This page is a Left Hand Path look at government, from fascist dictatorships to democracy, from a Satanic point of view. It is an attack on dictatorships and a defence of democracy and multi-layered government systems, i.e. those with a deep, rather than shallow, chain of command. Fascism, a form of government where the State's interests come first, and the people are tools, has potential advantages but those advantages can be better obtained through democratic means and without the disadvantages of dictatorships.
1. Satanic Government: Dictatorship or Democracy?
Satanic government would be a down-to-Earth government, based on solid logic and pragmatism, not idealism or other-worldly ideas. There are more forms of government than either "democratic" or "dictatorship", but these are the only ones I'm looking at here. My personal views are that I hold theocracy to be the worst form of government, and a semi-democratic meritocracy to be the best. But for simplicities sake I am sticking to a comparison between democracies and dictatorships from a Satanic point of view.
1.1. Fascist imagery
"The themes of theatre, indulgence and power are natural to a Satanic going about the task of creating visuals and drama, and as such the visuals that fascism and Satanism use are frequently similar and the shock factor or powerful use of this imagery is frequently employed by Satanists. In the words of Blanche Barton, 'The aesthetics of National Socialism and Satanism dovetail'. Beyond this agreement on aesthetic however, Satanism and fascism disagree on pretty much every major line of thought. [earlier] The Fascists heavily oppressed all forms of non-straight sexual activity and occultism, fascism is anti-freethought and not at all compatible with individualism or Satanism.""The Enema Image: Fascism" by Vexen Crabtree 2001 Jul 15
Related page: Fascism and Satanism, by Vexen
1.2. Dictatorships
For the purpose of this page a dictatorship is counted as the government where commands of one individual are automatically obeyed by others. Fascist governments are not automatically dictatorships. Dictatorships are recognized by the absence of a system that could be used to replace the dictator no matter how poor he becomes and where s(he) is not accountable for hir policies.
Dictatorships put an entire country under the control of a single individual. Julius Caesar, the original modern dictator, maintained control and gathered increasing power over the Roman Empire (which was previously democratic) by keeping the empire in a state of war during which elections were not held and other hierarchal mechanisms were frozen.
All people have their day and then decline; and a dictator is a person like any other. All dictatorships in history (correct me if I'm wrong) have suffered from decline, paranoia and increasing violence as the dictator realizes he is becoming an increasingly poor leader.
1.3. The Satanic Government
I speak on behalf of Satanists in general when I say that we do not trust Human Nature at all, or any one person completely. Not even ourselves. Doubt and questioning are at the core of Satan's rebellion; our role model here provides us with a good example of how things should be run. We must always question other people's motives and I for one, trust those in charge no more than I trust any other person.
This mistrust and inherent aura of competition must always be present within the government; an atmosphere where one person is not critically judged or challenged allows that person, who is running the country in which you live, to freely make mistakes. Wherever there has been one person in charge, unchallenged, corruption and inefficiency increase. The one thing that we should not accept within governing bodies is entropy. Those who begin to falter should be easily replaced.
Multiple levels of questioning, doubt and political combat are necessary to keep the best, cleverest and most cunning people in charge. Anyone with a decent amount of honesty about Human nature will not permit a dictatorship ... and so be it for Satanism. The Satanic government is fast moving, efficient, and its members will take every opportunity to exploit and point out each others failings, to compete amongst each other.
"Democratic institutions form a system of quarantine for tyrannical desires."
"Democracy's defining feature - the freedom to hire and fire your government - does not guarantee that countries will make wise choices, or that democracies will be good neighbours. The lesson of the 20th century is that no people is immune from falling under the spell of some hypnotic voice or pernicious doctrine. In 1933 Germans freely elected the Nazi Party, which went on to reduce Europe to rubble. But only the most twisted history could blame democracy rather than dictatorship for the depredations of Hitler, Stalin and Mao Ze-dong."
The Economist, 2006 Feb 4th
So what, in particular, is the biggest flaw of democracy? What can cause democratic countries to make unwise choices and even voluntarily allow monsters to rule? It is simply this: Human stupidity is the biggest challenge to democracy.
