Democracy and Human Ambitions He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy from oppression -Thomas Paine Winston Church-hill was a war time prime minister of the Great Britain. He had had a good taste of democracy and therefore hinted that the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with an average voter. Indeed, an average voter in our respective domains would certainly agree with Woodrow Bovard, that, with attention deficit democracy…combination of mass ignorant, fear-mongering government and lying politicians is putting our system of government to a death spiral. Also, at our different levels and status, we all can hear the whispering voice of conscience echoing to us that our democracy is in danger. Our democracy is indeed in danger because it has gone into the hands of scamps and cads. Psychos have taken the centre stage of government which was the business of nobles and princes. It is good that democracy has come to liberalize the government to accommodate all classes of people within our society, but how they would be transformed to live and act like nobles and princes whose virtues and values had brought dignity and honour to bear in governance is the concern of most men and women of noble birth and character. A lot of the so called honourable men and women parading today within the corridors of power have completely eroded the people’s faith in the democratic system of governance, as they are total contradictions to the nomenclature attached to their names as people’s representatives. It is so because of the platform from which they emerged as elected and appointed public officers, and the dirty things they do to get it done. Indeed, our democracy is in danger. Perhaps such condition had prompted John Adams to say that democracy, while it lasts, is more bloody than either aristocracy or monarchy … democracy never last long. It soon wastes, exhausts and murders itself. There is never a democracy that did not commit suicide. If indeed it is the turn of our democracy to commit suicide as it is currently in danger with the caliber of honourable men and women parading themselves in government offices, it is therefore pertinent that we have to do something to save it. How do we go about that? Franklin Roosevelt provides us the answer: democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely; the real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education. And, according to Sophocles, if we are to keep our democracy, there must be one commandment: “Thou shall not ration justice”. Approaches to dispensation of justice in any democracy determine how well or how bad such democracy thrives. Where justice is rationed, there exist ill-feelings and frustrations that lend credence to agitations for equity and fairness; and, like Langston Hughes, individuals, groups or communities would often cry: I swear to the Lord, I still can’t see why democracy means everybody but me. Such frustration has always bred anarchy. Our democracy has evoked series of questions in the minds of the people. Some of the questions have split into more other questions which answers are mostly subliminal. Such questions and the splinter ones arise in view of Woodrow Wilson’s assertion that the government, which was designed for the people, has gone into the hands of the bosses and employers, the special interests. An invisible empire has been set up above the forms of democracy. This, in a sense, means that the best form of government, as claimed over the centuries, has been transformed into an oppressive kind in the hands of few individuals who have stolen the public funds to institute the invisible empire in order to perpetuate themselves in power and remain as dominant forces in the economic realm of the society. Conversation with an average voter would leave one with so many questions that will continue to compound the problems engineered by the lust and greed of men of humble birth who have graduated to become the princes of democracy, and then fired by inordinate ambition to dislocate the once robust historical ties within the state. And as Marquis de Sade rightly says, lust is to the other passions what the nervous fluid is to life; it supports them all, lends strength to them all- ambition, cruelty, avarice, revenge are all founded on lust. It pays only the deaf, dumb and blind to feign ignorant of deprivation, alienation and neglect in the face of massive embezzlement of public funds and widespread corruption that has become the culture of our new generation. Of course, we have such men around us who are walking corpses suffering from the ravages of poverty and only exist to oil others’ ambitions for their own survival. This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual, HenryWallacesays, is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy. The result is that even the churches are caught up in the web of such societal ills that have rendered most of us as useless Christians only good for our stomachs and perhaps our households. In the words of Ben Franklin, those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Ambitions are not entirely evil but only those …which climb upward to the miseries and credulities of mankind, as noted by Joseph Conrad. The only means of guarding democracy from committing suicide and our society from degenerating into the kind of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” is to keenly observe our politicians and be good enough to identify those burning with inordinate ambition and rightly ignore them, no matter how persuasive they are in kind or in cash. For, ambition is so powerful in the human breast, that however high we reach we are never satisfied, so says Henry Wordsworth Longfellow. And as Petrarch puts it, five enemies of peace inhabit with us- avarice, ambition, envy, anger and pride; if these were to be banished, we should infallibly enjoy perpetual peace. From generation to generation, only caution has often saved the wise king or prince from the hands of his ambitious subordinates. Only very few leaders had listened to the heart-beats of some of their lieutenants as whispers by Horace Walpole: Oh that I were seated as high as my ambition, I’d place my naked foot on the necks of monarchs. It is such kind of ambition that had dealt severe blow on African democracy, resulting in our perpetual backwardness as a nation and as people. For, ambition, as pointed out by Sallust, breaks the ties of blood, and forgets the obligations of gratitude. Also, he says, ambition drove many men to become false; to have one thought in the breast, another ready on the tongue. In the words of Thomas Otway, ambition is a lust that is never quenched but grows more inflamed and madder by enjoyment. Noah Webster could not contain his feelings but pointed out that all the miseries and evils which men suffer: crime, ambition, injustice, oppression, slavery and war, proceed from their despising or neglecting the precepts contained in the Bible. Are we safe with the crop of politicians we are producing yearly by default? Danger looms and increases fear in the land, though we feel unconcern and perhaps satisfied with the little we are gathering as recompense for our myrmidon roles in killing democracy. Let’s learn at least one thing from Grove Cleveland: the ship of democracy, which has weathered all storms
Posted on: Thu, 18 Jul 2013 15:04:20 +0000
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