Lessons from Nephite History
King Mosiah institutes the rule of the judges in about 90 BC or so. He does it because he believes that it is less common for a majority of the people* to go wicked whereas a ruler like King Noah can certainly go wicked and then drag a bunch of people down with him. Therefore King Mosiah believes it would be better to have a system where the people were formally the ultimate backstop.
By somewhere in the range of 40-20 B.C., the Nephite system of government is totally corrupt and the majority of the people support wickedness. The number of chapters in Alma obscure for us how little time has passed. 50 to 70 years.
In contrast, after King Noah’s death his people quickly rebounded to righteousness.
The baptism of Limhi, by George Ottinger
There’s a puzzle there.
Just idle thoughts. What if making the people’s general good sense and morality your explicit safeguard for power just directs attacks against your system into efforts at corrupting and undermining your people? Whereas under a monarch the people wouldn’t prevent a King Noah from getting to power but also wouldn’t be fully sold on what he was doing and would be able to recover afterwards, under a judge system evil people know right from the beginning that corrupting the people is their only remedy.
There’s two different phenomenons that could be at play. The first is the common phenomenon that systems that work pretty well informally cease to function as soon as the become formal. Despite what some theorists say where they describe the majority as an inert mass to be shaped however the statesman wills, every country is informally partly democratic. Every political system is an Irish democracy. But maybe recognizing that informal reality and trying to make it a formal reality inherently distorts the informal reality. Maybe it even ruins it.
Second, I am wondering if its some kind of Too Big Too Fail problem here. There is a some real problem that is survivable but pretty nasty, so you fix it. If the fix fails, however, its not survivable. It is as if you were tired of yearly spring floods that wash away fields and bridges, so you build a series of dams which prevent flooding in most years but occasionally have a break which washes away fields and bridges and houses and individuals, so you build a massive dam which seems like it would never break but in 100 years the dice all roll wrong and a massive flood washes away fields and bridges and houses and individuals and towns and peoples, everyone dies. Or creating a federal reserve to end the business cycles which only creates larger and less frequent but more catastrophic business cycles. There is a right level of hormesis.
I don’t know, I haven’t succeeded at persuading myself.
Perhaps what’s really going on is that the Nephite people were given the opportunity to have a higher way of life and a higher level of responsibility with each one having greater agency and they collectively funked it. Perhaps even King Mosiah didn’t dream highly enough and the best system is a noble leader actively leading a noble people into new frontiers of the spirit.
*whatever “the people” might have meant for the Nephites of that time
Jacob G.
June 20, 2024
Mormon doesn’t go into detail about their government form was after the cataclysm in 33 A.D. I suppose it was probably a theocracy until the church fell apart, and then something a little bit democratic after that, but not a Monarchy.
Perhaps the point is that if people are truly good, the government and society will be too, and the structure doesn’t matter in that circumstance.
G.
June 20, 2024
Good insight. Now that you mention it I will point out that thinking about and caring about the government form is a feature of modernity that eventually dwindles.
Eric
July 1, 2024
The dam analogy has another angle to it: when the dam isn’t failing, it’s preventing floodwaters from depositing new silt and other materials that fertilize the farmland along the river’s bank. It also leads to the river becoming more limited at its mouth as a lack of flooding leads to fewer channels being created in the delta. So then the delta shrinks, with its accompanying wetlands and the kinds of life that thrive in such an environment. We can see this happening in real life, with the Aswan Dam in Egypt as a prominent example.
Whether those effects are good or not depend on which values (such as fertile farmland) you’re willing to trade for other values (such as no flooding).