How Modern Representative Governments Are Inconsistent With True Democracy
I recently posted part 6 of my series The Collapse of the First Global Civilization: The Failure of Democracy. The entire article was listed as a 59 min read. There are multiple subsections that stand on their own that I’m sure will interest special audiences in a smaller format. Here is the part related to the problem of using Representatives.
(Book reference numbers are related to the reference table in part 6.)
Failure of the Basic Model of Democracy Using Representatives
A Serious Problem With The Definition of Democracy
Let’s start with “one” definition for Democracy. Yes, I say “one” because the world can’t even agree on a single definition — which is one of its fatal 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 through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.
A second 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.)
I chose this definition of democracy, which is a widely accepted and used definition, specifically because it includes a serious self contradiction. A key goal of Part 6 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.” 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 Government
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.
Failure of Implementation
The discussion above related to contradictions within the basic principle of democracy itself. The material following addresses how society even completely corrupts the basic principles during implementation.
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 calledCitizens 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 ofpower 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 theutmost 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 ispolitic 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 toforce 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 withadequate 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 thedominant 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 thinkingcitizens 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.
photo from flickr
