Post by Thoithoi O'Cottage on Apr 7, 2015 12:34:08 GMT 5.5
Simplicity, at best, is inadequate, if not very seriously problematic, to deal with anything complex. Humans are the most complex of all creatures so far, first both biologically and psychologically, and then these seminal possibilities in turn bringing forth further complexities such as interpersonal relations, families, societies, commerce, culture, governments, nations, international relations, and so forth. No reductive approach can harmlessly abbreviate into simplicity the affairs of humans which have evolved from the simplest stage of their complexity in the primitive times through several complicating transformational stages to the current moment of ultra complexity in course of the continuous progressional passage inescapably involving still further complications. Being the latest form of social development which may probably be its final evolutionary phase in kind, liberal democracy, which has come through all the earlier forms of social organizations thereby assimilating into it and discarding several of their traits, is the most complex form of human governments ever1. Liberal democracy, thus, is not so simple a political system as one constituting the simple ruler/ruled dialectics such as a monarch and his subjects, an autocrat and the people, or a dictator against the public. In all forms of societies from the hypothetical social contract through the birth of state until democracy, men had been under the iron hands of their more or less autocratic rulers, but with the advent of democracy, because in it the public rule themselves, the responsibility of the people’s welfare settled on their own shoulders, and thus it becomes ultimately nothing but their quality that determines the quality of their representatives or government. While, in all these pre-democracy societies, the public, when they suffered under the leader’s or administrator’s rule, did not need to bother about the complexities of the affairs of the state or the whole community at large because this headache lay with the ruler and so they could lie back and enjoy the ride in this regard, democracy shifted this headache to the public for it to remain constantly paining them in exchange for liberty and equality which cannot be had without being self-reliant. Democracy, thus, put an end to the time when the people could remain intellectually ignorant and dependent with the driving done by someone else, for better or worse, thereby putting life in a whole new scheme of things in which the people are responsible for their own affairs. This new political arrangement is not any more simple as earlier forms used to be.
1. Writing soon after the disintegration of the USSR, Francis Fukuyama maintained in his The End of History and the Last Man (1992) that liberal democracy, having conquered rival ideologies like hereditary monarchy, fascism, and communism, had emerged throughout the world in the years following the fall of Berlin Wall. Repeating the message in his 1989 National Interest article, he reiterated in the introduction to the book that liberal democracy may constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution” and the “final form of human government,” and as such constituted the “end of history.” He argued that democracy is free from the defects, irrationalities and other fundamental self-terminating internal contradictions characteristic of the earlier forms of governments. While stable democracies like the United States, France, or Switzerland were not without injustice or serious social problems, these problems were ones of incomplete implementation of the twin principles of liberty and equality on which modern democracy is founded, rather than the flaws in the principle themselves. While some present day countries may fail to achieve stable liberal democracy, and others might lapse back into other, more primitive forms of rule like theocracy or military dictatorship, the ideal of liberal democracy could not be improved on.