September 2nd 2010    Tim Candler

    Rabindranath Tagore fretted about democracy in his homeland of India.   The idea perhaps of one man one vote left him with a sense that chaos was inevitable.   But as well he thought it might mean that his India would begin to look like the western world and that hurt his poetic soul.

   The mistake is the confusion one man one vote often evokes.   One man one vote is about change of leader without recourse to blood or to blood shed.   It has nothing to do with a happy place where men and women and oxen are equal.

   The ills and rewards of capital, to the contrary are not products of democracy.  Capital is about the individual's right to be as greedy as he wants to be.  But political people are usually ego-centric maniacs who pursue power as their source of contentment.  So this confluence of greed and power is a human condition and for those who believe in change a human problem.

    Quite obvious to me there is no single god.   But I do blame the Protestants for capital.    And if Tagore was alive I would explain the western opinion to him this way: "We let power and greed live in a cage, and we call that cage democracy."

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