The root ‘paed’ (or ‘ped’) derives from the Greek for boy or, more generally, child. It appears in many words, mostly compounds. These range from the laudable pedagogue and paediatrician to the eccentric pedant to the naughty pederast and nasty paedophile.
Greek no longer being taught in British schools, our comprehensively educated thugs place too much emphasis on the first root of some compounds and not enough on the second. As a result, they sometimes attack paediatricians, mistaking them for paedophiles.
Yet, whatever we feel about pederasty and paedophilia, neither presents a greater danger than another ‘paedo’ word: paedocracy, rule by children.
You don’t even have to read Lord of the Flies to validate this point of view. Just look at Britain, a country soon to suffer untold misery brought about partly by her ideological commitment to paedocracy.
Taking his cue from the French statesman Guizot, Churchill once said that “Any man who is not a socialist at age 20 has no heart. Any man who is still a socialist at age 40 has no head.”
Some doubt the attribution of this quote, but few doubt its veracity. Actually, real, visceral conservatives are unlikely to be socialists at any age, which doesn’t mean they have no heart. But the statement rings true as an indicator of a general trend.
It’s vindicated by modern democracies, where youngsters tend to vote for Left-wing politicians and causes, whereas older and wiser heads are more likely to vote the right way.
The two latest polls follow this trend: but for the youth, the Leave vote would have been a landslide, rather than merely a convincing majority; and Corbyn would have lost the general election by a crushing margin.
One has to admire Nick Clegg’s unapologetic cynicism manifest in his insistence that we need a second referendum because the Leave voters are dying out. They are indeed, if perhaps not quite at a rate Nick would welcome.
Of course our putative champions of democracy only like it when the ballot goes their way. No one who takes democracy seriously would have a legitimate reason to complain about the referendum. The turnout was the highest of any election since 1992, and Leave got more votes than Yes to Common Market in 1975, Major in 1992, Blair in 1997 and Cameron in either 2010 or 2015.
But Clegg’s reference to voting demographics is unimpeachable, as is the implied strategy of paedocratic subversion. For, to quote that other great advocate of democracy, Leon Trotsky, the youth are indeed “the barometer of the nation”.
Ever since government by divine right was replaced with government by manipulation, politicians have depended on a silly electorate easy enough to manipulate.
The quickest way of achieving this devious goal is to lower the voting age. The young, so beloved of Trotsky and other tyrants, are attractive specifically because their gonads are at their most active, while their brains aren’t yet even wired properly.
This is an ideal combination for expert manipulators, and they’ve always taken advantage of it. Every modern revolution featured mature gentlemen inciting subversion, but the young actually perpetrating it.
Today’s 18-year-olds, ripe as they are physiologically, are children psychologically and, typically, infants intellectually. Easy to organise into a rioting mob, they’re incapable of passing mature judgement on even trivial matters.
Would you trust an 18-year-old to run a university department? Coach a football team? Manage a large company? Of course not.
Yet somehow we feel that children ought to have an equal say in how the country is run, even though compared to this activity those mentioned above are indeed child’s play. This doesn’t make sense.
Nor is it supposed to. For aspiring Left-wing tyrants aren’t after mature statesmanship. They want their wicked ideology to prevail at any cost, which history shows is guaranteed to be exorbitant.
And, regardless of whether or not socialists hold political power, they invariably manage to usurp intellectual power, imposing their own seditious ideas on public discourse.
Through their control of mass media, Left-wing ideologues hypnotise the electorate into cerebral inertia. People have been brainwashed into responding to ‘liberal’ slogans not with reason, like sapient humans, but with instincts, like Pavlov’s dogs.
That’s why so few stop to wonder what sort of catharsis occurred in 1970, when the voting age in Britain was lowered from 21 to 18. Was it felt that the rapidly declining standards of public education had overnight made children wiser?
And now a movement is afoot to lower the voting age even further, to 16. Apparently even Dominic Raab, MP, a good conservative egg, is in favour of this abomination, proving yet again that even good political eggs can only ever be of the curate’s variety.
Would he trust a scrofulous adolescent to handle his personal finances? Somehow one doubts that. Yet this supposedly conservative politician feels that the same youth is qualified to pass judgement on public finances (among other vital issues) – and enforce it with his vote.
It’s predictable that advocates of silly ideas will offer silly arguments in support. And “the young will live with the consequences of our policies, so they should have their say” is as silly as they get.
By the same token, babies will live with such consequences even longer, so should they have the vote too? That’s probably where the country is heading.
If the maxim attributed to Churchill is right, and history shows it is, then many of those scrofulous youths will shed their silly ideas in parallel with losing their acne. Then they’ll find out the hard way that doing things is easier than undoing them.
Just look at the hoops we have to jump through to get out of the EU, that corrupt, tyrannical, anti-historical contrivance. Yet all it took to get in was one flurry of John Major’s pen.
Should Corbyn’s stormtroopers succeed in manipulating the youth vote to win the next election, they’ll plunge the country into an economic, social, and moral abyss – much deeper than one even Mrs May can manage, and she’s trying her best.
Then we’ll realise that paedocracy is indeed the deadliest ‘paedo-’ word in English, and that ‘young people’ is indeed an oxymoron. But even if we ever manage to climb out of the abyss, it’ll take decades to do so.
Raise the voting age to at least to 25, I say. This of course isn’t politically expedient, a concept that modernity has turned into an antonym of right, intelligent and moral.
Thank you for such a good piece on pedocracy i.e. rule by youth (Yoof?).
Up to the close of 1960’s, the voting age in the Anglosphere countries overall was 21. Moreover, many if not, most youngsters left school in their mid teens to join the labour force. Thus, they would have had several years experience of the adult workaday world before casting their first ballot.
As the 1970’s began, several such countries reduced the voting age to 18. This took place though, when increasing proportion of youngsters were staying at school longer.
Thus a situation of reduced or even lack of adequate exposure to adult workaday world does indeed have electoral and political implications.