A blupete Essay

The Driving Force Of Fear, Part 7 to blupete's Essay
"An Essay On Government"

Because of pure fear (it is an unproductive and an unhealthy state) people have, since the earliest times, preferred to band themselves together in a group under a strong leader. The principal fear from which people seek relief, is the fear of other people; either from within or from without the group.11 The simple fact is that there exists other people, who might injure the group, or take their property, or, -- often in the same aggressive act -- do both. In putting themselves under a leader strong enough to frighten off, or to deal with the victimizers of the world, the members within the group still continue to run a risk, the risk of being a victim to the leader, himself; but, since the leader would like to stay in power, it is a lesser risk. At any rate, if the members are molested by the leader, they can expect that the molestations will come from only one source; and the abuse, harm, injury and plunder, in total, they hope, will be less than what the people would otherwise experience if they were not within the group under a strong leader.

(For thousands, and thousands of years it never struck the members of groups, nor hardly the leaders, that the members should have much say in the choice of the leader, or have a say in his continuing support: that the leader should be strong and not molest the members too badly, was good enough. Except for the Greeks and the Romans the idea of democracy for most people was just that, an idea; for many people of the world it is still just an idea. Historically, workable democracies, in a representative form, have only recently appeared on the world stage. Best now that I tell you to keep the notion of "democracy" separate from that of "government." The ideal known as democracy, may, in reality, exist or not, no matter -- in its name bloodless revolutions come about and new governments are had [forget whether it makes any difference, or not]. My point is this: no matter how a government comes into being -- democracy, or not -- a given group needs a strong leader, one who, while not being a bully himself, can deal with the bullies of the world.)

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Peter Landry

2011 (2019)