The original format of the question this post answers was written as follows: “Which possible political system could replace modern democracy and have less flaws than democracy and still benefit the many?”
This question makes it seem as if how we manage our affairs and have a dialogue over how best to peacefully coexist in productive societies that encourage us all to achieve our best potential as individuals and as a society is just a matter of a change of clothing.
That’s now how this works.
Societies do not succeed or fail based on the system we use to govern ourselves.
Societies fail because we fail to govern ourselves as individuals.
Societies fail because human corruption leads us to failure.
Societies don’t fail because we pick the wrong system.
Systems fail because we fail to raise humanity from the muck of our primitive urges as individuals.
Haitians in Springfield are not living in fear today because democracy has failed them but because corrupt human beings have chosen hatred over understanding.
The only system that will ever work is the system that cures us of horrifying statistics such as one in five of us is a mentally unstable individual or 70%-80% of families are dysfunctional, or the primary cause of people leaving their jobs is because of abusive leadership in their place of work.
The only system that will work is the system of people who refuse to tolerate monsters corrupting human society, and that extends far beyond simple politics and well into every other aspect of human life and what we colloquially refer to as “civilization.”
The only system that can ever have a hope of working is the system that focuses on developing human potential, which means education, healthcare, and the ability to succeed on one’s merits in a system that encourages and develops our ability to achieve success through self-determination.
We don’t need to be ruled. We should know better how horribly wrong every other system has turned out to be. It doesn’t matter how messy democracy is because that’s not a problem with the system of democracy. That’s a problem with human beings.
We need to fix ourselves as humans and as a species sharing this mudball with billions of other species if we want any system to be stable over time.
Democracy as a concept is not “flawed.” It’s the best idea we have ever had. The problem is us. We must focus on being better individuals before we can better organize ourselves within any system.
We need to stop pointing the finger of blame at anything and everything that is not us and start taking some responsibility for who we are and what we are. If we can’t manage to do that, then we deserve to send ourselves over the brink and into oblivion.
This question as it was originally posted on Quora in its complete form is: Why do so many MAGA elitists come off as spoiled rotten, whiny and ungrateful babies who are in desperate need of a diaper change?
Donald Trump is a malignant narcissist, and his success at achieving such a high degree of public awareness and top of mind bolstered by all the corporate media driving him to the Whitehouse with their tacit support for his return to power is like a Midas Touch inspiring narcissists everywhere.
That’s why Elon Musk, owner of the world’s most enormous megaphone, fawns over the grifter in chief.
Donald Trump appears to naturally have what Elon had to pay $44 billion to have and with less fawning attention as he’s finding his audience of worshippers dwindling instead of doubling down in their support of him as a saviour equal to Trump. (That must also not be very pleasant for him because he is naturally much more intelligent than Trump.)
He’s like catnip for ego masturbators everywhere, and every single one of them is characterized by the image of a spoiled rotten, whiny, and ungrateful child. Anyone who has had any direct experience with a malignant narcissist, and chances are that it’s more than most realize because many still don’t get what that implies, will see the pattern in his behaviour and understand it for the malignancy that it is.
Powerless narcissists everywhere see him as the embodiment of their dreams of power for themselves, even on the smallest of levels, by permitting them the ability to act locally on their toxic impulses. It’s why hate crimes escalated while he was in office. His presence there was a license for every narcissist, malignant and covert, to feel justified in every destructive action they took against those they deem their enemies.
When we say a leader leads by example or when a role model sets the stage for all the performers to play similar roles, this is what is meant. Humans emulate acceptable behaviour. This is how we learn to socialize.
When long-repressed behaviours are allowed to let loose, they do precisely that. We saw that in spades on January 6th. — narcissists like the Q-Anon Shaman dood (Jacob Chansley), through to their flying monkeys, got into the acting out stage of rage against the system of their oppression.
Jacob even requested a special diet of organic food for him during his 41 months of incarceration, which was granted to him for “religious and health” reasons.
