Collapse of the First Global Civilization Part 6
The Failure of Democracy
Previous Parts in the Series
This series addresses the current environmental crisis in light of major new discoveries about human culture.
Part 1 introduced the two major reasons the First Global Civilization has started into collapse: over population vs. limited resources, and complexity vs. limited human brain ability. The A3 discoveries were also introduced. They will be used throughout the series to explain in more detail why these two problems are causing the collapse and how society can best get through it. This part also explained how the world, until just after WWII, still lacked an adequate scientific understanding to see how human civilization was approaching a limit to sustain human life.
Part 2 discussed how the scientific studies finally started coming together in the late ’50s to expose the impending problem. The studies quantified how our current world population is using resources faster than the earth can replenish them. The studies showed that the “storeroom” of critical supplies nature created before humans arrived is running out. Humans, however, were not able to accept the new scientific observations.
Part 2 then briefly explains why the new science alone was not sufficient to successfully change human behavior. Even though people throughout the world see evidence right in from of them, because of limitation of human thinking, most humans aren’t able to understand the science or VISUALIZE the implications. There are some people who did understand it and tried to explain to the world the impending ecological crises we face.
In 1962, Rachael Carson write the book Silent Spring about the world wide death of birds due to DDT. Large public protests occurred. It still took over 10 years of protests, the establishment of the Environmental Defense Fund, and many expensive lawsuits for the US to respond with a national ban on DDT. A similar process occurred after the publication of Farman’s 1985 report on the Ozone Hole. But, the phase-out of Freon only started in ’94 with a “directive” from the UN, with further enforcement by the EU in ’97. However, this problem has still not been put to bed! Only as recently as 2007, at the Montreal climate summit, did most of the countries in the world agree to stop fluorocarbon use. But even then, the complete ban date was kicked down the road to 2020!
For the last 40 years, world governments, university professors, leaders in the environmental movement and many media celebrities have talked about the problem. But they have made very little progress. Society, however, has made major breakthroughs before, like putting a man on the moon. So, why have these 40 years of talk been so unsuccessful?
Part 3 explained the concept of the “Stone Age brain” and how the limits of current human brains are not capable of dealing with the complexity of modern technology or the complex social structures we have set up. Human brains are fine tuned for quick responses to dangers immediately at hand. If your house catches fire, and you see the flames, your brain will instantly think of many ways to get out. When the problem is very complex, and the details can’t be directly observed, human brains don’t do so well.
Part 4 went beyond the simple inability of human brains to understand complexity and discussed deep psychological barriers Stone Age brains have that block people from taking action.
Part 5 dug into a never before understood problem of human language that has gridlocked governments around the world and prevented humans, the media, academia and public spokes people from being able to understand each other.
All parts of this series are based on the A3 Discoveries
Part 6, which is this story, will dig into major flaws pervading one of modern society’s most fundamental and cherished institutions: DEMOCRACY!
Because this story is so long, here is a Table of Contents so a reader can jump to sections that might be of particular interest.
The FAILURE of DEMOCRACY
Flaws in the Basic Model of Democracy Itself
A. Governing
Basic Concept Of Freedom
Time Needed For Action
B. Majority Rule
Majority Rule
Large Number Of Candidates — Stepwise Voting
Lynch Mob Democracy
Absolute Rights — A Bill Of Rights
Summary for Majority voting
C. Supreme Power Vested In The People
MISUSE of the TERM “THE PEOPLE”
Laws Are Too Naïve
D. Exercised Directly Or Through Representatives
A Serious Problem With The Definition of Democracy Chosen for the Introduction
Representative Democracy
Political Parties — The Need to Assign Responsibility
Direct Democracy
E. Free Elections
Summary of the Faults in the BASIC MODEL of Democracy
* **************
Faults and corruption in the IMPLEMENTATION of Democracy
A. Governing
B. Majority Rule
C. Supreme Power Vested In The People
D. Exercised Directly Or Through Representatives
The Republic
Implementing Political Parties — Avoidance of Responsibility
Finding Humans Capable of Leading
Implementing Leadership Structures
E. Free Elections
One Man, One Vote
Buying the Vote
Direct Democracy
Restrictions On Voting
Absence of Voter Support Tools
F. Summary of the Faults in the Implementation of Democracy
Final Words on the Faults of Democracy
Blind To Reality
Our 229 Year Blindness Is Not New
Democracy Will Always Fall Apart in the Presence of Predatory Competition
Elected Representatives
What about Socialism?
*References
The FAILURE of DEMOCRACY
One of the greatest values cherished in western society is that WE LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY. To us, that means “we the people” make the decisions. WE decide who are the leaders, and WE tell them what WE want our society to be!
BUT! Is this really true? Do we, the citizens, actually make the decisions?
I’m sorry to break “our” magic bubble. But this belief is very far from how things actually work.
Quoting Bertrand Russell from his book Principles of Social Reconstruction 1916 (1):
“Apart from war, the modern great State is harmful from its vastness and the resulting sense of individual helplessness… Even in a democracy, all questions except a very few are decided by a small number of officials and eminent men; and even the few questions which are left to the popular vote are decided by a diffused mass-psychology, not by individual initiative.”
According to Russell, we don’t really live in a democracy like we’ve been repeatedly told. It’s just a charade — just more of the same authoritarianism from the past in disguise. However, if we ask people about this claim, we get conflicting answers, even from the same person. Theoretically, on one hand, most people do believe we live in a democracy. But, realistically, on the other hand, they agree with Russell and completely admit we don’t. Why then don’t people take action to do something about it? Most people can also tell us exactly why they don’t take action: 1. They believe the “powers that be” have so much power, people don’t have the ability to defeat them; and 2. Even if we had the power, WE don’t really know what to do?
So, right from square one, civilization really has a serious problem. In one sentence, with great emotion, people say, “we live in a democracy”. But in the next sentence, they say, “people have no control”. In the following sentence they say, “we need to make changes”. But in the next sentence, they say, “we can’t agree how to make the changes.”
Make no mistake, these deep seated cultural oxymorons are powerful enough to destroy our civilization!
How can one of the greatest dreams most people in the world have, freedom, which was something democracy was supposed to give us, slip through our hands? What went wrong? This is what this part of the series, Part 6, will try to explain. To do so, we need to dig into the soul of DEMOCRACY itself. Let’s do that in two sections:
- Flaws in the basic model of democracy itself;
- Faults in how society implements democracy.
Flaws in the Basic Model of Democracy Itself
People have all kinds of notions about democracy, some elevating it on a pedestal to the level of a sacred religious principle. But upon investigation, we find the foundation of our modern belief is much less noble. The basic concept began in Athens Greece under Solon around 550BC, even then, it didn’t have a good start. It only lasted under him for about 44 years. It was reestablished by Cleisthenes around 508BC, rising and falling until 338 BC when control of Greece was taken by Macedonia (10). Even with its almost 200 year history, it didn’t spread very far. Even for the very simple, low population, sparse agricultural society of the time, the Athenian model of democracy was quickly found to be full of flaws.
So. Let’s start with “one” definition for Democracy. (2)
(Yes, I say “one” because the world can’t even agree on a single definition — which is one of its problems.)
Democracy: from the Greek demokratia, rule by the people; from demos, people, and kratos, power;
a. Government by the people; especially, rule of the majority.
b. A government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly [note “indirectly”. I’ll come back to that later.] through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.
The reason I said “one” definition, is that special interests recklessly make up modified definitions of democracy to try to capture the word “democracy” for their cause. Democracy is a “trigger word”. That means, when people read or hear it, it raises high emotions. But it also has high value in our society. So every cause wants to be associated with it.
(I discuss this problem with “language” in Part 5 of this series, and expand it below.)
Breaking the definition above down, Democracy requires:
A. governing of society
B. using majority rule
C. supreme power vested in the people
D. exercised directly or indirectly through representatives
E. involving free elections
Let’s look at these five elements one at a time.
A. Governing
The first principle of democracy is the assumption that groups of people in society need to be governed. From square one, the problems and contradictions with democracy already begin.
Many people don’t agree that society needs to be governed. These people are typically called “Anarchists”. (Ironically, in the 19th century, they were called “liberals”.) But the word “anarchy”, which is the root of anarchist, is often used with contradictory meanings. Let’s look at a definition again. (2)
Anarchy: b. absence of government and absolute freedom of the individual, regarded as a political ideal.
Yes, I intentionally listed the secondary definition first. I did this because it appears to support the observation of some people that government is not needed. But here’s the primary definition:
Anarchy a. a state of disorder due to absence or nonrecognition of authority.
