Undoing Democracy Under

The Pretext of Restoring It, Trough

The Power of Media

____________________

M. K. Sadigh

The complexity of human relation goes far beyond the simplistic social contracts among the people in order to live together in a harmonious manner. Aside from that, there are countless concealed differences of physical, psychological, political, and economical characteristics. Every person is unique from each other's and the rest of the society. That makes understanding, judging, evaluating, and harmonizing them under one unified umbrella extremely difficult.

Based on such assertion, governing a society composed of such variation of uniqueness and peculiarities, require great level of fairness and civility to assure the rights of every individual, to be determined by a justified system. Such consideration could preserve the rights of ruling majority, but at the same time equally respect and protect the rights of minority. That is to say, democracy defined as, government by the people, exercised either directly or through elected representatives, a political or social unit that has such a government. In such democratic system, the common people, considered as the primary source of political power, as a form of majority rule, which is the principles of social equality and respect for the individual within a community.

Unfortunately, in spite of its heavenly peaceful sound, such fair, human and civilized system could be subjected to gradual erosion through corruptions, and could be converted to a system that only by definition represent a democratic claim of preservation of every individual's right, but functionally perform entirely in a different manner, no doubt that no matter such system reaches to what level of perfection, still is far superior and humane than totalitarian regimes which people do not have any political power.

When the individual's conceptual capabilities cumulatively evolve to confused and disfranchised functionality in a democratic system, individuals become vulnerable and susceptible to misleading judgments and wrong decisions, lose their freedom which is self-activated ability, the most crucial requirement for construction of the fair social justice and democracy.

It is in this situation that general sincere consensus and truthfulness turns to excoriation; and wears off the rationality, ends up with denunciation of the achieved constitutions of justice system. The vulnerability of democracy, gradually abandonment human rights and finally leads to stagnation of democracy. The process of such erosion is associated with tear and wear off, or twisting the democratic laws and order, abrading the social democratic and humane relations, and rub out the achieved, honored and respected virtues and values, fraction by fraction.

The phenomenon of democracy is a composed sentiment, which is being structured bit by bit and during a long procedure of historical evolution along with tremendous human sacrifices and struggles. The erosion of democracy grinds down the achieved precious values embedded in such structure. When all these gradual transitions happened, the level of reluctance and disorientation rises, decisiveness of resolution will increasingly erode, Self-determination and self-steam will be replaced by obedience, self-censure, forced-dependency, and desperation. Flaws and imperfection become prevalent because, they are widely or commonly occurring and pave the way for corruptions, suppression, and impair fairness, soundness and reliability on social justice; the human dignity will be severely damaged, when spoiled by the flaws, and disparity.

The worst defect of such erosion is that mechanism of maintaining democracy would be converted to subversive instruments of prejudice, leading to deterioration of the human natural rights, which usually, are presented in a fictitious manner only as empty claims. The end result would be all kinds of impairments, discrepancies, defects or shortcoming, which their manifestations are not commonly transparent, but could be detected only when, the functionality of deficient social orders ends up in chaos. Falling short of the appropriation and efficiency in such paralyzing magnitude, removes the assurance for humane peaceful subsistence, and eventually leads to parity and impoverishment, which is the core of all evils. The social unity becomes a non-functional apparatus beyond restoration for harmonious democratic living; instead we end up surrendered to manipulative agenda prearranged for us.

Bypassing the Ethical Commitments

To Assure the Self- Preservation

The legitimacy of self-preservation mistranslated, to gaining wealth and power beyond the pale of rationality in all costs, and is not limited to any bounding, on the contrary; supported, encouraged, and promoted without considering, and analysing the side-effects and destructive damages inflict upon the subordinate level of society.

We delineated the process and direction of the erosion of social justice leading to deterioration of democracy, not as realistically tangible, transparent, and obvious, but in a gradual cumulative fashion. The most painful irony is the fact, that undoing the democracy takes place under the pretext of restoring it. Our inquiry is trying to examine and analyse this major diversion, and the grounds that create and facilitate such transition, as far as the validity of the proposed subject could be evaluated and supported by solid and proven documentations.

It is obvious that navigation trough the countless treatises as a common practice for a research, is not necessarily a journey trough the established and proven truth. However, exploration and fact-finding in a world of defensive bias, deceptive indignations, false definitions, jargons of confused unintelligible language of perplexity, could illuminate the manifestation of reality in a transparent and clear affinity. Expression of the conceptual reality of all the facts relevant to democracy, whether they are fair or bias reveals trough the functionality of the media, sophisticated or transparent, they all reveal in the persuasive presentations to be conclusive.

