Why Democracies are Failing

The most troubling aspect of democracy is its purely quantitative approach for electing the persons for governance, and hence no consideration for quality of the electors. This leads to low quality persons reaching authoritative positions and mismanaging the nation.

Democracy provides equal voting rights to all adult citizens of a nation for electing persons to form government. It was devised from humanitarian point of view by a Greek philosopher Democritus of Acropolis – a city state now known as Athens, and was practiced there before king Philip of Macedonia invaded the city state and occupied it under guidance of Plato and Aristotle.

At that time, the city state had a small population living in harmony and having not much of economic, social and intellectual disparities. So, there was no need of quality consideration of electors and all were provided equal rights for electing the government. Since then, a huge amount of water has flown from mountains to the oceans, and huge disparities have developed in populations on inter-national as well as intra-national levels.

Economic disparity in population with in a nation leads to other disparities such as in education, in health, in status, in thinking, in capabilities etc. This leads to exploitation of the weak by the strong, deepening the disparities. As time passes with exploitations, a section of the society becomes deprived of its basic needs and other amenities, and this population keep on growing regularly.

For the deprived people, basic needs have more value than the voting rights in a democratic election. So they vote under influence of petty allurements like those of food, alcoholic drinks, money, etc., with no consideration of merit of contestants in elections. In some cases, votes of weaker sections of the society are obtained though use of physical might and terrorising. As a result, democratic elections do not remain fair.

With unfair elections, rich and mighty persons capture political power of the country to serve their vested interests instead of serving the people, leading to corruption and mismanagement in governance of the country. This situation is prevailing in most of the backward and developing nations of the world, including India, the so-called largest democracy of the world.

Thus, there are three basic requirements for the success of democracy -

• The nation has so much of prosperity so as to provide respectable lifestyle to all its people, particularly the poorest section of the population. .
• No section of the population is deprived of basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, health services, education and justice, so that they vote freely and fairly in democratic elections.
• Economic disparities in the population are limited so as not to induce social disparities, and cause exploitation of the poor by the rich.

Such conditions are prevailing in a few countries of Europe and America only, and rest of the world is suffering under democratic mismanagement.

Another shortcoming of democracy is that it promotes growth in population of mutually competing sections of the society with a view to grab political power of the country through owning more votes than the competitors. In countries where high population is a problem, such as in India, any reward to population growth

I have been working on adding an intellectual dimension to democracy through classifying voters on merit basis and providing them different weightages to their respective votes. This will usher in involving the nation’s intellect in governance. I call the modiefied plotical philosophy as ‘Intellectual Democracy’ or ‘Intellocracy‘.

Read more: http://socyberty.com/politics/why-democracies-are-failing/#ixzz1UIkhAxyz