From Last Words:
“ONE of the merits of democracy is quite obvious: it is perhaps the most charming form of government ever devised by man. The reason is not far to seek. It is based upon propositions that are palpably not true—and what is not true, as everyone knows, is always immensely more fascinating and satisfying to the vast majority of men than what is true. Truth has a harshness that alarms them, and an air of finality that collides with their incurable romanticism. They turn, in all the great emergencies of life, to the ancient promises, transparently false but immensely comforting, and of all those ancient promises there is none more comforting than the one to the effect that the lowly shall inherit the earth. It is at the bottom of the dominant religious system of the modern world, and it is at the bottom of the dominant political system. Democracy gives it a certain appearance of objective and demonstrable truth. The mob man, functioning as citizen, gets a feeling that he is really important to the world—that he is genuinely running things. Out of his maudlin herding after rogues and mountebanks there comes to him a sense of vast and mysterious power—which is what makes archbishops, police sergeants and other such magnificoes happy. And out of it there comes, too, a conviction that he is somehow wise, that his views are taken seriously by his betters—which is what makes United States Senators, fortune-tellers and Young Intellectuals happy. Finally, there comes out of it a glowing consciousness of a high duty triumphantly done—which is what makes hangmen and husbands happy.”
I’m all for bringing back monarchy, where at least then the State didn’t pretend to be anything other than what it was. Democracy rests on the painfully obvious falsity that “we are the government”. Monarchies clearly know what they are and what they represent. Their lack of pretension gives monarchies an elegance and beauty that democracies lack. And, as history has shown, those States that have cloaked themselves in the propaganda that they were really “the people” are those that have slaughtered more of their own people than any other. Think Russia, China, Cuba, etc. Governments most given over to the “the people are the government” fiction are without fail always the most totalitarian. Hans Hermanne-Hoppe’s Democracy, the God That Failed, a book that deserves to be quoted here occasionally, taught us that only during the age of “democracy” and the elimination of monarchy did the age of total war begin. We are not the government. We are not our jailers, we are not the monopoly on the use of violence. We are citizens separate from the State, and that understanding is indispensable to our control over the State.
