Long ago a very famous man made the following observations:
“In all countries there may be distinguished three classes of citizens – the very rich, the very poor; and the middle class which forms the mean.
Now it is admitted, as a general principle, that moderation and the mean is always the best. We may, therefore, conclude that in the ownership of all gifts of fortune a middle condition will be the best.
Men who are in this condition are the most willing to listen to reason. Those who belong to either extreme – the over strong, the over wealthy; or at the opposite end the over poor, the over weak – find it hard to follow the lead of reason.”
“Men in the first class tend more to serious crime (white collar); those in the second too much to roguery and petty crime; and most wrongdoing arises from those two extreme groups. It is a further merit of the middle class that its members suffer least from ambition, which both in the military and civil sphere is dangerous to countries.
It must be added that those who enjoy too many advantages – strength, wealth, connections and so forth – are both unwilling to obey and ignorant how to obey.
This defect appears in them from the first, during childhood and in the home life: nurtured in luxury they never acquire a habit of discipline. But there are also defects in those who suffer from the opposite extreme of lack of advantages: they are far too mean and poor spirited. The result is not a country of free men (democracy) but a condition of envy on the one hand on the other contempt.”
It is astonishing how relevant this entire quotation is in today’s world. It could well have been written last week. The entire quotation is old, very old. It was written by the most famous philosopher-scientist whoever lived.
His name was Aristotle (384-322 BC). He was the last in sequence of the three famous men of Athens, Greece: Socrates, Plato and then Aristotle.
His comments concerning the middle class goes a long way in explaining in today’s world why it is so difficult to establish democracies in countries where the middle class is virtually non-existent.
That is why President Bush’s idiotic objective of replacing Saddam Hussein in Iraq with a democracy was doomed from the start.
It is to be remembered that it is not only the Muslim nations that universally have a small middle class but most of the world.
Non-democracies outnumber democracies by three or four to one depending on how you define a democracy.
Theodore Theodorsen
Manhasset
