The idea that the majority is always right, or that the majority defines rightness, is a meme which has contributed to the spread and legitimisation of democratic institutions. Nevertheless, as we have argued, it is a false idea and a mistaken justification. Despite its historically progressive role, it has also had, and continues to have, a destructive effect on political and moral discussion in the West.

New ideas always start out being held by a minority. Hence this meme automatically demonises new ideas. For example, we think the forcing children to go to school against their will is wrong. Most people still do not agree with us in this matter. The majority-is-right meme has the effect that anyone who challenges this form of coercion is challenging the democratic principle itself. And worse: since the majority is right, and in consequence has the right to rule, there is a ready-made argument that they ought to take control and suppress home education. Otherwise (for instance) weird extremists will allow their children to run around in ignorance rather than forcing them to go to school.

And so it is in every case when something better is proposed. The meme authorises, and then by the same logic mandates, the rule of the mediocre: — mediocracy.

The meme even makes it difficult to state criticisms of prevailing views without being misinterpreted. For example, if we say “Anti-semitism is rife in Europe.”, how will people interpret this statement? The principle that the majority is always right allows only interpretations like:

• the Nazis are about to come to power, or
• a tiny minority are playing up again, or
• The World’s writers are paranoid slanderers of The European People.

Yet it is possible, without any of those things being true, to hold the opinion that a large number of nice, non-Nazi people give credence to ludicrous conspiracy theories in which Jews play a large part. The idea that the majority is always right makes this suggestion almost literally unthinkable to many.

And no, we are not advocating that Europeans be deprived of the right to vote.

Here's an extremely apposite cartoon from the always excellent Cox & Forkum, on the occasion of the publication of the independent report into the Ra^thergate scandal.

A reader asked us to explain:

Why democracy prevents those in charge from doing too much damage. It seems to me that a monarch, for example, has more incentive to prevent damage to his country and its citizens than an elected official.

But how will the monarch decide what counts as ‘damage’, and how it is best repaired? Rulers are often wrong. Queen Mary thought that ‘damage’ was measured by the number of Protestants in the country, so she had them set on fire. Prince Charles talks to plants and thinks that

buried deep within each and every one of us, there is an instinctive, heart-felt awareness that provides -if we will allow it to- the most reliable guide as to whether or not our actions are really in the long term interests of our planet and all the life it supports.

Here speaks the voice of well-meaning tyranny and earnest unreason. Yet Charles' mistake is not that he wants to use intuition. For how else will the monarch – or any leader – decide when to overrule the experts, when to overrule the majority, when to overrule his advisers, and on the other hand, when to let some of those groups have their way despite his own contrary opinion? Charles' mistake is in his very conception of the problem: he conceives of it as being how to find a reliable guide, and it is implicit, as it always is with who-should-rule theories, that once we have found the reliable guide it is best to impose its judgements on everyone. How could it be otherwise?

But there is no such thing as a reliable guide. What makes the crucial difference between the possibility and impossibility of progress is not how reliable our leaders are, but how good our institutions for removing bad leaders and bad policies are. A key feature of good institutions is that under them, leaders are dependent on the people they lead. Democratic politicians are dependent on their constituents' good will for the political survival, and one mistake is sometimes enough to end a democratic politician's career. A key feature of bad institutions is that the subjects are dependent on the ruler: they are kept at the mercy of whatever intuitions, good or bad, he may suck out of who knows where, and after they have paid for his mistakes, they are obliged to do whatever he says all over again.

The monarch is in essence the "owner" of the government. The elected official is on a short term lease and has many incentives to treat the land and its citizens as, well, rental property.

The analogy does not hold. Neither being a monarch nor being an owner gives one automatic knowledge of how to serve one's own best interests, let alone the country's. In a free society, owners who ruin their property, gradually cease to be owners of anything. But monarchs who ruin their countries still get to rule poor countries (which generally does not affect their own standard of living at all). And if they just don't know what to do for the best, having an ‘incentive to treat people well’ won't help. After all, everyone has an incentive to become a billionaire, but few know how.

A king cannot live among his people. He will have held a position of power before his ascension to the throne. He will have shared the king's tribute and been complicit in his crimes. As such, he will want to avoid being removed from his throne and demoted to the level of an ordinary person for fear of retribution. When a democratic politician retires from public office he usually stays in the country he formerly helped to govern. As such, he will want to ensure that when he leaves office he can earn a living on the free market.

