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Demophrenia: Israel and the Malaise of Democracy
by Paul Eidelberg
Product Group: Book
Publisher: Prescott Press (1994)
ISBN: 093345127X
EAN: 9780933451278
Mass Market Paperback: 238 pages
Edition: 1
SKU: M4699
Condition: Very Good
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Customer Reviews
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A key to understanding the politics of today.
Rating  (5)
Date: 2008-07-13
Demophrenia, by Paul Eidelberg
A book of incomparable honesty and depth.
No way, it expresses an opinion. The references to history, philosophy and attitudes of leaders revealed in words and deeds turn the book into an undisputable observation. Over 300 references support the veracity of the text.
Democracy is an achievement of civilization, of civilized people. Democracy satisfies the needs and desires of civilized people. A country of civilized people can afford democracy as a ruling principle. Attempts to apply democracy to a population that is not civilized (not benevolent and tolerant toward each other) would eminently fail. Applied to a mixture of civilized and evil people, democracy would destroy all those ideologies that are not based on existence (which some refer to as objective reality and some refer to as God's world) and then will self-destruct by drowning in corruption and popular rejection.
Peoples that have not reached the state of civilization are not ready for democracy as a ruling principle. They use autocracy in its various forms: dictatorship, despotism, thug rule. Muslims, whose prophet Muhammad was a highway robber by profession, could not but instil in his religion the attitude of a parasite. A person or a nation that submits to a religion founded by an ideological parasite cannot be productive. In order to survive and prosper, it needs to live at the expense of productive people and nations. Values of sanctity of human life, adherence to truth, and pride in productive achievement are foreign to a highway robber, and by implication - to the blind followers of the religion he has founded.
On the other hand, civilized people and nations are productive precisely due to their adherence to values of sanctity of human life, adherence to truth, and pride in productive achievement. In contrast, the use of fraud, disregard for human life of friend and foe and the unmitigated desire to submit others are the means by which parasitic people and nations survive and prosper.
Persons and nations that live in democracy for generations start taking democracy for granted. They tend to forget their parents' and grandparents' lives under despotism of different kinds and degrees. They start projecting their desires, desires that only productive persons and nations can harbour, to persons and nations who are not productive and need the productivity of civilized persons and nations as a means of survival and prosperity. These civilized persons and entire nations, their most educated and ruling elite in particular, fail to perceive the desires of the uncivilized parasitic despots. Instead of calling their bluff, exposing the parasites for what they are and defeating them by force of arms, the democratic leaders try to appease the parasites. The democratic leaders increasingly fail to perceive their values as superior to the values of the parasites, precisely because they mistakenly perceive democracy as assuming everyone being equal and free to pursue happiness without regard for others. They do so at their peril. These democratic leaders fail to perceive the evil nature of the parasites.
Such behaviour of democratic leaders, and indeed of the majority of democratic intellectual elite, exhibits symptoms of schizophrenia, whose major symptom is - attributing crucial importance to a non-essential feature of an object or person and classifying these objects or persons according to this non-essential feature, while disregarding the essential features. This symptom of schizophrenia reveals itself in the superficial view of democracy as no more than "one person, one vote." Hence, the author of the book Professor Paul Eidelberg coined the name Demophrenia to describe this condition of democratic leaders and intellectual elite.
Demophrenia explains the headlong desire of democracies to recognize parasitic and despotic rulers as morally equal and plead for peace with them; moreover, to seek recognition of their legitimacy for survival from these parasitic despots.
These parasitic despots do not suffer from demophrenia. They harbour no illusions. They act in accordance with their parasitic faith. As a handy and helpful peculiarity, they have no scruples against lying. These parasitic despots take full advantage of the hallucinating demophrenics. Being aware how important peace is to the productive civilizations, the despots use this desire of the civilized exactly to the end of defeating them with most primitive material means, the only means the unproductive can afford. They are after submission. They have no use for peace.
The parasitic despots will continue their triumphant march toward enslaving civilized productive nations as long as the latter will remain afflicted with demophrenia.
Indeed, demophrenia leads to slaughter and another bout of Dark Ages.
My unwavering acceptance of Paul Eidelberg's reasoning notwithstanding, I find it unfortunate that the author ascribes immunity to the demophrenia affliction exclusively to knowledge of Torah and Talmud. I opine that another source of immunity to demophrenia exists: the Objectivist philosophy of Ayn Rand. Proficiency in Objectivist philosophy does require, however, a substantial course of study from someone with above-average education and love of reason. On the plus side, existence is the base of Objectivist philosophy, rather than religion.
In his search for a philosophy that would render intellectuals immune to demophrenia, Eidelberg resorts to denying to Judaism the title of religion. Instead, he defines Judaism as a proper way of life. He proves that, contrary to any other religion, the laws and advice of the Torah correspond to existence: they resolve actual conflicts, they prescribe harmonious relations among people and Man toward Nature, they predict logically ensuing future events. In fact, Prof. Eidelberg unwittingly points toward the philosophy of Objectivism that does all that but of which he is not aware.
Were people to join civilization by abiding the Torah or by understanding and implementing the Objectivist philosophy, the outcome would be similar. Few people have the time, ability and talent to discover the wisdom of the Torah. Even fewer people are even aware of the existence of the Objectivist philosophy, and again, this philosophy calls for an above average level of intelligence to understand it and follow. For a wide population of busy Jews, abiding the Torah could be a beneficial shortcut toward civilization. Undisputedly, that would lead to immunity to demophrenia, national pride and rational behaviour. For the educated and talented, however, there is the choice to study Torah or Objectivism. Better both.
