Armando P. Ribas

Rule of Law: the Path to Freedom Armando P. Ribas

There is a great confusion in the world and even more in that part of the world that considers itself as representing the Western civilization. This confusion arises in two realms: the semantics and the conceptual. The first of these confusions is the result of ignoring the ethical and the political philosophy antithesis between the Anglo-American philosophy and the Franco-German one. As Balint Vazsonyi once wrote, they are as different as day and night. At the same time, that philosophical confusion to which Dr Ribas refers as the syncretism of Western philosophy, is the pretentious nirvana of democracy in the West. Conceptually, democracy may be divided in two antithetical systems: the rule of law and the majority rule. Majority rule is the opposite of the protection of individual rights: to life, liberty, property and the pursuance of happiness. In this book Dr Armando P. Ribas exposes the fact that the apparent rights of the majorities are no more than the absolute power of governments in the name of the people, that constitutes the new deity. This is in Aristotelian terms demagoguery, and the reason why democracy fails in Latin America, as it happened in Europe where Hitler and Mussolini represented majority rule as the most common excuse: reason of the state.