The contradiction that arises with anarchy is that those who believe that government is not needed to organize society are unwilling to pay attention to history.
Most anarchists live in a world of denial at the fringe of society.
But some do integrate with society. They refuse to accept the extensive structures that society has in place that allow them to survive. Some are very wealthy, and very smart. But to believe that humans can cooperate without organization, means they are unable to visualize the complexity of the world and the roles people must play in it. They live in a fog of Single Sentence Logic, often believing that they have been chosen by a “higher” power to be rulers. To justify this privileged position, they hypocritically redefine words and concepts at their whim.
For example, during colonial times, the leaders of the “American colonies”, in their revolution against the British, asserted in the U.S. Declaration of Independence:
“all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Yet as soon as these same people were writing the governing Constitution for the U.S., black people and women were somehow not considered “men” in their eyes. So “life” and “liberty” did not apply to them. Slavery, in aristocratic eyes, was fully justified, despite the words they had just written in their own Declaration! In current society, people with similar attitudes write national and international law, to protect their wealth and power, completely ignoring the welfare of 99% of the planet’s population.
Ironically, a similar phenomenon appears among people throughout the affluence range. My research suggests it happens for the same reason:
They don’t have the mental ability to understand and visualize complexity.
Deep seated Stone Age psychology appears to drive them to seek “absolute independence”. This can usually be traced back to childhood or early adult developmental traumas that made them terrified of authority. But, they also usually have brain structures that are unable to visualize cooperation.
But, there is another component also widely associated with “anarchist” views: HYPOCRISY. Hypocrisy is a one sided view of things. The “absolute independence” they revere only applies to them and people they associate with. All other people must be “subjected” to rules for the safety of the anarchists!
It is important to mention this behavior here because, due to the explosion of complexity in modern life, a large part of society exhibits selective, Single Sentence Logic, anarchist behaviors. This is discussed at length in Part 4 of this series.
Basic Concept of Freedom
The concept of anarchy, even without considering it a privilege for a few, brings up a second complication: FREEDOM. The driver for humanity to throw off the oppression of authoritarianism was not democracy itself, but the quest for INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM. Believing that democracy means accessing the “will of the people”, and falsely believing that all people are “fundamentally” the same, people naively want to believe that democracy will result in all people gaining their wishes in how life should run. But “total freedom” for one individual is not the same as “communal freedom” for many people living together. When communities are concerned, even having as few as two people, freedom no longer means being able to do just what YOU want. As soon as two people have to interact and they have incompatible viewpoints, “total freedom” is no longer possible. Freedom, for the individual, in a community, means finding a form of freedom, with rules that “can” apply “broadly”, simultaneously, for ALL members of society.
This requirement, that in society, personal freedom must take into account everyone else in the society, is driven to an extreme by the complexity of modern society. In order for a complex technological society to function, people must follow extremely precise coordination protocols. If they don’t, the technology breaks down.
Eric Hoffer, in the Passionate State of Mind, told us:
“The basic test of freedom is perhaps less in what we are free to do than in what we are free not to do… “
For example, consider a person’s identity. The way current society works, we HAVE to be identified at birth through associations to others. These normally include the mother, the father, the birth location, the doctor and hospital, and a record of special medical interventions. We HAVE to allow ourselves to be tracked throughout life. Every child in the U.S. MUST go through the educational system which keeps detailed records of grades, test scores and behavioral issues. They must HAVE vaccinations to go to school. A U.S. citizen can’t be employed without a Social Security number. If they want to practice any major profession, they HAVE to have a business license and publicly display their academic history. If you want to drive a car, you HAVE to get a license. And when you do drive, you HAVE to follow a million arcane rules. If you want to go in and out of the country, you HAVE to have a passport and many times, visas. The internet now tracks people’s location, communications, and purchase history by the second.
So, the bottom line for “individual freedom” is that, if humanity wants modern technology, our entire view of FREEDOM has to change. We have to accept a lot more regimentation. However, the key freedom question must still be: who governs an individual’s actions. Other key questions are: what should the governing structure be, and how should it be established?
The extreme loss of “freedom” demanded by modern technology is discussed in detail in Part 3 of this series.
Time Needed for Action
Another flaw in the basic model of democracy is its inability to take quick action. A democracy can not respond well under short time pressure. In order to educate the public about a new issue, hold discussions, and gather and process many viewpoints, a society needs a lot of time. In a period of crisis, such as disasters and public hysteria, adequate time is not available. In a period of economic turbulence, the time needed for public input will create a delay that prevents quick response. This delay is further amplified by fear and greed. The typical response is that businesses jump in with expensive band-aid solutions that make things worse. This rekindles old political disputes about the cause of the problem, which delays addressing the fundamental problems! Given the frequent occurrences of crises, the result is that many of society’s most critical decisions are never made. Instead, they get delayed and finally resolved by events outside the democratic process.
What, then, are the actual principles that replace democracy? Right! Basic biological fight or flight responses to fear and the Seven Deadly Sins.
B. Majority Rule
Majority Rule
Once the decision is made that a society needs governing, the next question that arises is, what will be the process of making decisions. Such a process will have the typical range of elements: who, what, where, why, when, how etc.. In this section I address HOW and WHO.
Starting with how, let me address first what is probably the most significant flaw of Athenian Democracy: Majority rule.
Majoritarianism is a type of voting. People believe it means that they, society, agree to be bound by some approach if more than 50% of the “people” are in favor of it. But, while appearing to be simple, there are as many ways to implement this principle as there are politicians. For example, a “majoritarian” vote can be any percentage over 50%. So, it could be 50% plus one vote or proportions like 60%, 2/3rds, and 75%, which are also common.
To understand why “majority rules” is such a flaw, it’s important to understand is exactly what a citizen’s goals are. Is voting a goal? Is talking to a representative a goal? Of course not. Voting and talking to a representative are just means to an end. The end is getting the world to behave in ways that each of us wants. This, of course, brings us right back to the problem of freedom.
In critiques of democracy, the concept of MAJORITY RULE is typically referred to as the “TYRANNY of the MAJORITY”. What makes it a problem is the extent that it directly conflicts with PERSONAL FREEDOM.
In short, once 51% of a population makes a decision, the other 49% do not get what they want.
That is, using “majority rule”, once 51% of the population agree on something, they rule as tyrants over the majority. Ironically, social thinkers have known about this for a long time. John Stuart Mill, spoke about it in his book: On Liberty, which was written almost two centuries ago in 1859:
“It was now perceived that such phrases as ‘self-government’ and ‘the power of the people over themselves’ do not express the true state of the case. The ‘people’ who exercise the power are not always the same people over whom it is exercised; and the ‘self-government’ spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest… ‘THE TYRANNY OF THE MAJORITY’ is now generally included among the evils against which society must be on guard.. chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities.”
Is what he said clear? He said that democracy fails to support the “liberty of choice” for everyone who is NOT IN THE MAJORITY! If 51% of the people, even in a theoretically perfectly run democracy, decide to kill off the other 49%, then democracy has failed the 49%. This is referred to as ‘lynch mob democracy’, and it is literally, the “lynch pin” that kills modern democracy.
But in the real world, democracy is not even close to perfectly run. The bills in democratic governments, which create laws that all of us have to follow, do not even get close to a 51% vs. 49% vote. Why? Because the people get mostly left out. For example, in the U.S. there are only 100 senators. If 51 of them vote for something that ALL the people in the country hate, then they win with a 51 to 300 million vote. It’s more like .00005% vs. 99.99995% where 99.99995% of the citizen votes don’t have any influence at all. I’ll come back to this.
The people controlling the government will keep telling us that we have a voice. This keeps us sedated and out of their way. They will keep telling us that they are ‘public servants’, while, in fact, they are totally their own servants and servants of the rich and powerful.
The important point is, a majority vote democracy, even in a theoretically perfect situation, is not an adequate model. Athenian Democracy should NOT be held up as the goal. The goal should be personal FREEDOM. The goal should be LIBERTY for ALL, even though it is not logically possible to achieve completely, and not even easy to do well.
To date, society has not been able to solve this dilemma. Yet despite the huge shortcomings we now endure, most people in society view “majority rules” as a great thing. Why? Because society has perpetuated the lie that it is the only way to provide “fair” public input. And the world has been brainwashed into believing this for over 2500 years! It is not the only way. A new approach will be presented in a concluding part of this series.
