Democracy’s Noble Lies
Dec 7th, 2007 by Micah Tillman | 4 Comments |
***Spoiler Alert*** (This post contains a discussion of M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, so if you haven’t seen it, and don’t want the suspense ruined, read carefully.)
Plato wrote in The Republic, that his ideal city would require a noble lie. Since then, the noble lie has become a part of utopian and distopian literature.
I was talking to one of my classes the other day about history, and how some people love their own history so much they not only want to preserve it but return to it. The example we were thinking of was M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village.
(***BEGIN SPOILER***)
There the noble lie was the forest beasts. It kept the villagers in the village, in paradise as it were.
(***END SPOILER***)
A student asked me what our society’s noble lie is. I said we have two. Democracy’s two noble lies are:
(1) Representation.
(2) The Body Politic.
It is rather fascinating how some people buy both noble lies hook, line, and sinker. What our politicians do is something we do, because they represent us. What the majority does is something the whole country does, because we form one body.
Both are more myths than lies, perhaps. A myth is a story we use to help ourselves understand our lives or world. And Representation and The Body Politic are stories we tell ourselves to help ourselves make sense out of politics.
But people who’d never buy any other myth still buy these two. One of these days I’ll write a book on why that is, but I haven’t figure it out yet. I think it partly has to do with the fact that they help our politics run remarkably well, compared with the other political systems in history.
Makes you wonder whether we shouldn’t just turn politics completely into a giant myth. Someone would have to work out the story and myth-world more fully (right now all we’ve got is the idea that when some people act, other people magically and invisibly act as well), but I think that would be very interesting.
I’ll have to write that some day too.
Both of those amount to just one lie: “One vote matters.” It doesn’t, in any significantly large election. One vote has never decided an election of any significant magnitude.
There are ways in which your formulation differs from mine, but I’m not sure people really believe your formulation, in those cases. A great many people don’t believe that the Iraq War is something “we” started or that NAFTA is something “we” signed.
In any event, this lie is largely irrelevant. I don’t believe it and I still support the principle of a representative Republic because it does work (for the most part). (Because I don’t believe the lie, I haven’t voted in an election since 1992 and will probably never vote in another one.) However, I’m not as keen on democratic republics as most Americans. I agree with Churchill that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those others.
Perhaps it would behoove us, rather than trying to weave a large technicolour tapestry of noble lies, first to pick away the plethora of IGnoble lies that are scabbing on the face of the West.
Just sayin’. Priorities and whatnot.
[...] entry in my ongoing struggle with the idea of “groups” . . [...]
[...] are two ideas — or myths — with which many people function. They are so interconnected that it’s really [...]