“Because of his “shamanic belief system and way of life,” eating food that isn’t organic or has “unnatural chemicals” would cause the client, Jacob Chansley, “systemic responses that are not simply discomforting, but debilitating and, notably, dehydrating,” attorney Albert Watkins wrote in a filing on Wednesday. Chansley had lost more than 20 pounds, and his condition was “declining,” Watkins wrote”
Narcissists don’t much care for anything that doesn’t cater to their self-centred sensibilities, and having a malignant narcissist at the top of the power hierarchy meant they were and are entitled to their entitlements.
A narcissist will expect the world to conform to them, and any form of compromise they are expected to make is perceived as an assault against them. Living in society is already a condition of oppression they must conform to if they wish to survive and succeed in life. They don’t want to conform to a world that does not cater to them, but they learn to do precisely that to get what they want.
MAGAts don’t care about anything beyond whatever serves their ego, and that’s why you can hit them with a mountain of facts and evidence. They’ll keep coming back with yet another fiction they can present to avoid the admission of defeat and score what they can conceive of as a win. Their egos will permit them nothing less because that risks a full-blown narcissistic collapse.
They would rather die than face that hit to their ego.
Their incapacity to admit error or publicly acknowledge a weakness is what makes these freaks a severe threat to democracies everywhere. This is how and why they destroy families everywhere.
They are psychological children trapped in adult bodies as a consequence of having their emotional maturity halted at a young age due to severe trauma.
There is no cure for them beyond addressing the cause, and that cause is a horrendous problem statistically represented by a whopping majority (70%-80%) of families being dysfunctional. That also spills out to statistics involving a mental health pandemic visibly affecting a minimum of one in five people today.
We must prioritize mental health in society to have any hope of solving our common problems and preventing another Drumpf catastrophe. Our only other choice is to wait for the next Drumpf to capture public attention, while the media will be much more prepared to ensure the oligarchs win complete control over the nation.
This phrase was first coined by a Founding Father, John Dickinson. His pre-Revolutionary War song, “The Liberty Song” was published on July 7, 1768.
“Then join hand in hand, brave Americans all, By uniting we stand, by dividing we fall; In so righteous a cause let us hope to succeed, For heaven approves of each generous deed.”
It’s a bit dated and difficult to listen to now, but it reflects the spirit of the people who rebelled against an oppressive ruler and founded a new nation.
The meaning of “united we stand, divided we fall” is timeless.
It speaks to the survival success of the human species. It invokes Margaret Mead’s insight when she describes a knit bone as the beginning of civilized humanity. We have survived by uniting together and we began that journey of survival by being united when we hunted large animals in groups to feed and clothe ourselves.
To be united is more than just a word describing proximity. To be united is a pact we make to survive and prosper as families, friends, local communities, cities, regions, states/provinces, and nations.
Now that our world has shrunk to the level where geography is no longer a boundary between people, to be united now means continents and continental trading blocks. As our global environmental emergency escalates, united means the entire globe must come together as a species to restore our home to its natural state of sustaining humanity or we may not survive the culling. Our current efforts to mitigate environmental destruction already indicate many millions won’t if we don’t begin taking bold steps to fix our mess now.
Insofar as the efficiency of managing groups of people is concerned, the larger the group, the less efficiently they can be managed, and the less able any administrative body is to meet the group’s needs.
This dynamic creates a tension between individual needs and group needs that scale beyond individuals and their tribes into tensions of needs between tribes and regions, regions and their nations, and a global community comprised of a nesting doll of associations.
Even corporate structures are defined by layers of independence within a hierarchy of authority. Sections, departments, divisions, regions, and boards represent independent areas of authority limited by scope and subordinate to an escalated chain in a hierarchy of authority.
The human mind also works similarly within a structure of escalated authority in processing information. Our AI development efforts mimic that structure because it is the most efficient way of processing and managing escalated levels of complexity at escalated degrees of abstraction.
