Slouching Towards Tyranny

Slouch: verb,

gerund or present participle: slouching

1. stand, move, or sit in a lazy, drooping way.

Tyranny is the morality of the amoral. It looks like it’s poised for a big comeback. Global lack of a clear, objective moral compass in western democracies is beginning to take its toll on freedom. As a result, just since the New Year 2015 arrived, a number of world and national events indicate western democracies are slouching towards tyranny. Plato was right, again. Democracy concludes in tyranny. Here are some indicators and some prophetic warnings from Alexis de Tocqueville in 1835 and Joseph Ratzinger (the future Pope Benedict XVI) in 1969.

· ISIS attract millennial jihadists building a modern Caliphate by gobbling up vast swaths of Iraq, Syria, Libya and Afghanistan

· Tories thrash Labour turning the recent national UK election into a rout for the British right-wing

· American Catholic universities suppress free speech on both sides of the homosexual marriage debate at Seton Hall and Marquette.

· Middle-East politicians urge the restoration of dictatorships to stop the threat of ISIS

· Pope Francis in the cross-hairs of right-wing Cardinals and laity because he stresses pastoral mercy over dogmatic rigidity

· The Republic of Ireland changed its constitution to allow homosexual coupling as a sufficient condition for matrimony

· North Korea successfully fires an ICBM from a submarine

· President Obama washes his hands of any responsibility for ISIS conquering Iraq

· Top liberal-progressive-ecofeminist-journalist, Kirsten Powers publishes a book about how her liberal pals are “killing free speech in America”

· World leaders, including the Pope, push a political ‘climate change’ agenda to secure a world tyranny

· American scientists claim they impregnated a Taiwanese artist man clearing the way for the state to take over procreation globally

· The California State Assembly passed AB 775, requiring only some pregnancy centers, specifically those devoted to pro- life causes, to advertise the availability of abortion, but it would also fine facilities that do not comply

· Two New York City men were arrested on the subway committing the crime of ‘manspreading’

Wait! What? Suppression of free speech by liberal democrats? Demands for dictators by fledgling democracies? State controlled procreation without coitus? One world government to control climate? The Catholic Church zig-zagging right, then left? Seems the slouch is well underway. Now, before you scream ‘slippery sloop’ fallacy, remember that if, in point of brute fact, the sloop is covered in thick grease, then there is no fallacy. Sister Helen St. Thomas could wheel around from anywhere in our 4th-grade classroom and bean you with a felt eraser for slouching under your desk. Slouching is distinctly American. That’s because America is distinctly democratic in a lazy dropping way these days. It didn’t use to be that way.

By the time French envoy, and a man of letters, Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in 1835, America was not slouching. Strong, independent, robust and athletically free, America was ascending. Within 30 years, it would fight the bloodiest civil war in history to purge the cancer of slavery from the moral fabric of the nation. It was this uniquely American blend of pragmatism and moral enlightenment that captured the imagination of the world as reflected in de Tocqueville’s benchmark work Democracy in America

For all his admiration for the American devotion to mercantile democracy, de Tocqueville could already see that it was democracy itself that would lead to America’s slouch towards tyranny of the masses; through its suppression of free speech the masses find offensive.

“I know of no country in which there is so little independence of mind and real freedom of discussion as in America.”

“In America the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion; within these barriers an author may write what he pleases, but woe to him if he goes beyond them.” (Chapter XV)

Plato’s dialogue, Phaedo, describes what happens to those who go beyond what the ‘majority’ allows as free speech. Socrates drank poison rather than live in such a democracy that degenerates into tyranny. Tyranny can result from any of the four other types of government that match personality types in Plato’s Republic. The five political regimes he describes in order of best to worst are:

· Monarchy – rule of the noble born seeking ‘Good’

· Timocracy – rule of the property owners seeking ‘honor’

· Oligarchy – rule of the power elite seeking ‘wealth’

· Democracy – rule of the masses seeking ‘freedom’

· Tyranny – rule of the dictator seeking ‘power’

In this anthropology of politics, each of these corresponds to a prominent personality type. How does the devolution into tyranny happen? Both Plato and de Tocqueville provide similar answers. For Plato, only the philosopher-king is the best form of government because only Monarchy pursues ‘The Good’ as a philosophical ideal form that can never actually be reached in the material universe, but through the mind alone free from the distractions of sense.

“Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty. The ruin of oligarchy is the ruin of democracy; the same disease magnified and intensified by liberty overmasters democracy --the truth being that the excessive increase of anything often causes a reaction in the opposite direction, and this is the case not only in the seasons and in vegetable and animal life, but above all in forms of government. (The Republic, Book VII)

Why? Only a philosopher-king can restore civil order once the democratic masses vote into office politicians who will steal for them until there’s no one left to steal from.

For de Tocqueville, the lack of a clear and objective morality heralds tyranny even for America’s democratic fetish for freedom.

“Despotism may govern without faith, but liberty cannot. How is it possible that society should escape destruction if the moral tie is not strengthened in proportion as the political tie is relaxed? And what can be done with a people who are their own masters if they are not submissive to the Deity? (Chapter IV)

“The American Republic will endure until politicians realize they can bribe the people with their own money.”(Chapter V)

One organization has already heard from its prophet on the slouch towards tyranny, the Catholic Church. In 1969 a young, obscure, Bavarian theologian who would later be Pope Benedict XVI predicted the zig-zag collapse of the Church trying to make social workers out of its priests while preserving core immutable beliefs. Here's a good presentation of the prophecy given by early Joseph Ratzinger long before his papacy:

Today's Church could be faced with a similar situation, undermined, according to Ratzinger, by the temptation to reduce priests to “social workers” and it and all its work reduced to a mere political presence. “From today's crisis, will emerge a Church that has lost a great deal,” he affirmed in a radio address titled Faith and the Future of the Church.

“From today’s crisis will emerge a Church that has lost a great deal. … It will become small and will have to start pretty much all over again. It will no longer have use of the structures it built in its years of prosperity. The reduction in the number of faithful will lead to it losing an important part of its social privileges. It will start off with small groups and movements and a minority that will make faith central to experience again. It will be a more spiritual Church and will not claim a political mandate flirting with the right one minute and the left the next. It will be poor and will become the Church of the destitute.”

Read more: http://www.ncregister.com/daily-news/is-it-time-for-the-benedict-option/#ixzz3bkA8NwiS

The liberty flowing from democracy frees all manner of individual affirmation, but according to Plato this very unrestrained liberty ends in license, and degenerates into mob rule requiring the tyrannical man to step in as savior promising order, hope, and change. Tyrannical man/woman, driven only by lust for power, is the logical conclusion of democracy’s slouching soul. The tyrant is already here..waiting with riot guns.