Bertrand Russell’s Ten Commandments for Living in a Healthy Democracy

How won­der­ful if Open Cul­ture could ensure deliv­ery of these com­mand­ments to every politi­cian hold­ing a cab­i­net seat in Oz. Come to think of it, to EVERY POLITICIAN here. Prob­a­bly to every politi­cian in the entire world. Imag­ine what our lives would be like if these were held to be fun­da­men­tal truths …

Can some­body explain to me what man­ner of behav­ior #5 is try­ing to elic­it?

“Have no respect for the author­i­ty of oth­ers, for there are always con­trary author­i­ties to be found”

For Jonathan,
a) con­fi­dence in self and opin­ion
b) the belief / knowl­edge that one may also be wrong.
Michael

Imag­ine that we are all sub­ject to the Socrat­ic method of rea­son­ing — that there is no author­i­ty oth­er than the author­i­ty of the con­sen­sus arrived at after scrupu­lous rea­son­ing in some sort of elect­ed par­lia-ment — would­n’t it be some­thing?

I Don’t Agree With Rus­sel­l’s advice on how to live one’s life in the spir­it of lib­er­al­ism because Lib­er­al democ­ra­cy is a form of gov­ern­ment in which rep­re­sen­ta­tive democ­ra­cy oper­ates under the prin­ci­ples of lib­er­al­ism; char­ac­ter­ized by ;

1 . Fair, free, and com­pet­i­tive elec­tions between mul­ti­ple dis­tinct polit­i­cal par­ties, a sep­a­ra­tion of pow­ers into dif­fer­ent branch­es of gov­ern­ment,

2. The rule of law in every­day life as part of an open soci­ety; The actu­al effec­tive­ness of rule of law varies sig­nif­i­cant­ly across dif­fer­ent kinds of Democ­ra­cies ; the lib­er­al cau­tion is that free­doms must not be infringed and no one is above the law includ­ing these who gov­ern .

Three ques­tion Arise From here Includ­ing;
1. Should those who are in charge of a com­mon good accept restraints on what they decide; Why ? Democ­ra­cy asks .
2. Why should the best not gov­ern on behalf of of the com­mon good ? asks Repub­li­can­ism ; and
3. Are the two com­mon sense views of polit­i­cal author­i­ty embod­ied by democ­ra­cy and repub­li­can­ism ?

· By con­trast , Lib­er­al­ism arose in the small cov­er of the world influ­enced by tra­di­tions, fun­da­men­tal­ism , and con­cil­i­a­tion and nat­ur­al rights are shocked hor­rors of war fare .

· The are rights that no pub­lic or pri­vate agent can vio­let as argued suc­cess­ful­ly in west­ern Europe by the begin­ning of the six­teenth cen­tu­ry .

· With out recur­ring to arti­fi­cial device of fun­da­men­tal social con­tract , lib­er­al­ism can­not jus­ti­fy the exer­cise of polit­i­cal author­i­ty over ter­ri­to­ry; where as repub­li­can­ism does not go beyond asser­tion that is typ­i­cal­ly of all kinds of author­i­ty for the good of it’s sub­jects.

· The idea that var­i­ous rulers should sub­ject them selves to the rule of law ; not more or less that ordi­nary cit­i­zens is a repub­li­can con­tri­bu­tion.

· The three cur­rents have com­bine in com­plex and chang­ing ways as democ­ra­cy intro­duces rules formed by those who are mem­bers of a giv­en poli­ty over the past sev­er­al cen­turies and no one of them has been said to be more basic than the oth­er .

· They can be threat to a Democ­ra­cy if car­ried out to the extreme ; and are prefer­able to a regime based on it’s com­po­nent tra­di­tions

3. Equal pro­tec­tion of human rights, civ­il rights, civ­il lib­er­ties, and polit­i­cal free­doms for all per­sons. Among oth­ers

And lib­er­al democ­ra­cies often draw upon a con­sti­tu­tion, either for­mal­ly writ­ten , to delin­eate the pow­ers of gov­ern­ment and enshrine the social con­tract.

Oth­er wise ‚I would focus on eco­nom­ic devel­op­ment to Change democ­ra­cy ; Demo­c­ra­t­ic strug­gle and cri­sis is about stress­es of unem­ploy­ment , cer­tain­ly , eco­nom­ic and social and social injus­tice improve­ment of which can help to change democ­ra­cy.

1. Rus­sell crit­i­cizes the rad­i­cal who would advo­cate change at any cost. Echo­ing the Enlight­en­ment philoso­pher John Locke, who had a pro­found influ­ence on the authors of the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence and the U.S. Con­sti­tu­tion, Rus­sell writes:

The teacher who urges doc­trines sub­ver­sive to exist­ing author­i­ty does not, if he is a lib­er­al, advo­cate the estab­lish­ment of a new author­i­ty even more tyran­ni­cal than the old.

> If Rus­sell crit­i­cizes the rad­i­cal who would advo­cate change at any cost, what
then is the Dec­la­ra­tion of Inde­pen­dence and the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary War? How does the many laws, rules and reg­u­la­tions sup­port a lib­er­al view? I sup­port a mod­er­ate or mid­dle path in gen­er­al.

I thought briefly that this is the kind of teach­ings I should have had access to at school. Then I reflect­ed and realised that I would­n’t have lis­tened as a young man. Is it too late to change the world?