Democracy=tyranny

[Dr.Druid]

http://sez.stevenzenith.com/2006/08/a_re..._the_.html

Democracy = The Tyranny of Majority

Does George W. Bush understand the meaning of "Freedom"? I don't think so. He keeps trying to get the world to adopt a broken system he calls "democracy" in which he promotes large centralized government. He and others are using the terms interchangeably, as though Freedom and Democracy have common cause. But they do not.

Modern notions of "democracy" have become the tyranny of majority and the enemy of liberty. We are confused if we believe that the cause of one is the cause of the other.

The cause of democracy is the just means by which societies may hear the dissent of individuals. The right of an individual to voice dissent and be justly considered is the cause of true democracy. It can provide the means to protect us from the tyranny of majority. Yet the cause of democracy is not the cause of liberty.

The cause of liberty is the sanctity of the individual, the protection of the individual's right to act without constraint or coercion. A society that maximizes the ability of its members to act in this way is a free society. Government in a free society is minimal, decentralized, and transparent - and powerless against a free individual that is doing no harm. Harm lies only in the constraint and coercion of others.

Liberty needs no committee. And true democracy is not a vote, it is the right of dissent.

— Steven

A reminder:
"Like other tyrannies, the tyranny of the majority was at first, and is still vulgarly, held in dread, chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities. But reflecting persons perceived that when society is itself the tyrant — society collectively over the separate individuals who compose it — its means of tyrannizing are not restricted to the acts which it may do by the hands of its political functionaries. Society can and does execute its own mandates; and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself. Protection, therefore, against the tyranny of the magistrate is not enough; there needs protection also against the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling, against the tendency of society to impose, by other means than civil penalties, its own ideas and practices as rules of conduct on those who dissent from them; to fetter the development and, if possible, prevent the formation of any individuality not in harmony with its ways, and compel all characters to fashion themselves upon the model of its own. There is a limit to the legitimate interference of collective opinion with individual independence; and to find that limit, and maintain it against encroachment, is as indispensable to a good condition of human affairs as protection against political despotism."
— John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, published 1859.