The elected official can always blame the previous administration for the country's problems, the monarch cannot.

That's a feature, not a bug. A democratic politician gets into office by convincing people that previous policies caused problems that he can fix. People will vote him out of office if they think that explanation has not panned out. A monarch never has to face this issue as he cannot be removed from power when he makes mistakes. Democratic politicians are accountable for their mistakes, monarchs are not.

The elected official may need to "scapegoat" certain minorities to become popular enough to be elected. These minorities could be ethnic, economic, or religious. The monarch does not need to do this to acquire power.

This assumes that the monarch does not have to exert much effort to stay in power. In fact, a monarch has to work hard to stay in power because the only way of removing him is to kill him. Since he justifies his power by saying that his policies are right, he must blame other people for not following these policies. As such, he has an incentive to find scapegoats he can sacrifice to appease his subjects' anger. Furthermore, his family and friends have everything to gain by orchestrating his death and they too are gangsters and thugs. So, as history shows, destructive civil wars are common in monarchies.

Nobody has a monopoly on wisdom, so monarchs can only maintain power by murdering people who have better ideas. In this respect, monarchy is no different from any other form of tyranny and is just as evil.

A Reasonable Man makes an excellent point about military humanitarian aid:

I seem to recall a lot of people objecting to the US invasion of Iraq by saying that while they agree that Saddam was brutal and terrible, etc., it isn't appropriate to use and risk US military forces for humanitarian missions.

[…]

I don't hear many of these people complaining of the military assets used now to help tsunami victims

[…]

I can only conclude that [they believe] that helping people hit by a natural disaster is fine, but from a murderous regime is wrong.

It seems to me that many of them honor state power, even the worst sort, because it's something they respect and would like to be held sacred so that they can more easily use it to impose their visions on others.

Indeed. But the two types of disaster are not really that different. ‘Natural’ disasters are, fundamentally, caused by poverty, not by the various ‘acts of God’ that happen to deliver the coups de grace. (Oliver Kamm gets himself tangled in some rickety theology by missing this point.) And poverty, in this day and age, is fundamentally caused by bad government.

This would be cool if it could be perfected:

British scientists are developing a robot that will generate its own power by eating flies.

The idea is to produce electricity by catching flies and digesting them in special fuel cells…

the robot is part of a drive to make "release and forget" robots that can be sent into dangerous or inhospitable areas to carry our remote industrial or military monitoring…

Even better would be a scaled-up version that eats terrorists.

A widespread false idea about how democracy works can be stated concisely as Vox Populi Vox Dei (the voice of The People is the voice of God). In other words, democracy is morally right because the majority defines what is right and the government must follow the will of The People™.

But in reality The People™ does not have a will. It is a group of individuals with conflicting aims and theories about the world, and ideas for what should be done. There are countless ways of notionally aggregating those aims and ideas into a single ‘will’. Not only do these ways not agree, all of them are conceptually inconsistent and paradoxical.

Those who vote Conservative in an election in which Labour wins by a landslide will accept the result. But they will hardly do so because they agree that the Labour party, or The People, are right about what would be best for the country! Nor is the majority always right: majorities can, and frequently do, vote for mistaken policies like socialism, or for evil people like Hitler.

Furthermore, The People does not write laws; politicians write laws. Nor does The People enforce laws; the Police and the Courts do that.

So what role do The People play in democracy? Democracy ought not to be about who rules whom. As Karl Popper pointed out, political philosophers should not to answer the question ‘Who should rule?’ This question has no answer because human beings are fallible and so there is no way of designating a person or group as being the right ones to rule others. Popper suggested that instead we ought to ask ‘How can we prevent those in charge from doing too much damage?’ and democracy provides the best answer yet discovered to this question. The People get to vote every four years or so and on those occasions they may throw incompetent or malicious politicians out of office if they think somebody better is available. As Pericles of Athens (an advocate of the open society) once said: “Although only a few may originate policy, we are all able to judge it.”

As usual, both the people and the government of the United States have outclassed the rest of the world in the speed and scale of their response to human suffering – in this case, that caused by the tsunami in the Indian Ocean. InstaPundit notes some of this:

AMAZON.COM is accepting donations for Tsunami relief. The total is currently $112,000.00, but it's rising very rapidly.

