NeantHumain wrote:
The saying is don't feed the trolls!, but I'll take the bate as this is Politics, Philosophy, and Religion. (Or perhaps his sense of irony just doesn't cross the language barrier very well.)
In Western countries like the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands, we are raised early to believe in democracy. Well, we have more or less liberal democracies (a system of representational popular rule with constitutional limitations protecting individual rights) or social democracies (with a greater emphasis on societal guarantees for a standard of living). People like these systems because they've proven themselves to be comfortable and relatively free.
So the impulse to lord it over all the rest is anti-democratic and perceived as dangerous. This is why this thread has been more a discussion of Plotinus than of the idea he has proposed. The response is derision: mockery, ostracism. He holds an idea that offends the status quo here. That's not to say the visceral negative reactions aren't justifiable; clearly, they are, but I'd prefer to show why.
Western democracies have shown a trend towards greater inclusion and acceptance of minorities. Society still needs to be educated on the full range of autism spectrum conditions from profoundly disabling cases of autism to less visibly impairing cases of Asperger's syndrome. Greater understanding is being had of developmental differences, psychiatric disorders, and neurological conditions. We can make this progress because in a democracy like in the U.S. people can voice their concerns and pool resources for issues of social justice, and we have a legal system that respects certain fundamental rights for all people (again, with the usual caveat that the system isn't perfect). This only indicates a continuing need for education, understanding, and reform. Of course, we still have an elite class rather than societal equality, but a democratic system, especially as progressively more democratic reforms are made, will narrow that gap (some politicians seem to be bent on cementing in an American oligarchy).
An aristocracy makes no reform possible for the common wheal as their interest only goes so far as it advantages the nobility (you can see a continuum here between highly egalitarian, anarchic democracy and a rigidly hierarchical aristocracy on the other). Plotinus would want those "best fit rule" to mean the intelligent and the autistic (nominally us). So by circumstance of birth, we'd be granted much greater privilege, enforced by law. If we were born under another set of circumstances, Plotinus would have us treated as serfs. Additionally, such a system is highly disturbing to someone with a sense of empathy.
I absolutely agree. This is the core reason why I am pro-democracy despite the fact that sometimes the elected officials turn out to be terrible leaders.