Total Eclipse

I was arguing with an acquaintance on matters tangential to political philosophy. He was arguing from a rather extreme, radical political position, while I was arguing towards a more moderate, and in my opinion more realistic position.

At one point in the debate, I had the urge to just yell at him “But don’t you see that nobody agrees with you??”

I didn’t, because my trained philosophical mind immediately identified that as an argumentum ad populum, a logical fallacy. One can be absolutely right about something even though most people would disagree.

However, in the context of political philosophy (not my field of expertise by any standard), this raises an interesting question concerning political theory:

If I were to think of the most perfect political theory, odds are that most people would not comprehend it’s amazing complexities, and so it would never come to pass in a democracy. By ‘democracy’ I mean loosely any form of government where majority rules, and in that aspect has the unique appeal lacking in other modes of government where individuals are, at least theoretically, most free.
Let us examine this further.

Let a be the perfect mode of government. Now, a is either some variant of democracy or it is not. If it is not, then people are not free to choose their own destiny. Not what I’d call perfect and it would never be peacefully voted into existence by a majority. Revolutionary theory aside, I do not believe any mode of government birthed in violence could be perfect (and this includes modern liberal democracy).

However, if a is a variant of democracy, then it contains within itself an inherent logical fallacy. Hardly a perfect system either.
So, we are left with a puzzling choice, either a is self-contradictory, or it is logically incoherent, and hence self-defeating.

Reconsidering this again, I note a resemblance between this paradox and the various paradoxes related to omniscience and omnipotence (e.g. “Can God create a stone so heavy even he cannot lift it?”). Perhaps this is no chance.
I suppose one could try and argue that the relevant logic is not one which excludes the middle, however, that move would require justification, and I’m not entirely clear on how one would go about doing that.

Another approach, one I find more appealing myself, would be to bite the bullet. There is no perfect mode of government. All forms of government are dynamic, inherently imperfect social structures.

If it is indeed necessarily true that all modes of government are self-defeating in the sense given, this in my view is a strong case for philosophical adjectiveless anarchism.

“Above all we should not forget, that government is an evil, an usurpation upon the private judgment and individual conscience of mankind; and that, however we may be obliged to admit it as a necessary evil for the present, it behoves us, as the friends of reason and the human species, to admit as little of it as possible, and carefully to observe whether, in consequence of the gradual illumination of the human mind, that little may not hereafter be diminished.” – William Godwin.

Something to always keep in mind. When you get down to it, Right and Left are both Wrong.

Tagged as argumentum ad populum, paradox, Philosophy, political paradox, political philosophy, politics, William Godwin + Categorized as Philosophy, Social Politics