The magic of the word power: uttered or written is so strongly persuasive that rubs the audiences from their sanity and sensitivity and disillusions them to the level of a deadly intoxication. The only time they could be sober and intellectually alert would be when, they are shrewd, and diligent, and their responses overcome the influence of the discrepancies and detect the illusive and deceptive contents from the deceiving words. If they are persuaded, they can feel the pinch in their life later, obviously, that would be too late and beyond compensation.

The Persuasive Power of the Media,

Desensitises

The Intellectual Efficiency

Media is the most powerful phenomenon of the modern civilization with tremendous persuasive power. Its vast apparatus and far reaching expansion is capable to reconstitute the intellectual mindset of the modern human. Many people consider this powerful characteristic as the educational instruments in the direction of enhancement of human intellectual maturity.

The irony is that the media is able to create superficial robotic characteristic, disfranchised from the broad intellectual vision that supposedly should be reaching the level of expanded mind of the self-activated modern man. The educational value of media is qualified to be enlightening instrument, if take a humane, non-partisan, non-bias, non-profitable direction toward the enhancement of liberated human's intellectual development. Such characteristic would be almost impossible when the possession of the media is monopolized by the political and economical dominant powers. The quest for power and wealth does not allow any influence that could possibly destabilise the command and control over their set directions.

Distortion of the Facts

The dynamic of opposition and strive for domination is the centurial force of survival. In our modern living condition, such dynamic has not changed, eliminated, or even reduced, but the assumption is that the civilized man matured intellectually to rationalize it. In spite of that, no rationalization had really occurred, because the manifestation of the modern man's behaviours did not undergo any change but rather became far more sophisticated. What have changed, the language and the mannerism reveal in variety of expressive directions which every one of them pursue a specific mean to an end and the media is the most effective ground to manifest them under variety of pretexts.

· Overshadows the rationality.

· Divert the fairness to prejudice

· Suppresses the self-indulgence

· Falsify and concealed the truth

These are some random selected derivatives, which are not only the side effects caused by erosion of democracy, and materialized by the media, but phenomena usually are inseparable part of totalitarian suppressive systems, that presumably should not exist in a democratic system. Certainly in any system, they are not defined and introduced commonly as transparent as we present them here. For every one of them, there is a pleasant, logical, humane definition, which usually sugarcoated, digestible and appealing to the mediocrity.

The media constitutes every instrumental ability available to configure the mechanism required for persuasion, structures an army of legal experts, historians, sociologists, psychologists, philosophers, scriptwriters, play writers, actors, directors, film makers, reporters, anchors, political annalists, economical forecasters, commentators, lawyers, lobbyists, judges, army experts, war scientists, they all work, produce, create, and present, to feed the apparatus of consensus.

Such tremendous energy of brainpowers as well as man powers are orchestrated to make sure all the targeted issues are effectively formulated according to the preconceived intend, and they can masterfully cast their magical spells over the mediocre masses.

Overshadowing the Rationality

There is no ways of verification for the mediocre masses to question, criticise, reject or accept and physically participate in such predetermined projection presented to them, because, they are facing noting but a two dimensional image of what presumed, to be the truth.

What percent of the subject matters telecasted or broadcasted is verifiable by the audiences whom have not even have time to spend time with their family because they are obligated to their long and tiresome hard works to make it trough their financial deficiencies? Not much. Apart from their preliminary academic knowledge, most of the people, even when they read, listen to the news, or view the commentaries, their comments and evaluations, usually are the repeat of the same analysis they heard from media, the opinion that were imposed on them by those who are extremely articulated in expressive discussions. Particularly in most television shows, it is customary to invite an expert in the field to go trough some kind of professional analysis. That alone gives the impression to the public of their inability of understanding the events happening in their world and the feeling that apparently they need someone to judge for them, evaluate and determine the accuracy and validity of what is happening in their lives for them.

Obviously, the exports that all their lives have dealt with the subject know far better than ordinary people with no experience at all. The objectionable question is the sincerity and the reliability of the expert does not always make him non-bias. After all he or she is paid for his or her services and cannot be in opposition with the media.

