TOPICS: The true goal of a democratic government – Does anyone know better than the people? – The press must serve the people, not the elite – Representative democracy is a temporary stage – Why the people do know best – Why elitism creates chaos – The next stage beyond welfare – The limitations of intelligence – Two ways towards direct democracy – The potential for awakening the people – The population is not powerless –

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Ascended Master Saint Germain, May 3rd, 2017, through Kim Michaels. This dictation was given at a conference in Seoul, Korea.

I AM the Ascended Master Saint Germain. I wish to give you a discourse that applies to all of the democratic nations that have reached a higher level of democracy and are experiencing somewhat of a crisis in their nations because they do not know what is the next step for democracy. They have not seen it or they have not been willing to see it. I wish to give you my thoughts on this topic, which is a somewhat broad topic. It requires us to recognize a very simple fact that has not generally been recognized by the democratic nations, and that fact is the existence of a power elite.

I am not thereby saying that all democratic nations are ready and willing to acknowledge the teachings we have given about fallen beings on the planet. I am saying that all democratic nations need to be willing to recognize that the primary difference between a democracy and other forms of government, especially a dictatorship, is that a government that is free and democratic cannot allow the formation of a power elite.

You will see that all democratic nations had in their past a more dictatorial, centralized form of government. It needs to be understood that the central aspect of such a form of government was the formation of a small power elite that could exercise power over the majority of the population. What most democracies today call a dictatorship is a form of government where one person has near total power and around him is a power elite that has the major function of carrying out the dictator’s dictates.

The true goal of a democratic government

Nevertheless, it needs to be understood that even if you do not have a single dictator, you can still have a very small power elite that is in a privileged position where they can exercise power without accountability and where they can dictate to the people how the people should live. This, of course, is the antithesis of democracy, and it needs to be recognized that it must be the goal of a truly democratic government to make a very enlightened, aware effort to counteract the formation of power elites. It also needs to be recognized that so far, no democratic nation has done a good enough job of counteracting the formation of power elites.

It needs to be recognized also that all democratic nations had a power elite, when those nations shifted to a democratic form of government. That power elite did not simply lay down and die or evaporate into thin air. They continued to exist and they have, ever since then, attempted to influence the democratic government in many different ways. These have often been hidden ways because in a democratic country they cannot exercise power as openly as in a more centralized power structure. Nevertheless, this also puts a special responsibility on democratic governments to make sure that such a power elite cannot form, even if it seems like a benign power elite.

Does anyone know better than the people?

This, of course, brings up the topic that is at the very heart of democracy. What, my beloved, is the essence of a democracy? Well, it is that the people rule. Why then is it so that all nations that call themselves democracies have what you call a representative democracy? The people are not ruling directly by voting on issues but the people vote for representatives in their parliament and then those representatives carry out what they call the will of the people but which too often becomes the will of the hidden power elite.

Why is it that so many of the older democracies know they are in a crisis because the people’s confidence in the government is falling, yet they do not know what to do about it? Well, it is very simple my beloved. It is because in those older democracies a power elite has formed and that power elite is not willing to let go of its power. Now, you may say: “Is there not a difference between the power elite in a democratic country and the power elite in a dictatorial country?”

In many cases there is a difference because the power elite that has formed in many of the older democracies is what you could, with a certain irony, call a benevolent power elite. With that I mean to some degree that, it is not a power elite that is openly aggressive and openly and deliberately and maliciously seeking to suppress, manipulate and control the population. It is however an elite who is seeking to manipulate and control the population because they think they know better. They know better than the people how the country should be run. This is a topic that all democratic nations, but especially the older ones, need to consider very carefully.

My beloved, if you go to just about every democratic nation, you can ask the people who are elected representatives, who are in the bureaucratic establishment, who are in the educational institutions, the financial institutions, and the press and the media. If you ask these people what they think about this topic, most of them will say that the population, the people of their nation, are not capable of running the nation, of ruling the nation, because they simply don’t know enough about how to run the country. They don’t understand the complicated dynamics involved with running a country.

