The growing political risk is a major concern nowadays.
The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the Greek Debt Crisis were fiscal and financial risks, but with the emergence of Trump administration and Brexit, the situation we face nowadays has a clear association with increased political risks. Even among EU countries, nationalists and Euroskeptics have grown and populism has surged. It seems that the long-dominant societal foundation based on Western democracy has considerably weakened.
However, if you think about the fact that liberalism became the mainstream after the Cold War, the current system has only about 30 years of history, which is too short to declare it the standard.
It was Winston Churchill who said:
No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Thus, we must be aware that democracy and mobocracy are separated only by a fine line, and that democracy is the system where the quality of the people matters the most.
There is a famous story titled Yakozen (Wild Fox Koan) in the book The Gateless Barrier compiled by Wumen Huikai, a Chinese Zen master of the Southern Song Dynasty period. It goes like this:
Whenever Master Baizhang held a meeting, an old man used to listen to the teaching along with the assembly. When the people of the assembly left, the old man would also leave. Then one day the old man stayed behind, and the master asked him who he was. The old man said, “I am not a human being. In the past, in the time of a prehistoric Buddha, I used to live on this mountain. As it happened, a student asked me whether or not greatly cultivated people are also subject to causality. I said that they are not subject to causality, and I fell into the state of a wild fox for five hundred lifetimes. Now I ask you to turn a word in my behalf, so that I may be freed from being a wild fox.”
Then the old man asked, “Are greatly cultivated people still subject to causality?” The master said, “They are not blind to causality.” The old man was greatly enlightened at these words.[…]
Translation by Thomas Cleary (1993) “No Barrier: Unlocking the Zen Koan: A New Translation of the Zen Classic Wumenguan (Mumonkan)”
Yakozen (“ya” is wild and “ko” is fox) is an incorrect, evil kind of zen, which extends to meaning a half-baked understanding as well as the act of using it as complete knowledge (wild fox signifies a low-level specter fox). When I read this, I can’t help but reflect our political history and see Yakozen in our concept of democracy or liberalism. We thought we knew what democracy and liberalism were and how they would create an ideal society, but after all, it might have been that we simply lacked insight into what constitutes ourselves and our society.
In Yakozen, when the fox was once a head priest, he was asked whether or not people who are enlightened through practices are freed from the law of cause and effect. To this question, he answered, “Yes, they are not bound to cause and effect.”, and therefore had to turn into a wild fox. The Zen Master Baizhang advised him, “Do not be blind to causality,” that is, one needs to correctly recognize causality. With these words, the wild fox had a realization.
Munesuke Mita, one of the leading sociologists in Japan, said, “lucidity is a blind belief.”
In his book “Kiryu no Naru Oto (Sound of an Air Current)”, he continues:
It (i.e. lucidity) is a blind belief towards the generalization of a specific theoretical framework that you hold now. It is to be chained to your own historical and cultural worldviews.
Yusuke Maki, “Kiryu no naru oto: koukyo suru komyun” (Sound of an air current: A symphonic commune), 2003.
Into blinding darkness (ignorance)
enter those who worship ignorance (rites).
Into greater darkness, as it were, than that
enter those who are devoted to knowledge (the ceremonial portion of the Vedas).
Brihadaranyaka Upanishad Verse 4.4.10, as cited in Maki, 2003
Note: English interpretation is based on the translation by Swami Madhavananda (1950)
To fall into an illusion that we understand things might be the most dangerous mistake. You may think you know it, but this could eventually let something pull the rug out from under you. This is exactly what the wild fox episode teaches us. Think about the Weimar Republic of the old German state; it allowed the emergence of the Nazi Party, even when it had the most advanced democratic constitutional framework at that time.
Given various uncertainties, building a system where everyone can participate in sharing knowledge and wisdom to make things better is the only approach we can take to ensure that we can keep moving forward. Speaking of Brexit, it may be that we, as human beings, have been repeating this type of mess for different lifetimes over and over again (probably more than 500 times in our case). Amid this time in history where authoritarianism is gaining traction worldwide, there is an increasing presence of autocratic rulers in the political system. Under the drastically changing economic environment, there is a need to devote ourselves to find the most effective political framework, and to decide what system is best for us and what we can achieve by it. Before singing Auld Lang Syne (the traditional Scottish song sang by the Members of EU Parliament), I would like to think it through.