We are faced with a choice, to begin to follow the Will of the People or to continue to follow the Will of the Corrupt Class. The People include all our citizens – tyranni and liberti alike. The Corrupt Class is composed almost entirely of tyranni and we already follow their Will.
We see them managing religious hierarchies, running many elements of all levels of government, infesting our political parties, sending jobs offshore, depleting our industrial base, letting our infrastructure decay, profiting from the suffering of the ill, destroying the middle class, alienating other nations, dumbing down our education system, manipulating the stock market, denying civil rights to hated groups, creating false security and false securities, wrecking our economy, and, as if the foregoing is not enough, leading the fight to pollute our globe and our lungs for the sake of personal profit. In short, everywhere tyranni can use aggression and deception to get money, power, adulation, and prestige, you will find the Corrupt Class—and they control most of what happens in our nation. We already are forced to obey the Will of the Corrupt Class. It will take considerable effort to dislodge them, but far less time, treasure and tragedy than it took to dislodge the tyranni who ruled the slaveholding South.
The Will of the People or Mob Rule?
Many times over many years I have raised with many people the idea of using the Will of the People as the basic mechanism for governing. The most common reaction is that mob rule would result. People would mention "lynching" and "pitchforks." They would explain how the People are often irrational and emotional. They would explain that the People weren’t smart enough to understand complex issues and therefore would make unwise decisions that would lead to disasters for our nation. Some even said that democracy would soon be replaced by tyranny as the People rallied around some demagogue. All of these were valid points, but they don't tell the whole story. We should take a little reality check.
The common reaction to obeying the Will of the People is to list the dangerous possibilities, while ignoring the fact that many of these possibilities are already realities under the system we now use. In the case of emotional reactions that lead to bad decisions I offer the Iraq War. The People naturally will get emotional. The emotional reaction to the 9/11 attacks was deep and widely shared by all Americans. Such strong emotions are potentially dangerous – they can lead to mob action, or they can be exploited by ruthless men in pursuit of their personal ideological fantasies. Such was the case with the Iraq War.
Mob rule did not result, because the People were not in power, but their so-called representatives were. Even though they were upset, the People wanted to do the right thing. They do not want to needlessly expose their children, the economy, the lives of innocents in other nations, the good standing of America in the eyes of the world, or the well-being of our fighting men and women to unnecessary risk. The People truly understand and desire these things. The People understand that their lives are on the line. But it is true that they reacted with great emotion to the attacks – they just couldn’t do anything about it.
Their representatives surely saw the fear and anger of the People, and they probably felt the same way, and their representatives were in position to act, to commit the nation to any number of possible courses of action. In such a case the People had every right to expect their representatives to act calmly and wisely – not to yield to emotion, and never to exploit it. The People had every right to expect their representatives would determine the facts and take action that would enhance the safety of the People for the future. Retribution, if possible, should be pursued once the perpetrators could be identified and located, but this was a secondary goal. The People would not have pursued revenge if that revenge increased danger to themselves. For the People, their safety was the paramount aim of national action.
Unfortunately their representatives had other ideas, and they had the power to implement them. Our elected representatives worship the God of Reelection and the 9/11 attacks changed the political landscape for them. They could see personal political dangers and they could see personal political opportunities. I am sure that an immense amount of intellectual activity consumed the politicians and their advisers. They pondered which actions would help them get reelected and which would hurt. The lights burned late into the nights in the offices of the Senate and the House. How, our representatives wondered, can we exploit this immense opportunity? The managers of the dueling political parties tried to craft ways to strengthen themselves while weakening their opponents. Men and women of both parties who lusted for higher office, such as the presidency, labored to decide what they should say and do in order to maximize their political chances. Ideologues who were in power in the White House saw a great opportunity to put into action their theories, their unsubstantiated hypotheses, about how to change Muslim nations from theocracies to democracies, and about how to fight "asymmetrical" warfare. Their cronies developed strategies for getting lucrative no-bid contracts to provide equipment and services to the military. It must have been a glorious time for the politicians and their camp followers. They surely knew that they would be unlikely ever again to see such a feast spread out before them. They knew that it was "now or never." This opportunity would come only once in a political career. Money here, power there, dreams and fantasies everywhere. And screw the People.
Former Speaker Thomas Foley, commenting about the House of Representatives of his day, said: "We are partisans and we have to be – it is the nature of the body." and "If Congress fails, democracy fails." His observations are correct and they both apply to the reaction to the 9/11 attacks. Our representatives acted, not in the interests of the People, but in their personal and partisan interests. They did so because of their natures and because of the system, which is corrupt and partisan in the worst sense of the word. And, as a result, democracy failed. So, Gentle Reader, I am suggesting that our system did not protect us from unwise, emotional national action. While we rightly fear that the People might react emotionally and unwisely to powerful events, we did not consider (until it was too late) that the People’s elected representatives might do the same thing. Of course the People, if they had acted, would have done so out of fear and anger, but the politicians acted out of greed and lust for power. At bottom, as it too often does in this human world, Evolution by Natural Selection, not human wisdom, decided our futures. The people who controlled our government followed their evolved natures and acted in their own self-interest.
But there is still another situation that speaks to the wisdom of following the Will of the People. The reactions to the 9/11 attacks took place over a relatively brief span of time, so perhaps our representatives acted out of character. Perhaps their grasping for personal political advantage was a one time special deal, rarely to be repeated. Is there any evidence of frequent, repeated, systemic corruption that results in harm to the People? You bet there is, and we are right in the middle of today. I am speaking of the destruction of our financial system that culminated in the national government committing trillions of dollars to rescue the nation’s economy from the tyranno-actions of the titans of Wall Street.
These tyranno-supporters of the unsubstantiated hypothesis of "free markets," were enabled, over many years and during many successive administrations, to act free from regulation by virtue of their monetary relationship with our elected representatives from the legislative and executive branches and the regulatory institutions they control. The relationship between all these humans was at once symbiotic and parasitic.
It was symbiotic in that they all lived together in a mutually beneficial arrangement. The free marketeers gave money to the politicians seeking election and the politicians, in return and while holding power, loosened regulations so that the free marketeers could make still more money.
It was parasitic because all of these tyranni took the money, the homes, and the futures of millions of Americans.
This decades-long process was not the result of emotional reaction to a sudden catastrophic event, but rather was due to the cold, calculating introduction of systemic risk into the nation’s financial system. And from the point of view of a thief, the process was beautiful. Few, if any, will go to jail because so many people in our national government are compromised. The government can’t investigate the free-marketeers because they are themselves involved in the wrongdoing.
So these two catastrophes, the Iraq War and the destruction of the financial system, are the results of the failures of the current system of government. The People did not do this. They can do better, hell, even our representatives could have done better. All we need is a better system.