Japan is lowering the voting age to 18 from 20, giving no other explanation then “it is appropriate”.

As we know, the word and the practice of “democracy” comes from ancient Greek. The Greek established that the decisions could be taken by a vote between a number of distinguished members of society that were called the “demos”. The number of people who had the right to vote and were called “demos” was limited and those were supposedly the most clever and responsible members of the society.

Those restrictions could be traced nearly to modern times with “demos” being gradually extended to all those grown up men who were given the right to vote, assuming that they were mature enough to have the best interests of the society as a whole at heart. Unfortunately, with the widening of the voting “demos” the quality of decisions deteriorated accordingly.

Now we include nearly the whole society in the “demos” and we seem to expect the 18 year old boys and girls to be mature enough to have the best interests of the society at heart. That is definitely a perversion of the original philosophy and practice, isn’t it?

The young can be easily manipulated. They do not have the experience, the maturity, the cunning of the elder to see through the manipulations and clearly understand what is best for the country. They do not possess long-term views or wide perspectives. What kind of decisions can we expect from them? We can expect that they will go with whomever gives them the most convincing story, that is not the most truthful, not the most practical, nor the most needed, but simply the most attractively told.

Well, that’s easy to see now. That’s where the marketing comes in. This move to include younger people into the voting “demos” is nothing else than a trick to make the “demos” more gullible and easy to manipulate. Welcome to “democracy”.