Large Number Of Candidates — Stepwise Voting
Another complication for majority voting occurs when there are a lot of alternatives or candidates. The typical approach is to break the vote into steps. For example, in many countries, where there are a lot of political parties or a lot of candidates, they often have preliminary votes. A number of candidates, like two, three or four, with the highest number of votes, get to have a run off. This process is frequently referred to as primaries. While this again seems pretty simple, when complications are brought in, it isn’t. The problem is controlling the concentration of power.
Using primaries, the winners of a primary election are typically not determined by all the people, but by the limited set of people voting in that primary. For example, assume there is a mostly secular country. If a remote area with a strong religious following holds a primary, no matter who is chosen, they will probably bring into the general election biases related to their religion, despite their other capabilities. Those biases will cause them to lose in the general election. If the remote primary, however, was open to the entire country, it is possible that a religious moderate from the area might be selected, thereby giving the area some representation.
Primary elections that are not very carefully designed are choosing winners in a way that is very far from a selection by “all the people”. There are dozens of ways to improve on this simple approach (3) yet they are seldom used.
Lynch Mob Democracy
The previous mention of lynch mob democracy is actually a broad issue related to human RIGHTS. A basic assumption about the U.S. Constitution is that it protects “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” This is a major misunderstanding held by most Americans. These rights were actually stated in the U.S. Declaration of Independence. When it came time to write the U.S. Constitution, they were conveniently left out. Here is a hypothetical description of a tragic example.
A mob forms and decides they don’t like what someone else is doing. They decide the person should be hanged? This “lynch mob” takes a vote. The vote is unanimous: 10 to 0. The person they don’t like is, of course, not allowed to vote. “MAJORITY RULES” is the cry! They prepare to hang him. Does this process protect “life” or “liberty” or even justice?
A “principled” person in the mob figures this out and objects. He says it seems “unfair” to leave the un-liked person out of the vote. A new vote is taken allowing the un-liked person to also vote. The vote is then 10 — for, 1 — against. MAJORITY RULES is again the cry! They prepare to hang him again. Is this now just?
Another “principled” person speaks up protesting that something is missing. The decision was unfair because it has been made without “due process”. A court and jury haven’t been used. O.K. So the mob selects one of their members to be a judge, 2 are selected to be the lawyers, and the remaining 7 are sworn in as the jury. Not much question about what the outcome of that “trial” is going to be: GUILTY! The un-liked (minority) person is hanged.
The photo above was taken in Fort Lauderdale Florida in 1935. (9) The charge was, “threatening and frightening a white woman.” Notice the people in the photo besides the victim.
The point of this example is to show how voting, even using the most fundamental principle of majority rule, has failed society miserably. Tragically, such cases were all too numerous in U.S. history. But while an extreme case was used for this “lynch mob” example to make the problem clear, many Constitutions insure that this kind of drastic “mob” element will actually happen regularly. The Constitutions do this by creating a “spoils” system, which allows winning political parties to load government cabinet positions with a “mob” of their supporters.
Absolute Rights — a Bill of Rights
During the writing of the U.S. Constitution, this “mob rule” limitation was already well known. It was ignored. Four years later, a major step toward a solution was made by amending the Constitution to create the BILL OF RIGHTS. This set of Constitutional Amendments attempted to protect citizens from the “tyranny of the majority” for a number of specific BEHAVIORS. While it was a good step forward, it still left 2 serious problems: 1. The number of personal freedoms protected is very small; and 2. the wording of the amendments is so general and lacking in sound logic that the freedoms keep coming under attack and need to be fought for over and over again. With the current structure of U.S. government, implementation of the Bill of Rights now rests in the hands of just 9 judges, who are elected by government representatives. These representatives are “theoretically” voting the view of the majority of citizens, but clearly have an industry driven political agenda.
Greatest Good for Greatest Number
Related to the issue of rights is a pervasive myth that comes up over and over. There was a justification for “majority rule” associated with Jeremy Bentham, which was stated, “the greatest good for the greatest number”. The myth is a false interpretation of this statement. The popular myth is that the “greatest number” means an absolute count of people. Using that interpretation, the tragic poverty seen in the world is justified because there are now “more” people, as an absolute number, who are living well, than there were when Bentham first made the statement. But this is a false justification that is due to just having a much higher general population.
For example, imagine a country with 500,000 happy people. Now compare that to a second country with 5 million people, but 4 million of them are slaves. Could a democracy judge the second country “better” or “happier” because the 1 million who are not slaves, presumably the happier group, is larger than the 500,000 happy people in the smaller country. Even though there could be twice as many ‘happy’ people in the second case, a democracy couldn’t judge that case as positive with so many people denied their freedom. In fact, with 4 million slaves, the second example would be viewed as a catastrophe of the main goal of democracy.
This example can be used to understand modern democracy, and specifically, the tyranny of the majority. I presented the “lynch mob” as a perfect example of a complete failure of democracy. So, even if the vote is 10 to 1, a lynch mob still constitutes tyranny. A good short summary of this was provided in On Liberty by John Stewart Mill (4):
“If all mankind minus one were of one opinion, and only one person were of contrary opinion, mankind would be no more JUSTIFIED in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind … the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is SELF-PROTECTION.”
For the saying, “the greatest good for the greatest number”, an interpretation that makes more sense to equate “democracy” with freedom is to interpret “greatest number” to mean the greatest percentage. But even this is shy of the goal. Bentham said something else that can be used to form a better democratic guide: “Create all the happiness you are able to create: remove all the misery you are able to remove.” With these guides, society should use “percentage” as an initial measure, but also question whether “everything reasonable” has been done to eliminate misery. Unfortunately, our world is very far from either of these measures.
Summary for Majority voting
To reinforce the major points of this section:
1. A majority-vote democracy should not be the goal. The goal should be FREEDOM and individual LIBERTY.
2. A majority-vote democracy, even with a theoretically perfect implementation, is a failed functional model for a complex modern society.
3. The goal of freedom, however, can’t be sought through anarchy. That would only lead back to struggles for power, dictatorship and the equivalent of slavery.
4. When many candidates are involved, the process must still be designed to involve all citizens uniformly in every step of the vote.
5. The issue of individual rights must be protected above majority rule.
C. Supreme Power Vested In The People
Misuse of the Term “The People”
A fundamental principle of democracy is that the “supreme” power of government is vested in the people. This concept was the basis for the Athenian experiment. But the goal was flawed from the start because the Athenians evaded the broad meaning of the term “the people”, and only considered some privileged classes worthy of voting. So, in fact, rather than create a “true” democracy, they created a precursor of the aristocratic rule of Rome and medieval Europe, which continues around the world to this day.
But the basic concept of putting supreme power in the hands of all the people, even theoretically, is not as simple as it might seem. This is discussed in the next section under the subheading “Direct Democracy”.
Laws Are Too Naïve
Governing a society is a complex issue. To deal with complexity, and still be sensitive to diversity of action, laws must be developed that address, simultaneously, all the details. No country on earth has developed its laws with this view from the beginning. Instead, the laws have been based on legal structures developed for primitive cultures that preceded modern technology. That is, the LAWS of modern society are TOO NAIVE to eliminate the cleverness of power, deceit and corruption and thereby stop them. The laws are too naïve to provide adequate guidance to citizens so that they can plan fulfilling lives while still living in harmony. There are NO processes in common discussion by either political parties or academics that even come close to understanding how such comprehensive laws would look or be developed. There is NO process in common discussion that even identifies how individuals among the public, capable of developing such laws, could even be identified and enlisted for service.
D. Exercised Directly Or Through Representatives
A Serious Problem With The Definition of Democracy Chosen for the Introduction
I chose the definition of democracy presented in the introduction, which is a widely accepted and used definition, specifically because it includes a serious self contradiction. A key goal of this story is to expose this contradiction, and show the damage such definitions have done to society’s ability to resolve the problems of democracy.
Since the meaning of “democracy” often gets mixed up with “republic”, let’s define that as well.
Republic: from the Latin respublica, a thing of the public;
a. a government having a chief of state who is not a monarch and who in modern times is usually a president;
b. a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them [the citizens] and governing according to law.
The problem society is facing with these definitions for democracy and republic is that they both fail to capture the fundamental elements that “the people” associate with the word “democracy”. In the eyes of the average person, “democracy” is: “a government of the people, BY THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE.” In section C, using the words from the definition of democracy, it requires “POWER” to vest in the People. When the average person hears “vest in the people”, it has a lot of implications. One, for example, is that actions taken by a government should clearly be seen to benefit the “larger society”. And, if the “larger society” believes bad things are being done to it, they should be able to stop them. When a definition of “democracy” allows representatives to hold the power, that definition does not agree with the prevailing view.
