perpetual tyranny

In my previous post I dealt with the question of how Protestant and Catholic cultures handle the issue of replacing a bad government. I want now to go a step further and consider an oppressive, tyrannical government. My purpose is to inquire which of the two cultures, the Protestant or the Catholic, has the best safeguards to protect individual freedom.

The natural form of government in Catholic culture is autocracy. This culture deals with an autocratic tyrant ultimately by killing him; if a second tyrant arises after the first, he will be killed too, and so on and so forth until a non-tyrant autocrat is found.

Let us consider now the natural form of government of Protestant culture - democracy. This culture deals with a tyrannical government by holding elections and replacing it by a new majority; if this second majority is tyrannical as well it might be replaced by a third majority in the next elections, and so on and so forth. The point is that if all successive majorities are tyrannical, democracy offers no escape from tyranny.

It is possible to kill an autocratic tyrant, it is even possible to kill several of them in a row. It is not possible to kill the majority of the people in a society. Catholic culture has thus an ultimate, decisive solution to guarantee individual freedom and save people from oppression and tyranny - killing the tyrant. Protestant culture with its democratic form of government has none. Actually, democracy is the only form of government that can lead to perpetual tyranny.