RE: Democracy fails...
March 24, 2015 at 4:08 pm
(This post was last modified: March 24, 2015 at 4:18 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(March 24, 2015 at 1:25 pm)Nope Wrote:(March 15, 2015 at 8:47 pm)Lek Wrote: Democracies and democratic republics, or any form government for that matter, are only as good as the people who comprise them. If the people of nation are immoral, then they will elect immoral people. I'd rather live under a benevolent dictator than in a corrupt democracy.
Do you have a historical example of a benevolent dictator? I find it difficult to believe one ever existed
That's probably because you don't have a clearly thought out concept of what constitute benevolence. Instead you rely on feelings, which leads you to be over-optimistic about the potency of some favored attributes, and fail to account for the necessity of other disliked attributes under relevant circumstances.
I would say there had been many kings and dictators who left their world better than they found it, and were in the overall scheme of human affair and progress, quite benevolent dictators.
For most of human history, anything but a dictatorship would have been uncompetitive. Therefore anything that is not a dictatorship would result in failure and subjugation of the society. This means nothing but a dictatorship could possibly be benevolent with all effects considered, regardless how individual attributes of any non-dictatorship might appear overwhelmingly attractive to those observing from centuries and thousands of miles removed.
(March 24, 2015 at 3:03 pm)Dystopia Wrote: Before answering such relative question one needs to define benevolent - What is benevolent? Is it merely according to the principles of liberalism and human rights (something that by its very nature doesn't exist)? I would say that benevolent depends on each person's morality. My dad liked living during the dictatorship in Portugal, he genuinely thought the times were better back then, so I guess there's no absolute perspective. Let's look at Mussolini - Was he bad for the opposition? Yeah, but he did help Italy at least in the first years and the population supported him.
My final perspective is that dictatorship V democracy depends on historical and cultural context and thus one cannot be better than the other without taking into account other variables and mentalities. Maybe in 200 years we will be living in dictatorships, but obviously we are limited right now and thus we cannot think ahead of time just like humans before 1748 couldn't predict that something like liberalism would ever exist. And this without mentioning that there are many forms of democracy and dictatorship to make a definitive stance, and possibly in the future new political conceptions will exist
A benevolence according to some principle likely already overlooks practical impact of "benevolence".
