Stingson, what you began to understand here is what I’ll call a “developmental” perspective, because now you are beginning to appreciate people and nations as they change through time.

I’ve discussed this a bit in the Integral Theory section of our forum (in the Tibet thread), so I’ll only go into it briefly here. China is currently moving from being an agricultural state to an industrialized one (capable of producing greater wealth, education, complexity, and efficiency), so in a very, very general sense, it is going through what Western nations went through 300 years ago. (But it’s a lot more complicated because they co-exist with more “advanced” nations now, so they are aware of many, many more problems and complex arrangements than anyone was back then.) As such, it looks “oppressive” or “evil” by modern Western standards, just as pretty much all countries from back then would look to us now. But many pre-industrialized states existing in today’s world of course look to China for support and development, as they would love to be able to get to where China is and have the problems that China has (just as China would love to get to where the West is in terms of techno-economic development and expertise).

Secondly, I don’t think you can fault us too much for having members who automatically assume democracy is “superior” or “inevitable” in the common understanding of things; this attitude is ubiquitous in the West and is only recently starting to come under scrutiny. (The Economist, not long ago, mentioned legitimate non-democratic forms of government.)

It’s a question, as everything is, of functionality and values. Does democracy require a certain faith in the “best in people”? Sure, to an extent. But let’s look at non-democratic regimes: these rely MUCH more heavily on the best in people, because these require wise and compassionate and un-selfish rulers to a much greater extent, because there are less checks and balances and less accountability to the people, and these are much more vulnerable to regression.

That’s speaking in general cases; I think you’d agree that we also have to consider appropriateness given cultural and techno-economic conditions. Democracy is certainly not universally functional, nor universally desirable, and as we’ve seen in Iraq and dozens of post-colonial states, you can’t simply impose it and have it automatically work (in fact, in most cases, it will fail when it’s imposed). At the same time, we cannot simply dismiss it as something “equal” to a benevolent dictatorship.

Some of you may enjoy this link to Wilber’s thoughts on The Nature of Revolutionary Social Transformation:

http://wilber.shambhala.com/html/books/kosmos/excerptA/part3-1.cfm

The big question now is what transnational governments will look like, and what is beyond nation-state democracies, as we are certainly reaching the limits of what our current democratic structures can offer. The Wire, for example, is a great illustration on the weaknesses and fallibility of American democracy as it interacts with capitalism, political correctness, and irrational ethnocentrically-built values.

as for the india question: so fucking what if india is the world’s largest democracy? it’s a failed fucking state, just like the philippines. why do people always fucking think, “oh, it’s a democracy, people must shit flowers and piss cologne and children dance on fucking rainbows.” india is running along because of corruption and the money that a lot of indian engineers, etc. pump into the economy.

FUCK DEMOCRACY. it’s not a fuckign solution, it’s simply one form of government that most of you have been brainwashed into thinking is the only just and moral choice. many fucked up and corrupt postcolonial governments are fucking democracies. i grew up in a so-called democracy and let me tell you, we were better off when it was an authoritarian regime (although marcos was a shitty version of LKY).

i’m not going to get into the india situation because it’s too complex for one post, but when nehru and the other dudes put together the constitution, they chose a parliamentary system because they, too, acknowledged that most people would vote along ethnic, religious, class AND caste divides. they thought they’d be able to circumvent that with guaranteed seats, as well. sadly, they failed because they still hoped in the best of people.

india now is crippled by corruption and many, many divisions that have not been addressed and are only being encouraged by democracy.

ps. as for electing a female muslim, that is really not unusual for asia because, unlike americans, we have no issues with women in power, and the islam of india is very different from the islam of the middle east and even of pakistan.

ah fuck, i have to go and eat.

i don’t know why i still bother to post on this site of american chauvinism, man. my words just die a lonely e-death. sorry, D, but that’s what it’s turned into.

Here is one of his interviews/speeches.

http://www.cceia.org/resources/transcripts/123.html

When you said India promoted a sense of Indian identity it reminded me of how Lee said he is a “Singaporean first, then Chinese” in the article linked by Zhangfei. It’s also entirely consistent with what you said about people need to transcend beyond race and religion in order to have a real stable democracy.

