May 24, 2019 Friday
Bedtime Story
James Madison on Factions Within Society
At the very first James Madison
acknowledged the basic truth that development of factions in any society is
inevitable since “the latent causes of faction are thus sown in the nature of
man” and therefore all that can be done is to manage its effects.
Theoretically speaking there exists just
two ways to prevent factions from developing with a society:
One is to curb the liberty of people both
in their thoughts and actions such that the masses largely follow the writ of
the government imposed upon them.
The second is to make the people extremely
homogeneous economically and socially both in the form of their interests and
opinions such that not much of the difference arises either in their thoughts
or actions.
As would be obvious to you implementing
both of these measures were and are impractical if one wishes to create society
where men are free (at least as much envisaged in the United States Bill of
Rights) and are allowed to pursue their happiness at the very least in an
Epicurean way and often much more varied ways than that.
Liberty was what the people had fought for
and was the bedrock of the American Revolution and was to be an essential
ingredient of the American way of life.
Liberty in its several manifestations still
remains one of the most cherished values within the United States and Canada.
Individual liberty allows different men to
chose and live sundry ways of life and hold varying opinions regarding
politics, economics, religion and anything else that may concern them or even
not concern them.
The second measure of creating a homogeneous society was a logistical impossibility.
It was the dream of socialist and communist
thinkers to create a classless society where each individual would attain a heightened
level of consciousness, mindfulness, both personal and public discipline and observing
generally accepted rules of communist conduct making these qualities both their
inner need and habit.
Alas human apes in spite of their ability
to form groups and work in co-ordination can never be made to be homogeneous in
their act and thought for long.
So the only way to deal with factions
arising in society (which is rather inevitable) would be by creating a republic
rather than a pure democracy which would be far more adept at handling the pressures
of pulls of factions arising from various contradictory groups).
By this Madison meant that instead of people
voting directly for every legislation that needed to be considered and passes
or rejected they would instead chose their representatives who in turn would
legislate laws.
Madison was in favor of a large republic
than a small republic as more number of representatives or candidates to be
elected would allow for a greater choice of “fit characters”.
The larger the republic, the greater the
number of people who would be voting for the greater number of candidates and
lesser would then be the chances of the candidate rigging the game by either
fooling the voters or bribing them.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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