Just Say No to the Majority
Too often I hear people explain democracy as this, that the majority of people can decide on any direction for society that they desire. They totally seperate the will of the people from any independent agency or science. I blame this in part on how we have lawyers running our government rather than philosophers. With mass media we have stopped wondering why democracy is (and what God wants) and suddenly began to believe we know what our government is. It has ceased to be a philosophy, even though our political platforms shift year by year.
The majority of people is the status quo, and belief that the larger body of people knows best-is closer to communism than what our forefathers intended. New inventions and social changes are brought about first by individuals. Even if those individuals are only acting due to social prompting [see Original Thought] the fact is that change will occur in smaller groups before it does within the majority of any closed population. There are problems in this world that no amount of money can solve, alternative energy, cures for disease. We can help to ‘prompt’ the invention to occur through education and resources, but at the end of the day it will be one person (or one small group) who will push society forward.
What does this say about democratic governments? For the most part there is no change. A human rights philosophy or even the belief in limited government should be enough. That change can be brought to our society relatively easily, I often believe that a true democracy allows for a constant state of revolution-which in times past would have resulted in major social unheaval. The problem is when preventing a danger from occuring to society becomes intermixed with causing society to take on an action. Law ideally in my belief should not cause an action. There are a few challenges to this, such as a tax system, which is why I use the term ideally. When we try to make laws cause actions, such as how we want people to be, we are treading on the ground of natural social evolution.
The concept of natural laws have often been misused and has been stigmatized by racists and eugenicists. To me the phrase merely means those laws that would exist whether or not we have them scribed into legal law. Remove all of our laws and it would still harm a group of people to have a muderer running amongst them, or even for the most part a thief. We are merely codifying that which should already be. There would still be a punishment that would be felt by society without the legal code. It is my opinion that the purpose of our government is merely to scribe the law that already is, and the biggest problem facing modern society is that government scribes the law they want to be. Any law that is meant to cause or guide behavior should not be in the hands of the federal government. Communism might believe that the larger group is superior to the individual, but I do not. All we can do is cause harm, the greatest amount of freedom allows for the greatest social growth.
