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  "description": "Vive la démocratie! From the Illuminati to technocrats, why every generation reinvents the same debate about who deserves to run the world.",
  "path": "/blog/vive-la-democratie/",
  "publishedAt": "2026-03-04T08:42:00.000Z",
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  "tags": [
    "AMERICA",
    "CONSPIRACY",
    "CULTURE",
    "PHILOSOPHY",
    "POLITICS",
    "RELIGION",
    "TECHNOLOGY",
    "REFLECTIVE"
  ],
  "textContent": "When I was little, I used to hope the Illuminati were real, not because I wanted to be oppressed by a shadowy elite, but because at least it meant that somebody knew what was going on. Unlike the alternative that the entire world was just barely keeping its head above water in a sea of chaos. But then I grew up, and the chaos theory won. Nobody’s in charge, – the lights are on, but nobody’s home, everyone instead stands outside, arguing over who should pay the electricity bill. And then lately, beyond my peripheral vision, and I swear something moved, I’ve started putting my tin foil hat back on. Political influence is surfacing from directions that don’t quite make sense on paper – too coordinated to be coincidence, yet too coincidental to be conspiracy. And rather than do the sensible thing and ignore it, I’ve made the mistake of looking closer. Which, as anyone who has ever looked closely at anything and lived to tell the tale will tell you, patterns are not repeated shapes, but relevancies. So bear with me, if you’ll excuse the tin foil. The Illuminati, it turns out, were not the shadowy puppet-masters stealing your socks, they were actually just a small intellectual society with a fondness for secular governance and a profound distaste for the political power of churches and monarchies. Reasonable enough, you’d think, except Bavaria banned them in the 1780s. And as someone once said, “The moment something is banned, it immediately becomes far more interesting than it was.” – Barbra Streisand, probably. After the French Revolution, some conservatives were so uncomfortable with the idea that the little people could collectively form coherent ideas, that they concluded the revolution must have been orchestrated by the Illuminati. Since then, without anyone quite noticing, the Illuminati completed their journey from the shadowy anti-elite, to the very embodiment of elite power itself, which is either a profound insight into power or a spectacular failure of narrative consistency. Christian Zionism, a religious movement that reads geopolitics as prophecy and wraps political support for Israel in the language of eschatology. Not a conspiracy as such, but a very organised theology of influence – a world view in which certain political actions are spiritually mandatory, and the end of the world is on a schedule someone has planned for you. Then there’s the Dark Enlightenment, followers known as Neoreactionaries (which is a great word for keyboard warriors btw), born from writers like Nick Land and Curtis Yarvin, and as ‘enlightened’ as worshipping a passive-aggressive tree, but anyway… It critiques democracy and egalitarianism and argues that hierarchical or technocratic systems are simply more efficient. A world run by CEOs, which, technically, a dictatorship is, and much like a prison. But what I find interesting is that despite the Christian Zionists and Neoreactionaries occupying opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, both of these movements circle the same ancient drain. The same tension that has been running through political thought since long before Weishaupt was handing out membership cards. Who should have the power, the few, or the many? It is, as far as I can tell, the only political question. Everything else is just the gift-wrap. Rich versus poor – power for the many, or power for the few. Socialism, capitalism, neoliberalism – different carpets covering the same floor. The Illuminati were interesting because they threatened concentrated power. Christian Zionism is interesting because it is concentrated power shielded by sanctified authority. The Dark Enlightenment is interesting because it makes the philosophical case for concentrated power, which at least has the courtesy of being honest about it. Every generation dresses the same fight in new language, believing it to be the original, the only difference is that the solution always seems to centre whoever is selling the solution, ignoring the consistent problematic truth that, people like being involved in people stuff. Democracy, in theory, is the answer to all of this. But in practice, it is – as I’ve written before – essentially two foxes and a chicken deciding what’s for dinner. The problem isn’t the process, the problem is the feathers all over the floor. Plato found democracy so unreliable that he decided we should put philosophers in charge instead – an idea I’d be considerably more sympathetic to, if it hadn’t been a philosopher who suggested it. There will always be an easy argument for concentrating power, and everyone who makes it always, somehow, places themselves conveniently within the group that would benefit. And I lay here, like a fly with its wings stuck in honey, for there is something seductively philosophical about building the perfect system. Unfortunately, the problem, is every system needs someone in charge, but nobody, who wants to be in charge, should ever be in charge. And I’m going to quote Douglas Adams here, not because he was the first to say it, but because he said it the most elegantly. – “To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it.To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.” For a while, – when I wasn’t defeatedly thinking that maybe we should just give power to whoever can pull a sword from a rock and hope for the best, – I thought maybe the answer was a kind of civic competency requirement, like a political test before voting – not as a gatekeeping device, but as a minimum standard of engagement. For I often think of the person with a degree in economics and politics, who gets one vote, and so does the person responsible for silica gel packets being labelled DO NOT EAT. Both, presumably, adults, both of equal weight in opinion. Which sounds unfair, but does it? I’m beginning to question, who is it unfair to – the outcome, or the people, because there is a difference? I’m sure Curtis Yarvin believes his opinion is worth more than mine. He came from a wealthy family, so I imagine he was better educated than I was – I barely attended school at all. By my own original logic, that would mean his vote should count for more than mine. But the blood in my veins says otherwise. I believe compassion (the kind only a poor person has time to accumulate) carries its own weight. Whatever metric you choose, we are both alive, and we both have an equal right to life. So in light of the recent rise of both the Christian Zionists and Neoreactionaries, I’ve come to realise, that maybe the best political system isn’t about socialism, or capitalism, or technocracy, or rule by religious prophecy, or a philosopher-king who was suspiciously enthusiastic about nominating himself. If you think about it, the foundations behind many conclusions have always quietly been circling the same justification, – that political decision-making should be guided only by the intelligent, the moral, or the philosophically disciplined. And if we also accept – which we really should – that people have an equal right to decide how they live their own lives, then at first glance, those two ideas appear to be in tension, but I don’t think they have to be. Democracy, a word I’ve said so many times that it leaves a bad taste in my mouth, is where I started, but it’s where I finished. Democracy is the answer, and without realising it, the reasons that others present, don’t even disagree with me. Because the conflict only exists if ignorance is treated as inevitable. Democracy doesn’t actually ask us to believe that everyone is equally wise, moral, or informed. It asks us to accept that everyone is equally affected. And that means the solution was never elitism narrowing the circle with exclusion – it was always about strengthening what’s inside it, with education. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the whole radically unglamorous point. We all know that education is important, but I don’t think we realise just how important. Education is the difference between participation and manipulation. Education is the very beating heart of a society, and if one was to ever fall, you can be sure that it was a lack of focus on education that was cause. Because, for all my moaning about it, democracy is obviously the answer, but only half of it, for if it is to actually function, education isn’t optional, it’s the foundation, the linchpin, it is the sine qua non.",
  "title": "VIVE LA DÉMOCRATIE",
  "updatedAt": "2026-04-27T11:15:54.000Z"
}