because the people who are now “Never-Trumpers” made sure he wasn’t welcome inside. An astute, competent leadership would have asked Ron Paul to make a prominent speech on the opening night. But instead, he was cast aside and his followers shamed for being heretics. Yet the anti-establishment, patriotic followers of Ron Paul were not finished and they were in a fighting mood after being disrespected.
The modern-day Royalists were getting fat while mercilessly persecuting the pious working people of the land, until the peasants rose up against the aristocracy and popularly appointed a Lord Protector. Democracies have followed in form the state infrastructure inherited from various monarchies. The state as a governing structure for society remains inherently authoritarian in spite of the intentions and efforts to the contrary. The 18thCentury Scottish history professor and philosopher Alexander Tyler put it this way:
"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the time that voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship."
“The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.
So, where do you think we are today in this cycle? Can we skip any? Or go back a few? These criteria correspond closely to an individual psychological growth cycle; here being universalized into a collective social “mind.” I propose that that there are people at every stage in the cycle acting independently and vigorously every day such that the most populated stage rules the day in democracies. There are, at any one time, people in bondage, people with spiritual faith, courageous people, people who will value liberty for all, people enjoying abundance, people caring only for themselves, people taking abundance for granted, people who don’t care about anything including themselves, people who can’t take care of themselves and people who sell themselves into slavery. And some doing just the opposite. We each exhibit many of these traits, some more than others, and we are all different. Some choose courage over apathy, spiritual faith over complacency, liberty over bondage, and abundance over dependency and some don’t. Today it appears that complacency and apathy just went by rather quietly, and dependence is gaining legitimacy.
The growing sense of entitlement is the path to bondage. The American people can avert a more overt dictatorship by choosing, once again, to have spiritual faith, great courage and liberty even though abundance must follow when the table is set for laziness. We are all born to look for ways to conserve energy, but when no challenges exist to inspire strong effort, a low effort generation is assured. Low energy to low expectations to low production to low standards to “giving up.” Our civilization has gone from “I think, therefore I am” to “I was born, therefore take care of me.” The state has become the father, the mother, the church, road-maker, rainmaker, and all-around savior for too many.
The “loose fiscal policy” today is staggering as there are trillions of dollars in private, government and derivative debts that can and will never be paid back. Many realize that this is a sign of something to come. President Donald Trump has taken on a job that Hercules could not accomplish and Job could not endure, but cleaning out the stables of Washington, D.C. and surviving in the belly of the beast are a show to behold. The entire structure of elite enabled and controlled democratic institutions are being shaken to their foundations. Who thought that the Korean War would ever end? Who thought that a President would cut four regulations for every new regulation? Fight to let taxpayers keep more of the money they worked for? Tell the smug New York-Hollywood crowd to go screw themselves? Criticize the corrupt party leadership of both parties? If he starts to cut spending and pay down the debt, then the end of the world is surely close behind.
But “we” won’t be able to pay off much of it before the next bubble bursts and the whole “bust” thing starts all over again--another nasty little cycle that tends to wreak havoc on society in the later stages of democracies. Again, Donald J. Trump is not the cause of the problem, only a manifestation of the process that inherently incorporates a systemic flaw. Democracy is used by the elite to provide a veil of legitimacy to hide their economic trickery (fractional reserve banking). Ron Paul had the intellectual and moral understanding as well as the guts to reveal this fundamental truth to the American People. He also publicly exposed the primary enabler of this long-legalized banking scam: The Federal Reserve. Donald Trump, I’m afraid, does not. Bummer.
Ron Paul gave people who vote a peaceful and honorable alternative to the hand-picked boot-lickers of the Establishment; he started the Tea Party movement, the Revolution and inspired people to get fired-up about faith, courage and liberty. But Ron Paul was ridiculed and marginalized along with his followers by the elite’s minions. This proved that our society is not yet ready for a decent man of peace to lead us giving rise to something more crude, vulgar and easy to demonize. Yet anarchy (i.e., self-government, voluntaryism, etc.) looks better every day to more and more people. This is a good thing. Maybe the next time around we will do better.
“A man receives only what he is ready to receive, whether physically or intellectually or morally, as animals conceive at certain seasons their kind only. We hear and apprehend only what we already half know. If there is something which does not concern me, which is out of my line, which by experience or by genius my attention is not drawn to, however novel and remarkable it may be, if it is spoken, we hear it not, if it is written, we read it not, or if we read it, it does not detain us. Every man thus tracks himself through life, in all his hearing and reading and observation and traveling. His observations make a chain. The phenomenon or fact that cannot in any wise be linked with the rest which he has observed, he does not observe. By and by we may be ready to receive what we cannot receive now. I find, for example, in Aristotle some thing about the spawning, etc., of the pout and perch, because I know something about it already and have my attention aroused; but I do not discover till very late that he has made other equally important observations on the spawning of other fishes, because I am not interested in those fishes.”
~Henry David Thoreau, I to Myself: An Annotated Selection from the Journal of Henry D. Thoreau
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