Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Name	Ludwig Wittgenstein
Life	1889 - 1951
Country	Austria
Category	Idealism
Wikipedia	>>

This occult saying of one of the world's most cryptic philosophers in the 20th century can be understood in many ways. On a simple level it is a warning not to take sides in the, since Darwin ongoing conflict between religion and science. My park, for which this booklet is written, is essentially, however, a park for political philosophy. From that point of view, another and a more sinister interpretation of Wittgenstein's saying is possible. Some say that in reality societies are always ruled by an elite. Others that the masses are always content with bread and circus, which today is TV sex and violence. If so, perhaps the stability of our societies demands that the elite keep silent about the deepest political truths and help the masses forget about life's real problems, ever providing them with media infotainment and playful nonsense gadgets. Which "deep political truths and real problems"? Perhaps the leaders themselves don't really know what they are doing. Perhaps they are only grappling with the big problems - inequality, ethnic hate, inflation, unemployment, etc - by blind trial and error. But as the sheep demand good shepherds, our leaders must pretend to know and to "march with firm and sure steps on the road of truth, virtue and happiness...", as Condorcet hoped they would. A prominent Jewish-American political philosopher, Leo Strauss (1899-1973), has suggested that there are two types of knowledge. One is the exoteric one, through which the elite can manipulate the masses. The other is esoteric knowledge, which should be restricted

to the elite and used to calm the fears and qualms of the uproarious masses. Like orthodox priests behind the iconostatsis, our leaders, behind guarded silence, should pretend to have a hotline to supreme truth. Modern research shows that huge differences in intelligence exist in any society, global as well as local. Three out of onehundred individuals test above 130 on IQ-tests, 50 below 101 and some 17 below 85. The ruling elite, which rarely exceeds one in a thousand - the others up there are obedient and loyal climbers - are normally recruited from the first of the three groups. Their understanding of complicated problems is likely to be significantly higher than those who test below 85. These facts, which by IQ-experts are considered "objective", are however hateful to the many who want to be "equal" in every sense and who, in our democracies, are given formally equal weight in political affairs. We should not close our eyes to this dilemma in "the worst of all political systems, with the exception of all the others that have been tried", as the greatest defender of democracy, Winston Churchill, supposedly said. To do so would be to shut out an important problem in a world growing ever more complicated. Perhaps the survival of our societies depends upon the silence of the political elite about how they, with modern media persuasion, manipulate the masses in order to maintain some order in our atomic world. No serious politician can believe in democracy, but nothing is more important than that the masses do so! That is at least what some may think. Behind the veil of enlightened silence, however, corruption may grow. How to strike a balance between the ideal of "transparency" and manipulative silence is bound to become a serious problem for democracy in our atomic future.