The Enlightenment And All Her Empty Promises

Part One: Enlightened Leadership

Thomas Paine argued that hereditary kingship was against God’s will, and Niccolo Machiavelli made the unqualified statement that the masses were wiser than the Prince, but beyond that it’s difficult to find an argument that spells out exactly why democratic election is a better of choosing leaders than any other. 

 It’s something that people definitely believe though.  So at the risk of strawmanning let me lay out the reasoning the way it was explained to me.

The Theory

Choosing leaders by election is better (better than appointment, dynastic succession or any other method) because ability and genius are distributed randomly throughout the population and not concentrated in a single bloodline.  Opening up the possibility that anyone can be a leader, opens up access to the widest possible pool of genetic talent. The public can then choose whom they understand to be the best and the brightest from amongst themselves, thereby ensuring that the nation is always are led by the best quality people the nation has to offer. 

Theoretically then, in a country the size of the United States which has almost half a billion people and a very large and very diverse population from which to draw talent, our bureaucratic institutions should be teeming with little Bobby Fishers each waiting for their crack at the presidency.  We should be the best-led country ever!

So what went wrong?

Some have been better than others and a few have been well liked, but it’s safe to say that on average the quality of American presidents have been pretty mediocre.  Certainly our track record hasn't been much better than anyone else.  America’s success is attributable to many things, but the genius of our leaders is not one of them.

The early Enlightenment thinkers, optimistic fellows that they were, postulated that a “state of nature” once existed in which all people were intelligent, rational and “free.”  All one had to do to liberate that inner rational being was eliminate everything that prevented him from getting exactly what it wanted--kings, for example, and the church with all its nutty superstitious rules. 

So when is the promised age of enlightened leadership supposed to happen?

The answer is: never.

When revolution and reform finally removed these obstacles to liberty people stubbornly remained just as unenlightened as they always had been, and 250 years of compulsory liberal education has altered this fact very much.  Not to put too fine a point on it, but this is because there never was a “state of nature” and no inner rational being in fact exists.  Not only is man’s essential nature not only not reasonable, but as Nietzsche argued in Twilight of the Idols, human beings have no capacity for reason whatsoever.

If this is true (and all observable evidence indicates that it is) Liberal Democracy cannot possibly work.  Like it’s ideological cousin Marxism, it is an idealized system designed for ideal beings.  

The proposition defies even basic logic.  No one is able to recognize ability or intelligence beyond what they themselves possess.  (If they could, they would be smarter!)  Average people, by the mere fact that they are average people, are incapable of identifying someone of above-average intelligence and are unlikely to choose a clever person to be their leader based solely on the fact that he is very clever.  It’s a cruel fact of life that’s particularly galling—especially if one happens to be very clever.

Very clever people with limited access to power, money and attractive women often romanticize about ideal places, times and circumstance where people like themselves are recognized by all to be the enlightened geniuses they always knew they were.   Today we have Star Trek and World War Z.  For the rootless cosmopolitans of the 18^th century this need was filled by ancient Greece.

Then as now, the conception liberals had of the classical Greek and Roman world was idealized beyond all proportion.  It was a dreamland of marble columns and singing shepherds pieced together from bits of poetry and philosophy.   It was very similar to the warped picture of the United States entertained by Japanese people today (and vice versa.)  Everyone in Greece was intelligent and reasonable, and fear, ignorance and superstition did not exist (not until the Christians introduced them hundreds of years later.)

One can easily picture an Enlightenment weeaboo like Baruch Spinoza (ברוך שפינוזה) gazing out the window of a Dutch coffee house, daydreaming about being fed grapes by togated babes with large pendulous breasts.  (Or maybe a bronze-chested Hercules, this is Spinoza we’re talking about.) At noon he would go down to the Athenian forum and hold forth about philosophy with Socrates.  Then the Greeks, astonished at his intellect, would make him their king.  

That would show them.  That would show them all.

In reality of course it’s far more likely the Athenians would have force-fed him hemlock, but liberals try not to dwell on those kinds of inconvenient realities.

As with most liberal ideas democracy actually accomplishes the opposite of what it intends.  It is far more likely that a hereditary line will produce a great genius through accident of birth than it is for one to be elected by a democratic process.  It in fact has a leveling effect on the quality of leadership, and virtually guarantees that the system never produce anything but mediocrity.

But the best argument against the belief that elections produce better leaders is the fact that no one uses them in situations where strong leadership is important.  Do movie crews elect their directors?  Do orchestras elect their conductors?  Do soldiers elect their generals?  Of course they don’t.   If it really were a better system that could mean the difference between victory and defeat we certainly would.

Despite all the conditioning to make us believe democracy is better, we instinctively know this.  Which is why we tend to restrict it to domains where perception is more important than reality, such as student body elections, choosing prom royalty and leadership of the Free World.

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