Part 7: Democracy is a means to an end where as capitalism is an end to a means. We, the people, have become a means to that end My doctoral investigation will seek to define a number of things that I hope I’ll be able to make accessible to a wide audience away from academia. What’s on your [my] mind, as Facebook likes to ask is “the modern state”, just what is it [the modern state]? Of course the state means something slightly different to everyone but there must be something tangible and a clear idea; something that sums the state up in not too long a paragraph or sentence. Conveniently wikipedia, the online brain, that students are forbidden to quote in essays at university, yet whom governments use to go to war on, sheds some light on this subject in the form of a quote by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. Kant writes the following: Law and freedom without force is anarchy. Law and force without freedom is despotism. Force without freedom and law is barbarism. Force with freedom and law is a republic. But is a republic, I ask myself, the same as a democracy? Or is it that we have enough knowledge of republics to know what a republic is but sadly have very little idea of a what a functioning democracy is because the idea of democracy in a capitalist society is clearly not desirable and therefore the concept of democracy is only ever given lip service. As I recently tweeted, “Democracy is a means to an end where as capitalism is an end to a means. We, the people, have become a means to that end.” However regarding democracy being a means to an end, we as humans, have had much more success in measuring the exact distance of the moon to the earth, than agreeing that the earth, our mother earth, is in a dire state and we all need very quickly do to something about it. The second thing that is on my mind and that I want to investigate further stems from a conversation that I was involved in recently. About the last thing, well second last thing, you want to mention in a polite conversation is that “anarchy might be the way forward”. Delicate women faint and tall men from an aristocratic past rage with anger whilst gulping down whole glasses of fine wine to numb the shock of the word “anarchist” in their company. Of course the word “anarchy” can only be surpassed by the name Karl Marx, which is sure to bring any kettle of conservative voters or right-wingers to the boil in a nanosecond. But I will leave Marx for a moment as it “anarchy” that I want to briefly discuss. Around twenty years ago, as a young man, I attended a lecture at Manchester University on the subject of “anarchy and its origins”. The lecture was so important to me that I never forgot it because it laid bare an incorrect notion, created by mass media, that anarchy means people walking around smashing windows and burning cars. As I learned then anarchy means “without rules”. But as a student of philosophy and design, with a special interest in biology and the drawings of Leonardo de Vinci, this lecture would become a defining moment at university. I was far from being radical at university and held no political opinion either way; after the shambles in Britain under Labour in the late 1970s, and after what Thatcher had failed to do in 1980s, in order to build an economy for the future that wasn’t based on credit, I simply did not believe that British politicans either had the will or the vision to plan for the future. Like most people I had been lazy and allowed the media to define anarchy for me without really challenging the media’s definition but by the end of that lecture I was able to see how the media changes words and redefines language. But not only had my view of numerous riots in Britain in the 1980s changed but I no longer believed the concept of “anarchy” as defined by the media and therefore anarchists could not have inflatrated the miners who had been striking. The Manchester University lecture created an idea in my mind that people come together to resolve issues when the individual or smaller group cannot. I also remember thinking the idea that there may be some connection between how the natural world is organised and between how humans relate to each other at the level of society; maybe there was a golden rule how humans connect to each other when in need and how life has developed; an underlying pattern. It was clear to me that Immanuel Kant’s idea that “Law and freedom without force equals anarchy” was little more than a linguistic oxymoron rather than an absolute in moral philosophy and this was to be borne out and has now been proved to be false because of the social media movement online. And so it was a few days ago that I decided to test the water with a new hypothesis. Sitting in a bar I said in passing, as my two friends discussed the how social media had changed protest, “I read a very interesting article online. The writer talked about the idea that the internet is a system based on no points of absolute power. We are two things,” the writer said. “Either a receptor or a transmitter in the brain and we can be both when necessary. We are cells of equal importance in a huge neural network. There are no top-down rules on the internet. It is essentially a anarchist platform.” With that my friends eyes lit up. “Yes exactly,” said one friend while the other agreed. Of course I am not saying for a moment that my comments and the way I managed to engineer the conclusion is without criticism but it was interesting to see their response. The final thing that’s on my mind at present is I want to find out why political theory is known as political science, when for the life of me, most current political ideas that come out of think tanks and government’s (especially in England) are so far removed from people’s reality. Yet many of these new ideas are forced on people as though, for example, the idea to privatise the legal system in Britain was a natural progression of the order of society. It’s similar to the King, on hearing the news of Isaac Newton’s discovery of gravity, suddenly deciding to tax people for walking on the ground; anyone who can fly is exempt from the tax. A just and fair legal system more than the vote is at the heart of a democracy because it stops the ambitions of corporations who seek to do what they want. The vote is an illusion, open to media manipulation but the judiciary are the pillars, certainly in many western European countries of freedom and free speech. Open up any aspect of the judicial system and you might as well say hello to corporations fielding candidates in general elections, sentencing people to prison for profit and ultimately goodbye to 798 years of judicial review; maybe the legal system in England and Wales is at times not perfect but clearly after 8 centuries of patches and upgrades no politician in Britain has the wisdom or intellect to replace justice with profit. It simply doesn’t work; any Greek will tell you that, ancient or modern. I have to ask, are governments so clearly out of touch with reality? Or are western European governments just soft versions Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s gas the electorate when challenged? Erdoğan has, according to many in Turkey, eroded numerous freedoms founded by the father of Turkey Kemal Atatürk. The answer in Turkey’s case is, and in all societies for that matter, justice should not to handed out by the government even if the government in Turkey goes by the name the Justice and Development Party; justice needs to be served by an independent judiciary if the opinion of Turkey’s young is anything to go by. Should laws that protect all and that have worked well for 800 years in England be swept away, like they are being in Turkey, the US and many other countries, by men who have little if no experience per head in this field?
Posted on: Thu, 20 Jun 2013 21:02:09 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015