Months before the much-hoped-for national elections, the Commission on Elections (COMELEC) is scrambling to procure automated poll machines by which it plans to bring the Philippine electoral process into the 21st century.
Unfortunately for the COMELEC, the 21st century demands progress, not regress. No, it is not because they are vain in trying to update their hopelessly obsolete election apparatus; indeed, if this is even a fault (which it is) it is because the principles that allow, if not dictate, these means are themselves flawed.
The Philippine political situation is, if it is anything at all, a sour joke, perpetrated by our authorities-cum-clowns who cling to power as if it were their birthright. While charity and truth have every right to depose these scumbags who make democracy a worse ideal than other political formats, the purpose of this essay is to examine why democracy is flawed in the first place.
One of its principles is worth the scrutiny: political equality is one of the main draws of democracy, much like a hero of the battlefield praising his son before the people who have come to see the former. Political equality states that everyone is a citizen, whether he be a president or a farmer, and is entitled to one and only one vote, besides other political opportunities provided for by the state. This seems a given…until we see its inappropriateness.
Politics is a delicate exercise of societal relations, and it has a lucrative possession in tow: power. You may call it government, or some such fanciful name, but it always boils down to power – the arbitration and enforcement of convention sine qua non chaos simply draws the line between life and death. Bringing that exercise to a quantitative showdown was the first political sin, since it degenerates the value of the inherent power of the society which it seeks to govern (by recording the process of ostraka we can blame the Greeks for this). Democracy is the magnification of that first sin.
The decisive factor here is formal education. Not all men are comfortable with formal education, something that is required by democracy in lieu of the very discriminative ennobling process. While formal education is admittedly insufficient to bring about societal change, its dispensation places democratic government at the mercy of chaos, which understands no equality whatsoever.
The delicacy of politics is such that knowledge of convention—a knowledge ensured safeguarded by formal education—is required, along with a reasonable partiality, to effect justice and morally acceptable change. If politics devolves into a numbers game, all societal relations subject to that politics are compromised of their political value, i.e. any political process becomes a travesty because the convention, which recognizes no majority or minority but emphasizes its appeal to all, has been overridden by the ad hoc convention of a majority. This political value, ironically, is what political equality claims to safeguard for everyone. The majority-minority format thus imperils the entire political process, especially if the majority is ignorant of both the convention and the delicacy of politics.
Power is basically quantitative; most forces of nature are. But it is precisely our rationality that transforms it into a qualitative reality, thus enabling it to be shared. To leave it into the hands of the ignorant is to warrant the death of politics and destroy—not just impede—the progress of man.
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