Note: Behind the green door is a post about the great awakening, a post about the 1980’s classic comedy Trading Places and the Sunday podcast. This week the plan is to do some more Ukraine stuff, given the uptick in war news. You can sign up at SubscribeStar or Substack.

The communists were fond of picking at what they claimed were the inherent contradictions within capitalist societies. They argued that these contradictions were irreconcilable and would eventually bring down the system. The accuracy of their claims is debatable, but the examination of contradictions within a system is a perfectly valid analytical technique. Conflicts in logic are often the cause of defects in a system and not just political or economic systems.

In fact, software developers spend much of their lives hunting down these sorts of errors in the code. Perhaps the cause was poor coding or maybe it was the business logic which defined the code that was flawed. Those bugs in the software are the result of one set of rules contradicting or overriding another set of rules. One user enters data and gets one result, while another user enters data and gets a different result, despite both users expecting a similar result.

This software analogy is further useful in that the users will lose confidence in the system if these internal contradictions are not resolved. Systems are sets of rules and if the user of a system cannot trust the rules, they cannot trust the system. Many software systems have been scrapped due to a collapse in confidence. The same holds for political and economic systems. Some communists thought if they could exploit the contradictions in capitalism, confidence in it would collapse.

When we look around at the general lunacy that has come to define the West, it is often assumed that the lunatics are operating outside the rules of liberal democracy and that is the cause of the lunacy. “If we just go back to our constitutional principles” is the call of every civic nationalist in the comment sections of Conservative Inc. No doubt the people in support of the lunacy have similar claims about their opponents not following the new rules of blessed progress.

What if the reason our age is so deranged is the rule-set that defines the ideology we call liberal democracy? What if the crisis facing the West is simply the result of a system that contains irreconcilable contradictions? People are naturally reticent to think like this because liberal democracy has been sacralized. Democracy means good, so anything it touches must be good. Liberal democracy is even better because it contains two words that have come to mean morally good.

If we take a step back and look at what liberal democracy means in theory, it may help explain why it is increasingly deranged in practice. The off the shelf definition of liberal democracy is the combination of a liberal political ideology that operates under a representative democratic form of government. The word liberal here means the political philosophy based on individual rights and liberty. Individuals are equal before the law and equal in their political relationship.

A liberal society, regardless of the political system, will be defined by things like equality before the law and the rule of law. Further, those laws are written down so everyone can understand them. Those laws also codify things like the right to own property, the right to speak and organize in order to address the government, and a market economy that is open and transparent. There are other things that can be part of a liberal society, but in general it is a society based in individual rights.

Democracy, of course, is where everyone gets a say. In theory, everyone participates equally, but this is obviously not possible in a large society. As the political theorist Robert Dahl showed, you cannot have a true democracy in a large society. Instead you have the features of democracy to one degree or another. You can have free and fair elections in which everyone can participate, even though many people will simply choose to ignore the process entirely.

There you have liberal democracy in a nutshell. It is a set of rules based on liberal moral philosophy where the people, through direct voting and through indirect representation participate in the rule making of society. Right away you can see a problem. If the people can make the rules, then they can vote to get rid of those rules that are based in liberal moral philosophy. The public could be persuaded that free speech is a bad idea and vote to suppress political speech.

Now, the usual suspects will jump up and down and say this is not so because those liberal rules are placed outside the democratic process. They are based in nature, maybe, or rooted in the ancient traditions of the people. In fact, they are written on a piece of paper which is kept in a museum. That way everyone knows that those rules are off limits to further tinkering. This is obviously not true, which is why America is shaking itself to pieces over those timeless rules.

Liberal democracy has the same problem that any democratic system has in that the people are the source of all authority. Those timeless rules based in human nature are deemed timeless by people who pretend they are based in human nature. They are not, in fact, rooted in a moral authority outside man. Since an axiom of all democratic systems is that no parliament can bind subsequent parliaments, all rules, even the timeless ones, are open to question.

In theory, liberal democracy has the same problem as communism and libertarianism, in that it has no answer for what happens when people change their minds. It has no answer for what happens when a decent number of people decide that those liberal rules are no longer working. If authority lies in the people, which is true of all democratic systems, then whatever rules you make, however you describe them, will be subject to the whims of the people.

Communists solved this problem by creating a new class of people who will be the vanguard of the revolution. The party makes sure that the rules remain fixed, so that the people never get any wild ideas about communism. Libertarians, of course, solved this problem by never coming close to creating a libertarian society. Even in their solons where everything exists in theory, they never solved this problem, because there is no way it can be solved.

Interestingly, the post-Marx culturalists landed on what they think is a solution to the internal contradiction in liberal democracy. They relied on anachronistic language to appeal to their audience at the time, but in the modern age, repressive tolerance has become the solution to popular dissent. In modern hands, this means those who are deemed a threat to our democracy are surrounded by the defenders of democracy and threatened with destruction if they continue.

Putting that aside, liberal democracy has no solution within the ideology of liberal democracy to the paradox of liberal democracy. If the people are sovereign, it means their are the authority for all the rules of society. That includes those foundational rules that the creators would like to think are immutable truths. When the people are the source of authority for the rules of society, they can change even those immutable rules of the universe if they so please.

This is why America has become increasingly chaotic as it has become increasingly democratic since roughly a century ago. In a time when a limited number of men of high status controlled the rule making, respecting those limits on the popular will was not just possible, it was necessary for their survival as a class. Once authority began to expand through expansion of the franchise, the cancer of democracy began to eat at the rules and the reasoning behind those rules.

As is true of other ideologies, the only way to make them work is to find some authority outside mankind to legitimize those fixed rules. Theocratical liberalism, for example, could work if the holy text codified the liberal moral code. A liberal dictatorship could work, assuming the people at the top saw an advantage in maintaining the liberal order for their people. Tradition could also work as a useful authority. Even belief in the simulation could work if explained properly.

In the end, liberal democracy suffers from the same central defect of all radical ideologies, which is that it seeks to free man of coercion. The liberals dreamed of a world free of political coercion. The Marxists dreamed of a world free of economic coercion, while the post-Marxists dream of a world free of cultural coercion. As the last radical ideology standing, liberal democracy promises a world free of all coercion, which is a direct threat to society itself.

It turns out that humans evolved to live in societies and societies are nothing more than a system of rules. In order to maintain the rules, people must often be coerced into abiding by the rules. Therefore any ideology that promises to eliminate coercion is promising to destroy that which makes society possible. Liberal democracy is a direct challenge to the very idea of human society. it is a suicide pact, which explains the the lunacy of the current age.

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