Ochlocracy Quotes

Mobocracy in democracy is a perfect ochlocracy.

When there is an autocracy, we may be sure that the masses will some day overthrow it; and when there is a democracy or ochlocracy, we may be sure that some group of mentally and physically superior individuals will some day overthrow it by establishing a more or less enduring (but never wholly permanent) supremacy, either through judg­ment in playing men against each other, or through patience and abil­ity in concentrating power by taking advantage of the indolence of the majority. In a word, the social organisation of humanity is in a state of perpetually and incurably unstable equilibrium. I believe in an aristocracy, because I deem it the only agency for the creation of those refinements which make life endurable for the human animal of high organisation. In an aristocracy some persons have a great deal to live for. In a democracy most persons have a little to live for. In an ochlocracy no­body has anything to live for.

The sequence is monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy and ochlocracy,

Cyclical Models The pattern of rise and fall: this is the general shape of history outlined by both Herodotus and Thucydides that is generically common to practically all the other cyclical models. The degenerative cycle of the four ages: this is the Gold–Silver–Bronze–Iron model of Hesiod, the Zoroastrians, and the Hindu Yuga cycles in which a state of initial perfection degenerates by ages to a final barbarism before the cycle starts again. The Anacyclosis: this is the political pattern of constitutional cycles outlined by Polybius which follows the sequence monarchy, kingship, tyranny, aristocracy, oligarchy, democracy, and ochlocracy before a period of barbarianism resets the cycle. The providential cycle (judgement–retribution–restoration): this follows the pattern of the Book of Jeremiah and the ‘alternative’ Christian tradition of the Venerable Bede and Geoffrey of Monmouth. The Phoenix cycle (birth–death–rebirth): this is Petrarch’s model which posits a Dark Age between two better periods and in which the New Age will look to Antiquity for inspiration.

All political systems, excepting direct democracy, are oligarchical. The question today is not whether the few or the many will rule the state. The question, said Max Weber, is what kind of oligarchy will it be? The favored answer, since time immemorial, has been “aristocracy,” or “rule by the best.” But who are the “best”? The warriors? The priests? The rich? The intellectuals? Monarchists hold that the best person is ordained by God or the Church, especially on account of his lineage. Given the circumstances of the American Revolution, America’s Founding Fathers were opposed to monarchy and aristocracy; therefore, presidents would be elected every four years, congressmen every two years, and senators would be appointed. The election mechanism, the independent power of the states, and the courts, were conceived as checks on executive and congressional power. Under the Constitution, America is only a democracy one day in every two years; that is, in November, on a Tuesday that follows the first Monday, of every even numbered year. What the Framers of the Constitution feared, above all, was ochlocracy (i.e., mob rule) where the majority might pass a bill of expropriation against the propertied classes. This, they knew from ancient history, would end in a leveling despotism.

Polybius studied the histories of Greco-Roman city-states and noticed a recurring progression of political regimes—from kingship to aristocracy to democracy to anarchy —from which a new kingship would emerge. This progression itself was nothing new: Plato and Aristotle had said something similar. But Polybius went further. He specifically linked it to a pattern of generational succession. In his view, the city-states' first kings are generally powerful and good, but their children so weak and corrupt that an aristocratic rebellion eventually arises among the children's peers. The founding aristocrats govern well enough, but their children sink to oligarchy, prompting a democratic rebellion among their peers. A generation afterwards, the initial democrats' children sink to a mob rule ochlocracy, leading to a state of anarchy. In due course, a new king seizes control, and the cycle repeats. Polybius never says how long it takes for this sequence to occur. Apparently, it could occur slowly, over a period of many centuries—or rapidly, over the course of one saeculum (four generations).

Every democracy, whether ochlocracy, aristocracy, oligarchy, monarchy, anarchy, proletarian, popular, or liberal, is by its very nature always a scotocracy, that is, the rule of obscurants, derived from Greek words σκότος for darkness, and κράτος for power, dominion, strength. But the "power" of obscurants is based on ignorance and madness, and, like night, from which only shadows remain when the sun rises, is powerless against the light of knowledge and reason.

The hijacking of scientific prestige is typical of the ochlocracy of our time; some would-be censors propose prohibiting certain kinds of communication because they are “false by consensus.

Of all the simplifications to which the human spirit naturally inclines, unable to reconcile itself to the complexity of the real, there is none more dangerous than the attempt to integrate the whole of society in one vast, permanent action group.