Another SBS series

Next in the series of crazy, excellent SBS TV shows; it's a series called "Why Democracy".
One episode, called "For God, Tsar and Fatherland" features a fat man swimming in his freezing swimming pool while his servants do petty chores inside his sprawling castle and garden. He has convinced them that they need his religious guidance and that Imperial Russia needs a strong Orthodox faith to defeat the Imperialist, rotting West. The fat man illuminates, proving (quite convincingly) that God's soul is not democratic and (less convincingly), that therefore a society which doesn't recognise the necessity for an inherently hierarchical order in human society will inevitably crumble....Quasi-scientifically, he says that because successful wolf packs have this absence of equality, so too must humans follow God and then Tsar, and religion understands this "basic fact". I must that the plausibility of his argument [that religion allied to nationalism might prove a strong opponent to an increasingly divided, atheistic West] scares me a little. And also, within Western countries, those in the shrinking religious minority have more and more elitist, co-operatively inspired power than the rest of us divided atheists...look at the influence of the Christian far-right in USA and Australia especially. Oleg, a lawyer, is one of the adults oddly taken to this re-education camp by his ageing mother.

It is true that Russia is growing again, and the fat man has me thinking about the fact that more religiously observant societies tend to be poorer. Somebody once said that religion was only for the poor, weak or disillusioned, although now I think religion (at least in the modern world) causes the poverty which breeds national weakness and personal disillusionment, which reinforces the drive towards theocracy which then perpetuates the misery. Chicken and egg, and all chicken-or-egg problems have the same structure of solution...I suppose in the west the chickens are fewer and the eggs are easily broken.

Hey religious people out there, if citizens in a society are not striving for understanding and mastery of all things material (science)...in any case, what is non-material anyway? :p AND hoping for the most efficient acquisition of all things material (through capitalistic competition), it's not surprising that you should fail to obtain the material things which you desire, and so not surprising that your country lacks wealth and so global hard (military) and soft (cultural) power.
And down below, a man in Iran protesting against the Danish Mohammed cartoons holds a sign saying "Freedom of Expression Go To Hell" and in the backdrop, the words "Down with the USA" have been literally carved in to the wall, presumably an officially-funded artwork.

See whydemocracy.net -- The 10 questions posed by "Why Democracy?" are:

Who would you vote for as President of the World? What would make you start a revolution? Can terrorism destroy democracy? Is Democracy good for everyone? Are dictators ever good? Who rules the world? Are women more democratic than men? Why bother to vote? Is God democratic? Can politicians solve climate change?