Democracy is the opium of the masses

Democracy is evil.

Nope, I haven't gone out of my human senses and became anti-democratic, but I think it's about time to revise what we preach.

Democracy for the past half a dozen of decades has been the core of most socialist and communist regimes, where egalitarian and classless societies "democratically" incorporated the power of the people into the divine power of one.

Examples on this extend form Stalin and Castro internationally to Bin Ali and Saddam locally. Meanwhile, members of the Mc-Donaldized part of the world are -as we speak- declaring war in every corner of our planet, in the name of democracy and still getting away with it.

What is this all about? It seems that the word itself is enough to gain public acclaim to cover economic inequalities, wars and political tricks. It sounds enough to plug the word democracy into any president's speech.

Let's check the basics. Democracy is the respect of the equality and freedom of humans in a socio-political regime that assures the sovereignty of the people. Freedom of act, of expression and decision making is more explicitly included.

Isn't this what we are trying, as young leftist, to tell people? That, Democracy- hence freedom and social justice- is the only way to a better society, a better world?

But wait a minute, Lebanon is democratic. We have more or less freedom to express our thoughts and we are free to do most of the things that we want to do. So why aren't we pleased with Lebanese democracy? Why is not Lebanon as good as democracy allows it to be?

Let me ask you this: isn't democracy itself the reason behind transforming the country into a farm? Aren't our secular "leaders" democratically elected? So where's the error?

Allow me to tell you that we have been wasting our time striving for the wrong solution. We don't need democracy. We rather need knowledge.

We don't need fair elections. We want people to know what elections are about. We don't want freedom of expression. We want people to actually have something to talk about rather than following blindly what our "masters" boldly say.

How about restricting voting only to those who have earned their Baccalaureate degrees? Or even a university degree? Wouldn't that be a better electoral procedure?

As leftists we should work for the "right-to-know" before the "right-to-do".

The right for better public schools, universities and even curriculum should be top priorities.

We should improve ourselves in the interpretation of our socio-political problems and grow out of the nutshell of clichés that our fellow older comrades had left us.

We should stop wasting time in the search of Plato's utopia and start from scratch, from our complex Lebanese reality to build the better future we are all dreaming of.

Hussein Harajli is an Electrical Engineer and an activist of the Independent Leftist Groups. He wrote this commentary for Alternative