I'm in Britain (extracting my wife) and it's surreal watching these people talk about their election. Brits talk about their school fees while every school in Gaza is destroyed. They talk about saving their National Health Service while their national savings goes to bombing every hospital in Gaza. There is a whole genocide being conducted in their name and on their credit card, and the British literally sign up for it in the act of voting.

This killing charade is, in fact, Democracy™ working as intended. Since the Greeks trademarked it, democracy has always defined rights for an in-group of citizens, and wrong for anyone outside of it. As Dimitry Kochenov said in his book Citizenship (via):

Like slavery, like sexism, like racism, citizenship knows no justification once you leave the purview of those few whom it unduly privileges. The sexists, the racists, and the super-citizens have convinced themselves, and want to convince all of us, that dignity, equality, and freedom are not to be applied to all. This is wrong.

For an illustration, Philip Brook Manville said in The Origins of Citizenship in Ancient Athens:

Athenians proposed for enrollment in a deme at age eighteen (discussed below) were probably sold into slavery if a subsequent scrutiny or appeal found them to be of unfree birth; the enrolling demesmen could be fined for accepting candidates below age, and aliens who illegally adopted the status of citizens could be imprisoned, prosecuted, and sold into slavery if convicted;

Democracy™ is inherently bullshit, a tool marketed as a totalitarian solution. Democracy is marketed as a value in and of itself when in fact it's just a technology with no inherent values, especially the way it's programmed. The core value of Democracy™ is actually the violent exclusion of everyone outside of it, and the silent delusion of everyone within that this is cool. Democracies™ allow you to attack and enslave anyone that isn't a citizen and most colonial invasions and enslavement were (and are) done through parliamentary democracies.

The worst predations of democracies have been in the modern era, in English, not in ancient Greek. Whenever I refer to the Greeks people say ‘yeah, but they enslaved people’ and I say ‘yeah, you do too.’ Slavery is a feature, not a bug, of Democracy™. When you give rights to people ‘demed’ citizens, you are inherently taking them away from people ‘demed’ not. You can copyright Freedom© within your little club while illiberally bombing and besieging everyone without. This external sin inevitably corrupts the inner soul of Democracy™, which is also violent and exploitative at home.

People often say 'what else?' which again comes from not reading the Greeks as anything deeper than a branding exercise. In his On Politics, Aristotle said, “there are very many species of democracies.” That book is a tour around what we would consider tiny Mediterranean city-states, and he finds dozens of political forms. Each one, is, in fact unique. As old Aris continued,

All laws are, and ought to be, framed agreeable to the state that is to be governed by them, and not the state to the laws... From whence it is evident, that the founders of laws should attend both to the number and the different sorts of government; for it is impossible that the same laws should be calculated for all sorts of oligarchies and all sorts of democracies, for of both these governments there are many species, not one only.

Modern colonizers—committed as they are to plantation monocropping—have tried to homogenize democracy as one form, which must be imposed with whips, chains, NGOs, and bombs. In the modern era, the worst people on Earth have branded one of the worst forms of democracy (duopoly oligarchy) as the Democracy™, and liberally brutalized people into submission. What they're really doing is expanding the power of their city-state by enslaving the periphery, ie the ‘same shit different day’ theory of history which rarely leads me wrong. Modern national democracy has turned the original sin of city-state democracy (what about everyone else?) into a planet-destroying virtue via industrial marketing (AKA propaganda).

In fact, the most liked (by its own people) form of democracy is actually in China. This sounds crazy to a western mind, but that's just the marketing (AKA propaganda) talking. Aristotle would acknowledge Chinese democracy as just another type (he covers much more diverse forms in On Politics), but his idiot heirs try to write every other form of governance out of history and philosophy entirely. That's how deep their commitment to the original sin of exclusion is. Liberal Democracy is, in fact, a Trojan Horse they use to divide and conquer populations (beware of Greeks bearing gifts!). What they really mean when they say some place is 'not democratic' is that ‘they're not our slaves, and we don't like it’. That's all.

Western-style democracy is one city-state dominating the world from different capitols, Amsterdam, then London, and now Washington. They fly different flags, but to us on the bottom, it's just one undifferentiated White Empire doing one thing. Stealing our shit and giving us meaningless receipts in the form of dubious religious lectures and now political ones. The myriad non-human creatures of creation are, of course, not counted at all. They cannot even theoretically be citizens and practically can go to hell if it makes some abstract line go up. To the millions of species turning into fossils, this sort of violently exclusionary democracy is just on undifferentiated sucking sound. And to the gods of climate watching it all, it's just pride going before the fall.

