Friends, these are dangerous times.Dangerous because of the very simple fact that there is a common conception that we have reached, if not the end of History, then the final phase in social development. People claim that we have now reached a stage where ideologies no longer should be taken into consideration, and that the classic ideologies no longer exist. And as Confucius said, the ultimate form of government is the one we don't ever feel is there, so we must surely have come to this phase when we no longer have any ideologies.
However, we (speaking for the Western world) are under two ideologies all the time. The political principle of representative democracy and the economic principle of market economy. Such a combination must however be said to be most dangerous when there is no opposition to it. A system that has made many believe there is no alternative to it is dangerous in the extreme, for it has reached a state where it assumes almost a totalitarian form, but indirectly and covertly so.
Totalitarian because we have the right to agree - and not much else. If we speak for socialism or communism, we are met with 'threat to democracy', 'you mean like in China' or claims that human nature is against socialism. What a glorious system that is able to ingrain itself so thouroughly that through 'human nature' we become Homo Capitalicus instead of sapient! When something as absolute as human nature is for capitalism (which, as a system, has only existed for a short fraction of the human history), there obviously is not much to say against it - after all, we can't defy human nature. An interesting fact is that a Soviet scientist during the Stalin period came up with the idea that acquired traits could be passed into genetic material (and thereby 'human nature'). This is a veritable dream for any would-be totalitarian dictator, because enough propaganda would be enough to firmly ingrain it into human nature and consequently spew an army of ... The connection between his theory and today's "capitalism in human nature" bear unnerving semblance.
In the 'good, old days', we could justify this. The world was so much simpler back then. We had the 'free world' in the west, and the 'empire of evil' in the east. If capitalism and its covert implementation of a one-way track mind was the alternative to Communism and its overt actions of the same nature, we felt this could be justified. Desperate times require desperate measures.
Wrongly so. The world today is not much better, and there still is that unnerving idea that we can place capitalism within human nature. Thereby it becomes a necessity and not an ideology.
The same goes for representative democracy. The concept of democracy has by now been hollowed out to such a point that the very word 'democratic' is almost synonymous with 'good'. However, the nature of representative democracy has two great glitches. The first is that the one who gets elected is rarely the one best at managing a nation but usually just the most charismatic (this usually happens in societies where political interest is not common - after all, people are not sheep), but secondly the system of representative democracy assumes that those who are most are automatically right. This is not necessarily so, though, because a system that gives the power to one representative of the people puts this representative as the elite and the people as masses - thus dividing their interests. Representative democracy combined with capitalism is indeed dangerous, because most members of the Western world have been indoctrinated enough to believe it is the ONLY just way to manage a society. The people who are in power under a representative democracy are thereby those who are most susceptible to the indoctrination from above. Since there are no alternatives available for a person with this mindset, we have arrived at the end of the social evolutionary ladder to their thinking.
Ideologies still exist, and as I said, we live under two of them all the time. Here I must say the opposite applies to the Confucius quote when it is applied to ideologies and not 'a government'. Those who aren't felt are the most dangerous of all.
None.
