Democracy And Violence

A staunchly-defended article of faith in Western political rhetoric is the belief that democratic governments do not engage in wars with one another. This belief has been promoted for the purpose of generating trust in the state. If political systems are democratically constituted, it is contended, the public need not fear government officials whose powers could be taken away by the same electoral process that put them in office. The American Civil War, wherein the democratically-established federal and confederate states warred with one another would seem to put this doctrine in doubt. As would a couple of 20th century skirmishes that pitted democratic states such as Great Britain and the United States and others against a democratic Germany.

Beyond this simplistic faith in a "social contract" theory of the state lies the reality that such systems have always been under the control of small groups of persons who are answerable to no one, particularly those they presume the authority to rule. "Democracy" is just one abstraction that the state owners have employed to distract the attention of their victims; to create in the minds of their subjects the illusion that they, not the owners, are running the system.

Believing that the state represents their interests, and that – through "democratic" processes - they control its direction and energies, most men and women identify themselves with that state. In this way, people and the state share the same "ego boundaries." When millions of people come together in this manner, it becomes easy for each to lose his or her individuality – and, hence, responsibility - in a collective identity. By engendering fear of others who share different ego-boundary identities, the state is able to mobilize "dark side" forces of the collective unconscious into a critical mass that allows the state to aggrandize its powers through violent, destructive means. Adolf Hitler used such methods to organize Germans against those he called non-Aryans. In the same way has the United States employed the specters of "communism," "drug-dealers," and "terrorism" to bamboozle its ego-boundary adherents into participating in its continuing war against life itself.

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