(Paternalism has staged a remarkable comeback, not only in politics, but also in economics, where the 'rational individual' had been solidly enshrined. In his book, Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioural Economics (Penguin, 2016), Richard H. Thaler divides people into 'Econs' and 'Humans', the former the nonexistent creature of economic theory, and the latter the flesh-and-blood individuals of real life. Along with a colleague, he was able to persuade people in one experiment to save more than they were doing. An Econ would always be saving the right amount, being perfectly rational. But Humans have problems such as inertia, loss aversion and lack of self-control. When an economist of the traditional school evaluated their experiment, he asked, "But, isn't this paternalism? (pp 309 - 322)" This was cruel, so they decided to call their version 'libertarian paternalism', or nudge (the title of Thaler's bestseller.)
So far, we have investigated the lowest rung of the political ladder - the voter - and found him/her clearly guilty. But did the elite also take part in the murder of Mahima? Let us proceed.
According to Finer, the Forum polity (democracy, republic) has been a rarity in history whereas the Palace polity (monarchy) and its variants have been the most common. Only in the last two centuries has it become more widespread. Historically, it was largely restricted to the Greek poleis, the Roman Republic, and the mediaeval European city-states.
He adds, however: "Furthermore, most of them for most of the time exhibited the worst pathological features of this kind of polity. For rhetoric read demagogy, for persuasion read corruption, pressure, intimidation, and falsification of the vote. For meetings and assemblies, read tumult and riot. For mature deliberation through a set of revising institutions, read instead self-division, inconstancy, slowness, and legislative and administrative stultification. And for elections read factional plots and intrigues. These features were the ones characteristically associated with the Forum polity in Europe down to very recent times. They were what gave the term 'Republic' a bad name, but made 'Democracy' an object of sheer horror. (The History of Government, pp. 46-47)." As we have seen, Polybius identified democracy with ochlocracy, and even in the eighteenth century it continued to be a pejorative.
Thus, when Tambiah identifies democracy as the cause of violence in South Asia, we should not be surprised. "The general theme of whether democracy as a political process and the democratic state as a system intensify the occurrence of violence is an old one in the history of political theory. From the Greeks onwards, even up to the nineteenth century, many theorists, perhaps most, associated democracy with civil strife, and it is only subsequently that this became a minority view (Levelling Crowds, p 262)."
The minority view is not held by the elite of Bangladesh (or of South Asia). Why do they persist in believing in a system that is shown to be dangerous by empirical evidence? There are two reasons for this tenacity: one rational, another irrational.
First, the irrational.
The psychology of an elite has deep roots in experience, not so much immediate, but distant, as is history. We have seen outgroup-ingroup hostility and favoritism at work (in the context of Bangladesh, what West Pakistan did to 'us' is beyond criminal, but what 'we' did to ourselves, as in the famine of 1974 and other events of the period, must not be discussed; in India, Narendra Modi may be a 'mass murderer' but he's 'our' mass murderer, and so on.) However, society at any given time consists of groups that dominate other groups. Heavily influenced by evolutionary psychology, the group dominance theory, chiefly associated with Jim Sidanius and his colleagues, views society as inherently oppressive and group oppression to be the "normal, default, condition of human relations" (Political Psychology, p 174 - 175). Sidanius argues that
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