[At the time we are writing this, Amazon.com's customers' donations stand at just under one million dollars.]

Jeff Jarvis says that Amazon is already sending more money for tsunami relief than the French government.

[…]

The Everett-based aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln is headed to the Indian Ocean to help with tsunami relief efforts.

[…]

More than 5,000 military personnel of the Navy's Expeditionary Strike Group 5 will skip their New Year's holiday on Guam to fulfill a humanitarian mission in Sri Lanka.

Total US aid for the tsunami disaster is expected to run into billions of dollars.

Jan Egeland, chief of ‘humanitarian aid’ for the UN, described the ‘rich countries'’ response as ‘stingy’. The US Government interpreted this as an insult to America in particular, as indeed it was intended to be.

A.E.Brain responds as follows to similar insults to another exemplary donor, Australia:

Like the War on Terror, we're all in this together. In cases like this, we don't worry about what stupid and insulting things various Malaysian government bigwigs have said about us recently, nor even whether today's victims in Aceh were slaughtering Christians and burning down Churches last week. When Mother Nature throws a tantrum, we save 'em all, and let God sort them out.

However, the country that that romps home with first prize in the no-good-deed-ever-goes-unpunished category is Israel. Within hours of the disaster, the IDF who, by sad necessity, are world leaders in disaster relief expertise and technology, put together a rescue package. It consisted of a jumbo jet containing 80 tons of food and medical supplies, plus, crucially, 150 medical and other disaster relief specialists. They were due to fly out to Sri Lanka this morning.

What happened next? Unfortunately, you will not guess, because you can't make this stuff up.

First of all, the Sri Lankan government refused permission for any Israeli relief workers to enter the country. They graciously accepted the supplies, though. So the IDF sent the supplies (who knows where they will end up?) and told the volunteers – 60 military and 90 civilian – who would have set up emergency field hospitals including surgical and pediatric units, to go back home.

The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano commented on these events:

The Vatican newspaper has denounced what it called a decision by the IDF to deny emergency help to disaster victims in Sri Lanka.

Calling for "a radical and dramatic change of perspective" among people "too often preoccupied with making war," L'Osservatore Romano singled out Israeli military leaders for declining a request for emergency medical help.

At the time of the non-existent ‘Jenin massacre’, L'Osservatore got equally excited about Israel's ‘aggression that turns into extermination’. Israel's extraordinary humanitarian actions in the middle of a war were drowned in a tsunami of unmerited hatred.

Update: The Diplomad helpfully distinguishes US aid from UN babble.

Further Update: More Diplomadic comments on more unmerited hatred.

Yet another update – Vatican newspaper story was a ‘translation error’, says Catholic World News (they don't say what the error was or who made it):

Vatican, Dec. 28 (CWNews.com) - The Vatican newspaper has denounced a decision by Sri Lanka to reject emergency aid offered by the Israeli government. Sri Lanka declined the Israeli aid because it would have been furnished by a military team.

Calling for "a radical and dramatic change of perspective" among people "too often preoccupied with making war," L'Osservatore Romano chastised the government of the stricken Asian nation for putting unnecessary restrictions on an Israeli offer to furnish medical help.

And still more: The UN is a sham. Indeed. And a scam.

Jimmy Walter is a millionaire and a conspiracy theorist who thinks the US government was responsible for the 9/11 attack. He is annoyed because people don't take him seriously:

"I am a patriot fighting the real traitors who are destroying our democracy. I resent it when they call me delusional," he said.

His second mistake is to try to solve this problem by offering $100,000 to the first engineering student who can show that the World Trade Center collapsed in the manner described by the government. Walter said that the contest would be judged by a panel of expert engineers. He imagines that nobody will manage to win and so he will be vindicated.

Now, before we consider that, we have to wonder why anybody should take Mr Walter's ideas seriously when Mr Walter himself does not? Why do we say this? Mr Walter does not believe the government's story, but there is no reason why one has to believe it in order to test it. The laws of physics and chemistry governing the behaviour of towers and aircraft are fairly uncontroversial. So a decent team of engineers could run a computer simulation, build scale model, and so on, of how the government said the crash happened. If the towers don't fall down during this test then it would constitute a prima facie criticism of the government's explanation of the events of 9/11. If his panel of engineers is competent to judge candidate explanations for 9/11 then surely they ought to be able to come up with such a test themselves. So why doesn't Mr Walter simply hire his own panel of engineers to conduct the relevant test and see what happens?

