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Title: Democracy or Anarchy Author: Charlotte Wilson Date: 1884 Language: en Topics: democracy Source: https://www.panarchy.org/wilson/democracy.html
Democracy is the political theory that assumes that all members of a
community meet as equals on equal terms, but that nevertheless the
majority have an absolute right to over-rule the minority. And it is
worthwhile to look closely into the real significance of this curious
non sequitur, which starting with the formula of free association ends
with the formula of authority.
Where does the majority get its absolute right from? Right is a dubious
word that one gets in the way of using without explanation; but I
suppose that we mean by it in a general way, a claim put forward by
members of a society and allowed by the rest, either because they feel
it to be just or because they are afraid or unwilling to contest it - a
socially recognised claim in fact. It is often said that men have no
rights as against one another individually and collectively but such as
they are able to maintain by superior force. And I think that though
this barbarous and inhuman theory is perfectly untrue of many social
rights, it is the universal explanation of the acceptance of a claim to
rule. But can majority rule claim its right on these grounds?
Is it not a plain and obvious truth that supremacy in brute force by no
means rests with the majority. History and daily life show us examples
thick as blackberries of an energetic and resolute minority utterly
defeating the majority in the most desperate trials of actual physical
strength, ever since the days when a handful of Greeks defeated the
mighty hosts of Persia on the plain of Marathon and Horatius and his two
comrades held the Tiber bridge against the army of Lars Porsena.
Providence fights on the side of the strongest battalion, but not by any
means on those of the largest. And this is even more obviously true when
the contest is transferred to the intellectual field.
No; the history of authority has consisted of a series of minority
rules, each one of which has existed in virtue of the superior
possession of the real strength of vital energy in one form or another.
And where is the evidence that the dominating force is about to become
or is becoming the portion of the majority? The majority today retains
the relation it has always retained to the energetic minority of the
population. It represents the dead blight of a blind adherence to habit
and custom, of insensibility, dullness and apathy, of lazy inclination
to avoid all responsibility, all reform, all enlightenment, in fact all
departure from the beaten track, all need for unwonted exertion even in
thought. If it is to exercise authority it will exercise it only by the
dead weight of inertia, the blind force of unreasoning and irresponsible
stupidity - in the sense, in fact, in which it exercises it now and
always has exercised it.
No doubt "the public collectively", as Mill says, "is abundantly ready
to impose not only its generally narrow views of its own interests, but
its abstract opinion and even its tastes upon individuals.” And if it
has machinery at command for doing this without trouble it will oppress
without mercy. Do you think that the majority of American citizens were
any more unwilling that the Chicago men or John Brown should be hanged
than the majority of Jews that Christ should be crucified? Do you think
that a plebiscite of London citizens, or the inhabitants of England
would maintain the right of meeting in Trafalgar Square? In the name of
human progress and the spontaneous individual initiative on which it
depends, we may thank our stars that the majority as yet show no sign of
acquiring that right to rule founded on superior force. But if the
theory of democracy or the rule of the majority cannot be based on the
appeal to force which has been the basis of all other over-ruling, what,
then is its basis? Shall we say expediency? It is a first
approximation - a blundering attempt to return to the principle of free
association, still hampered by the ideas of authority yet current in
society. On all occasions for common action, or where a general
understanding is desirable, one must have some principle of decision and
the recent development of social feeling has rendered an appeal to the
old species of authority as morally odious, as it is intellectually
contemptible. It is a matter of common experience that men, like sheep
and all other gregarious and social animals, have a pretty general
tendency to go in masses and act together unless they are prevented by
some abnormal division of interests. Each one of us is inclined by our
social feeling to like in a general way to do what the rest like. In
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred where a number of people are met
together to decide upon some common course of conduct, they will all in
the end come to some definite decision in favour of one thing; because
those who were at one time inclined to dissent, prefer in the end to act
with the majority, if the matter is of practical importance; not because
they are forced to do so by the majority over-ruling, but because the
largest body of opinion has so much weight with them that they choose
not to act contrary to it.
We all admit this general fact. It would be quite impossible to take any
common action at all if it were not so. But the special theory of
democracy is that the general tendency of humanity which becomes so
apparent whenever men associate on anything like terms of economic
equality, should be made by men into an arbitrary law of human conduct
to be enforced not only in the ninety-nine cases where nature enforces
it, but by the arbitrary methods of coercion in the hundredth where she
doesn't. And for the sake of the hundredth case, for the sake of
enforcing this general natural tendency where nature does not enforce
it, democrats would have us retain in our political relation that fatal
principle of the authority of man over man which has been the cause of
confusion and disorder, of wrong and misery in human societies since the
dawn of history.
"Men are not social enough to do without it," it has been said. For our
part we do not know when they will be social enough to do with it.
Experience has not yet revealed the man who could be safely trusted with
power over his fellows; and majority rule is nothing else in practice
than putting into the hands of ambitious individuals the opportunity to
crush their fellows by the dead weight of the blind mass of which we
have spoken.