Aidonian's blog

I saw a Youtube video on Aristotle treatise on democracy and how he saw democracy as flawed and open for many dangers like tyranny, oligarchy, etc… Its good to see that even in his time, there were clear class distinctions of rich, poor and middle class. Each society had those classes. Whether it is monarchyn, democracy, tyranny, oligarchy, or theocracy, each goverment is not without faults.

Monarchy is flawed because you will have great kings, but also terrible and feabled kings who are worthless and endanger the monarchy as a whole. Weak or bad kings or emperors are the reason or one of them why a kingdom or empire collapses. A weak king of emperor opens the kingdom or empire to corruption and unequal distribution of weatlh and power to a single group of people. It opens the door for revolutions, oprising etc… A weak or bad king or emperor needs people who do his bidding , to support him no matter what. It can lead to bad decisions regarding policies and diplomacies which could lead to war either civil war or external one. Take the last czar of Russia. He went to war with an army that has limited weapons and ammunition and the losses started piling up. This lead to inflation and hunger back home because many people couldn’t feed themselves anymore. This lead to a revolt that saw the end of the Romanov dynasty. Bad leaderships leads to bad policy which leads to chaos and strife.

Tyranny is always bad because its always short term and leads to revols no matter what happens. What is interesting is that Aristotle stated that democracy leads to tyranny because when political leaders focuss on the poor, it leads to populism and the rule of many outdo’s the law and that leads to dangerous situations. We saw that in Germany after WO1 where one democratic goverment after another fell because they couldn’t do what they were elected to do: to get Germany out of problems. Germany had a big problem like most countries: you have a group of rich people who wanted to get richer at the expense of the rest of society and the poor who wanted their misery to end. This gave rise to fascism both in Italy and Germany as a why for the rich to take control and maintain their power and wealth and increase it at the expense of the rest because the state is doing their bidding and is outlawing all regulations that stops them from gaining more power and wealth. Ironically, this is what Aristotle also warns us about. Oligarchy is similar in that sense that the rich rule the land instead of elected leaders. But a goverment that focusses only on the needs of the richs is doomed from the start. What Aristotles says about oligarchy is true today as it was back than. But what he misses is that even in democracy even constitutional goverments, the rich can still seek control and influence on elected leaders. Even with safeguards in check, lobbyists for rich people seek to influence goverment in all sorths of manner. According to Aristotle, the biggest reason why democracy could be succesful is through a strong middle class. A strong middle class could be the key to maintain a democracy healthy and free from class division. In theory this is true. The problem is that in our capitalistic economic society, the middle class is on the verge of disappearing. The rich has fed us myths through media that the trickle down system is worth pursuing and that it is beneficial for all groups in society. The reality is far from that. These myths have been spoonfed to a lot of people that we need to protect companies from going bankrupt and give them what they need to survive. This is so wrong on so many levels. In a capitalist society, the losses, the risks are for society to bear, the gains, the profits are for the rich. The most recent example would be the covid health crisis. the vaccins were created with goverment funding, but the profits did not go to the goverments. it went to the companies that distributed them. Goverments had to set up vaccin programs and they bought these vaccins from these companies for which they made a lot of profit from. If something goes wrong, goverments were at fault, not the companies. The same goes for the 2008 financial crisis. Banks were saved, but the people were left hanging to fend for themselves.

Shouldn’t it be the other way around? Shouldn’t goverments help people out? Look at Iceland. There the ceo’s of banks who went bankrupt were put into jail. All other western countries gave them money to bail out the banks and didn’t do anything much to make sure something like that can never happen again. There were some regulations put in place but they can be easily circumvented. the head of JP Morgan, the biggest bank in USA wants to get rid of these regulations because according to him, it limits their growth, mind you that they made a lot of profits since they were bailed out with tax payer money. Why is he saying this now? Because with either Trump or Harris wining, it means that he can do whatever he wants. Especially if Trump wins. Trump, like Hitler were the type of populists that Aristotle warned against.

The biggest threat to democracy are the lobbyists who seek to undermine and control legislation in favour of their rich bosses. The rich want to increase their wealth no matter what. During the pandemic, profits for companies like Amazon, etc.. went up while others saw their profits diminish. So the next step would be to cut wages so that they can keep giving more to their board of investors who don’t add much to the system except that they demand more money which means they have to cut in wages by reducing wages or firing people. This creates a instability on a long term because it makes sure people have to focus only on surviving by focusing on essentials: food, bills, etc.. which means that spending in local pubs, restaurants, etc.. is going to be diminished which means that those busisness might go bankrupt because of lack of clientele or they are forced to serve to only tourists. This will result in the elimination of the middle class that Aristotle saw as the solution to the flaws in a democracy. The weird thing is, that the middle class is cheering for this because they have been fed lies about it all that this is temperory, that by helping the rich, the middle class gets some of the money of it as well. Which is not true, but that is something that they don’t know.

You can say that the world is at a turning point. Climate change is threat but financial instability through the loss of middle class is a threat on itself that endangers societies. If the rich feels that the state can no longer be in control of the population, it will turn to fascism as a means to gain more control of the population. This is happening now with the rise of the far right groups and parties in Europe and USA. The thing is, history tends to repeat itself but always in a differnt way and what we are witnessing now is the repeat of the 1930’s of last century but in a different way. This is the real threat to democracy everywhere.