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Great book
Rating (5)
Date: 2005-08-03
6 out of 6 customers found this reveiw helpful
This is a great book. It is full of philosophical ideas, and has not a drop of fascism. It's unfortunate that some people do not understand that some ideas--Nazism, for example--are evil, ultimately and in fact, and by comparison to democracy as practiced by Israel, the US and Europe of today have nothing of value to offer the world. Demophrenia points that out, very well indeed.
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Foolish and poorly presented
Rating  (1)
Date: 2005-08-02
21 out of 25 customers found this reveiw helpful
Paul Eidelberg presents a case that moral relativism is a problem for democracies. The case in brief is that the US, Israel and Europe should start throwing their weight around in the world. That the international system should replace equality between nations with a moralistic paternal system where "superior" countries (and peoples) make decisions for "inferior" countries.
Contrary to the claims of the book, the US and Europe have both been moving away from proping up undemocratic governments in favor of democracy. Eidelberg seems to be blissfully unaware of Indonesia, South Korea, the Phillipines, Chile, most of central America and many other places where the US has helped push aside undemocratic governments where it once favored them.
But whats really behind this book, as with others, is the neo-conservative agenda of breaking and remaking other countries as was on display in Iraq. And at the same time the need to take away self-government from peoples supposedly incapable of it such as Palestinians.
Eidelberg goes on in the book to attack the entire middle east peace process and Israeli recognition of Palestinians in particular as moral relativism. Of course in supporting endless undemocratic Israeli military rule and Israeli settlement of the west bank/gaza, the question arises of what "morality" really means to him. Apparently very little.
"Evil" Palestinians, incapable of democratic government, are both unfit to rule themselves and unfit to even to be talked to by the Israeli government. Many may remember back to the 1970s when Israel "taught" palestinians democracy. The Israeli military authorities appointed their collaborators as "mayors". These mayors executed their democratic obligations by identifying palestinians to the Israeli army for arrest, helping Israelis confiscate land and organizing palestinians into a well-controlled force of cheap manual labour inside Israel.
Eidelberg then takes a turn for the worse in the book by promoting the discredited Fascist idea of "inferior" and "superior" peoples under the new phrase "asymmetrical". But its the same old thing. The United States and Israel only negotiate with equals. Inferior peoples are simply given direction and told the decision that has been made. He then goes on to make his case for Israeli superiority and arab inferiority. To him, soft heads may tend to want to view all people regardless of birth as equal, but his hard-headed realism says that inequality is a fact of life. And that decisions must be made based on the truth of that inequality. The superior has the right to tell the inferior what to do.
The book is at its most amazing when it claims that the west must accept the basic inequality of people & nations in the name of equality, freedom and democracy. But that is not philosophy, that is madness!!! You cannot stand for equality and freedom while you tell hundreds of thousands of palesinians that they are inferiors with no right to even govern themselves.
The end conclusion is that equality is the enemy of freedom and democracy. That the west has taken equality too far along with freedoms and rights. That somehow people have too much freedom today and that freedom is the enemy of morality/moral values. At one point, he even makes the claim that too much freedom in a democracy leads to mental illness and political collapse.
The ideas are not new. Years ago, I heard similiar ideas spoken by military officers in Asia and South America to justify dictatorship. Freedom was to them a disease that only led to communism among the inferior lower classes of their country who were not capable of democracy.
For those with sympathy to the ideas I've outlined in the review, I would suggest skipping this book and going directly to the hard-core nationalistic political literature. Its what you really will want anyway. Go find a biography of Franco or something on the political ideology of LEHI.
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Enlightening
Rating  (4)
Date: 2005-07-31
2 out of 2 customers found this reveiw helpful
Demophrenia is a term coined by Paul Eidelberg to describe the political relativism that has grown up in western democracies.
In other words, the U.S. Europe and Israel have for several decades increasingly viewed totalitarian states, monarchies and other sorts of third world regimes with the same acceptance as they have their own idealistic democratic societies. The moral relativism that has been applied to so much of western life--I'm okay, you're okay--has come to rest in politics as well.
Eidelberg takes on the dangers of this state of mind with a case in point--the state of Israel, where acceptance of negotiations with the Palestinian Liberation Organization in 1994 accelerated the process of political relativity.
The book is not simply a political analysis. There is much logic and philosophy herein as well. For example, Eidelberg discusses the notion of symmetrical and asymmetrical relationships, as put forward by the psychologist and philosopher Ignacio Matte-Blanco.
The mind subliminally tends to view everything as symmetrical, he writes. If John is the brother of Peter, it also holds that Peter is the brother of John. But this view of the world and relationships breaks down when one applies it to parents. It is clearly not true that, if John is the father of Peter then Peter is the father of John. But in the logic of the unconscious this is normal. Eidelberg then proceeds to explain why these ideas are important in every democracy, using Israel as the example.
If moral relativism were merely an academic doctrine that predisposes democracies to semantic subversion, Eidelberg writes, its philosophical refutation might mitigate the ill effects. But the principals of equality and freedom--the cornerstones of democracy-- “lend themselves to relativism, hence to semantic subversion.”
Equality pervades every aspect of democratic life, shaping the minds of the educated and uneducated alike, and prompting them to apply the ideology to all domains, including moral values or opinions on how man ought to live. Equality also reinforces the principal of freedom, which nowadays generally translates to living as you like, according to Eidelberg. “The absence of ethical or conceptual constraints on self-actualization and self-determination cannot but eventuate in mental disorders and political anarchy.”
This is a fascinating political study, with a great deal of value. Its conclusion leaves something to be desired, but the discussion en route is most enlightening.
--Alyssa A. Lappen
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