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Dao de Jing / Tao te Ching

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Nice. <-- obligatory.

This reminds me of how enthusiastic the Europeans were for war in the beginning of "World War 1." They were enthusiastic about war for a century leading up to that. The beginning of nation states coincides with the beginning of mass propaganda. Newspapers and pamphlets turned war into heroism to get the support of the public for the ambitions of the politicians.

And they haven't learned the lesson... They learned exactly the wrong lesson. They went with big government. They should have noticed that wars became more frequent when the legislatures seized power from the monarchs.

Democracy isn't peaceful. Its perpetual war - when the oligarchs aren't using explicit war as a means to steal, they use democracy to steal from the people.

You could say that **_democracy is eternally at war - either externally, or at war against its own people._**

What use is truth that's comfortable? This is true.

#Philosophy #daoism #taoism

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Discussion

Teboho 8mo ago

Democracy, in it's ideal configuration brings about optimal peace imo. I feel like you meant to say is "the current popular method of governence isn't peaceful". In it's ideal state, I think, democracy is more akin to the *concept* of Muamar Gaddafi's Third Universal Theory. Cool Tao te Ching poem/qoute though. And I agree with most of whatchu said. War is some faux heroism/patriarchy psyop stunt. All efforts to resolve international conflict should first and foremost be focused on peace negotiations.

Comte de Sats Germain 8mo ago 💬 1

Depends on what the alternatives are. In a lot of places, I'd prefer democracy over what they have going on now. But it's a utopian ideal that has never played out in reality, at least not at the scale of a nation state. There are some very nice micro states, like Lichtenstein, which do a good job with democracy. So maybe its a choice - either go with fully sovereign micro states, which can responsibly run democracies without thieving oligarchs running it ; or do the nation state thing and have a fake democracy that's fully under the control of oligarchs. Since real democracy isn't growing, and all the power continues centralizing to oligarchs and their nation state puppets, I have to conclude that democracy is not working in reality and has to be treated as a dangerous idea, in the same category as communism.

Teboho 8mo ago

I understand what you mean. I still feel like we're defiling the true meaning of "democracy." We're redefining it based on how it has been carried out so far in most states that self-identify as democratic, rather than on what it truly is.

According to Wiktionary, "democracy" is defined as: "A system of government in which the people exercise power directly or elect representatives from among themselves to form a governing body, such as a parliament."

In its natural modus operandi, democracy entails that the people or citizens are in full control of their state. It just so happens, as you said, that there are some thieving oligarchs who attempt to capture and control states. This is an expected possible result of wealth gaps and capitalism, but we cannot say that "capitalism" is bad. Likewise, we should not claim that the idea of democracy is, in itself, the cause of incompetent governance and mass dissatisfaction. I believe that the only problem with democracy is that people do not exercise their due power as would be expected in an ideal democracy.

If you pay a plumber to fix leaks and he only makes them drip less, you cannot say that the whole industry of plumbing is a sham. Rather, you should consider the obvious fact: this plumber is not doing his job as "ideally" as he should.

Comte de Sats Germain 8mo ago 💬 1

Fair points, but I feel like they're still coming from utopian thinking, although they are true and valuable thoughts.

Oligarchs are always chipping away at democracy, even if they have the best intentions. And I use "oligarch" very broadly - everyone from corrupt congressmen to corporations (and their shareholders) benefiting from government spending. I'm also not saying capitalism is bad - I'm a capitalist : anarcho capitalist, specifically - or that corporations are bad. But as long as the political framework is democracy, the system will trend towards corruption. That's because of two reasons : people are incentivized to take from other people, and they vote that way ; and as long as its possible to take from other people, oligarchs will use the power of the state to enrich themselves.

What's the limit to their theft? The only limit is when force rises to meet their force. This is usually a cost/benefit calculation, since credible resistance rarely materializes. The more centralized the state, the more theft. If it costs more to send thugs to steal (taxes, levies, prohibitions, licenses) than the state can afford, they won't do it - so in edge cases, freedom can exist, but only because innovation hasn't yet allowed the ravaging democracy to steal more by saving costs. The edge cases all disappear in the long run.