The political freedom and the high material standard of living enjoyed today in the West are very much taken for granted, but are in fact unique in the world’s history.
Prior to the development in the 18th century of the then novel Western political system of liberal democracy, all government had been authoritarian, and the standard of living of the great majority of people barely facilitated survival.
Authoritarian government means government that enforces the obedience of the majority of the population to the rule of a dominant minority group within it. This minority had generally gained moral as well as political authority over the majority, morality being the principal means whereby human society peacefully exercises control over its members.
The supposed source of the objective moral authority asserted by each ruling minority was generally religious in nature. By claiming divine inspiration and adding supernatural elements to society’s basic moral code, these minorities justified their claim to moral authority over all of society. Together with political authority, this moral authority was expressed in each society by means of a hierarchic social structure headed by a king, emperor, pope, sultan, pharaoh, or dictator.
Adam Smith, father of the free market and author of ‘The Wealth of Nations’, referred to the dominant minority that controlled pre-liberal Democratic society, as ‘The Masters of Mankind’. Apart from controlling the social organisation of each society, this minority also controlled the economy, which it manipulated to its advantage, with the majority of the population basically serving as the labour force for the dominant minority.
The fact that this form of political organisation prevailed for nearly all recorded human history suggests that it reflected an underlying biological reality; namely, that humanity is indeed divided naturally into leaders and led, with the minority controlling the majority by conceiving and providing the society’s World-View, and its supernaturally-based belief system.
Radical change
In the secularising West in the 18th century, however, there was a radical change in the ancient human social order. Belief in the supernatural had gradually been declining with the ongoing development of science, and with this the supernaturally assisted moral authority of the dominant minority to rule society was increasingly being challenged.
With the consequent collapse of the feudal system and the introduction of liberal democracy in England, continental Europe, and the United States, the supernatural belief system that the minority had used to control the majority proved no longer sufficiently credible. As a consequence, the majority were finally freed by liberal democracy’s rational principles from their historical social bondage.
Liberal democracy, as a rational and secular political philosophy, achieved this civilising advance by questioning and challenging the minority’s justification to its claim to moral authority over society. It did not question religious belief as such, but it strongly challenged the legitimacy of the religious manipulation of society’s natural morality that the minority had previously employed to gain moral authority.
The liberation of the majority at this time did not, however, mean that the majority was forever free from minority domination. It rather illuminated the fact that the use of spiritual dogma and moral manipulation is the basic method whereby a minority is able peacefully to control the majority of a population. If the West ceases to observe the rational governing principles of liberal democracy, moral manipulation is very likely to be the way that the current minority will once more take complete control of Western society.
Rational and secular
Liberal democracy freed the majority politically because it was rational and secular. Its common-sense character also resulted in it advocating private property ownership, toleration, free elections, and political, social, and economic freedom, together with the rule of law, among other concepts conducive to securing the liberty of the individual. These liberal practices also facilitated the development of capitalism, the most fruitful of human economic practices, which defers consumption, and invests savings to enhance production.
Liberal democracy has been criticised as being anti-collectivist. In realty, it values individualism above all, but only as the best method of securing a fruitful and healthy social collective. Liberal democrats had previously witnessed the backward and authoritarian collectivist society that resulted when personal freedom and individualism were consciously suppressed. Individualism is, in fact, collectivism at its most civilised. And collectivism for its own sake, without freedom of the individual, is pointless.
The release of the majority from the cage of dogmatic collectivism that had been created by historical moral manipulation by the minority freed people desirous and capable of giving social expression to their individuality. The diversity of talent inherent in the freedom of the ‘masses’ (and inadvertently suppressed by the rule of the minority) resulted in an extraordinary outburst in the West of social, cultural, technical, and economic creativity. Over the next hundred years this creativity led humanity to the comfortable civilisation that we benefit from today.
Biological predisposition
Liberal democracy changed the structure of Western society. What it did not change, however, was the inherent biological predisposition of the majority of Western society to tacitly accept the authority of its naturally selected minority to ‘rule’ it for their own safety and material benefit. This retrogressive process is in fact already under way, in the form of intellectually led moral attacks on liberal democracy and capitalism, together with the largely meaningless call for something described as social justice. Even though liberal democracy has been their saviour, the majority is naturally predisposed to comply with the minority’s opposition to it.
In the 19th century, with the collapse of feudalism, various forms of socialism were offered as political alternatives to liberal democracy, but were rejected, among other reasons, because the economic models that they presented defied common sense and do not actually work in the real world.
Socialism was never a viable economic system, but is rather a secularised and highly moralised quasi-religion presented as one. Misleadingly advertised as “scientific socialism”, it offered, and still offers, like the religions, the utopian concept of a just and perfect society, but one supposedly attainable here on earth, rather than in an afterlife. Again, like the religions, it also claims to represent an objective and universal moral truth. Socialism aimed originally to replace, not just the economic system of a defunct feudalism, but the whole discredited belief system of the feudal ruling class. The socialists were also concerned with the welfare of the historically abused masses, but had no real idea how to improve their lot economically.
Socialism may be described as an ancient spectre still haunting the world, to paraphrase one of its prophets, and it is being used, with some modifications, by today’s ruling Western minority as the best means of discrediting liberal democracy, and gaining moral control over the majority. Wokism is the current moral form it has taken, an aspect of Critical Race Theory.
Morally virtuous
This irrational and child-like ideology deliberately divides society morally into different groups (collectives), some of which are deemed inherently morally good and others which are not only deemed inherently morally bad, but actually evil. Individualism is not a relevant factor, as people are judged morally, not by their personal behaviour, but by which group they are born into. A just and perfect society will supposedly be attained only when all power is in the hands of the morally virtuous, and the evil have been justly punished.
As members of the currently still-free majority, the choice is ours in terms of governance: to actively support the continued application of the rational principles of the liberal democracy that freed us from our moral servitude or to return quietly to our spiritual cage.
[Image: La Liberté armée du sceptre de la Raison foudroie l’ignorance et le Fanatisme]
The views of the writer are not necessarily the views of the Daily Friend or the IRR.
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