democracy – Philopedia

Putin and Trump – Resentment and its Bloody Legacy

No society can do without social inequality, because it must foster the useful knowledge and skills of its citizens in order to survive in the competition among nations. If it were to defy this imperative—as Mao did during the Cultural Revolution and as Vladimir Putin has done since the attack on Ukraine, through which he lost his best minds to foreign countries—then a country slides into the abyss because it falls behind technologically. If, on the other hand—as in turbo-capitalism—it is a state’s declared goal to reward useful knowledge and skills beyond measure, then it risks an uprising by the disadvantaged segment of the population and thus destroys social stability. Nothing is as dangerous to a state’s cohesion as the resentment of segments of the population who were respected citizens just yesterday but suddenly count for nothing. When millions of Germans lost their jobs in the wake of the Great Depression of 1929 and were forced to beg at public soup kitchens to feed their families, they turned to a man who, until 1928, had been nothing more to the overwhelming majority than a political clown: they turned to Adolf Hitler.
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Democracy – a reversibel Progress

Excerpt from my book “One World! – Why the rise and fall of Great Powers musst come to an end” published in German but not yet available in English.

Whereas democracies assume that everyone is fallible, in totalitarian regimes the fundamental assumption is that the ruling party or the supreme leader is always right. Harari

What defines a system as ‘democratic’ is only that its centre doesn’t have unlimited authority and that the system possesses robust mechanisms to correct the centre’s mistakes. Harari

The sciences of nature are fundamentally accessible to all humans. Knowledge is not inherited; it must be acquired through individual effort. In this regard, science and enlightenment were inherently democratic from the beginning. However, democracy as a political form of governance does not necessarily arise from the demands of enlightenment. If knowledge and skills are to replace privileges, we may well argue that the leadership of the state should be in no other hands than those of educated experts. Given this premise, it is by no means surprising that leading figures of the European Enlightenment, such as Montesquieu, Locke, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, or Kant, widely differed as to their opinions on this matter. For instance Rousseau: his “volonté générale” was never more than an intellectual construct, only to be found in the real world when the masses are incited by demagogues. And let’s not forget: more than two thousand years earlier, none other than Plato had expressed the opinion that the governance of a state should be in the hands of the knowledgeable — the philosophers as he called them. In doing so, he was inspired by Sparta, a military dictatorship.

Nexus or Harari, the visionary

What a biography! The range of this great thinker extends from “Sapiens – a brief History of Mankind” to “Nexus – A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI”, which means that it embraces three centuries of European intellectual history. While “Sapiens”, the great early work, was still imbued with that euphoria of progress and science, or at least with that amazement at its demiurgic achievements that we already know from Francis Bacon in the early 17th century, “Nexus” surprises us with its radical skepticism.

Israel and Ukraine – about wars of princes and wars of faith

The 1949 Geneva Convention defined war crimes by setting out specific rules on how wars may not be waged under any circumstances. Protecting civilians is the top priority. This agreement was a great attempt to secure fundamental human rights. However, the effort was doomed to failure from the outset.

All against all: the cyberwar against truth and reason

(section taken from my yet unpublished new book »Homo Faber – what holodoxy tells us about the future of man«)

Hardly any thinking person today would still claim that the „progress“ of weapons technology makes the world a better let alone safer place, but this was precisely the prediction made with regard to the internet and the social media. The interconnectedness of all with all appeared to its creators as a promise of worldwide dissemination of truth and knowledge. The fact that everyone could now express their opinions and that these could, in principle, be heard by everyone else on the globe was even hailed as the dawn of a new global democracy.

The unresolved Challenge of Freedom

Not long ago, politicians and even some scientists tried to convince us that democracy would soon spread throughout the world, as if history were following some kind of teleological law. Historical evidence has always argued against such a view, but reason and our feelings of right and wrong seemed clearly in favor of it. Must it not seem much more desirable to every rational and justice-seeking person to take an active and participatory part in political affairs rather than to follow the dictates of a government that decides over his head? Doesn’t such an attitude make democracy an imperative?