Collectivism is back in fashion at the moment, particularly with the young in the West, who have no experience of living in collectivist societies and who are a generation or two removed from the experience of their effects in the political sphere, and also with those who are enamoured of the moral kudos that comes… Continue reading Collectivism and the Intolerability of Uncertainty
Tag: democracy
The Totalitarian Ratchet: how fear, ignorance and disgust is eroding the democratic spirit and presages an ominous future.
The recent decision by Austria to mandate vaccinations for all its citizens, followed now by Germany and the Czech Republic, is the latest turn of the ratchet in the process by which democracies collapse into authoritarian, even fascist, states. It is one thing when a dictatorship is imposed on an unwilling population by a minority;… Continue reading The Totalitarian Ratchet: how fear, ignorance and disgust is eroding the democratic spirit and presages an ominous future.
Antagonistic Tribalism: the cement of political extremism
Being that we are tribal in nature and have lived in tribal cultures for far longer than we have lived in individualistic ones, there is a strong propensity to be swayed by appeals to tribalistic urges, including negative propaganda, negative rumours and negative stereotypes. Sometimes we need no external catalyst, but are primed to categorise someone and assume the worst of someone on the basis of a perceived shared identity, ignoring and collapsing the likely complex self-identity of individuals on the basis of limited information and experience. This tendency is countered most effectively by personal knowledge of people from many different backgrounds
Who Will Mind the Minders?
We often, particularly around this time each year, pride ourselves here in the UK on our having given birth to modern democracy in the context of the nation state and have even earned the epithet “Mother of Parliaments.” But that does not mean that our parliamentary system has not on occasions been rocked by scandals… Continue reading Who Will Mind the Minders?
The Limits of Tolerance
Attacks like the one we saw in the heart of London last week always set in motion a series of political spasms on the right and the left, the right decrying the lack of calling a spade a spade in the establishment media, in that the danger is posed not just by Islamist terrorism, or… Continue reading The Limits of Tolerance
Chance and Necessity in Populist Revolution
May you live in interesting times (Confucian curse) Men are qualified for civil liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites (Edmund Burke) A scholar of impeccable academic credentials once suggested to me that revolutions are spaced about the average lifespan of a human apart, about 70 years.… Continue reading Chance and Necessity in Populist Revolution
Postscript to the Referendum: the Continuing Case for Reform of the EU
Amid the celebrations, dejection, hopes, foreboding, possibilities, instability, treachery, transformation and general uncertainty that has followed the outcome of the EU referendum, one thing has been generally overlooked, which is unsurprising as it hardly featured in either the campaign to leave or to remain: the desperate need for fundamental reform of Europe’s political institutions. This… Continue reading Postscript to the Referendum: the Continuing Case for Reform of the EU