The visibly righteous as reliable democrats?

In political systems seeking to improve a nation’s material productivity, intellectual capabilities and spiritual character, the citizens’ sense of righteousness and justice is presumably well developed. Righteousness concerns itself with individual uprightness and morality while justice is grounded on what people recognize and extend to each other as human beings. Justice is the bedrock of democratic processes which protect human life, liberty, property and – as others would add with considerable flair – the pursuit of happiness.

In a democracy, righteousness and justice have to go together. Otherwise, there is grave danger that the democratic order would be subverted. People with a highly developed sense of righteousness usually are exceedingly clear about what upright and moral living must be. They run the risk of being democratically certain about what standards must be observed and – gaining power and authority – are often tempted to compel people to live or die by their standards.

Unless those who are righteous are tempered by the strongest sense of justice, they paradoxically threaten democratic societies. For them, ends do justify any and all means. Fortified by dogmatic certitude, they can be insensitive to natural as well as human law. At times, they ironically invoke even as they misrepresent and pervert these laws. During reigns of terror, the righteous trumpet their devotion to liberty, freedom and justice even as they summarily decapitate many who are innocent of any crime.

Historically speaking, no political regimes can be considered more righteous than those which existed in what had been dubbed the Dark Ages, that period in Western history roughly between the fifth and the eleventh centuries A.D. These regimes were primarily conspiracies of church and state that harbored no doubts about the universal validity of a particular religious perspective. Their sense of fanatic righteousness enabled the authorities to use brutal methods in regimenting their helpless constituencies. Many people suffered indescribable tortures precisely in order that their moral and spiritual elevation might be effected. The best minds were exiled from their decapitated heads and the most courageous spirits were divorced from their mutilated bodies in the course of righteous rule by these infallible authorities.

In modern times, during the late 1930s and the early 1940s, an uncompromising sense of righteousness also inspired the Nazis to unprecedented levels of genocide. Racial and ethnic cleansing preceded, precipitated and coexisted with a war that claimed the lives of 50 million people in the West alone. In Asia, the righteous imperialists cloaked their racist designs and spoke of building a co-prosperity sphere. As elsewhere, fascist righteousness in Asia marched hand in hand with murderous brutality and set back its human development by several decades.

The truth is, all imperialist regimes fall back on some perversion of righteousness. The shibboleth might be couched in terms of a "Manifest Destiny," a "mission civilisatrice," a "white man’s burden," or the imperatives of a natural order where Brittania ruled the waves. However, lest one forget, righteousness is also reflected in the communist rhetoric seeking to unify and liberate the oppressed workers of all countries, those who have "nothing to lose but their chains" and nothing less than "a world to gain!"

Righteousness affects many guises and speaks with many tongues, but in most cases it favors imperial rule and distrusts democratic governance. Only when it consorts with justice is righteousness reliably kind to a democrat.

The sense of righteousness among those influential in Philippine society has to be carefully monitored. Recent developments reflecting a preference for shortcuts which abort the delicate processes of a nestling democracy may be indicative of an arrogance characteristic of the overly righteous. Whether they be officials of the national administration, partisan politicians opposing the administration, media moguls and other civil society influentials transacting with the administration or simply dark eminences used to dictating the course of national administration in this country, these people are not hard core believers in democracy.

They are simply true believers in themselves and pathologically distrust the public most of all. They may pay lip service to democracy but their hyperinflated sense of righteousness, more precisely their ungovernable self-righteousness, abort democracies here as elsewhere. There has been no shortage of these groups whose sense of righteousness has reached a point where the sentiments of other people, even most of the country’s people, no longer matter. Unfortunately, these exclusive groups and their unmitigated version of righteousness have so far largely defined the nation’s history.