by Joshua Jones

Created on: April 13, 2009

Democracy is one of the guiding principles of modern political structure, but is democracy necessarily good? Is letting the public good be the guiding force of government a legitimate virtue? Are there things that are necessary for democracy to be good?

Democracy, like so many other philosophical concepts, was invented by the ancient Greeks, and comes from the Greek prefix for people (demo). The Grecian people had strong concepts of the city-state and fierce nationalism. To a Greek his purpose was the glorification of a god, achieved by benefiting the state. Athens was the original organized, large scale democracy. They saw democracy as a means to better the state, because the state is a collection of people, and what the majority of the people want is what is naturally good for the state. The individual's rights are always ancillary to that of the state. This organization of the Athenian democracy is responsible not only for the efficient political system of Athens but also the tragic death of Socrates, unjustly put to death on false charges by a democratic jury.

Democracy, in its basic concept, is the will of the majority prevailing. This seems like an inherently good notion. It would seem unjust that the will of a minority would trump that of a majority, but let's consider an example. If 500 people are gathered in the streets and 450 of the people propose to riot, we would not consider the fact that those 450 would be in the right for rioting simply because they were in the majority. Most people argue that people are not so irrational. This I scoff at. If people were not that irrational, the French republics would have never fallen, the first U.S. government would have succeeded, and Socrates would have lived to 80. People are flawed beings and these flaws tend to be magnified when pulled into large groups.

How then have democracies succeeded for periods of time? There have been times in history when the majority of people in the democracies were rational and informed, but as time progresses these people die and fail to teach the next generation the virtues that led them to have an effective democracy. Revolution and tyranny remind these next generations of those virtues. Those successful democracies were often tempered by law and other political notions that made them not actual democracies.

I tend to find democracies as fundamentally evil. The idea that any group of people, by nature of their being a group, has the power to force an opinion on an individual is immoral. In a democracy, individual liberty is derived from the consent of the state. But from whom does the state receive its power? The state is said to receive its power from the notion of a social contract in which the people surrender all their rights to the government in exchange for safety. Those rights which the state deems unnecessary to detain are leased back to the people until they violate the law of the state. This notion of surrendering your rights to a group of people for any reason is personally disgusting to me. In order to properly legislate in any governmental system we must not ask what rights the individual has, but rather we must ask what rights the state has to deprive any citizen (no matter how unsavory or unpopular) of his rights.

I think that we can safely assert that democracy is not inherently good, but rather an evil while men remain irrational. But the question remains whether or not rational men would surrender their rights to the public.

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