Why democracies don’t take care of their democracy?
Western societies like to boast off their superior values like freedom of speech, liberal democracy, liberty, and human rights. We tend to give instructions or criticize other countries for their lack of democracy and how they ought to be developed as if our own democracies are already perfect. However, quick reflection reveals to us that they aren’t; some are closer to the values represented by liberal democracies, some are further away. But for all of the democracies which are proud to call themselves liberal democracies, the question has to be asked: why don’t we regularly develop and pay attention to the state of the values we are so proud of?
Aldous Huxley, one of the best minds on social issues of his time, describes a familiar dilemma in all western democracies with a witty fable in his book Brave New World Revisited (1958), where he comments on his astonishingly precise prophecies of future made thirty years before:
In the West, democratic principles are proclaimed and many able conscientious publicists do their best to supply electors with adequate information and to persuade them, by rational argument, to make realistic choices in the light of that information. All this is greatly to the good. But unfortunately, propaganda in the Western democracies, above all in America, has two faces and a divided personality. In charge of the editorial department, there is often democratic Dr. Jekyll — a propagandist who would be very happy to supply his reader with the best arguments and facts. But this worthy man controls only a part of the machinery of mass communication. In charge of advertising, we find an anti-democratic, because anti-rational, Mr. Hyde — or rather a Doctor Hyde, for Hyde is now a Ph. D. in psychology and has master’s degree in the Social Sciences. This Dr. Hyde would be very unhappy indeed if everybody always lived up to the John Jekyll’s faith in human nature. Truth and reason are Jekyll’s affairs, not his. Hyde is a Motivation Analyst, and his business is to study human weakness and failings, to investigate those unconscious desires and fears by which so much of men’s conscious thinking and overt doing is determined. And he does this not in the spirit of moralist who would like to make people better, or of the physician who would like to improve health, but simply in order to out the best way to take advantage of their ignorance and to exploit their irrationality for the pecuniary benefit of his employers.
This is a natural state of affairs in modern western states, where the democracy hasn’t only take liberal form but has also made a strong alliance with consumerism. In liberal consumerist democracies, it is the nature of things that consumerist firms are profit-maximizing, which, with the help off branding and advertising companies, employ all sort of tricks to earn a maximum-profit on the expense of consumers. While the original argument for capitalism was a provision of a maximum benefit to the consumer with goods, the present consumerism vows in the name of obsolescence, trends, and satisfaction. Firms prioritize an economic benefit from the exploitation of inherent human weaknesses over a provision of a maximum benefit for the consumer. In an age of comfort and consumerism, people prefer to relax after a consuming day at work or school with light-minded video blogger episodes, entertaining celebrity magazines, relaxing Netflix, and couple-second lasting comedy like memes or Vines. The final product of the newspaper Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Hyde work for competes with Netflix and Vines for the precious off-work time of the consumer and thus has to be more relaxing and amusing than Netflix and Vines. To meet these standards, we can easily assume whose opinion weights more on what type of reporting and content, in general, will the profit-maximising newspaper publish. As the audience is accustomed to being distracted and does not like to be asked to concentrate or make a prolonged intellectual effort during their leisure time.
Especially the arrival of the internet and social media, together with present-day entertainment, has decreased our ability to concentrate on long texts and information which requires deep and critical thinking. Nicholas Carr discusses the issue of hectic internet, with all of its hyperlinks, thumbnails and constant distractions in general, in his Pulitzer-finalist book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. On average our ability to concentrate for long time intervals on information and process it has decreased. Thus, it is natural that the newspaper has to supply catchy and snappy articles which don’t require critical thinking and are summarised in as few words as possible. The great issues of today must be dealt within couple paragraphs or within five minutes at the most. The result is that the electorate of democratic society gets their news and political opinions in a flat, entertaining and abbreviated form.