To the “larger society”, the phrase “by the people” does not mean handing off power to the government. To be consistent with the expectations of the “larger society”, if representatives are used, their roles must be strictly controlled to be collectors and implementers of public views, not purveyors of their own views.
To summarize this point, the definition of democracy presented at the start this story needs to be rejected and a revised version presented that is logically consistent with the basic principle of distributing power uniformly throughout society. In short, democracy should be rigidly held to mean:
Democracy: from the Greek demokratia, rule by the people; from demos, people, and kratos, power;
a. Government by the people. For this definition, people means each, and only each, human citizen in the society, who can demonstrate the ability of logical human reasoning. (this specifically excludes any discrimination by age, gender, race, or judicial situation);
b. Coordination of society in such a way that the individual freedom of ALL citizens, and authorized visitors, is maximized to the full extent of logical principles;
c. A government in which both supreme and general powers are vested in the people and exercised by them directly.
d. Representation may be used; however representation is strictly to collect and analyze the views of the people they represent, and to implement actions which affect the society, in a way that directly respects the view of each and every person in the society in proportion to their fractional presence in the society.
e. If a logical person chooses to withhold a view on any issue, which may be done only by that person, they will be allowed to join implementation in any amount they choose at any time during implementation.
f. Collection of views through proxy is NOT ALLOWED.
{ A democracy, according to this definition, is not now achievable using commonly known social principles. Anyone wanting to jump ahead to read about new principles that can achieve such a democracy should look at Personalized Democracy. }
Representative Democracy
Except for very small local organizations, ALL western “democracies” are actually organized as REPUBLICS. This means they use representatives as some kind of voice for the people. Even from a “theoretical basis”, this creates substantial problems trying to faithfully capture each individual’s personal view.
The fundamental concept of “representation” is: the action of speaking or acting on behalf of someone else. That is, a representative is someone who’s responsibility is to convey the voice or action of some group of people.
What can the word “group” mean here? Some typical choices are the people in a bounded geography, or with a common belief, an ethnicity, an age range, a gender identity etc. Representing multiple people in any one of these categories would be easy if they all had the same view on some issue. But what happens when they don’t? How can all the views be captured and then addressed? This problem has been recognized since the beginning of civilization. The logistics obstacles are so immense when the accuracy of every viewpoint is critical, that even with current computer technology, it is still done poorly. Even when the number of choices is very small, say picking one of two candidates for president, we still can’t do it without significant technical problems and large controversies.
Political Parties — The Need to Assign Responsibility
Once it is decided that representatives will be used, ironically, it forces the creation of political parties. This was already known when the U.S. Constitution was first written. From Consent of the Governed (5):
“A second principle of majoritarianism requires that the location of political power be clear and recognized… By 1796, Jefferson himself saw that responsible majoritarianism required the organization of political power through political parties… It had become obvious that the alternative to the organization of responsibility was unorganized irresponsibility.”
Direct Democracy
One frequently suggested solution to the representative problem is “Direct Democracy” — let each person represent himself. Here are 9 critical problems that need to be addressed to make Direct Democracy work. The inability to address any one of them would derail the whole process:
- Availability of people: Modern life has become so complex, that the number of issues that need to be addressed far exceeds any person’s ability to even read a list of all of them, never mind make substantial inputs to them. Many people would not even be able to get involved with more than a few issues due to time constraints. It would just be too much work for them. Others don’t have access to the internet and would have to travel long distances to get involved. Not many people would be willing to do the research to adequately comprehend the detailed principles involved even if some elements of the outcome strongly affect them. That means, almost every issue that is subject to public input would often be decided by only a very small portion of the population.
2. Lack of Ability: Many issues which come before government are complex. With the current level of technology and social complexity, no human is mentally capable or has the knowledge and training to address all the issues. Such decisions would have to be made by only the few people able to understand them.
This wasn’t always the case. Up until the industrial revolution, which was only about 150 years ago, society was still pretty simple. Most people were farmers. The technology of the world was simple and farmers were generally familiar with it. The working of government was simple, and most people could easily understand the information the government worked with. So, prior to the industrial revolution, most people had the knowledge needed to participate in government. Their only problem was the logistics of gathering their views together.
All of that has now changed. Most modern technology is beyond the knowledge base and logical ability of average citizens to understand. The interactions of modern technology are now beyond even the smartest human to understand.
One example can easily show this: medicine. As of the last time I checked, there were over 12,000 individual diseases discussed in medical text books. To treat those diseases, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration had approved over 55,000 drugs! No medical student can even read about all of these, never mind understand them all. So, how could we expect every citizen to make an input about each one of them?
So, at best, small groups of well trained individuals will be able and needed to make specialized contributions. Selecting these members the way we do now would be fraught with favoritism. The problem is how to do it in a way that insures the entire citizenry has their views addressed.
For those willing to become informed on some issue, the internet provides quick access to an almost limitless source of information. But that raises the problems of relevance, accuracy and efficiency using the internet. In its current form, it would be a tragedy. None of the search engines, or even all of them in combination, can effectively produce a good collection of “relevant” information on any topic. There are too many references found that are poorly organized and contain inaccurate, irrelevant or even fraudulently distracting material. Any currently implemented attempt to bring human judges into the process brings human bias along with it.
3. Complexity: Some problems are so interconnected that they cannot be understood or dealt with one at a time. Human’s are not capable of understanding these cases without sophisticated computer support. So, even if people are able to make “some” final decisions on their own, everyone will require reliance on complex specialized computer processes.
4. The TRUTH problem: Even with any good organization of people, human society has still not been able to solve the issue of TRUTH. If we can’t know truth, then every “democratic” decision becomes just an opinion poll of superstition.
5. Obsolete foundations: What if the problems being presented to people for voting are not solvable by making small changes to our existing processes? This could happen because the fundamentals of those processes have become completely outdated and irrelevant? If so, then giving the general public that flawed knowledge for them to vote on will still not generate adequate solutions.
6. Human selfishness: Due to human psychology, and the inability of most people to understand society broadly, most people make choices that are very self-centered. Naïve economic policies that are widely accepted, claim that “market dynamics” will resolve the apparent irony: i.e. that many wrongs will average out to many rights. The term “market” here does not mean the stock market. It means the economy. This leads directly to suppression of minorities. Democracy can not easily deal with group thinking.
7. Market volatility: The same naive thinking that fails to restrain greed also results in huge market swings and market failures.
8. Influence of money: The whole issue of money corrupting legislators can just as easily direct pressure on voters. Voters would still be subject to the pressure of authority or the draw of money or reward to sway their votes.
9. Voting fraud: And, of course, fraud in gathering and collecting direct votes still needs to be addressed.
E. Free Elections
The idea of “free” elections rests on two principles:
1. Each voter has the ability to gather all the information they need to cast an informed vote without interference.
2. Each citizen has a chance to vote on issues without interference.
From the standpoint of the basic Athenian model, both of these were achievable in early societies. The first principle is no longer achievable in modern society. Modern society has become so complex in technology and the interaction of all of its parts, that most people are unable to understand it sufficiently to render an informed judgment.
As for voting without interference, at last we find one issue that can be logically achieved under the basic model of democracy.
Summary of the Faults in the BASIC MODEL of Democracy
In summary, the model of “Democracy” that we have brought forward from the Greeks, and that we hold in such high regard, is so full of fundamental flaws that it can’t even begin to achieve the goals that most people in western society believe it does. Specifically:
1. Society can’t even agree upon a detailed definition of what Democracy is, even for just the Athenian form and the forms implemented around the world. This is a serious flaw in western culture and language.
2. The world hasn’t addressed the “anarchy” problem and set out a mechanism to deal with it. Again, this is a serious flaw in culture and language.
3. The basic concept of Individual FREEDOM has not been brought to public consciousness or agreement. New principles of individual freedom in the face of modern technical complexity have not been established and brought to agreement in society.
4. The limitation of majoritarian decisions to address individual Freedom has not been made common knowledge, nor have grounds for accepting the limitations been generally accepted.
5. The biases in representational voting have not been eliminated to prevent “lynch mob” autocracy.
6. Psychological biases in human nature have not been eliminated to prevent discrimination of minorities.
7. The problems of Liberty and Freedom created by modern complexity have not been understood by society.
8. The use of representative “rule” is inconsistent with the concept of “vesting” power in the people.
9. The complexity of modern society is not compatible with broad citizen involvement in decision making. Society has not developed “democratic” approaches to address this.