Another thing I want to mention was from the article Zhangfei linked. I took a college course called Chinese Foreign Policy and while the teacher is very objective, there is also the inevitable “China is evil” crowd. When Lee said “So, yes the media will go and say what human rights, this dissident arrested, that dissident put down, this fellow arrested, this chap disappeared, but people in the developing world, I can’t speak for westerners, but westerners at the very top are also getting to become quite sophisticated. But in Asia and in Africa, and in the developing world, they are asking themselves, how did this country, in 30 years, from such backwardness, suddenly make this great big leap into modernity. When all the western nations say, `the system is wrong, how is it?’ That is what they are going to register.” the statement opened up an entirely new perspective that I should have noticed earlier. So now I see that developing nations might see China as a economic role model while developed nations (usually Western) see China as an oppressive regime.

Thanks again for these articles, I learned a lot!

Stingson (welcome!), I’ll respond very broadly (because I don’t know a ton about the workings of either country). Having stable, working democracies require a ton of factors all being in place, one of which is that a majority of the population can rationally understand democratic principles and abide by them. This becomes much more difficult, though not impossible in multi-ethnic nations with large power imbalances between races or classes. While India does seem to have a stable democracy (in which they elected a woman Muslim, no less!), I’m not sure how well it’s working with regard to economic development and class equalization (or promoting the rise of a large middle class); from what I can tell, the Indians haven’t done so well in that regard, and I wouldn’t be surprised if ethnocentric class and sub-race hierarchies play a large part in that. With regard to what does work, I assume (and correct me if I’m wrong) that they’ve at least manage to create or promote some sense of “Indian” identity.

In South-East Asian countries, I don’t believe that this is the case. States are very much split along racial and religious lines (the Bumiputra policies in Malaysia and Brunei are prime examples of this), and as Lee said, everyone will vote ethnocentrically regardless of rational policy considerations, undermining democratic ideals (this, of course, happens in the West, too, but isn’t as large a threat for reasons I won’t get into here). Ultimately, the people with the numbers and/or the money-power will win, generally the Chinese, who in that part of the world (or most parts, really) don’t particularly care about things like minority rights, social welfare, class equalization, and all that good stuff.

For a democracy to fluorish, you need industrialization, free-flowing information, and a critical-mass of people with “worldcentric” views which hopefully transcend race/class lines (witness the abolition of slavery in the U.S., the rise of gender equality, minority rights, etc. which emerge frmo that worldview). Lee appears to believe that Singapore does not contain such a mass of people.

I do want to make one thing clear: I acknowledge that autocracies, meritocracies, dictatorships, one-party rule, whatever you want to call them, are legitimate forms of government, but I do not concede that they are equivalent in complexity, morality, or compassion to the more representative forms of democracy (which contain both representative and meritocratic elements).

What we ultimately have to be aware of is whether a party or ruler is holding back democracy because it’s truly not viable, or because they simply want to maintain power. “Benevolent dictatorships” can’t last in the long run: without checks and balances, someone stupid or selfish coming into power is inevitable, and all you need is one or two of those guys to fuck up a whole country. It’ll be interesting to see how Lee and his son maintain a legitimate meritocracy in the future.

My question is Lee Kuan Yew argued that Singapore doesn’t have a western style democracy based on the premise that people in general would vote only for their race and/or religion and progress will be dragged down a lot. I don’t know if India is a western style democracy but I hear India is the world’s largest democratic country all the time in the news and classrooms. But India is also extremely diverse (I think even more diverse than Singapore) in ethnicities and in religion and India doesn’t claim to be a meritocracy. So my question is can Singapore do the same as India? Thanks for reading.

You take Tibet. Who started it? It was started by the Tibetans. The March incident, March 14. I was reading Jonathan Eyal who writes for our Straits Times. He was a commentator from London. He is from I think Chatham House, a very thoughtful man. He said if they had called in the newspapers right from the word go, and said look, this is what happened. The Economist correspondent was in Lhasa when it happened and wrote about it. He was favorable to them. The rioters started killing people and they were not reacting. The orders were not to shoot, not to take on the rioters because they didn’t want trouble. Had they engaged the west, all this would have turned out differently.

Why didn’t they? Because there was a chasm between their mental make up and that of the west. So they say all western correspondents out, that means you have got something to hide. I think that was not very wise. Supposing it was Singapore, do we say all correspondents out? No. I say look come on, stay, watch it, see what happens, see who started what. Are they stupid? They can’t do what we do? No. Its just people at the people at the top have not been educated in the west, they have not been exposed to that kind of environment, that kind of rules of the game, and are not playing by those rules of the game.

The day they build up an educated middle class, a large middle class, huge numbers of whom have been educated abroad, PHDs, MBAs in America, Europe, Japan elsewhere, and they are the people setting policies at the top, not people whose mental mindsets are from Soviet days, that day they will find they can play by the western rules and win.