2. Stupidity Versus Democracy
If the masses are stupid, democracy doesn't work. The government has to rule by stealth, tricking the people through things that merely sound good but in intelligent society promoting and doing things that are good, or democracy shoots itself in its foot and causes the downfall of the nation into an anarchic mess. Shallow policies do not make for good government, but, most stupid people vote on shallow issues. The solution is to trick the stupid people into voting for you or to educate them. A good-intentioned deception is nearly always much easier and will never be dispensed with, the only alternative is to restrict voting for uneducated people. This is the dilemma of modern Western democracy!
"Trash Culture is specifically British. It is the mainstream culture across all of the central lands of the United Kingdom. It is characterized by binge drinking, smoking, stupidity, the active hatred of intelligence & responsible behaviour, fashion-conscious youths, ignorant uneducated adults, misbehaviour at school, petty crime, organized crime, violence, homophobia, racism and xenophobia. It's greatest social monuments are pub culture and football. That long list of negative words is the central feature of the mainstream culture in the UK. Its principal proponents are peer pressure, uneducated parents, alcohol, the enslaving television and trash tabloids.""British Trash Culture" by Vexen 2004 Nov
The majority of the electorate are in this state. The pertinent issues for a government wishing to rule well are not the same as the shallow issues that the people can be incited to vote on. Therefore a form of deception has become the status-quo in all political campaigns: This holds true across many of the countries of the West, not just in Britain. Frank Furedi bemaons this in his book "Where Have All the Intellectuals Gone?" stating that a stupid public are "only affected by sound-bites and short-term ideas", and that the decline of intelligence and the rise of vote apathy, all since the 1960s, undermines the authority of democratic government [Furedi, p78-79]
2.1. Deception
When I say that stupidity causes the government to rely on deception then I'm not implying a moral deception. It's a pragmatic one. It means that in order for the populace to understand something, it has to be dumbed down to the point that it's meaningless. So politicians come to rely on appearances, slogans and image rather than substance and content. This is because the masses do not have the ability to understand the content, statistics, the sociology of required changes: they only understand the surface patterns, the veneer. You end up with people being concerned with outrage and shock more than issues. Naom Chomsky is an intelligent critic of the way modern democracy works. This employing of "dumbed down" politics, which is really nothing more than a soap opera and just as shallow, is summarized by Chomsky into what was known as the "Mohawk Valley Formula": The use of hollow slogans and shallow campaigns for the stupid masses. Because while parties still explore issues and produce in-depth papers and analysis, it's only the intelligent minority that understand them. As a result of stupidity and trash culture, democracy is threatened because the masses votes are not hinged on pertinent factors but on frivolous ones. Chomsky talks of the situation in USA politics, but the affect is the same as in the UK: Trash Culture in the UK is the same as the religious, mass stupidity and commercialist factors that undermine American social voting:
"They were called "scientific methods of strike-breaking," and worked very effectively by mobilizing community opinion in favor of vapid, empty concepts like Americanism. Who can be against that? Or harmony. Who can be against that? Or, as in the Persian Gulf War, "Support Our Troops." Who can be against that? Or yellow ribbons. Who can be against that? Anything that's totally vacuous.
In fact, what does it mean if somebody asks you, Do you support the people in Iowa? Can you say, Yes I support them, or No, I don't support them? It's not even a question. It doesn't mean anything. That's the point. The point of public relations slogans like "Support our troops" is that they don't mean anything. They mean as much as whether you support the people in Iowa. Of course, there was an issue. The issue was, Do you support our policy? But you don't want people to think about that issue. That's the whole point of good propaganda. You want to create a slogan that nobody's going to be against, and everybody's going to be for. Nobody knows what it means, because it doesn't mean anything. Its crucial value is that it diverts your attention from a question that does mean something: Do you support our policy? That's the one you're not allowed to talk about. So you have people arguing about support for the troops? "Of course I don't not support them." Then you've won. That's like Americanism and harmony. We're all together, empty slogans, let's join in, let's make sure we don't have these bad people around to disrupt our harmony with their talk about class struggle, rights and that sort of business."
