Plutocracy - a state or society governed by the wealthy.
"No one can accept public policies which turn a democracy into a plutocracy"
We, citizens in the majority of western world countries, live in a state of fantasy – and a fantasy state. We think we live in democracies but we live in a plutocracies – societies engineered by the wealthy for the wealthy. There is a thin veneer of democracy – artfully drawn and colourfully woven that captures our attention, or our distraction. It is us who are naked, the modern-day emperors (yesterday’s robber barons) have stolen our clothes.
How? Why?
Wealth has become the ultimate conjurer. It has disproven the time-proven quote and fools most of the people most of the time. How else can people, Nietzsche’s herd or the mass, vote for a state, and a state of being, injurious to their lives. The poor voting against a wealth tax appears to be insanity but, in reality, it is an example of political three card monte.
Those most easily fooled are those already bought. Useful idiots in useful political parties. Choruses of deluded men and women prancing, clapping. When things turn bad, as they inevitably do, they are easily sacrificed. To inverse Burke’s meaning – “they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle”. But, and this is the point, the contemptible struggle survives.
Those who seek to expose are marginalised. Queue choruses of the usefully purchased. “Communists.” “Socialists.” “Marxists.” “Climate change scaremongers.” “Envy taxers.” Evidence-less rhetoric shouted as axiomatic by living sock puppets and spread by virtual ones.
When the wealthy are exposed – by independent journalists, thinkers or through their own arrogance – expensive lawyers are price of justice and injustice. Money influencing justice - surely a definition of plutocracy. Clarence Thomas! If there is no justice for all, can there be democracy?
What of the Free Press? The would-be guardians of democracy were long ago bought, if they were ever free. The irony of the situation, seemingly lost on the mass, is inflicted on the mass. Murdoch et al. paint the societal view of democracy in plutocratic colours.
What of the truth? It too has been sold. A casualty. A post-truth democracy is the rarest of genres – a dystopian non-fiction.
Can democracy survive, or perhaps outlive, plutocracy? Can speaking truth to power rebalance power? Those are questions for our time.