The National Institute of Standards and Technology is conducting tests to understand exactly how the World Trade Centre collapsed. So the US government is taking its own explanation of what happened on 9/11 seriously and is trying to understand what happened in more depth in order to make future attacks less damaging.

So why does Mr Walter does not take his own explanation as seriously? We guess the reason is this: His explanation requires the US government to have organised a vast conspiracy that works perfectly to deceive the American people. He arrived at this nonsense not by contemplating problems of engineering but because he dislikes Republicans. He dislikes them for having confidence in Western institutions, which he lacks. Mr Walter prefers the doctrines of environmentalism and socialism to those of the free society that allowed him to become a millionaire. The US government's explanation just requires the existence of some very evil enemies, which is rather uncontroversial, plus government complacency and incompetence, which are never in short supply.

---------------------------------------------

Update: Check out this debunking by Popular Mechanics of several such conspiracy theories.

Nothing expresses the monstrous depravity of today's ‘peace movement’ better than Nobel Peace Prize winner Mairead Corrigan Maguire's description of Israel's nuclear weapons as the gas chambers of Auschwitz, “perfected”.

Thus she equates machines whose only purpose was to commit genocide, with machines whose only purpose is to prevent genocide.

Mairead Corrigan Maguire is moral inversion, perfected.

Hurray for the French Government! President Chirac was absolutely right…

…to celebrate the completion of this:

it is the tallest bridge in the world.

The ribbon of steel which forms the highway in the sky is 270m (885ft) above the river, but the central pillar is 343m (1125ft) high.

That makes it taller than the Eiffel Tower and four times the height of Big Ben in central London.

And it was 100% privately funded.

Under the headline Slavery: Mauritania's best kept secret, the BBC expresses righteous indignation about the continued existence of chattel slavery, with government connivance, in Mauritania: an open secret.

But why does the BBC see fit not to mention an even better-kept open secret? The word ‘Arab’ does not occur in the article; nor does the word ‘race’, even though the slave-owners are Arabs and Berbers while the slaves are black. The words ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islam’ do not appear in the article, even though the 800-year-old institution of slavery in Mauritania began with the enslavement of non-Muslim black Africans by invading Muslims from the North, and today a local form of Islamism is integral to its justification and day-to-day operation.

On September 3, 1939, Britain and France declared war on Germany. If it had somehow been possible to impose a free and fair election on Germany that day instead of a world war, Adolf Hitler and his Nazi Party would undoubtedly have won a landslide victory and a wholehearted mandate for their policies. So the war would have followed anyway, the only difference being that the West would now have been fighting a regime that was unequivocally legitimate by the West's own standards. It would have been fighting a nation. A people. And of course, that is what it was fighting, in the actual war.

Facts such as these are cited by the many opponents of the Bush Doctrine (or the Sharansky doctrine) of victory through the imposition of democracy. Opponents of all types, from enemy sympathisers to defeatists to neo-imperialists to idiotarians, and even anxious supporters, think that they see a fatal flaw in this doctrine: what if the enemy, once democratised, votes the bad guys back into power?

The naive answer, that ‘the people’ – the majority – never have evil objectives that they value above their own safety and prosperity, and that all the harm is done against their will by their evil rulers, is simply false. Fortunately, the Bush Doctrine does not depend on such a fairy-tale premise. The doctrine is not about relying on the goodwill of a supposed silent majority of liberal democrats among the enemy population. It is about allowing such a majority, and the associated institutions of an open society, to evolve where they did not exist before, by actively destabilising – if necessary by force or the threat of force – the inherently fragile fear-based regimes that prevent their evolution. This is a much harder and more complex task than merely forcing free and fair elections at gunpoint (which, by the way, can be done and often has been, and is indeed sometimes part of the solution). But it is feasible.

