The democracy of the late 20th century has been more beneficial to the friends of commerce than to the democrats. Its advantages and successes have turned it into a political regime that is now anachronistic and untimely. Democracy is the name inherited from a past imperfect and recent, which used to manage our way of life. Today, that life of ours is managed by commerce and the friends of commerce. If politics is the organization of power, that is to say, the administration of freedom, the rights of the democratic citizen are moving away from the legal framework of the States. With the historical failure of democracy in the 21st century, three realities with which humans have lived since the Renaissance also fail: the modern State, political freedom, and civil laws. A post-democratic society is one in which the State fades away, political freedom disintegrates, and civil laws fit onto a complaint form, because the rights of the citizen are the rights of the consumer, in the hands of the friends of commerce, which is to say, nothing. People have not yet internalized the failure of democracy. The market does not want democrats; it wants consumers.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
- A Post-Democratic Society.
- Reverse Globalization.
- Idealism and Democracy. The 21st Century will be History's Greatest Caricature.
- Have You Wondered Why You Tolerate Those Who Deny Your Freedom?
- What Is Democracy?
- Why Has Democracy Failed?
- Democracy, Anglosphere, and Postmodernity.
- Is a Democracy Without Freedom Possible?
- Fiction, Democracy, and Freedom.
- Democracy's Greatest Betrayal Is Negotiating the Denial of Democrats' Freedom.
- Democracy and Supragentilic Societies.
- The Myth of Freedom in Postmodern Democracies.
- Culture, Censorship, and Democracy.
- Democracy, University, and Barbarism.
- Three Reasons Why Current Academic Education Is and Will Be a Failure for Democracy.
- The 7 Horsemen of the Teaching Apocalypse in the Postmodern University.
- Democracy's Silence in the Postmodern Destruction of Academic Freedom in Today's University.
- Ignorance, Democracy, and Mental Illness.
- Mythologies of Democracy. Four Great Narratives of Postmodernity.
- Democratic Elections as the Only Encounter of Politicians with Reality.
- The Limits of Democracy.
- Europe of the Peoples, as the "Democracy of Peoples," Couldn't Handle the Coronavirus. Why Is the State Always Indispensable?
- Catholicism and Protestantism Facing the Coronavirus: Two Democratic Ways of Being and Dealing with the Illness?
- Democracy Imprisons the Planet: The Pandemic as a Political Experiment.
- The People of Spain Facing the Coronavirus and Against the Ruling Elites.
- Democracy in its Deadlock: Historical and Irreversible Failure of a System of Government.
- Postmodern Democratic Society: A Society of Failures.
- Spain Interpreted... from the People's Republic of China.
- The Disintegration of Democracy as a Political System: China, the Sole Alternative.
- The Denial of Utopia.
COLOPHON
Foreword
The future, which excludes nothing, is History's best-kept secret. Anyone claiming to know it declares themselves for what they are: an impostor.
This book contains no prophecies or forecasts, but rather a realistic proposal for surviving the failure of democracy as a political system. Above all, it aims to raise awareness. Our contemporaries remain unaware that democracy, as a political system, has failed in the West since the early 21st century, resulting in a new regime of political organization – a post-democratic nature where the reality of the State, human freedom, and the global economy function quite differently from just two or three decades ago.
The aim of this essay is modest: it seeks to present to interested readers a perspective on what is perceived as the historical failure of democracy in the 21st century.
Here, we will speak critically of democracy beyond democracy itself, that is, independently of contemporary ideologies that mythologize and politicize it from the "left" or "right," or any other philosophical, often unreal, options. These ideologies do not explain what democracy truly is but rather adulterate it fictitiously under utopian, speculative, or idealistic interests, which are actually foreign to democracy itself.
It remains wearisome that philosophers, or those who consider themselves as such, and who understand the reality of the world least — because they live in the idealism of their philosophies, no matter how materialistic they may perceive them — are the ones who, since the emergence of the Modern Age, talk most about politics (they talk about everything, but say nothing: about anything). Before the 18th century, religion was philosophy's favorite subject. Today, in competition with politics and various ideologies, it is mostly self-help.
Naturally, readers of this book will agree with some observations and disagree with others, but this is frankly irrelevant, albeit "entertaining" and "useful" for useless debates leading nowhere. Agreement, like disagreement, remains an emotional state, somewhat witty, causing psychological and sociological reactions rather than enduring necessities or demands capable of fostering broader and more consistent thinking. Let us not forget that "left" and "right" are emotional ways of collectively organizing people's ignorance today.
One of the main problems faced by any interpreter striving for rigor these days is the denial of objectivity. The public has been educated, since the 18th century due to the influence of German and Anglo-Saxon idealism, in the idea that objectivity is impossible in critical interpretation. Even objectivity in the sciences is denied, and, of course, the possibility of interpreting scientifically facts intervened by opinion, which is the virus of ignorance, is denied or even proscribed. Opinion's right eclipses scientific rationalism to denial or even interdiction. Ideological or biological involvement is demanded for the exercise of interpretation or profession, so only a man can practice urology or a woman intervene in gynecology. In sum, it seems one must be an insect to interpret insects since the objectivity of the entomologist is not admitted simply because they don't know how to be an entomologist. And others are not allowed to be so. Insects do not want entomologists. They prefer their own predators.
I insist that this essay aims to present the reader, dispassionately and objectively, that is, rationally and without emotions, with the reality of democracy beyond idealisms, philosophies, and utopias, and entirely apart from political myths typical of any era, beliefs, or ideologies.
