The decay of democracy in both the USA and India as noted and worried about by various intellectuals and newspaper editors is disturbing but not surprising. Across centuries, political philosophers and intellectuals have seriously questioned democracy as the best way to govern the country. The search has always been on to find the ‘wisest and the best’ to guide the country to an ideal of maximal individual liberty under the umbrella of minimal state interference and maximal state security.
Plato (3rd century BCE) believed that democracy ruins itself by excess of its basic principle of an equal right of all to determine public policy. Oratory skills and the ability to garner votes become important to win power rather than ability even as nepotism, corruption, general incompetence, and finally tyranny becomes widespread in a democracy. Plato’s pupil Aristotle thought that democracy is based on a false assumption that those who are equal in one respect (like the law) are equal in all respects, including governing. In Francis Bacon’s ideal world, the government is of and for the people but by the selected best of the people. Spinoza was clear that democracy had still to solve the problem of selecting the wisest and the best to rule themselves. Yet, over the centuries, democracy has become the norm all over the world.
Sri Aurobindo said that the evil of democracy is the decline of greatness in humanity. Indian traditions, a mix of both ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ values had evolved a way of an enlightened monarchy, a decentralised polity, and free citizens ages back. Indic wisdom focussed on the duties at all levels from the king to the ordinary citizen unlike western rights-based traditions. Thus, alternatives to democracy thrived without affecting trade, travel, agriculture, literature, and sciences in the Indian civilization, at least five thousand years old. Colonial consciousness accepted western political philosophies to solve problems for us even as many of the ideas do not simply make sense. Problematically, democracies seem to be failing both in the western and the Indian world. This is perhaps the best proof of what philosophers have always been saying- democracy in the present form is not the best form of governance. The problem of choosing the ‘wisest and the best’ to administer the country remains intact.
RANDOM MUSINGS 