The Lotus Eaters

Chapter Twenty-one

Responsibility and authority will equal out in the long run. The society that robs the future will have no future. The descendents of the man who places family over society will find no society to shelter them.

The trick, then, is to limit power to those who can, in the aggregate, be expected to use it responsibly. As we have seen, kings and tyrants are, at best, fifty-fifty; elites, oligarchs, and aristocrats are not a whit better; and even popular democracies have no great track record of responsible voting and actions, over the long term.

Geniuses may vote irresponsibly while morons vote wisely, wisdom being more a matter of instinct and experience than raw, native intelligence. Education not only doesn't guarantee responsible exercise of political power, if anything it tends toward the opposite, for the educated—who are too often also the arrogant—fool themselves into thinking they are voting the issues, after sober reflection, when in fact they just vote their emotions and gut instincts. Whatever the airs they may put on, they are, like the rest of mankind, not rational so much as rationalizing.

Just as, in the words of Voltaire, "A rational army would run away," so the act of responsible voting requires at some level an irrational mindset—to vote for the good of the whole over the good of the self—or one that, if really rational, thinks in the long term and understands long term costs and benefits.

—Jorge y Marqueli Mendoza,

Historia y Filosofia Moral,

Legionary Press, Balboa,

Terra Nova, Copyright AC 468