Humans have a natural bias against loss. Loss has a far more negative impact than a proportionate gain has a positive impact; if you were to win $1 million and the next day lose $900,000, even though you remain $100,000 ahead, you might actually feel worse than if you hadn’t won the $1 million at all! This kind of loss aversion makes evolutionary sense, in that it drives individuals towards striving to protect what they have built and accomplished, deigning to design systems which prevent loss, but this can also drive irrational behavior.

Democracies are, compared to other forms of government, spectacularly loss averse, and thus prone to its most insidious negative manifestations. Each politician faces the pressure of being able to guarantee the most gains while simultaneously guaranteeing the least loss. There is a sort of tragedy of the commons created, with every citizen seeking to maximize his own benefit and to externalize his costs on to other constituencies. Since every geographic constituency is already following this strategy, this leads to costs being imposed on the one constituency that cannot vote: the young and the unborn. They cannot ever penalize a politician by voting for someone else, and when they become of age, then just like a fraternity hazing event, it is now their turn to borrow on the credit of their descendants.

This also foments an incredible cowardice in the political elite. There is reward to rhetoric that obfuscates the reality that no lunch is free. Thus, every democratic politician must endlessly speak of the benefits of his favored policies while drawing as much attention as possible to the costs of his opponents’ favored policies. In reality, both sides must, by necessity, favor policies that have some definite cost somewhere, yet both puts on an air that only their opponents’ policies would have any cost.

We live in an age in which the government’s official numbers regarding its debt, financial liabilities, and outlays are readily acknowledged by both the inner and outer party as being seriously problematic. The official numbers do not speak to reality, but are formulated and framed precisely for how they most effectively skirt around reality. Only a great fool takes a democratic government at its own word regarding the state of its finances; if the present Congress were to throw up their hands and admit that they know of no way to service the debts piling up, they would be torn apart in the street. And so, each representative and senator claims solidarity with the political class, declaring that everything is fine and dandy while nervously eyeing the rapidly rising debt, praying that this potent Sword of Damocles does not fall on their head.

The only escape from the future is increasing focus on the present, heightening time preference in order to derive greater pleasure from present amenities in order to better ignore the worry that would otherwise accompany any attempt at taking on the future. A king would at least have a dynasty of his own to care for, imposing a burden of low time preference that must always be unpopular to a fast food, easy credit, cheap oil society.

Those who bring up the doom clearly visible on the temporal horizon are shouted down not as inaccurate, but as evil for bringing worry. If, as leftists say, there is simply nothing wrong with a native population being displaced by immigrants, why is it such a crime to point out that this exactly what is taking place, and it is due to their own policies? What of lower fertility among high IQ women induced by equal educational and employment opportunity? These things are, according to the official narrative, officially not problems. Then why, in the documentation and exposition of the official narrative, is it officially incorrect to bring this up? Democratic politicians are forced to feel shame for their own values, unable to insist that what they value is so great as to be worth giving up less valuable things. They cannot appreciate their own policies, their own ideals. Democracy results in self-loathing, motivated ignorance, and finally self-destruction. It is a political drug, every election another dose of heroin that makes the body feel so good as it wastes away.

We should always be on guard against charlatans selling snake oil, making promises that should be suspected of chicanery for seeming too good to be true. Only a great fool believes the ads which promise you can lose 15 pounds in a month by using this One Neat Trick, yet the average citizen consistently is deluded into believing the promise that our social problems can be solved by using this One Neat Trick [if you vote for me!]. Humans are dull, slow, like cattle; civilization has domesticated man, which is not itself the problem. The problem is that man lacks a sufficiently wise ruler, a man who can act as a father to a child, imposing authority and guidance whether or not the benevolence of the action is understood. We do not wait until children are adults capable of understanding the benefit of vaccination before letting a stranger stick a needle in their arm; what benefit does consent grant in this situation? What does the consent of the governed matter, if they only ever consent to forms of governance that destroy themselves?

Democracy is the opiate of the mass. It is designed more to make the citizenry feel good, because consent has been obtained, no matter the terrible cost of obtaining it. Democracy cannot shoulder the burden of civilization, and is positively crushed beneath its weight as the barbarians rush in all at once.