What do a retired Egyptian general and The Guardian have in common? OK, many things, but what we have in mind today is that they both peddle anti-democratic conspiracy theories. The general in question, Sallah Al-Din Salim, recently spoke on a Lebanese TV channel and his words were recorded by MEMRI:

[The US] wants a collaborating [Iraqi] government and a collaborating national assembly, which it can later use to control Iraq, and build military bases, in order to distance Iraq from the Arab path and then to use Iraq's land to attack Iran.

So the United States is going to control voting in the Iraqi parliament. In a similar vein, Ian Traynor of the Guardian writes that a “US campaign [is] behind the turmoil in Kiev” in Ukraine:

With their websites and stickers, their pranks and slogans aimed at banishing widespread fear of a corrupt regime, the democracy guerrillas of the Ukrainian Pora youth movement have already notched up a famous victory - whatever the outcome of the dangerous stand-off in Kiev.

Funded and organised by the US government, deploying US consultancies, pollsters, diplomats, the two big American parties and US non-government organisations, the campaign was first used in Europe in Belgrade in 2000 to beat Slobodan Milosevic at the ballot box.

He then lists the many means that such organisations deployed to try to prevent electoral fraud and sway the election in favour of Viktor Yushchenko. All of this is rather admirable and does not amount to the US being behind Ukraine's electoral problems. However, the article gets even more ridiculous:

Officially, the US government spent $41m (£21.7m) organising and funding the year-long operation to get rid of Milosevic from October 1999. In Ukraine, the figure is said to be around $14m.

Let's just see if we understand this correctly. The US has supposedly delivered a victory to Yushchenko with an investment of only $14m? This suggestion is ludicrous and insulting to the Ukrainians. It is astronomically unlikely that a $14m intervention could be the deciding factor in the race – and if it had been, why were the Americans not outbid by other interested parties like Mr Putin or the Ukrainian – er – parties? In reality, the incumbent Ukrainian Prime Minister Viktor Yanukovych's attempts to rig the vote are behind Ukraine's electoral problems. No American organisation has attempted to rig the election and they are not behind the Ukraine's problems.

A world in which the United States can control the actions of parliaments and the votes of electorates exists only in the fevered imaginations of people like Egyptian ex-Generals and Guardian writers. If they have a penchant for writing fiction they should get it out of their system by writing a bad novel instead of inflicting it on people watching and reading the news.

The death of Yasser Arafat provides an opportunity for peace between Israel and a new state of Palestine, but only if the peace process is linked to genuine freedom and democracy for the Palestinians, writes Natan Sharansky. Go and read it all.

Then buy the book.

MEMRI TV Project monitors the Hizbollah television station in Lebanon: Mothers of Hizbullah Martyrs: We are Very Happy and Want to Sacrifice More Children.

HonestReporting describes some of the so-called ‘incitement’ by which Palestinians are drawn, from earliest childhood, into the suicide-bombing death cult:

'The venomous propaganda in the Palestinian media and education system is the root and foundation of the expansion of the suicide terrorism phenomenon,' said Sharon.

Unfortunately, the typical news consumer has no idea what Sharon is talking about, since, as HonestReporting has continually indicated, the western media have largely turned a blind eye to the incitement against Israel and the U.S. that permeates Palestinian culture.

Meanwhile in Iran:

The Islamic death cult in Iran is running a registration drive, signing up thousands of would-be murderers to carry out attacks against the US, Israel, and … Salman Rushdie

The world will not be at peace until such cults are history. Why do the media barely mention them and never discuss their mode of operation and their political effects?

The narrowness of the schoolteacher subculture; the confusion between form and substance caused by over-reliance on a written Constitution; and Political Correctness. These three blights on American society have combined to bring about a lunatic reversal of the meanings of ‘secular’ and ‘religious’ in school curricula:

On the one hand, the teaching of the foundation stone of the United States' secular political culture, the Declaration of Independence, has been made taboo on the grounds that it constitutes ‘religion’.

On the other, Muslim missionary work in American schools is being encouraged on the grounds that it is ‘multicultural’ – i.e. promotes secular values.

While our troops are fighting for our liberties abroad it seems that the politicians at home are dead set on eroding them – if the Queen's Speech is anything to go by.

