For celebrating the end of 2002 (1)

December 30th of 2002 as a date is quite near to the end of one year
that has motivated several minds to CELEBRATE its disappearance from
the present and its insertion forever in the past. This feeling has
arisen due to many dramatically inconsistent and incoherent
arguments, expressed through pretended clever reasoning, that aim at
encouraging people - the highly civilized fellows and the masses - to
maintain the unsustainable trends of our magnificent civilization.
This celebration seems to be justified in the hope that the year 2003
will become spontaneously the time for changing deeply rooted
barbarian, therefore inhuman, intentions into really enlightened
aims, therefore humane ones. Such assumption is in fact a childish
reaction, but even most dissidents, nonconformists, rebels and
heretics have been educated to believe in the emergence of renewed
light every new year, refusing de facto to recognize that any
calendar as a conventional arrangement would not contain magical
power.

Anyhow I have chosen to celebrate the end of 2002 after recognizing
that it is urgently needed to comprehend sufficiently well what makes
unsustainable our civilized way of life. For making feasible this
requirement is indispensable to use explicitly the Bertalanffy's Top
� Down approach in order to identify the causality of the problematic
civilization through the perception of one or another of its features
as a gestalt or a whole. I dare to choose DEMOCRACY as a problem.

Lewis Mumford quoted in 1944 a reflection of Henry Adams written in
1905: "At the present rate of progression since 1600, it will not
need another century or half century to tip thought upside down. Law
in that case, would disappear as theory or a priori principle and
give place to force. Morality would become police. Explosives would
reach cosmic violence. Disintegration would overcome integration."
Adams was certainly against the dogmatic way most of their
contemporaries were implementing Democracy, as it had become a weapon
for manipulating the mind of common people in order to lead them to
believe that their interests and motivations had been taken into
account.

The democratic principle, that arose first as a conceptual tool, had
been adopted several centuries before for the election of the Pope in
order to temper the evils of absolutism and to fight against the
weakness of nepotism. Gradually and even consistently the democratic
procedures were developed for making functional the operation of
communities and cities, under the assumption that to govern
rationally any human organization becomes a feasible task through
cooperation and consent. However, at the same time other humans
cleverly chose to learn and develop deeply and extensively the
Machiavelli's ideals in order to make effective to govern by means of
force, terrorism and corruption.

At the beginning of the twentieth century the democratic principles
had assimilated well the Calvin's doctrine which claimed that
citizens were equal on Earth as well as their souls in Heaven. The
ancient aristocracies and monarchies were substituted by the
democratic election of Machiavelli's disciples who required only to
be explicitly empowered by the enthusiastic participation of those
masses who were learning well to be conducted, instructed and tamed
by civilized means.

Henry Adams recognized the degradation of Democracy, though mainly
intuitively, when he argued "Bombs educate vigorously". He did not
know neither fascism as generalized controller nor national socialism
for fighting against the dictatorial socialism which became soon
fallacious alternatives, though they were influenced as well by
Machiavellian ideals.

"Adams knew that the detonators of violence and destruction were
present in every part of the social structure of the Western society"
(Mumford). He did not dare to imagine that it could be saved. He
neither theorize that 100 years later Charitable Corporations -
emerging spontaneously - would engage themselves in organizing
Compassionate Warfare using economic, social, cultural and only
exceptionally traditional weapons for fighting against the evil
enemies of highly civilized humans. Nor could he recognize the
tremendous advancement of Science for increasing ad infinitum the
number of technological facilities. Those required for an exhaustive
exploitation of natural resources in order to produce everything,
anything and nothing needed by everybody, anybody and nobody for
going everywhere, anywhere and nowhere, being excepted those
individuals who are always complaining and should be eliminated by
humanitarian procedures and be substituted afterwards, if necessary,
by a generalized Automation.

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Received on Mon Dec 30 15:21:54 2002