Dear Friends,
It seems to me, we need to ask ourselves, what is the meaning of the will of the governed? Is it the actual will of those who live in a nation? Maybe the will of the people is a perception. It doesn’t exist and so it can be whatever those in power wish it to be. Then there are the advances in public manipulation pioneered by Edward Bernays. If elites with unlimited money for public service ads can’t swindle us into whatever mindset the elite want us in, that mindset must be pretty bad. At this point, we use voting as an analogue of the will of the governed. Elections, however, can either show the actual will of the people or the will of the elites superimposed on the people. So I ask again, what is the meaning of the will of the governed? Is it a perception or do we have agency?
Since the Enlightenment, the will of the governed has been a guiding principle in industrialized Western style governments. Human philosophy transitioned at that point from the rights of kings to the will of the governed. Prior to Enlightenment we were ruled by a series of false arguments. One was that the king’s power devolved from God himself. Whatever god you happen to worship will do. Another was appeal to authority. Where the authority of the speaker denied questions. If the King or Pope said a thing, no matter how absurd, you were obligated to believe it. They were the legitimate authority at the time. The will of the governed, and questioning authority, upended those fallacies. The idea that people should not be imposed upon unless they accede to it is the opposite of the rights of kings.
Now that the will of the people is a foundational ethos of governance, every civilized nation on Earth has elections… even if simply for show. The idea is that they can point to a 100% approval rating by election as proof that the people accept their divine rule. Indeed, the legitimacy of any State is now dependent on its serving the will of the people, whether they do or not. So while every nation claims to exist at the will of the governed, very few do. Most governments today use strategies to manipulate the will of the governed to the will of the governors. They rationalize this by claiming to be smarter, better educated, and more moral than the common run of man. So they feel justified in subverting the will of the governed to their own will. How to do it is their question.
The answer for despots is to pervert elections, censor the people, and use mass media manipulation. This way they can appear to be serving the will of the people, when they only serve their own will. A system that truly exists at the will of the people cannot censor the people’s voice… no one knows the will of a mute. Good government doesn’t use mass manipulation to drive consensus… because a mark is not a free agent. Moreover, States that serve the will of the people never allow vote fraud… since the will of the people cannot be known if the mechanism to find it has been corrupted. Those systems that are corrupted, then, have reverted to the rights of kings. Censorship and manipulation are a reversion to appeal to authority. So we are coming full circle since the Enlightenment.
Today elites manufacture consensus with propaganda, censor the plebes, and election tamper. The term will of the people has no real meaning anymore. Even nations that espouse democracy as a core ideal engage in propaganda, censorship, and election tampering. In the EU, whole parties are banned, election winners are removed by unelected bureaucrats, and people go to prison for tweets. In the US, election fraud is canonized into law. For example, the recent LA election, and those who were charged as being insurrectionists for protesting the 2020 election fraud machine. So let’s drop the act. We are silenced, manipulated, and defrauded. We come full circle, returning to appeal to authority and the rights of kings… or in our case, the authority of experts and the rights of bureaucrats.
Sincerely,
John Pepin
