Page:The Minority of One, April 1960.pdf/3

Might is Not Right

Were democracy no more than a procedure for reaching decisions on public affairs, the Bill of Rights and the Constitution need never have been written. Instead, the Founding Fathers could have established the law of the land in a single sentence: "All decisions of this nation shall be made in accordance with the unrestricted wishes of the majority of citizens."

The numerous principles embodied in the Bill of Rights and the many articles and amendments of the Constitution were necessary because there was no inclination to give such sweeping powers to the majority. Its rights and prerogatives have been clearly restricted in many domains; and many courses of action, even if sponsored or backed by a large majority of the people, can be ruled illegal.

Were democracy no more than a voting technique that gives precedence to majority decisions, Hitler's ascent to power and his reign could be regarded as perfectly democratic acts; his rule was unquestionably supported by a majority within the German nation.

Such a conception of democracy, which unfortunately is frequently adhered to, reflects a primitive and brutal approach to public matters. It is a political paraphrasing of might is right that chooses to ignore criteria of quality and bases its legitimacy on a purely quantitative approach. In substance, it seeks to decide all public issues on the merits of the physical strength behind each recommendation. Although the actual physical wrestling match between opponents never takes place, the one who commands the most muscles is still the victor.

David and Goliath saved their respective peoples from bloodshed by taking on each other, while technical democracy averts bloodshed between advocates of opposing views by surveying the physical forces behind each and speculating on the hypothetical victor. He is then proclaimed the victor although no battle took place.

Certainly, even such a way of solving controversies represents a civilized development in relation to a still more primitive stage in which no solution could be reached except by actually killing the opponent. But the modern world could hardly boast of an achievement that goes only one step beyond ultimate primitivism and brutality. This is why public policies are not adjudicated as democratic or anti-democratic only in relation to the number of votes behind them. A certain course of action may be anti-democratic even if a great majority of citizens favor it, and the deeds of the small German anti-Nazi underground served democracy in spite of its being a minority course.

The bankruptcy of those inclined to regard any and all majority rule as democratic is further evidenced by the fact that many decisions that seem to have been made by a majority represent, in actuality, a quite indefinite picture of public sentiment. Adhering to the majority vote as the sole principle of democracy would require an almost impossible definition of what constitutes a majority vote. If, for instance, the majority of citizens cast their vote for a specific course of action as a result of being misled by their leadership, would such a decision be considered a democratic one? Then too, who would be authorized to judge, and by what criteria, whether the majority vote resulted from misrepresentation? And what remedial steps would be taken in such a case?

Another complication of what initially might have occurred as the simplest system of government enters the picture through the need to define the electorate which, in the process of decision making, splits into a "majority" and a "minority". For instance, if two communities are involved in a conflict of interests and each conducts a referendum within its sphere of jurisdiction, chances are that each of the two irreconcilable communities could claim to represent a "majority". Even a referendum commonly conducted by both communities would not necessarily provide a democratic solution: a nation of, let's say fifty million people, could demand the annexation of its five-million-people neighbor, agree to leaving the decision up to a free referendum of both nations and then reinforce its demand on the basis that it reflects the wishes of a vast majority of both nations.

These situations are not purely speculative and hypothetical. Rather they represent events that have occurred in both domestic and international problems. The outcome of many a popular vote or election has been determined either by a lack of knowledge among the electorate or by its being intention- ally misled; and in the international arena decisions are hardly ever reached on other merits than the potential physical might backing them.

The public leader's relationship to the citizen in a democratic society is more intricate than the term "public servant" would seem to imply. In his position of power, secret information and influence, he is not merely the executioner of public sentiment but also its architect and manipulator. The means for this range from withholding relevant, perhaps decisive, data from the electorate to creating a public image of problems so as to precondition public sentiment in favor of a course advocated by the leader.

But even if all these obscure handicaps did not exist, and a clearcut, unquestionable majority decision could be reached on any particular issue, no mistake is invalidated just because a majority of people participate in it. Two plus two is not three, even if a majority of the world's population claims it to be true. The very development of civilization proves that majority opinions are not necessarily the right ones; all progress begins with the questioning of an established "truth", and were it not for such perpetually occurring revolutions of the mind, we would still be living in caves. There is no basis for assuming that the collective intelligence exceeds the individual intelligence and two people may err as easily as one. Two individuals whose IQ is 100 do not add up to a collective IQ of 200.

An unrestricted majority decision, even if arrived at fairly, would still pose no guarantee of correctness, intelligence and propriety. At the very best it would represent a system of solving controversies without bloodshed but also with- out assurance that the right decisions would be reached.

A truly democratic society is measured by the checks on the majority's power. True democracy not only is not total license of the majority but, on the contrary, it imposes strict rules and limitations on that license. The great advent of democracy-the French Revolution-was anything but an expedient mechanism for decision making. Its banner was not "Let the majority decide!" but "Liberte! Egalite! Fraternite!" Only the application of these principles constitutes the democratic act, whether it is executed by a majority or a minority of citizens. Only such a system, embodying moral and social principles rather than exhausting itself in procedural mechanics, represents the democratic idea.

Democracy's most vulnerable weakness lies in the failure of any great visionary to develop an ideology or Weltanschauung that clearly permeates the mechanics of democratic decision making with the high principles of tolerance and humaneness, thereby establishing a goal for man's inspiration that would balance the negative value of preventing oppression with positive spiritual values. It is this deprivation which so often has enabled crusaders for the darkest and most inhumane ends to mock democracy by exploiting it as nothing more than a procedural system of decision making.