Where's the rottenness?

Yesterday Diogenes was contemplating the nature of government, and wondering exactly what one might do to overthrow one. Governments, we learned, exist in the realms of ideas, organizations and actors. So where does one start?

Let's consider the top level, the idea on which a government is founded. How does one overthrow an idea? The short answer is, it can't be done. Of the major revolutions in history, only one put a slight dent in the former philosophy: The French Revolution proved the Divine Right of Kings to be so much hooey, although it took a while to die a long-overdue death in the rest of Europe.

Philosophies of governing, once put into practice, have a way of hanging around as ideas, legends and folk tales, and can re-emerge at any time, if conditions are right for a change. But whether a change is made from a monarchy to a republic, from a republic to an autocracy, or from autocracy to democracy, the underlying ideas never fade away. They may be temporarily silenced, but they are essentially eternal as long as there are minds to consider them.*

So might it be easier to dump the organization of government? Well, maybe, but again, where to start? The American Revolution did overthrow the mechanism of the British colonial government, replacing it with the mechanism spelled out in the Constitution, but when you get right down to it, all government systems that aren't pure autocracies look pretty much the same: A head of state at the top, who delegates authority to a group of secretaries or ministers, and in most contemporary governments does so in concert with a parliamentary body, most of whom are elected by the governed populace.

Trying to dislodge a government at its ideational or bureaucratic level seems fruitless, then. And why strike at those levels anyway? Even if a philosophy of government seems inherently evil, the idea itself is immutable; it's the physical manifestation of it that must change, and that is not to say the bureaucratic structure occupied by the minions of the head of state, but the very head itself. Only by decapitating the beast of bad government, or in modern parlance administration, can real change be effected.

In "Hamlet," Shakespeare has Marcellus say "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." The use of the phrase "the state of Denmark," rather than just naming the country, indicates that the rottenness lies in the state, that is in the head of state, Claudius the king. And in 1859 Abraham Lincoln pointed out that while the American people have the right to overturn the government, they should aim "not to overthrow the Constitution, but to overthrow the men who pervert it —"

Diogenes confesses that he knew all along this would be the answer, but, not wanting to leap to a conclusion, he felt the intellectual exercise was necessary to clarify and direct his thoughts on the matter--and he is now certain where the rottenness, the heart of darkness lies: at the head of the federal administration, in the person the Huffington Post called the "Most Corrupt POTUS. Ever."

"Now we are certain of the core of the problem," said Diogenes. "Now we know where to strike."

--Richard Brown

*For an entertaining read about the permanence of ideas, check out "The Stars, Like Dust," by Isaac Asimov.