At any rate, after all that preamble, there are limits to what any state is capable of simply because of limited resources. In Canada, the differences between provinces are a little more obvious in my mind simply because of my familiarity with differences in resources across regions. In the western province of British Columbia, forestry is the primary industry and source of economic growth for the entire world. Next door in Alberta, the oil industry has generated its wealth. Its rich resources have had its provincial politics polluted by greedy Americans like the Koch brothers. Next door to Alberta is the province of Saskatchewan, which has a farming output that has fed the world. Manitoba has a greater diversity of resources to exploit but has had essentially enough to sustain its economy. The same is true for Ontario, where national equalization payments across provinces have helped to stabilize the country’s economies during periods of instability.
I’m not as clear on the specific details of U.S. methods of assisting member states — but the point of being united, over and above the typical answer of a military force to protect the nation from foreign aggression, is the national security arising from economic stability across all states.
Each state has the freedom to operate and manage its affairs as the citizens of each state determine what is best for them.
Freedom, however, and as this question implies — along with all the numerous exclamations by many people and groups like libertarians and anarchists fail to appreciate that freedom is not free. Freedom is always defined by limitations and accompanied by obligations.
For each state to exist as its own country would make each state vulnerable to numerous enemies ranging from foreign agents (including all other states), economic volatility, and bad actors within each state. Operating as a united states means all states are members of a community working together to ensure mutual security, stability, survival, and prosperity.
Many Americans have lost sight of the significance of community synergy and have allowed themselves to buy into the toxic competitiveness that justifies selling their own families down the river for a few extra pennies in their pockets.
These Americans, Canadians, and essentially the whole of conservative ideology all across the globe today have lost sight of the value of the community while pursuing a cutthroat agenda of “I’ve got mine so fuck you”.
It is this perversion of individual desires above the needs of the many that has led the nation down a path of toxic fascism that threatens the end of 243 years of democracy. If Americans lose their crucial battle for freedom in their next election, if they install a convicted felon as their head, then that will serve as a severe blow to freedom for all people all across the globe. The hegemony of plutocrats and their medieval infrastructures of authoritarian operations we casually refer to as corporations will assert their ascendance above all who are reduced to disposable cogs in a modern facsimile of ancient serfdom.
Each state should want to be an integral part of a larger community if it wishes to survive as an independent community. It’s as much in their best interests to be united as a nation as it is in the best interests of their citizens, families, and communities, as it is also in the best interests of all citizens as a united whole.
For the reasons cited above, the citizens of the U.K. are now suffering from their childish error in judgment by voting for Brexit. They are learning to cope with their grievous error of impetuous judgment, like the petulant child in a family who decides they can cope well enough with a treacherous world to survive on their own while they still haven’t reached adulthood. They often can’t and are converted into forgotten faces buried within statistics.
The way forward for the survival of our species is not to fractionate ourselves into warring tribal units but to unite as a community to stand tall as we meet challenges far more monumental than we have ever faced.
Here’s a song based on the phrase “United we stand, divided we fall” in an easier-to-listen-to version of the expression as interpreted by “Flower Children” from the “Age of Aquarius”:
“For united we stand Divided we fall And if our backs should ever be against the wall We’ll be together, together, you and I.”
As a child growing up in an era where television programming ended at the end of each day with a closing message, this song inspired me even as I struggled within my fractured community.
It still holds meaning for me, and I believe more firmly than ever before in my life that this is the way forward because the nightmare of toxic individuality we have been cultivating is responsible for creating a world of psychopaths I do not want to live in.
BONUS:
While doing some basic research to answer this question, I discovered a modern variation of the expression “United We Stand, Divided We Fall” by the group “Two Steps from Hell”. Of the three musical examples provided, this one is far less literal, far more emotive, and far easier to listen to:
I also learned it was music used in an advertisement for the MCU release of Captain America’s Civil War:
thotbag 