Getting Free from Being Governed by Knaves

Here’s a neat word for you: kakistocracy.

It means “government by the worst persons.” The word, which dates back to the 1820s, derives from the Greek word kakistos (worst). The Oxford English Dictionary offers a quotation from James Russell Lowell: “Is ours a government of the people, by the people, for the people, or a Kakistocracy rather, for the benefit of knaves at the cost of fools?”

Good question.

Long ago, Srimad-Bhagavatam (12.1.40) told of the rogues who would take hold of the governments of the world in Kali-yuga, the present Age of Quarrel:

asamskrtah kriya-hina
rajasa tamasavrtah
prajas te bhaksayisyanti
mleccha rajanya-rupinah

“Crude and untrained, barren of spiritual culture, and drenched in passion and ignorance, these barbarians playing as heads of state will devour their citizens.”

By taxes. By collusion with giant corporate interests. By factories and slaughterhouses. By domestic acts of “foreign terrorism” engineered by one’s own government. By brutal invasions launched on false pretexts so that one percent of the world’s people can keep a privileged hold on ninety-five percent of the wealth.

The Bhagavatam (12.2.8) predicts:

praja hi lubdhai rajanyair
nirghrnair dasyu-dharmabhih
acchinna-dara-dravina
yasyanti giri-kananam

“Such greedy and merciless government men will act no better than thieves. And as they plunder people’s property and snatch men’s wives, people will flee to the mountains and forests.”

Three days ago, two hundred riot police in the central Asian state of Kazakhstan descended on a small, peaceful rural community of Hare Krishna devotees, demolished thirteen homes, and threw men, women, and children out into the snow. Their property had become valuable. And word had come down that the president’s brother wanted it. So trash the legalities and commandeer the land.

Welcome to the Age of Kali. It only gets worse.

Except for one way out:

kaler dosa-nidhe rajann
asti hy eko mahan gunah
kirtanad eva krsnasya
mukta-sangah param vrajet

Here the Bhagavatam (12.3.51) recounts advice given in a former age, back when heads of state were noble: “My dear king, in the ocean of faults called the Age of Quarrel there is only one good quality: Simply by chanting the Hare Krishna maha-mantra one can get free from material bondage and attain to the spiritual world.”

The hell with the kakistocrats, the knaves who wield state power to bulldoze and plunder! And the hell with this material world!

Chant Hare Krishna and get free from them both.