Dangers of Democracy

We democrats can see the dangers of monarchy and fascism wih some clarity. We understand the dangers of democracy less well. A democracy which exists with the Faustian space of the modern world and has thereby lost any sense of the modes of being and levels of knowing can no longer know either what a person is or what wisdom is. We have been taught that knowledge will make us free. But at the same time, we have come to confuse knowledge with wisdom, to believe that all knowledge is equally valuable, that anything we can do we should do, and that by making all knowledge available to everyone, our problems will be solved. The metaphysical perspective that gives priority to facts is blind to persons. There is a fine line between the repressions of individuality by totalitarian regimes (or totalizing discourses) and its evaporation into nihilism through the triump of relativism, spiritual confusion, and the domination of the dis-Oriented.

--Tom Cheetham, The World Turned Inside Out, 110-111.