"My Fellow Citizens! Are You Unfit for Self-Governance?" Bellows the Orator

Spartacus:

On the whole, Americans are morally unfit for self-governance. Raised, trained, and educated to be acquiescent, the activism required to lead an independent democratic way of life is a practice in which they are utterly unskilled. Authentic, consensual, social democracy is entirely outside their personal political experience.

Leo Strauss felt this way, as did Plato about Athens. So we end up with democracy as spectacle for the rubes as political investors of both parties divide the spoils.  The people are unfit for democracy, I am afraid, as their leaders are unfit for Aristocracy; so what are we to do?

Comments

[Gerry]

Is is that the public can't manage its own affairs, or that the cons and gamers that run the system need a critical mass of sheeple who vote to keep running the con. Plato never explains how you get wise philosophers instead of wiley opportunists with a will to power. Strauss and his students work for whoever has the power.

What has always been true and always will be is that nobility is a quality of character, not something conferred by the possession of money and power. Democracy has never really worked because it has never really figured out a practical means of selecting leaders with the appropriate qualities of character. It too often devolves into a bureaucratic, systematic exercise of raw power, and petty tyrants and their factions make a battleground of the Public Square.

[Phil]

Public education, an independent and vigorous media, and a leadership class raised with a sense of honor and of fiduciary responsibility might help. The neoliberal myth of the market is an alibi for those whose view is, "Get mine first."

[JJ Commoner]

Hide ... behind the tv.

[Phil]

Hide inside the tv control room, if you can get inside.

[Gerry]

With the right sets of bits, I can get inside and control things from here.

[Phil]

You are selling yourself way too cheap, then, Gerry.

[Gerry]

It's not something I would do, just pointing out that the control room is virtual. I have the bit sets for my companies systems, and I often am controlling things from my basement or a hotel room across the country.

Have you read William Gibson's Neuromancer? Probably the origin of of an imaginary picture of "cyberspace". The main character had broken the rules and they surgically took away his ability to access cyberspace. It's worth a read just for the imaginary picture he paints of a cyberized world. He uses the terms "ICE" and black ICE to describe what we would call a firewall and security software. The "sets of bits" I refer to above are the digital keys and access software for these systems.