All right then, so how does it work with this LIBERAL democracy?
Let us start with the fact that the adjective "liberal" distances it from democracy in the strict sense roughly as far as its PEOPLE'S strain — unfortunately still alive in us — was once distant from democracy itself.
It should be added that people's democracy, as a system based on lies by design, drew in, coerced, and broke — and then exploited — parts of the nation's prewar elites. So their elements, though deeply hidden, paradoxically existed and functioned at that time.
It is also worth knowing that classical democracy has had many critics — and this since the very times for which it was tailored. Aristotle, for instance, called it — aptly even today — "the rule of hyenas over sheep," himself decidedly preferring politeia, that is, elections conducted only by those who know what they are deciding about, and equally importantly, can afford it. So in this version of governance, today only those who pay taxes would participate — while those who live off the state — the entire public sector, adult pupils and students — would sit quietly and wait for the decision of people who may be unaware but at least finance the whole national mess.
Thus Aristotle offered, contrary to Churchill's famous and deceitful claim that there is no alternative, an actual proposal! And there are more — constitutional monarchy, meritocracy, and so on...
In the currently prevailing liberal democracy, the outcome of elections was supposed to be decided by the middle class — as the one possessing both awareness and the burden of responsibility for anything at all.
It was supposed to, but it does not — because liberalism means individual freedom and the rule of money. And since Copernicus we have known that good money always, unfortunately, loses to bad money. It is therefore no accident that the middle class is vanishing across the entire West, while in Poland it practically never emerged. The result? Eighty years without a major war in the world have clearly shown which countries, under conditions of relative peace, earned the title of economic tigers — hmm, whatever one might say about them, we would not call them democratic — not to mention the free market.
Korean chaebols, Japanese keiretsu groups, and above all Chinese giants — these are not entities that grew from winning in free-market competition; quite the opposite — they grew thanks to exclusive state concessions combined with export-oriented mandates.
It is therefore worth looking, especially today — amid the full-throttle post-election propaganda of the two faces of the empire on the Vistula — at the expansion of Orlen from this perspective as well. And I am not here defending Obajtek's purchase of Polska Press!
Returning to democracy and economics...
The economies of liberal democracies for decades more or less defended their postcolonial position or one derived directly from military superiority — but everything has its time, because there came another Copernican moment in the technological development of humanity: the rules for maintaining influence over current political decision-makers were overturned — the old deep state in the US or multigenerational aristocratic German families with traditions of ruling industry and the Wehrmacht largely lost their role to the nouveau riche owners of internet infrastructure and social media.
And once again Copernicus wagged his finger, reminding us: bad money drives out the good...
...But we, blinded by our new god in the form of the free market, competition, and technology, had already managed in the so-called meantime of the last two decades to hand over all of Western civilization to these madmen. Because you have to be a madman to first earn truly big money — running into millions of dollars — and then risk everything, solely for the purpose of personally dominating the entire globe! And that is precisely what happened! Take the history of web browsers... barely 25 years ago, Google was one of many and certainly not the biggest, with no clear business model for its operations — nobody was even thinking about paid, digitally targeted ads back then.
It is time to realize that we have arrived at a powerful paradox: today's owners of our mentality and way of thinking are irrational gamblers, behind whose accidental success stand thousands of once-competing examples of failure, broken families, and suicides. Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon — these are companies that conquered the whole world, and fundamentally, to this day nobody knows exactly why it was they who achieved this success. Let us grant that Amazon is, as the only one in this group, an infrastructural monopolist, and therefore a somehow explainable case. But — precisely — a monopolist and the free market 😂
As for us Poles, we are still orphans in an adoption process that, under favorable conditions, will take another hundred years. Where does this thesis even come from? From Tischner and his reflections on Homo Sovieticus...
...and from the realization that today we have no influential group of people who, like the deep state in the US or the barons in Germany — regardless of who wins elections — while quietly tolerating the intellectual antics of homegrown liberals and communists, simultaneously and consistently work to advance the core interests of their own nation — since those interests are, after all, identical with their own.
What does that leave us with? Hard work, thanks to which — and in spite of everything — we continue to develop, and our own search for solutions for the new times.
Our own, because those from the broadly understood West, as we can see, are slowly failing the test.
It is time, then, to start from the basics — as a starting point for intellectual exploration of new solutions and the empirical knowledge that neither communism nor liberalism has delivered. From the Polish experience of the Solidarity uprising, with a capital S, understood as a successful social experiment in effectively implementing the principles of coexistence straight from John Paul II.
Damn, I remember what it actually looked like on the street, in the shop, at the clinic...
True, it was all crushed by Jaruzelski's tanks and lasted only two years, but back then we showed the world and ourselves that it could be done, that things really could be beautiful!
And whatever bad things one might say about those two years — because nothing human is perfect or eternal — we as a nation had a sense of agency, satisfaction, and justice.
As for where the rule of liberal democracy can lead, just look at the recent election of the new president of Argentina — a country many times larger than Poland.
He describes himself as an anti-system anarcho-capitalist (a current within liberalism that is a subgroup of libertarianism).
What is important — and paradoxical in the context of what follows below about him — the US will probably applaud, support, and back him, because he declares the transition of all of Argentina to the US dollar, while simultaneously liberalizing the market for... human organs and child trafficking...
He won the election campaign running around the country with a chainsaw, is a declared fan of mafia principles, and calls Pope Francis a "fucking communist" per se.
P.S. The official economic advisor to the president of Argentina is his now-deceased dog Conan, with whom he remains in contact...
Does this remind you of anything?
A continuation will follow shortly — in fact, it is already being written — and in it: the Social Teaching of the Church, which, interestingly, usually anticipates, if not the Church itself, then its own times, and as history shows, accurately diagnoses the future.
As such, it is worth a closer look at a time when the Western systems we have known are cracking — either internally, or by failing to withstand competition from the East...