Faults and corruption in the IMPLEMENTATION of Democracy
The sections above discussed the flaws in the basic model of democracy itself and how world culture is totally clueless about them. Not being aware of this, many governments: national, regional, state, province, county, and city; have all claimed to have “implemented” democracy. In addition to governments, society has implemented similarly flawed democracy models in many of its institutions: Colleges and Universities, businesses, neighborhood and social clubs, and even extended families. Because all of these organizations are blind to the basic faults, when the faults show up, they improvise to get out of trouble. The result is, most of the “solutions” take the implementation of democracy even further from its basic goals. The following discussions provide examples for the most severe implementation failures.
A. Governing
The most common implementation fault is the government implementing some process that is clearly not in keeping with democracy but then lying to the people and telling them it is a democracy. That is, the structure of the government is set up in one form, but the people are led to believe it is something else. The government of the U.S. has been this way from the beginning. The people are told they live in a democracy that is a “government of the people, by the people, for the people”. This of course is a lie. At its best, the U.S. government is a republic structured as a government of the people, by a few representatives, for a small group of special interests.
The people are told they still have control because they elect the president and representatives, and have access to their representatives. But, as implemented, the president and representatives have little concern for really understanding what their constituents think. The leaders are expected to “speak their own mind, to say what they feel”. This may vary widely from the popular view on any issue and the promises made during election campaigns.
Public control of what the representatives say is only controlled by voting when the representative stands for re-election. Because social issues are complex, the representatives can simply deny any complaints and easily confuse people. People can’t easily verify what they’re being told. So, the president and representatives can actually act very different from their “constituents wishes” and their campaign promises on a broad range of issues as long as they preach to just a few very popular “single issues” during their campaigns. This is especially the case if the popular issues carry high emotion, and the majority have strong prejudices against minorities.
So, in practice, what we see all over the world are governments, OF the people, BY the representatives, FOR a small number of powerful special interests.
B. Majority Rule
While majority rule seems like a simple process, there are many ways to distort the process. One of these is called gerrymandering. This fraud is created by allowing the “pie” of voters to be carved up in special ways that benefit someone. Let’s say, in a certain “hypothetical” geography, there are two political parties, A and B, that are just about evenly distributed. What happens if a congressional district, say district 5, is drawn in a “special” way so that it captures a lot of party A voters. Then in the area surrounding district 5, there wouldn’t be many party A voters. So many of the districts near 5, like 7, for example, would be tilted toward party B.
You’re probably thinking, that this would be hard to do. Here is an actual case. Both districts had about the same number of people.
Are you surprised at how extreme district 5 was drawn? Can any rational person deny that the boundary of this district was drawn with some particular goal in mind? It turns out that District 5 spanned over 140 miles and captured large populations of African-Americans from Jacksonville, Gainesville and Orlando into one voting group — 53% of that district in 2012. This means, the 250,000+ African-American voters in that district had just ONE congressman speaking for them, Corrine Brown, who was also African-American. But all the districts around District 5, only had small populations of African-Americans. None of them had African-American representatives. So, in the Florida congress, there was a very small African-American representation in proportion to the number of African-Americans in the state.
There was a lawsuit that ruled the existing boundaries were outside legal guidelines. Below is one of the current plans that meets the court’s rules. The drawing covers the same part of Florida as shown above. Notice District 7 is about the same, but District 5 is now squashed into a small area near the upper right that only captures a portion of Jacksonville.
C. Supreme Power Vested In The People
The principle where power actually vests with the “governed” has never occurred in western democracy. In fact, it has never even been formally conceptualized in a way that it could be, including in Athens. Sure, the form of government implemented in Athens, allowed governing decisions to be made through voting by “citizens”. But, the rules that defined a “citizen” were very narrow, primarily being wealthy business owners, elected officials and soldiers. Women, children, laborers and slaves were excluded. Since all modern democracies are actually structured as “Republics”, and put a huge wall of elected officials between voting and citizens, modern democracies make a farce out of vesting “supreme power” in the people.
Repeating the quote from Russell:
“Even in a democracy, all questions except a very few are decided by a small number of officials and eminent men; and even the few questions which are left to the popular vote are decided by a diffused mass-psychology, not by individual initiative.”
D. Exercised Directly Or Through Representatives
The Republic
Right from square one, the western world, while grabbing on to and waving banners with the great “trigger word” Democracy, did not implement democracy. They set up REPUBLICS! That is, the countries around the world claiming to be democracies are NOT democracies. They are republics, because the power to rule resides with an elected body of representatives, not with the people.
Allowing this charade to go unchecked creates a HUGE language problem for humanity (as discussed in Part 5). When any institution analyzing social problems goes looking for their cause, they attempt to use the definition of “democracy” to search for explanations. The reason for using a “definition” is that it guides the studies to implementations in the past that have been described by the same terms. If the terms are not correct, the analyses select incorrect examples for comparison. It’s like studying apples to understand oranges. So, if we investigate republics of the past looking for clues, falsely believing they are democracies, we will not be able to understand current problems that clash with current public expectations for what a democracy should be.
The following paragraphs are looking at the problems introduced when a “true” democracy is introduced. Since what society has set up is republics, what we find is a double distortion. That is, democracy is first distorted by implementing a republic. But then, the republic is also distorted through corruption. A third distortion occurs as well when the governments lie to cover up all of the distortions.
Step one: society sets up a republic, not a democracy. So, the people do NOT make direct decisions, they don’t even directly elect their supreme leaders. The decisions are made at the discretion of the representatives.
Step two: the representatives fail to use effective methods to know the will of each individual in society. Instead, they cater to elite members of society that can finance their election campaigns.
Step three; the government lies and tells people we live in a democracy.
The founders of democracies around the world were all elite members of society. While applauding the revolution to eliminate monarchies, they deceitfully set up systems that would maintain power for themselves. Specifically, they inserted themselves between the people and decisions for action.
What most people don’t realize is that this fraud was well known right from the beginning! The watchdogs of society have always known this. Jefferson knew that the key issue was power. He also understood that if society didn’t clearly isolate power, it couldn’t be watched, and the people controlling that power couldn’t be held responsible. This is summarized in the 1963 book, Consent of the Governed (5):
“…there are striking gaps between model and reality… the idea of a public interest… a common welfare, which it is the function of our political system to seek out and implement… [while] actual politics are… a struggle for power… dominated by special interest groups… “
But the power and influence that the elites hold over industry and the media has always been able to drown out the cries of the watchdogs.
Most early colonial era citizens had virtually no input to the formation of the government. But even if they had, as this article explains, no sound theories that could achieve true democracy were available at the time. Up until now, society hasn’t had any.
Implementing Political Parties — Avoidance of Responsibility
So, Jefferson pushed for creation of political parties to achieve accountability. While that was done, those leading the organization of the political parties purposely spread out authority so that no individual could be held responsible for any platform. This led to wild swings in party platforms for 200 years.
This early avoidance of accountability in politics was completely outdone in 2009.
“Unorganized irresponsibility” was unleashed by a U.S. Supreme Court decision called Citizens United, which allowed corporate money, both for-profit and non-profit, to fund groups outside the political parties to represent party ideas. This decision, and the flood of misleading information that followed it, had the obvious consequences of overwhelming the ability of most voters to comprehend any complex issue at all.
Once we see that power in a country is really controlled by wealth, and is simply enforced by congress, it’s clear all modern society has done is reproduce the aristocracy of Europe all over again, which the great revolutions of the last 300 years fought, with great loss of life, to get rid of. Democracy has been completely over run by power groups! And it’s absolutely critical that the world face up to this and understand the consequences.
Here are some excerpts anticipating the problem from Consent of the Governed (5):
“… the dream of democracy as a “powerless” utopia in which public action flows freely and automatically from the independent decisions of autonomous individuals … [is] still [here]. …the consequences … have been the ability of men of power to deny that they have any … [to make] claims to be the ‘voice of the rank and file’ … the ‘spokesman for his constituency…
… the basic requirement for holding him responsible is a recognition that he has power — that is, he makes decisions … and his decisions are not the only possible ones that might be made. … only if power can be identified can it be held responsible. The purpose of democratic politics is not to eliminate power but to hold it accountable.”