Now my beloved, you may, if you want to be kind to this elite, say that they are right. In many nations the people, if you look at the broader population, do not know enough about how their country works or how, for example, the economy works, so that they could rule the country. Can you see that when this statement is made by a power elite, it is hollow, it is hypocritical because, my beloved, who is in charge of the educational system and the press and the media of that country? Is it not the very power elite who claim that the people don’t know enough? If that power elite has not educated the people as to how the country works, whose responsibility is it?

If they have not educated the people, it is not because the people are not capable of being educated but because the power elite is not willing to educate the people because they do not want to share power. It is, my beloved, that simple. There is no way around it, there is no fancy argumentation you can come up with that changes the dynamic here. The power elite of the older democracies have not been willing to educate their own people as to how the country works and that is entirely their responsibility. You see my beloved, this form of democracy cannot take the world into the Golden Age. It is impossible to move into the Golden Age without educating and enlightening the people as to how a country works because in the Golden Age the people must rule. They must make the major decisions.

The press must serve the people, not the elite

My beloved, what needs to be done to change this dynamic? Well, it can only happen by the people beginning to stand up for themselves and demanding a different form of government where they have a more direct influence. We have talked before about this phenomenon of direct democracy where the people vote in popular referendums about major issues in the country.

There will be a considerable resistance to this idea even in many of the older democracies. Do you not see that all of these democracies are facing a situation where the population have less and less faith in their elected representatives, in those who run the economy, in those who run the educational systems and in those who run the press and the media? You may say, if you are a member of this power elite, that this is a dangerous development because the people often respond to what has lately been labelled as fake news. But you see, my beloved, why is it that the people are so open to news that do not come from the established sources? It is because even if the people cannot articulate this, they know that they cannot trust what comes from the mainstream media because the mainstream media has as its primary objective to maintain the status quo.

They want to maintain the present power structure. So you may say that it is dangerous when people respond to these fake news − and I will not disagree that it can be dangerous − but then, what is the alternative? It is, of course, that the news that are already there need to wake up and realize that they will only survive if they serve the interests of the people, not the elite.

It is not the job of a free press to preserve the current power structure when that power structure does not serve the people and does not serve the country in the long run. The country is moving into a new phase of its development where the old form of representative democracy is becoming obsolete, is becoming outdated. Of course, the power elite that has taken advantage of representative democracy does not want their hold on the country to be upset, to be overturned, and therefore they will do anything they can to maintain that structure.

This means that there are those among the power elite in some nations who are deliberately creating fake news in order to undermine the peoples’ belief in, or faith in, alternative news media. They believe that by putting out fake news that are so outrageous that people can see through them or that can be exposed by the mainstream media as being fake, they can scare the people to come back and only listen to mainstream media. My beloved, this is an exceptionally naive belief and it simply cannot happen. You cannot turn the clock back to a situation where most people had faith in the major media outlets. These media outlets are like the dinosaurs. It is just that those who work in them have not realized that they have become extinct.

My beloved, the major media outlets in most democratic nations are run by people who are part of this power elite. They see themselves as a benevolent power elite. They sit there in their media towers, their fortifications, and they think that they will somehow be able to survive in the internet age and maintain their monopoly on printing newspapers, printing books, running television stations and radio stations. They think they can maintain their structure and maintain their advertising income and get people to continue to subscribe to their newspapers and magazines even though the people are losing faith in them. But it cannot be done, my beloved, and it cannot be done for one very simple reason. They are not serving the people and the people are beginning to realize this in greater and greater numbers.

Why are they not serving the people? Because they have built such an arrogance of thinking that they can know what the people should think about all topics. Therefore, they believe it is not their job to simply report the news and let the people form their own opinion. They believe it is the job of the media outlets to form the opinions of the people. They believe that they know what opinions people should have in order to maintain stability in their country. My beloved, as I have said before and as we have said before, we as the ascended masters do not have it as our primary goal to maintain stability but to maintain growth, to create growth, to create self-transcendence.

The rest of this dictation, along with an invocation based on the dictation, is found in the book: Accepting Saint Germain’s Golden Age.