Fundamental Flaw In Western Civilization | Gather
In Western society we are taught how the Western tradition goes back to the democratic ideals of the Greeks. A possible subtext of this is that although the Greeks produced very advanced ideas and the first real genius philosophers the Greeks did not last all that long as practitioners of democracy. Politics and militarism always took over and disrupted the Greeks, not to mention that the context of these democracies were within the societies themselves, slaves did not get a say.
If democracy was the be all end all of human interrelationships wouldn’t it have lasted once it was invented, perhaps with continual evolution as we have in our amendments to our Constitution? Is the ideal of democracy a seductive fairy tale to put citizen’s concerns of self-determination at ease as perhaps as religion functions to put their worries of death and pointlessness to bed allowing citizens to be economically more productive? At the bottom of all societies isn’t everything a struggle between valuing one’s life balanced against the cost of fighting to change it, balanced against the possibility that struggle will end up with something worse that we started with?
If we assume the latter, that is, that all people constantly weight their political and economic fortunes against a massive social movement for change or freedom then we can see more easily the dysfunction in American society and politics.