This quote tells us that the major purpose of political parties is not to organize elections, but to identify political positions and actions with an identified group. Then, as the pendulum of how well the actions perform swings back and forth, the parties can be held accountable for the failed policies they’ve advocated and implemented over their history. The same thing applies to individual representatives in congresses and parliaments.
Of course, this monitoring function has become almost non-existent in modern society. The human reasons were discussed already in Part 4 and Part 5 of this series.
Again, this observation is not new. Jefferson clearly understood it. The Social Contract (6), which, was written by Rousseau in 1762, gives the following explanation:
“When cabals and partial associations are formed at the expense of the great association, the will of each such association, though general [representative] with regard to its members, is private with regard to the State; it can then be said no longer that there are as many voters as men, but only as many as there are associations. By this means the differences being less numerous, they produce a result less general. When one of these associations becomes so large that it prevails over all the rest, you have no longer the sum of many opinions dissenting in a small degree from each other, but one great dictating dissent. From that moment there is no longer a general will, and the predominating opinion is only an individual one. It is therefore of the utmost importance for obtaining the expression of the general will, that no partial society should be formed in the State, and that every citizen should speak his opinion entirely from himself. When there are partial societies, it is politic to multiply their number, that they may be all kept on an equality.”
It’s obvious that the founding fathers didn’t, and current government representatives don’t pay much attention to this document. For example, the whole idea that voting machines are built with a ‘party lever’, which can select all the candidates from a particular party with one pull, is exactly what this paragraph was warning us against.
It should also be obvious to the reader that this warning is in direct conflict with Jefferson’s observation presented just above, that political parties were needed to focus accountability. To resolve such a contradiction, a very carefully planned and executed structure would be needed. Neither was done.
By way of summary, it is impossible for a society to hold its leaders accountable if the citizens themselves don’t have a common basic morality as a guide. It is clear society no longer has such a guide. The result is the public uproars we see, which are better identified as mass hysteria or mass rage. They are just emotional stampedes. And the people who are swept up in the herds are best described as being in the throes of a personal hysteria or personal rage. It’s the same mental condition that led the citizens of nations like Germany and Rome to follow their leaders on world conquests. As the fabric of modern society tears itself apart under the pressures of technical complexity, runaway population, resource depletion, cultural mixing, information overload, and religious radicalism, we will see similar aberrations in social behavior. To overcome these new challenges, individuals need new tools. The tools need to help them become rational and responsible. The tools need to guide citizens to demand that politicians be responsible and be held accountable. The tools must show people how to force politicians to put teeth into laws they develop and achieve accountability. Without these new tools, the invisible government aristocracy will just heard the public like sheep, to new forms of indentured and wage slavery.
Finding Humans Capable of Leading
Another problem related to using representatives is finding candidates with adequate intellectual ability. Here is a comment about this from The Consent of the Governed (5):
“… [the] assumption about the nature of man and society on which our inherited ideas of democracy rest, have been widely challenged or repudiated… The eighteenth-century view saw man as a rational, infinitely improvable political animal who could be trusted to govern himself… [but] psychology as a scientific discipline has led to account the dominant role of irrationality and selfishness in human behavior.”
If we examine both the people chosen as candidates for elections and the people driving those elections, it is obvious that their characters are dominated by both irrationality and selfishness.
Winning is based on charisma, not intelligence. Almost all humans are able to learn to speak a language, no matter how low their IQ is. They quickly pick up “street smarts”. But being able to quickly spout a lot of popular sound bites, is not equivalent to having a broad understanding of an issue. This puts the public in a difficult position. If a person hears a candidate rattle off a bunch of statistics, plus a number of details about an issue that the person is not familiar with, how can the person know if what the candidate says is true or not? The public is placed squarely in the middle of a decision they don’t know how to resolve.
To handle the complexity of modern society, they need to elect someone very knowledgeable about and very capable dealing with complex issues. Yet, if a candidate discusses the details of any such issue, to demonstrate the candidate’s ability to understand it, the public is going to turn away because the material will seem confusing. That is, people associate “intelligence” with all the material the educational system tried to force them to learn in high school, which they hated. But they subconsciously don’t want to admit they couldn’t or didn’t learn it because it would make them appear ignorant, both to others and themselves. So they make up the excuse that intelligence is arrogance, and reject the candidate. The result is that those most capable of dealing with social issues from a true understanding of them are rejected.
This is a failure of implementation because both the political parties and the media are dominated by celebrities who lack the ability to understand complex issues. Neither knows how to separate and clarify the issues for the public.
It is common knowledge among campaign leaders that the strongest way to manipulate people to support an issue pushed by the parties is by manipulating their emotions through fear. They do this by isolating just a few elements of an issue that people will believe can harm them. Trigger words are then selected which can be associated with the fear elements. The trigger words are then packaged into Single Sentence Logic (i.e. sound bites). The public is then barraged with those sound bites. The public is never given the context of the issue which provides other elements that show safe balancing alternatives. This is an implementation problem because of its control by the parties and the media.
So what kind of leadership skills do these practices favor in elections? The ability to drive citizens through fear, and falsely suppress the complexity of issues. This produces elected officials who are masters of their trade driving sheep where they want them to go. But when it comes to coaching the public about how to understand complex issues and guiding thinking citizens to achieve a thriving society, such officials never see the light of day.
Bertrand Russell discusses this in his book Why Men Fight 1917 (7):
“Men who have the habit of authority are peculiarly unfit for friendly negotiations; but the official relations of States are mainly in the hands of men with a great deal of authority in their own country.”
Do you see the ironic twist here? We’d like world society to be led by people who are good at friendly negotiations. But, the world is filled with tough leaders. People’s Stone Age brains kick in and they want to kick back! When they choose leaders, the best people to negotiate with a tough leader are thought to be other tough leaders. The result is that we don’t get leaders who are good at building cooperative societies.
So, the way we select leaders still “needs some improvement”. In fact, admitting the public is completely incompetent at picking leaders might be more honest. But that’s the way current leaders want it! Their goal is power over the public.
Implementing Leadership Structures
After electing candidates, we have to put them to work. Right from the first task of implementing leadership, we’re in quicksand. We are told that the goal of a democratic government is to secure our common welfare. The ideal model for that starts with the assumption that those who rise to power will hold the public interest foremost, which they swear an oath to do when they go into office. But, somehow, that doesn’t seem to happen. In Consent of the Governed (5), Livingston says:
“Motivations to politics are: desire for fame, prestige, power, fortune, group representation, ideology, philosophy to social justice.
The techniques of politics are: force, threats of force, bribery, duplicity, manipulation, martyrdom, reasoned arguments, appeal to authority, appeal to shared values.”
Does this sound like a person who is concerned with the public interest?
The way we have the structure of politics set up, it almost totally precludes selecting people for leadership who can even conceive what the public interest is. Here are two lists that parallel Livingston’s subtitles in the above quote using a public interest viewpoint:
Motivations to politics: desire to see society do well, pride of successful accomplishments of citizens, ability to facilitate well, modest reward, empowerment of others, ability to help find wisdom, philosophy leading to social efficiency.
The techniques of politics: development of egalitarian principles, teaching principles, open participation, unity of wisdom, development of mutual reliance and cooperation, sharing success, reasoned wisdom, appeal to principle, appeal to individual creativity, appeal to shared values.
So, how do they compare? Complete failure! Only one thing in common. How can we expect democracy to actually work if the fundamentals upon which politics work are one hundred eighty degrees out of sync from what democracy depends on?
The tragedy of this example is that EVERY level of government is filled based on the motives Livingston listed. This is not just about the position of President.
E. Free Elections
One Man, One Vote
The idea of “free” elections rests on two principles: 1. Each voter has the ability to gather all the information they need to cast an informed vote without interference, and 2. Each citizen has a chance to vote on issues without interference. As stated before, the first principle is no longer even theoretically achievable in modern society because of complexity. When we consider how elections have been implemented, we see that the second principle has also been lost.
Buying the Vote
When any organization has available funds to spend on elections, or to influence legislators, and they are not stopped by law, then the basic principle of “one person, one vote” is lost. Organization money can be used in multiple ways. The most direct is making payments to legislators in return for business favors, like passing bills that favor the donor. Corruption and bribery are rampant around the world. They continue because the politicians who write the laws seek the benefits of the corruption. Also, the system, including judges, is also on the take. So they get rewarded when they don’t penalize politicians who get caught.
