Fra Technocrazy.
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Utdrag:
"China intends to conquer the world with authoritarian Technocracy rather than guns and missiles. Thus far, they are excelling and the rest of the world is regressing. There is no give and take in China; it’s their way or the highway. The rest of the world is just starting to figure this out. ⁃ TN Editor.
It already seems that the biggest struggle in the 21st century may be between the competing models of Chinese technocratic authoritarianism and Joe Biden’s hopes for a revitalised democratic West. Unless the climate crisis dooms us all, of course.
Since the early days of the American and French revolutions towards the latter part of the 18th century, it has become an increasingly accepted truism globally that their democratic example has been appropriate, valuable, and beneficial to those nations which practise it — and where their citizens live under its logic and structures. US politicians have traditionally boasted that their nation served uniquely as “a light among the nations”. Meanwhile, the French have argued for centuries that their national mission was to carry out a “ mission civilisatrice ” to the rest of the world — and especially the places it colonised.
A corollary to such statements has been an understanding that expanding democracy’s writ is a particularly worthy, virtuous action. (The Marxist view, of course, was that those deeply embedded, all-encompassing economic forces largely prevented the real expansion of liberties and freedom for the mass of people until the power of those underlying forces were fundamentally broken. That perspective, at least as far as governments are concerned, has now largely been swept away following the end of the Soviet experience.)
While there are deep roots for democracy as a philosophical and political construct that reach back more than two millennia to ancient Greek thinkers and the (albeit limited) experiences of the Athenian polity, as a practical matter, democratic government, even in its rudimentary or partial forms, has been a relative newcomer. It was developed in a world that had long witnessed absolute monarchies, miscellaneous forms of despotism, autocracies, totalitarian dictatorships and expanding empires by the dozens, along with the more troubling intervals of Hobbesian chaos and anarchy in many parts of the world throughout history.
In our present circumstances, rather than any realistic threats of new absolute monarchies or old-style all-encompassing, totalitarian dictatorships arising freshly in democratic nations, there are two real threats to the primacy of the ideal and idea of democracy. The first is that the threat, challenge or temptation from a seemingly powerful, alternative idea — something increasingly being labelled as Chinese technocratic authoritarianism. The second comes from within ostensibly already democratic societies and nations that aspire to become such. This threat stems from the increasing intolerance within such societies and by leaders towards some of the basic core ideas a democratic state is based upon.
For the first challenge, the basic argument of its largely Chinese proponents has been based on its apparent efficiency in resource use (and often ignoring externalities) and its effective allocation mechanisms in the delivery of infrastructure, goods, and services to the population, but determined by a small ruling elite. This success, therefore, comes at a price. There is little of the citizenry’s engagement in the process of determining who actually makes these major decisions, or who actually gets to determine all those outcomes".
