A fundamental truth that we dare not speak
We are all engaged in an act of collective folly and cowardice that future historians will struggle to understand.
In the near-ish future — maybe thirty or forty years hence — a historian may look at our current period of relative decline, poor governance, and economic stagnation, and explain it thus:
“For some reason, in the early 21st century, practically everyone embraced an obvious folly that democracy could be improved by involving more people in the decision-making part of public policy.”
They may then add
“At the same time, they were happy to outsource the fundamental precondition of doing that — the job of describing what the public thinks, wants, and knows — to a socially narrow, privatised public sphere.”
The historian would then give a brief pen portrait of an activist media industry that takes most of its information and commentary from sources that are paid for by private capital, and processed to a conclusion by a small subset of citizens who are time-rich, and unusually certain about things that they wouldn’t even be able to describe very well.
Our historian may then add….
“This privatised public sphere was positively incentivised and rewarded for acting in bad faith.”
They may conclude…
“So they hyper-democratised something that should be done by professionals, and privatised something that can only be done properly if everyone is engaged in it.
As a result, Liberal Democracy — the hegemonic worldview of the globe’s dominant powers had an upside-down understanding of its fundamental value — democracy.”
Such a historian could, quite rightly, ask how an entire political culture could be this stupid. Because our historian has met some human beings, he or she would be aware that we already knew how difficult it was to get a sensible collective understanding of even the most simple issues.
They would know that no one in their right mind would outsource an important personal decision to an unstructured crowd of people.
Such a historian may well conclude that none of us felt brave enough to say something that we all knew very well:
“Large groups of people should not be involved in making decisions about policy. A good democracy only asks people what outcomes they want, and who they trust best to deliver those outcomes.
A good democracy also goes to some lenghts to ensure everyone has their interests, circumstances and even their opinions represented fairly — and that they have a fair opportunity to shape that common understanding.”
Such a historian would probably preface such an observation with a reminder about Hans Christian Andersen’s tale of The Emperor’s New Clothes. The thing that everyone knew, but was somehow unable to articulate. A mass act of social cowardice.
We can only hope that the historian in question is still able to write anything without first getting it cleared by the censors working for the kind of authoritarian strongmen that we are currently helping with our collective folly.