Another common practice is for special interests to purchase advertising that influences people to vote certain ways. This is very effective when complex issues are involved because people don’t have sufficient background to understand the issues. Special interests purchase media time and present logically appearing “facts”, that only tell part of the story. They also use their power and financial pull to hide or discredit other parts of the story they don’t want citizens to believe. Individual citizens, with Stone Age brains, are no match for the college educated professionals, who apply extensive research psychology to trick the individuals to vote the way they want. People believe what they see in advertising because they don’t know any alternative or can’t dispute what they are being told.
Direct Democracy
Simple thinking suggests the act of getting representatives out of the way and letting people vote directly is a solution. This approach, at first glance, appears to many to make sense. It would fail terribly, however, during implementation for the same fundamental reasons that representative democracy fails: individual voters can be bought just like representatives can be bought. Furthermore, the logistics of Direct Democracy are so complex, they would be plagued by corruption.
Restrictions On Voting
Another key way free elections are interfered with is by either political parties themselves or special interests using laws to restrict voting. A prime example is setting tight time periods for voting. This biases the votes because poor people are less able to meet the time restraints. A second example is the current spate of voter I.D. laws which require modern forms of I.D. Again, poor people may not even have cars or driver’s licenses. If they are then required to travel long distances to get special licenses, to offices with hours not convenient for working people, they are discriminated against.
Of course, the perpetrators claim some noble goal for the restrictions like preventing “voter fraud”, and insist that there is no bias against any particular group in the law. But both of these biases are in play most of the time there are restrictions.
Absence of Voter Support Tools
To help voters deal with these interferences, both the government and the media could implement support tools. For example, if a political party is trying to enforce voter restrictions, based on some noble goals, both the government and the medica could have formal processes in place to quickly evaluate the “noble goals” and support or reprimand the party. This role has recently been taken on by an ad hoc group of “fact checkers”. The media and government treats them just like one more form of noise.
F. Summary of the Faults in the Implementation of Democracy
In summary, implementation of the model of “Democracy” that society thought it brought forward from the Greeks, is so full of corruption that it can’t even be recognized as democracy. Specifically:
1. The government directly lies to the people by telling them they live in a democracy when not only are we yoked under a republic, but the elements of a republic have been corrupted to leave the individual out of decisions.
2. The organization of government structures uses a “spoils” system, thereby creating a “mob” structure within the government. With this heavily biased government, the process of voting in local areas is gerrymandered to sway the voting outcome.
3. Modern “democracies” are actually implemented as “republics” where representatives stand in for citizens. This is justified by allowing definitions in reference books to cover up the original intent of what democracy was intended to be and what people believe it to be.
4. Even when representation is implemented, the expectations for representatives is not faithful to “representing” the actual opinions of those represented, but allowing the representatives to vote their own beliefs.
5. Watchdogs in society have made the wrongdoings known from the time the first modern democracy was founded in the U.S. in 1787. The elite control of government has always suppressed the watchdog’s protests.
6. Political parties, which were a delicate concept due to their ability to infringe on one-man, one-vote principles, were implemented based on Jefferson’s claim that they were needed to achieve accountability. They were implemented in a simplistic way that neither preserved “one-man, one-vote” nor made accountability clear.
7. Elections are run in a way that favors personal charisma over governing competence. Voters do not understand, nor know how to choose between candidates that have high complexity skills. This is especially accentuated when governing competence must include an understanding of the extreme complexity of modern society. The result is elections do not include candidates with sufficient technical or organizational knowledge or skills to manage high complexity.
8. Campaigns are driven by professions highly trained in the ability to psychologically manipulate voters. Voters will not acknowledge that. Society will not take action to help voters resist the manipulation.
9. The goal of candidates and political parties is power for the candidate and political establishment. The expectation of voters is candidates and parties whose primary interest is the public’s interest. The voter’s do not know how to correct this breakdown even though most of them know it exists.
10. Strong special interests now control the government. Many voters know this. The other voters have been brainwashed by the psychological control of the special interests to deny it. As a world society, the population does not know how to unwind this charade.
11. Direct Democracy has become a common buzzword. But, it fails for all the same reasons as representative government.
12. Voting restrictions corrupt elections.
Final Words on the Faults of Democracy
Blind To Reality
In short, the philosophers and historians defined what democracy was supposed to be; the politicians told us they understood, but implemented structures in a way that protected their interests. Time passed. The scientists figured out that the philosophers were naïve. Humans have much more primitive brains than the philosophers wishful thinking depended on. Society also moved forward into a much more complex form. The philosophers and academics then outlined a “new” democracy to include the new knowledge. The politicians, academics and industrial monarchs corrupted that as well.
The leaders of the world, spouting “democratic ideals”, and waving democratic banners, lay siege to countries with authoritarian aristocracies. Losing their armies of slave labor, they continued to reinvent the subservience and free labor of slavery in multiple disguises. They raised the Seven Deadly Sins to a fine art infusing them into the current culture and economics. The people of the world, dancing to their own version of the Seven Deadly Sins, were sucked into the political trance, electing leaders for their charisma instead of their competence. The result is the world we know.
Most people are aware they have been tricked. The one remaining element of democracy people think they have left, is voting for legislators and the President. But even this is only half true. While Americans can vote directly for their legislators, the President is actually elected by an “electoral college” composed of the representatives. Confronted by this “formality”, the people’s next defense is to claim, “well, we can still talk to our representatives.” But that, of course, is also a myth. To actually get to talk “directly” to a representative is a very special privilege reserved for wealthy donors or organizations that have a lot of influence in elections. And even if the average citizen could speak directly to a legislator, all the citizen would get is lip service. The legislators position on any issue is determined, not by average citizens, but by people who have the money or influence to get the legislator re-elected.
Repeating Bertrand Russell from the introduction:
“Apart from war, the modern great State is harmful from its vastness and the resulting sense of individual helplessness… Even in a democracy, all questions except a very few are decided by a small number of officials and eminent men; and even the few questions which are left to the popular vote are decided by a diffused mass-psychology, not by individual initiative.”
So, why then do people still “believe” and insist that WE LIVE IN A DEMOCRACY????
People hang on to the democracy myth because it somehow allows each of us, ‘WE’, the people, to individually believe we get to determine what goes on in our lives. It’s a denial, a lie, because we have each been brainwashed to believe that what we say makes a difference. It doesn’t. It’s a BIG LIE. Even in elections, the popular vote does not count. The popular vote, either for a person, or a referendum on almost every subject, is just a pole that is used by the legislators to gage their vulnerability. They keep the ability to decide the winner or the issue to themselves. And for smaller issues, like municipal decisions, even when a high majority of voters take to the streets for school reform, or even governance, as in Detroit, the mystical rug of democracy can still be pulled completely out from under them.
So, how did the founding fathers, around the world, get the implementation of democracy so wrong? At the time the American colonists declared independence, they were not just a wild and carefree bunch of new world pioneers. The colonists had been citizens of England for over 150 years. The problem was, when the colonies were established, they incorporated English law and structure. English government had a house of commons and a house of Lords which dated back to Edward III in the 14th century. Western society was very authoritarian with a strong belief in a society split into two parts: the “educated” aristocracy, and the “illiterate” common people. So, the “revolutionaries” might have appeared novel declaring themselves a ‘Democracy of the People’, but they didn’t have any TRUE democracy as a precedent to fall back on. Plus, the leaders were, after all, aristocrats, and they wanted to keep it that way. It was a pure power play among aristocrats. So, it’s easy to see why there was little novelty in the way the structure of modern governments were set up.
It’s actually easy to get fooled about what structures we have. The reason is not what people usually think. Consider the parallels between the U.S. and the U.K. The most obvious answer people jump to is: the house of Lords is parallel to the U.S. Senate; the house of commons is the parallel to the U.S. Congress. This isn’t so. They are actually very different.
Right from the beginning, the people setting up the U.S. government, who were mostly wealthy landlords, tried to create a government ruled only by representatives that the wealthy could pick from among themselves. Luckily, there were those like Thomas Jefferson and Madison that rejected that. So, stage one was to duplicate the English system to give commoners a strong voice. That would have produced two bodies, a Federalist Senate and a Republican Congress, divided by aristocracy and political party. Don’t be confused by the party names. The original Federalists would become today’s Republicans. And the original Jeffersonian Republicans would become today’s Democrats. Following English law, both bodies would be about the same size. England has about 700 members in each house of Parliament.
