Democracy is good, being the will of the majority, or at least ostensibly so. But is democracy delivering on the aspect of majority rule?
Or is democracy all about crowd control and the management of the mob? Whoever gets to control the mob calls the shots in a democracy.
It’s not something the purists would agree with. They’d be wedded to the notion that democracy is one man one vote. It’s public preference at work. It’s the most favoured form of Government a la “it’s best, except for all the rest”. Churchill is supposed to have said that.
Democracy is also the crowd. The majority is by definition the crowd. It is the mob, and sometimes it’s the mob gone mad. It’s the phenomenon of governance and political direction dependent on the fad of the day.
It’s not to decry democracy but to see it as it is, warts and all. The true nature of a democratic form of government can only be determined by keeping ears to the ground and listening to how the mob reacts. It’s particularly so in these parts of the world.
But isn’t that unkind — to say that the mob rules? Mob is not used here for the want of a better word, but you could use proletariat if you would. The mob may have negative connotations but that need not necessarily have to be. Besides, you could use mob interchangeably with so many other words, such as hoi polloi maybe, or rabble.
You’d notice that the connotations only keep getting unkinder, and that’s unhelpful. But it’s definitely a herd-mentality out there and a herd is a crowd.
A crowd can be unruly, and crowd behaviour can sometimes be erratic and unhelpful. Think crowd control as in a football stadium situation, or a rock concert crowd crush.
People have died when the mob went berserk or acted irrationally. It happened last year in South Korea when people who gathered for a Halloween party were suddenly caught in a rampage due to the reported arrival of a K-pop star.
RADICALISATION
It’s an apt metaphor for politics. People crowd around a purported cause and the political-buzz that’s created is palpable. However, all that’s necessary is a tiny spark by way of a news story that’s less than credible, and the entire melee can implode.
It has happened too many times in the past. Pre-election violence used to be the norm in this country. Things have changed and pre-election violence has been replaced with pre-election social media blitzing, where reputations are left in tatters, and there are no holds barred.
Political movements owe their origins to the need to vent frustrations, and that can rarely be the type of politics that ends well. Fire-breathing politicians have made hay in such circumstances and rabble rousers have had the greatest chance.
Parties that follow a religious persuasion have had rabble rousing as their core strategy. The slow radicalisation of persons in the Eastern province led the way to the disaster known as the Easter Sunday massacre. Though it will be argued that the Islamic radicals so called that were behind the Easter Sunday carnage were not seeking political office, it is a fact that conventional political parties have at various times adopted the same form of radicalisation with far less venom fortunately. But the fact that conventional parties don’t radicalise men into attacking others with terrorist intent, doesn’t mean that they haven’t been any less of a menace.
The JVP in the 70s began as a political movement with regular party meetings and rallies, but history tells us where all that ended. For those who may have somehow forgotten the past, the fact is that thousands lost their lives due to the two JVP insurrections of the 70s and the 80s.
That’s an example of when the crowd simply goes completely out of control, it may be argued. But crowds that are in control have caused great havoc in terms of creating permanent antagonisms between communities and originating rifts that have taken a long time to heal.
But yet, even this type of democracy that’s hardly in anybody’s control rarely gets a bad rap. The mob, or rather, even the mob let’s say, has legitimacy in democracies that find it hard to contain dissent within the bounds of civil discourse.
But these mobs that are born out of paranoia or whipped up paranoia are everywhere, and if anyone thinks they are endemic to developing world democracies so-called such as ours, perish the thought.
The worst possible example of a mob that went totally out of control was Hitler’s mass following of sycophants that gave rise to the Second World War and the abomination of the holocaust. The genesis of the Nazi-movement was through democratic practice, and Hitler came to power by winning elections.
Anyone smug about the surmise that democracy always works should hold that thought about Hitler in their minds for a while and ruminate on what were the consequences.
There don’t have to be examples as extreme as Hitler. The slow-burn is almost as damaging as the slash and burn when it comes to polarising political movements.
Dangerous
The slow-burn is even more dangerous when some mass movements acquire so much legitimacy that their hallmark becomes self-righteous condescension.
These movements don’t have to be supported by the equivalent of the Gestapo. They have acquired such legitimacy that should generally ring alarm bells, but don’t, because the herd-mentality is at work.
People are free to vent, but democracy ought not to create mobs that get out of hand. But mass movements are cult like because the believers con themselves into accepting that there is no alternative route and that they should try their hand at anything to bring about transformative change.
It has worked a few times, but has failed miserably far more times than it has worked. The mob is primarily for venting and venting does not make for rational policy. It’s an entirely different matter if the mob engineers a revolution that’s not recognisable as regular democratic practice. Many revolutionary movements began as democratic parties that took part in regular elections and hoped to capture power through the ballot.
SAFETY
But when success at the polls was elusive these movements morphed into armed campaigns, the radicalisation was complete. When that happens the people at least have a chance to recognise that there was a glitch in the matrix and regular democracy just didn’t seem to work for the now radicalised outfit. They can then choose to make a rational decision to refrain from joining an armed movement, or taking up arms themselves.
The slow-burn of political mobs is not open to such transparency. Sometimes, it’s too late when people begin to realise that they have been had.
The point is that democracy has no in-built mechanism to identify what’s the irrational mob and what isn’t. In rare instances movements may self-destruct due to some form of overreach but very often their true intentions are couched by bland statements of policy and so on that are meant to lull sometimes suspecting followers even, into complacency.
Mobs never reveal their inner-anarchists. That way the crowd control example given above is the best. A crowd is benign and feisty until there is the tinder of one small rumour, and the assembled go berserk in a stampede. In Seoul all it was required was for somebody to plant the story that a K-Pop star is due to make an appearance, and the crush began and quickly reached a point where it could no longer be contained.
Crowd control is only an analogy, but democracy is crowd bahavoiur and quite often there are no gatekeepers or ushers to manage the crowd crush. It’s often the nature of democracy that things fall apart. The mob is unpredictable however, and the inherent danger of it is that sometimes what’s misidentified as a mob may be a genuine and useful political movement. But democracy cannot identify that, and much is left unfortunately to mere chance. The price for safety on the other hand is eternal vigilance.
