New Zealand Equality Education Foundation
(incorporating the International Ex-Fetus Association)
The Political Theory of Agendaism*
© Peter Zohrab 2005
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Prologue: the Chimps
Imagine that you owned a large group of highly intelligent chimpanzees, and that you were able to communicate with them in their language. Suppose that you kept them locked up in an airconditioned building without windows, television, radio, telecommunications, visitors, or any other way of receiving input from the outside.
Suppose, further, that you were a democratic sort of person, and that (apart from those restrictions) you allowed the chimpanzees to govern themselves democratically. However, they were dependent on you to supply all the information on which to decide which way to vote.
For example, suppose they wanted to eat a kilo of bananas each per week. In that case, you might tell them that the price of bananas was much higher than it really was, and/or that the budget was much smaller than it actually was -- because you had another agenda, i.e. other reasons for restricting the amount of banans that they ate. You might have some good reason for not telling them about your agenda, or you might just not feel like telling it to them.
In this set-up, though the chimpanzees made democratic decisions, they were based on the information that you supplied to them, and that information was determined by your agenda. That was a democratic system, but it was subject to your agenda. You were the one who was really in control, and the fact that the system was democratic was really irrelevant.
The Humans
Western democracies are democratic in just the same way that the chimpanzees' system is democratic: we get to vote democratically, but the information we base our voting on is controlled by people with agendas of their own. See the pages: Manufacturing Concern: Worthy and Unworthy Victims, Media Bias, and Indoctucation by the Media-University Complex.
Left-wing activists are largely in control of education systems and the media, though left-wing journalists keep pointing unconvincingly to right-wing media barons as a source of bias. Unions are also usually run by left-wing activists, who use their members' funds to pursue various causes that have little or nothing to do with the industries where their members work.
As an example of union fascism, I could mention my branch (the Correspondence School Branch) of the Post-Primary Teachers' Association, whose executive routinely placed agenda items that I proposed at the bottom of the list, below "General Business", so that anyone could raise anything under "General Business", leaving the lunchtime meetings too little time to discuss my agenda item fully, if at all.
Revolution
So it is a red herring (a very Red herring) to worry about how democratic a country is, when our information is controlled in this way. Extremism and revolution are inevitable, in the long run, unless the system changes as regards the control over information.