Divert from the Truth and

Fairness to Prejudice

Practically every religion and political affiliate with the religion use the sanctity of religious or secular moral codes as their basic ground for attracting and persuading their believers to their fait or political doctrines. The basic issue is the universality of implication of morality, which, safeguard the ethical values in relation with the protection, or guidance of all humanity against the wrong doings and evil. The irony is that in many theocratic systems they try to be selective and use only those moral codes that fit in their own agenda.

The morality introduced in most of the religious text, starting with the Avesta the Zoroastrian holy book of sixth century BC the first Iranian monotheistic religion, all addressing a holistic concern about the well being of the humanity and guiding them toward the moral and logical convection. To see it in a simple and clear expression "fairness and rightness verses prejudice and unjust", virtue verses vice, the same dualism which most of the monotheistic believes were based on it.

It is mind boggling that almost in every political campaigns, or religious advocacy, no matter in what part of the world occurs, we see the "moral issues" are popping up and widely publicised among the mediocre in a selective fashion.

In the US election 2004 campaign, for example, the moral issues as selected carefully in relation with family values; abortion and gay marriage were selected as hut issues. While the moral issues are extensive as reflected in the bible, covering a vast number of concerns such as not lie, not killing the innocents, not destroying the livelihood of others, not stilling from others and so on. These moral codes were not even mentioned while the American Christians in Iraq committed war atrocities in Abo-ghorab prison.

Concentrating only on the definition of family value alone covers, many aspects of morality very important to human life, the fair and decent working relations, which is not suppressive, inhumane, the wage and the fairly respected human right, but non of these issues even brought to the attention of the public as moral codes.

We refer to the last century of foreign US policy as a Christian nation with ultra orthodox religious convections. Almost a large segment of the nation's population particularly in the Middle Western regions, is strongly evangelists which their religious convections far exceed the ultra fanatic of Moslem zealous orthodoxy.

A great number of the soldiers in American war in Iraq are from the religious population of United States, which mostly are the poorest segment of the nation. Particularly the last American war in Iraq, we will find that every step they have been taken, it was against the Christian religious ethical codes which clearly stated in Christian bible, as well as secular moral codes, yet the media concentrated only on the moral code issues suitable for election and never bothered to go any further.

Suppresses the Self-Indulgence

The Media sustain on the commercial profit which the whole advertisement commercial is nothing but utilization of ultimate power of persuasion, even if the outcome of such functionality bypassing a lots of un ethical measures. When we are talking about the self- indulgence, we mean to take unrestrained pleasure in a task, prospect, or choice, yield to the desire of doing some thing that we really want to do without facing obstacle or confinement; we do it with excessive leniency, generosity, or consideration.

We are referring to confidence, self-reliance, and a human condition having the choice and option. The persuasive power of media is able to change all that by reconditioning our views, evaluation and eventually our judgment. No matter we are viewing a commercial about the furniture, a car, a house, a food, a dress, or watching a documentary, we do not have the power to change any part of what has been presented to us, to fit our taste the way we want it, we are forced to choose what have been presented to us on the bases of "take it or leave it".

Falsify and Concealed the Truth

It happened repeatedly that a defective automobile, a food, or a medicine have been glorified as the most beneficial and perfect product for several years or months after introducing them in the market, they turn out to be dangerous, or defective. We are not talking about the common human errors that are inevitable. We are talking about deliberate cover-ups, those that become a common practice and only revealed when disclosed, either by the law-suites or whistle- blowers. Based on the consideration of moral codes as the principles of a democratic system, we all are obligated to do the right deed in order to protect our democratic values. Yet media and its profound mysterious apparatus conceal, divert, exaggerate, and mislead the public masterfully up to a level that become revealed to the masses as a false advertisement, undocumented report, baseless accusation, or simply an technical error before they admit or restrain them selves of continuing such mannerism.

If we analyse this attitude, further and deeper, we realise that the misleading does not occur as a simplistic common error, it is rather a policy. It is not any simple policy, but an orchestrated, well conceived, well organized policy so shrewd and so diligent and so powerful that could not only be able to change the mindsets, tastes, judgments, evaluations of the mediocre masses, but also could change the governments, topple the political systems, dehumanise honest people, and eventually undermined the whole concept of democracy.

Getting to this level of complexity, the validity of our claim of the democracy is questionable. It is painful to see so many earnest and mystified people of the free world are so proud of the democratic system, that they cherish so dearly, and they have the undeniable right to be so, are not able to purify the contamination which threatens their democracy that they achieved with so many struggles and scarifies.

M. K. SADIGH

Bethlehem.

Thursday, 04 November 2004