The fact is that every city-state is fated to die. If the concept gets bigger, it just dies harder. Every form of government starts with hostility but ends in hospice soon enough. It's the folly of every Democracy™ to think that they can suck the provinces forever, but eventually the fact that they suck overcomes them. As the aboriginal philosopher Tyson Yunkaporta said, “Civilisations are cultures that create cities, communities that consume everything around them and then themselves. They can never be indigenous until they abandon their city-building culture, a lesson the Elders of Zimbabwe have handed down from bitter experience through deep time.”

This was shocking for me to read, because I also like the spoils of Democracy™, but now I think we can all admit that it's just spoilt and smells terribly off. The destruction we're witnessing is, in fact, built into the philosophical concepts people have taken as abstract goods, AKA Gods. As the true God told us long ago, the tree of knowledge was always poisoned, but we kept eating it, expecting something other than shit to come out. But this is not how shit works. As God said in one of his more inchoate incarnations, shit happens.

Democracy in any form—including the superior Chinese form—is still the idea of self-government. It is still based on the illusion of self (which the Chinese should know, we Faxian'd them the documents long ago). Around this illusion of the individual self, westerners have built this idea of an imperial citizen, who is in fact just a better-treated slave than all the others without. We have thus incarnated a ruling algorithm which views non-citizens as prey, and non-humans as beneath mention or even perception. And we've given the commandment 'eat' to these false profits, and wonder at the mounting body count. ‘I didn't vote for this!’ people will say, but of course, you did. Genocide is a feature of any system that privileges one set of families (ie genes) over another. Someone has to be unprivileged for someone else to have privileges. Something has to be undone for all of this to be done.

This is why I call this post the Undeath Of Democracy. People in the West can increasingly see that their democracies are bullshit (Genocide or Diet Genocide, Austerity or Gay Austerity), but that's just because the shit is falling on them now. It's been falling on us in the South for centuries, and the myriad creatures are literally fossilized in the great hubris of it all. The colonized could have told you that these Democracies™ suck centuries ago, the creatures could have told you thousands of years ago, and God knows They told us at the very beginning. All we've done is incarnate Satan in the form of corporations, and wondered foolishly why it's getting hot.

The fact is that whatever you count, you are not counting other things. The very act of perception destroys other ways of seeing things. This is why the Confucians and Taoists call 'The Way' subtle and basically inexpressible. To put the wordless into words is to destroy it, and to put it into numbers via ‘The Economy’ is the greatest folly of all. This grand city-state we call globalization is just the act of burning our own house down and crowing about how bright we are. You cannot separate the planet into in-groups and out-groups and grow the one infinitely at the expense of the others. This is just cancer in what is actually one body, and kills us all in the end (which is nigh). Democracy™ is just the marketing on the cigarettes killing us all.

Watching people care about elections at this stage of collapse is honestly farcical. A child told me she voted for the orange party in her school election (children are, of course, not included in Democracy™) because that's her favorite color. I told this to an adult and they couldn't articulate a much better rationale. These adults are worried about sending their kids to private school while bombing every school in Gaza with public funds, and they know something is terribly wrong. But what are their choices getting shot or stabbed, senility or psychopathy, or really just different combinations of both? I honestly give a fuck about these people and their little carnivorous club, which my country (Sri Lanka) has unfortunately been re-colonized into (along with them, Britain was conquered by America in WWII). We're all just children in the back seat of a car going off a cliff, given a toy steering wheel to think we're in charge. The modern form of Democracy™ is really just rule by global corporations, with a big unreality TV show as distraction.

People talk about saving our democracy, which is like the neck talking about saving the noose. How do you think 'we' got here in the first place? The original sin is the illusion of 'we' in the first place, and the idea that 'we' gets to oppress everyone (and everything) that doesn't have the right paperwork. Democracy isn't dying, it's been a zombie the whole time, eating brains, nom nom. What we are living through is the 'undeath' of democracy, where something we ascribed solidity to turned out to be an illusion all along. All the packaging and marketing of these Democracies™ is ending up in the historical bin, while the last citizens try to warm their hands around the dumpster fire. That's all these last elections are, some last cigarettes before dying of planetary lung cancer, while standing on the gallows for good measure. Smoke 'em if you've got 'em.