But the U.S. had another problem to solve that took over the debates. That was the size of the different U.S. states. If there were, say, two representatives per state, that would mean the small states, like Delaware, with only a few people, would have the same federal power as big states, like New York, that had many people. Hardly a ‘one man, one vote’ situation. The solution, which was proposed by Roger Sherman and Ben Franklin, was to make the two bodies different in size and give them different roles. So the Senate was set up with two representative for each state — thus creating an equality by state. The Congress was set up with the number of members per state based on the population of the state — thus creating an equality for each voter. A similar problem occurs when we consider world governments like the UN. We all know what a can of worms that is!
After establishing the dual size legislative bodies to solve the state size issues, both houses of congress subsequently became split along party lines. And it is the parties that continued the aristocrat vs. commons division: the current U.S. Republicans being equivalent in thinking to the house of Lords; the current U.S. Democrats being equivalent in thinking to the house of Commons. But, in the U.S., it was all implemented through a relatively small number of representatives, making their aristocratic power concentration greater.
In short, modern western governments are all “republic” forms of representative “democracy”, but the people are still being ruled as if they live in an aristocracy. Again, from Consent of the Governed:
“American politics is not organized or conducted … to discover the will of a majority on public issues. The politician tends not to conceive his role as representing a majority … rather … as that of satisfying the many organized minorities.”
Or, in words that may be easier to understand by our Stone Age Brains: the people’s freedom is still yoked by the tyranny of the vote, they are governed by the tyranny of representation, and the aristocratic legislators still favor their friends who head up the corporations, the colleges, the professional associations, and the military. Yet, no one is going to tell “us” ‘we’re NOT a democracy’. Democracy is DEAD! Long live Democracy!
Our 229 Year Blindness Is Not New
I pointed out statements from Thomas Jefferson and others during the writing of the U.S. Constitution that discuss the problems. Most people have been so brainwashed by education and the media that they are in absolute denial about this. And I say DENIAL because it’s not that it hasn’t been repeatedly pointed out for over two hundred years. Here’s what John Stuart Mill said in 1859 from On Liberty (4):
“It was now perceived that such phrases as ‘self-government’ and ‘the power of the people over themselves’ do not express the true state of the case. The ‘people’ who exercise the power are not always the same people over whom it is exercised; and the ‘self-government’ spoken of is not the government of each by himself, but of each by all the rest… ‘the tyranny of the majority’ is now generally included among the evils against which society must be on guard.. chiefly as operating through the acts of the public authorities…
…Society… practices a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life…”
Democracy Will Always Fall Apart in the Presence of Predatory Competition
It might be tempting to think that democracy is currently falling apart because it is currently under stress. It would be different in more peaceful times. Not so. There is a fatal flaw built into western society that will assure that Democracy always falls apart, no matter how well it is designed and implemented: PREDATORY COMPETITION! As long as business and human development are based on predatory competition, eventually it will spread into government. In our current world, fighting with each other is built into every element of society.
Elected Representatives
Of course, this raises the huge question, “couldn’t a representative system be constructed that would work?” The answer is yes. But, not without eliminating four major problems: 1. elections based on a majority vote system; 2. representatives allowed to vote “their own views”; 3. access for corruption by money and power; and 4. A predatory competition basis for social interaction. Until this is figured out, a representative system can’t be made to work.
What about Socialism?
Democracy, in fact, is VERY closely tied to socialism. From a book called Today’s ISMs (8):
“The link between democracy and socialism is the most important single element in socialist thought and policy. The history of socialism quickly shows that successful socialist movements have grown up only in nations with strong democratic traditions.
The reason for this parallelism is simple. Where democratic, constitutional government is generally accepted, socialists can concentrate on extensive economic and social reforms: to create more opportunity for the underprivileged classes; to end inequality based on birth rather than service; to open the horizons of education to all people; to eliminate discriminatory practices based on sex, religion, race, or social class; to regulate and reorganize the economy for the benefit of the entire community; to maintain full employment; to provide adequate social security for the sick, unemployed, and aged; to re-plan the layout of towns and cities; to tear down slums and build new houses; to provide medical facilities for everybody, regardless of income; and finally, to rebuild society on the foundation of cooperation… All these goals of democratic socialism have one thing in common: to make democracy more real by broadening the application of democratic principles from the political to the nonpolitical areas of society… Freedom of worship and freedom of political association, historically the first liberties to be won, are still the essential foundations of democracy.”
The link between democracy and socialism is so strong because democracy is a process people believe takes power away from a monarchy and distributes it to the citizens. This is also a socialist goal. Socialism focuses on fixing problems that those same democratic people find themselves in the middle of, which is also a democratic goal. Two of socialism’s primary goals, for example, have always been social equality and the abolition of poverty. These are clearly goals for “true” democracy as well.
The problems people have understanding socialism and comparing it with democracy are: 1. socialism and democracy are not both social structures to begin with — the apples and oranges problem discussed above; and 2. the example implementations of both socialism and democracy history has to draw from are all partial and distorted implementations to begin with and faulty implementations to boot.
While most people think democracy, as a principle, is also concerned with social issues, when Athenian democracy is implemented, it contains fundamental flaws that prevent it from equitably addressing those social problems. Socialism, likewise, as both a principle and an implementation, is also severely flawed. This means, the way modern democracy and socialism have been implemented totally miss the goals that each philosophy actually sets out to achieve. So, when people get into arguments about whether democracy or socialism is better, they don’t even have good models to talk about.
One important reason I briefly address socialism here is because the word “socialism” is a strong emotional “trigger word” in western society. When people hear this word, many immediately assume it is the opposite of democracy. It’s not. Socialism is an economic system that can best be contrasted with Capitalism. While there are multiple variations of the definition of socialism, one of it basic assumptions is: any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods. Putting these clarifications together, we get the following graphic:
Democracy is actually a tradeoff against autocracy. Socialism is a tradeoff against Capitalism. Balloon 1 is where most U.S. citizens believe the U.S. is. Balloon 2 is what is really going on. Some readers might ask why the #2 point is so far away from the Capitalism side of the box. That’s because of the U.S. entitlement programs: Social Security, Medicare, public education, unemployment, and the military. Because the population is not realistic about what the U.S. really is, they get into big idealistic arguments about needed changes that totally miss the real issues.
The most important reason, however, to briefly bring up socialism here, is an assumption that conservatives intimately link with socialism: laziness! That is, a major concept of socialism is that every human must be provided a basic living from the state. Therefore, the belief goes, if people aren’t forced by natural drives, like hunger, to work, they won’t work! This can actually be shown from biology to be largely correct, despite the denial by liberal advocates. But it is also relatively easy to fix. So, by itself, welfare opportunistic laziness is not the fatal problem conservatives hold it out to be.
There is another concept of socialism that causes a much greater problem: the claim that “all men are created equal”. Remember this? Ironically, while considered a major element of socialism, it’s also one of the founding principles of U.S. democracy! If this equality belief, which both democracy and socialism both support, is logically associated with opportunistic laziness, it means, all people should get an equal basic living. This logical truth throws a deep philosophical belief in direct conflict with deep human biological / psychological drives. Because society can’t solve this riddle, society has slipped into deep denial and repeatedly grabs at disastrous solutions.
If we ask people, are “all men are created equal?” many people will instantly say yes. But, no one actually believes it! If they are probed about people’s “natural abilities”, people can clearly observe that all people are, in fact, very different — i.e. NOT EQUAL: some work a lot harder than others, and work in ways more supportive of broad social goals. Some are athletes, some artistic, some tall and strong, others small and frail, some smart, some.. not so. The answer people give depends on how the question is asked.
The simple inability of society to resolve this oxymoronic view of human equality, and capture the “truth” of the issue in cultural dialog, is one of the major language flaws of the human race. It is the basis behind the gridlock in modern government. The same problem is causing the standoff between advocates of democracy and socialism. Because “socialism” has become such a strong trigger word, society is unable to rationally address the details and sort them out. And the prominent arguments that rage in the media about this question are completely built on irrelevant distractions.
References
1. Bertrand Russell, Principles of Social Reconstruction 1916
2. Apple New Oxford American Dictionary http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/words/about
3. Voting Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_system
4. John Stuart Mill, On Liberty 1859
5. Livingston and Thompson, The Consent of the Governed 1966
6. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract 1762
7. Bertrand Russell Why Men Fight 1917
8. Alan O. Ebenstein, 10th edition, Today’s ISMS 1994
9. Lynching of Reuban Stacey, https://floridalynchings.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/the-lynching-of-reuban-stacey.pdf
10. Athenian Democracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athenian_democracy
Images courtesy of flickr and FreeDigitalPhotos.net
The topics discussed here are expanded further on the A3 Society website.
