The Illusion of Democracy

Rene Guenon
One of the false foundations of the democracy is the vote, that should be ideally a collective
judgement of the art of governing. Now, nobody, sincerely, would defend the peculiar idea that the
majority would be intellectually qualified and with enough knowledge on what is administration
and government to be in conditions of exercising a judgement.
Kept the due proportions, such supposition igualitarist would be equal to affirm to that everybody
is qualified, for instance, on a medical ubject. A real situation would illustrate very well such
absurd. A person is seriously wounded. Dozens of onlookers observe afflicted the event. Which
could be the plausible criterion to determine who can help the wounded? Naturally, the ones that
are qualified for such, that is, doctors or nurses. A voting would be entirely irrelevant, because the
majority is never qualified for the medical function, as well as it is not for the admistration.
If the reasoning is valid for a wounded person, it is evident that if we take in account the destiny of
millions of individuals, that is what happens in the case of elections for the government, we can
see that the irresponsibility is the more complete imaginable.
We would have a variety of examples of the nonsense of the "democratic" foundation that affirms
the superiority of the majority, in other words, that an opinion of a larger number of individuals is
superior to other, defended, for instance, by a qualified minority.
How to sustain that 200 bottles of cheap wine, only because of its number, is superior to an only
wineglass of high quality? Or, then, how to affirm that 1450 individuals, of the most varied
professions, less the physics, will be more qualified that an unique specialist to solve a subject of
quantum physics?
In the origin of the Democratic Illusion is the denial of the natural hierarchy, whose clearer
expression is in the Hindú Doctrine of Castes, hierarchy that settles down from top to bottom, that
is, from the highest quality, the spiritual, until the least high, in other words, the material. The
mentors of the modern democracy based it precisely on what exists of more roughly material and
quantitative.
The denial of the qualitative superiority and of the hierarchy begins at the end of the Medium Age,
more precisely by the year of 1313, with the destruction of the Order of the Temple by Felipe the
Beautiful, then King of France. This monarch ordered to surround the Pope's palace, that died
humiliated few days after such insult. Felipe, the Beautiful, decides then to force the nomination of
a submissive pope, easy to his greed and to his political projects, what will be impossible under
the authority of a real Sumo Pontífice.
The denial of the priestly superiority (typical attitude of rioted Kchatriya) implicates the denial of
the Unique, or God. But, respecting the logic, is it possible to defend such denial?