Naom Chomsky, "Media Control", p25
It is a catch-22 situation. The government, in order to maintain democracy, must keep people voting. But the campaigns are so shallow and dumbed-down for the masses that the issues actually being voted for are irrelevant to the what the politicians want to do. So, only a shallow, almost fake, democracy is upheld. The problem is that the masses do not understand deeper issues, the trends or complexities of society, and that no society has come up with a way of effective mass-education to a good standard.
2.2. Stratification
There is an obvious solution. One that has been debated and occasionally employed in history. That is to restrict voting to certain people. In history, the intelligent were the educated. Nowadays we know that many intelligent people exist without qualifications. Personal study and development has been made possible. This means that it is very difficult to judge by qualifications or certificates who would be an "intelligent" vote and who a "dumb" one. The solution to the problem of a central mass of stupid voters is to bias the importance of the votes towards educated people. So, make the "worth" of an "intelligent" vote twice that of a dumb one. All you need is a system to sort out "intelligent" people from "dumb" ones.
But the search for such a system is what has made the implementation of stratified voting problematic. Any intelligent person knows that it's next to impossible to devise accurate tests! But the crises of democracy has gotten so bad, a combination of voter apathy and mass ignorance, that it is time to implement a system of stratified voting regardless of potential weaknesses.
I will suggest a very simple example of what such a system would look like: Anyone with a degree gets two votes. This makes the votes of many intelligent people count more than the votes of inferior people. On the face of it, this leads to a more sensible government where dumbed-down campaigns have less affect and therefore trash culture no longer makes democracy hollow. The problems are of course that many people don't have degrees or any education at all, yet are capable of voting on intelligent issues not vacant ones. So such a system is only a partial fix, a broken fix. This semi-democratic meritocracy has already been proposed by social theorists down the decades.
"Liberals have expressed particular reservations about democracy not merely because of the danger of majority rule but also because of the make-up of the majority in modern, industrial societies. As far as J. S. Mill was concerned, for instance, political wisdom is unequally distributed and is largely related to education. [...] He proposed a system of plural voting that would disenfranchise the illiterate and allocate one, two, three or four votes to people depending upon their level of education or social position. Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955), the Spanish social thinker, expressed such fears more dramatically in The Revolt of the Masses (1930). Gasset warned that the arrival of mass democracy had led to the overthrow of civilized society and the moral order, paving the way for authoritarian rulers to come to power by appealing to the basest instincts of the masses.""Political Ideologies" by Andrew Heywood, p44-45
Related page: Equality and Stratification in Satanism, by Vexen 2005 Jan
Conclusions
When the masses remain ignorant and stupid, plain democracy is impossible and meaningless. Hollow campaigns do not facilitate the honest voting on government activity. But the stratification of voting bias does not lead to equal votes. But equal votes is the problem, not the answer!. I would declare to all that people are not equal. What a stupid person thinks government should do is less important than what an intelligent person thinks. Unfortunately no system exists that can determine in what way a person needs to be "intelligent" in order for their vote to get a higher status.
A system of exams should precede a vote. If you pass the exam, you can vote. The exam would be on the basics of politics and society, current events and basic knowledge. Or maybe different exams, so that a scientist who is voting on issues of technology or issues of importance to him can take the "science" poll booth test. That way, you have to know something about one area in order to vote. This system would discourage stupid people from voting unless they had a genuine concern or issue, and had not merely been swayed by the political soap opera that trash culture represents politics as.
A form of stratification fixes the leaks that democracy springs when the masses are ignorant and stupid. The tested intelligent electorate should have two votes, the uneducated and inferior should only have one. The present culture in the UK is at such a level of education that democracy has become an empty shell, until education reaches a generally higher level stratification is the least problematic form of democracy. Better to have a functioning unequal democracy rather than a dysfunctional, hollow pseudo-democracy based on simplistic deceit. The former is a little like a meritocracy, whereas the latter is national suicide.