The government is planning to introduce a Mental Health Bill that will give GPs the power to compulsorily “treat” people whom they deem to be “mentally ill”. The bill will also increase the number of behaviours that are deemed to be “mental illness”. Let us translate this for people who are not used to psychiatric doublespeak: doctors will be given the power to chemically subdue, or torture, people whose behaviour they dislike, even when these people have committed no crime.

The speech also refers to a Consumer Credit Bill and a European Union Bill. The former is intended to prevent lenders from conning people; the latter to enable the government to con people:

The spending of the "yes" and "no" campaigns is limited by the Political Parties Elections and Referendums Act for up to six months before a referendum, but the government's own spending is not limited until the last 28 days of a referendum campaign, the Vote No campaign said.

The government is also persevering with its ridiculous quest to impose ID cards upon the public. ID cards are an infringement upon our civil liberties: innocent people should not have to present cards at police stations to “prove” they are not criminals. As ID cards will be forged as soon as they hit the streets and quite likely earlier, they will also be utterly useless for security purposes just as they have been in every other country with ID cards. And they will create a completely new type of completely harmless ‘criminal’ (the ID-card non-carrier) on whom the security services' efforts and resources will be wasted at a time when we are in great danger from real enemies. We are also disgusted by the Conservatives' spinelessness over this issue:

The Conservatives say people needs [sic] answers to key questions before knowing whether the planned national ID card scheme will work and protect people's liberties.

Successive governments have eroded Britons' right to defend themselves, by banning guns and prosecuting people who choose to defend themselves. That the state can be everywhere at once is both ridiculous and undesirable: it is long past time that the petty, officious bureaucrats caring, competent representatives in the House of Commons realised that.

John Kerry claimed that he was in Cambodia during the Vietnam war. If he was, he failed to appreciate features of the Cambodia campaign that are analogous to the role of Iraq in the War on Terror. Why did Nixon order troops into Cambodia? First, he wanted to prop up an anti-Communist leader Lon Nol who was under attack from Pol Pot's Communist forces. Second, he wanted to cut off North Vietnamese supply lines in Cambodia. This was a single offensive in a much larger campaign. If Kerry had understood the strategic situation, he might not have objected to the incursion into Cambodia then, and he might be President now.

Pol Pot wasn't an immediate threat to American forces, let alone the American people. However, he was an ally of the Communists of North Vietnam, whom he allowed to operate in regions that he controlled. As a result, the North Vietnamese Army had supply bases in Cambodia. Also, as a Communist, Pol Pot was dedicated to the destruction of freedom and so would harm the United States if he were given the chance, just as the North Vietnamese Communists would.

Was Saddam the biggest threat to the civilised world? In the immediate sense, no. However, like Pol Pot, Saddam supported enemies of freedom, such as Palestinian suicide bombers. Like Pol Pot, he was utterly hostile, ideologically, to the United States and was bound to act upon this enmity sooner or later because the very existence of the United States and its allies would be a standing rebuke to his evil regime. Saddam had to go: the only question was when and how.

The main reason to choose to liberate Iraq by force in 2003 was tactical: Saddam was the most convenient target who couldn't be disposed of by other means.

Any war consists of many small campaigns that don't achieve much on their own but add up to something larger. This is the business of war, the day-to-day substance behind the glamour of declaring victory over the forces of evil. Iraq's liberation is already a great achievement but it is only the start of something much larger. One day, all of the citizens of the Middle East will be free and America will only be safe when they are. This is at the heart of the Bush Doctrine. Kerry showed no sign of understanding it. The majority of Americans did.

Read Oliver Kamm on the White Poppy fascist peace movement in the 1930s, 1940s, and today, here and here.

Yasser Arafat's death makes it possible for the Palestinians to choose peace. It also makes it possible for them to re-package and continue their existing policy – misleadingly named ‘the peace process’ – of ensuring that the murder of Jews remains institutionalised and legitimised by the international community.

To ascertain (and also to influence) which of these options the Palestinian body politic is going to choose, it is essential that any agreement with them be conditional on early progress on certain issues, most importantly the disarming and disbanding of terrorist organisations and the introduction of a liberal-democratic system of government. All concessions to them, not only by the Israelis but by the Americans too (except possibly for purely symbolic negotiations), should follow, not precede, their compliance with these conditions.

Whether the new Bush Administration sees it that way will itself be an early test of whether they are serious about achieving peace in the Middle East, and indeed about winning the war on terror.