What results from this? The candidates who run for office have to give the same sort of catchy and snappy promises or speeches. They over-simplify issues and are simply unable to tell the whole truth as their audience is simply unable to receive complex and lengthy arguments or at least such arguments are highly unappealing and ineffective. The methods employed by candidates have to be same as in advertising of a deodorant or presentation of most flashy celebrity news of the day. The political principles and specific plans for specific action have come to lose most of their importance. The personality of the candidate and the way he/she is projected by the advertising experts are things that really matter nowadays. Take for example the recent US presidential election. What most remember from the event is that it was a battle of misogynist/racist/white male who promised to make his country great again with a catchy slogan which doesn’t really mean anything concrete, against an establishment/minority defending lady who irresponsibly deals with her emails. Of course, this is an eager exaggeration but how many were actually familiar with programs and visions of Mr. Trump or Mrs. Hilton on how they planned to take care of domestic or foreign issues of the greatest power in the world. Maybe some were to some extent, but without a doubt, the characters of two candidates stole the greatest attention of the media and so the electorate. Such an outcome seems to be quite obvious. How can one who fast-scrolls Instagram or Facebook daily, or spends most of the time watching soap operas with funny characters and catchy phrases in times of elections preserve him/herself from catchwords and fiction-like characters and vote rationally for the best proposition to govern the society he/she lives in?
Non-stop distractions of the most fascinating nature are deliberately used as instruments of policy, for the purpose of preventing people from paying too much attention to the realities of the social and political situation. Only the vigilant can maintain their liberties, and only those who are constantly and intelligently on the spot can hope to govern themselves effectively by democratic procedures. A society, most of whose members spend a great part of their time not on the spot, not here and now and in the calculable future, but somewhere else, in the irrelevant other world of social media and Netflix, of mythology and metaphysical phantasy, will find it hard to resist the encroachments of those who would manipulate and control it. In their propaganda, today’s politicians/dictators rely for the most part on repetition, suppression, and rationalization — the repetition of catchwords which they wish to be accepted as true, the arousal and rationalization of passions which may be used in the interests of the Party, the State or some third party Social Mogul.
Democracy of imbeciles
In the words of Aldous Huxley, who was deeply concerned by this issue already sixty years ago:
The survival of democracy depends on the ability of large numbers of people to make realistic choices in the light of adequate information.
The skills of critical thinking and concentration are decreasing in Western democracies. In the country I am from, Finland, and other Scandinavian countries Norway and Denmark, have all experienced an average loss of 0.23 IQ points per year since the mid-1990s. Such numbers cannot be ignored since the decrease in intelligence, especially with such a rate (in 30 years, Finland will lose 7.49 points of overall IQ), significantly undermines the basic principle of the democracy, that the most popular opinion is the best opinion. A society where people aren’t intelligent and are incapable of critical thinking and learning cannot claim that the opinion of its people is the most adequate decision. Thus, it is strange that no modern democracy contribute actively to the development of critical thinking, logic, and attention to alienate itself even a bit from the problems described, as this is fatal for a functioning democracy. Especially in the age of Fake News, it seems that people have greater and greater problems in recognizing what is factual news reporting and what is a conspiracy theory, our political discourses ending at the beginning as no one can agree on facts. Social media and the internet, in general, have also added another X-factor as people are on average more free to express themselves which has added an amount of opinion in the sea of information. To break away from the problems described and to make the electorate to have greater integrity and independence, governments should invest from a young age into its electorate. A lesson in basic logic could be executed from the first year of school and become more and more demanding with years just like in every other subject. Nowadays, people are introduced to basic logic in the first year of university if they study humanities which is simply insane if the government wants to have the most intelligent electorate which makes for the best decisions in society.
In general, a greater investment in education should be done. Especially in Finland, it seems like we are content with all the past success of our education but haven’t yet reacted fast enough on the constantly dropping PISA Test results in global comparison. The most worrying aspect is that there is no hope in sight for the near future as two last Finnish governments have decreased country’s education budget by 1.5 billion.
The most likely is that none of these propositions will be executed because a more aware and critically thinking audience is not seen as an ideal by the advertising companies; companies who want to sell more goods or governments who want to have more compliant electorate (I would like to believe that at least Scandinavian democracies care for their democracies). But if democracy is the rule of the people, the people of democracies should demand change so that their posterity could enjoy more aware and intelligent democracy; a democracy that wants to develop its integrity and independence, a democracy that cares for its democracy
