Governement Question Hour June 26 9 am

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JerryDon Lane
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Re: Governement Question Hour June 26 9 am

Post by JerryDon Lane »

Ahem......yes, then perhaps G could explain how he uses Polybian analysis to determine that it is unethical for a Chancellor to be married to an RA member in RL. I would ask him to take us step by step through this analysis to show how we could join him in reaching this same conclusion. :D

The Constitution is not an instrument for the government to restrain the people, it is an instrument for the people to restrain the government — lest it come to dominate our lives and interests. Patrick Henry
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Guillaume Mistwalker
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Re: Governement Question Hour June 26 9 am

Post by Guillaume Mistwalker »

I was in the middle of writing a very long post in response, JD, before my computer's power cut out. I hope you will excuse brevity and not mistake it for ignorance.

Polybius was an ancient Achaean - from the Northern Peloponnese - who was strategos, or general/executive, whose moderately anti-Roman politics caused the Romans to remove him from office and take him to Rome, where he became a historian in order to explain to Greeks why the Romans began to dominate Greece. His Histories explained Rome's dominance from dominating only all of Italy by 260 BCE to dominating the Mediterranean and joining both the East and West with symploké by 140 BCE - a little over a century later. Part of Polybius's analysis relies on how the Romans had so much power, and he answers this with an analysis of Rome's peculiar republic (Polyb. 6.2.8-6.3.4).

In the Greek imagination, there were three types of "good" government and three types of "bad" government (6.3.5-6.4.9). These rotate in a cyclical system, or kyklos, whereby one good government decays into a bad government, a revolution happens and the enfranchisement becomes broader, and this repeats until the rule by a mob, when the entire cycle restarts and begins again at monarchy (6.6.10-6.9.10). The explanation of archaic anarchy and chaos aside, those six governments cycle in this way:
monarchy -> tyranny
aristocracy -> oligarchy
democracy -> ochlocracy (rule by mob)

A republic, however, is not one of those forms of government. In the concept of the kyklos, a republic is in the centre: it is a tripolar state system wherein the elements of "good government" are preserved (6.11.11-6.11.13). The consuls (or the executive) is the monarchical element (6.12); the senate is the aristocratic element (6.13); the assemblies of the people at Rome are the democratic elements (6.14). In terms of modern republics, the Enlightenment-era thinkers reorganised this republican system to make it executive-legislative-judicial; to the ancients, the judicial was not so important and its functions would have been taken up by the democratic or aristocratic elements (this is not important for the subject at hand). Polybius finally explains how this tripolar system brings out the 'good governance' in those three forms of government (6.15-6.18).

The opening line of 6.57 is humbling, and ought to remind one that even republics decay and return to the system of kyklos: "That all existing things are subject to decay and change is a truth that scarcely needs proof; for the course of nature is sufficient to force this conviction on us. There being two agencies by which every kind of state is liable to decay, the one external and the other a growth of the state itself, we can lay down no fixed rule about the former, but the latter is a regular process" (Polyb. 6.57.1-6.57.2).

This selection of lines from Polybius should be heart-wrenching and make you quiver with a sense of concern running down your spine, as they do mine when I consider how Sandus and the CDS may no longer be truly free:

"When a state has weathered many great perils and subsequently attains to supremacy and uncontested sovereignty, it is evident that under the influence of long established prosperity, life will become more extravagant and the citizens more fierce in their rivalry regarding office and other objects than they ought to be. As these defects go on increasing, the beginning of the change for the worse will be due to love of office and the disgrace entailed by obscurity, as well as to extravagance and purse-proud display; and for this change the populace will be responsible when on the one hand they think they have a grievance against certain people who have shown themselves grasping, and when, on the other hand, they are puffed up by the flattery of others who aspire to office. For now, stirred to fury and swayed by passion in all their counsels, they will no longer consent to obey or even to be the equals of the ruling caste, but will demand the lion's share for themselves. When this happens, the state will change its name to the finest sounding of all, freedom and democracy, but will change its nature to the worst thing of all, mob-rule."
(Polybius 6.57.5-6.57.9)

Modern scholars explain this in slightly a different way. It is when two of the poles in the tripolar state-system, much like a tripolar international diplomatic system (as the Hellenistic kingdoms of Macedon, Syria, and Egypt found themselves in 200 BCE), that a republic begins to decay. If two poles of the tripolar system unite, the entire system - which some have considered to be a spinning top - becomes too heavy to those two poles and the entire system collapses to the ground. While in the CDS we do not yet have two entire poles uniting, we do have a member of one pole uniting with another: the Xigalias have the leaders of their house in two of the poles of our republic. Thus, it is the concern of many citizens that the Chancellor and the RA member should exercise the supreme amount of caution and, when necessary, recuse themselves or be level-headed when there is a blatant conflict of interest. I believe that is the implicit concern of Cadence, Rosie, and Tor over having two members of the same house - or as Rosie puts it, two people "who literally sleep in the same bed" - in two branches of government. This has never before been as much as a concern, at least in my four years of being in the CDS, because there have simply been no two members of the same house or the same family in two different branches of government.

Ultimately, this does not mean that the CDS will collapse simply because we have M. Xigalia as Chancellor and Mme Xigalia as RA member: it just means that it is more likely the entire system will be more prone to decay.

Gaius Nebuliens Curio (Guillaume Mistwalker)
si enim pecunias aequari non placet, si ingenia omnium paria esse non possunt, iura certe paria debent esse eorum inter se, qui sunt cives in eadem re publica. (Cic. De Rep. 1.32.49)
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