Systems and democracy
Systems have invariants: things that remain constant when the rest of the system changes. If we want to believe that we live in a democratic system, we would expect to observe that democratic governance is such an invariant. If we really believed in democratic governance, government on behalf of the people and their interests, then that form of governance would be protected in times of crisis. In a crisis, governance becomes more important because it guides how a way out of the crisis is found.
There was a Harvard study ten years ago to see whether any popular initiative in the US could become policy. There were zero examples in recent history. That is, government in the US has not in modern times been a democracy. It does not respond to what the populace[1] want their country to behave like. It doesn’t matter what the issue is, whether it is framed as right or left, black or white, male or female or enby; it won’t make it into policy or law.
Looking at this issue systemically gives interesting insights. We can’t be “a little bit” democratic. We can’t pretend that having an election occasionally makes us more democratic. If elections are not respected, by politicians and/or by voters, then the votes merely provide camouflage for what is really going on. We get typically awful destructive policies justified as being what people voted for. We do not get “hang on, why would people vote for their own destruction, how can that be democratic governance”. The system does not try to maintain or reassert the central place of democracy itself.[2]
Every so often we get a somewhat esoteric debate about voting systems and which is fairest. This merely betrays that our system gives power to whoever is deemed to have “won”, and that party shows less and less understanding about their need to redress whatever imbalance has been thrown up by the results. If an election result means cities or countryside is underrepresented, money or working people, young or old, that is not a mandate to trash the interests of the other. Or not if we believe in democracy: how could it?
In Disclosing New Worlds: Entrepreneurship, Democratic Action, and the Cultivation of Solidarity, Charles Spinosa, Hubert Dreyfus, and Fernando Flores, the authors, explain that voting is often a poor mechanism for democracy. It is poor because it weights everyone’s opinion the same, whereas the reality is that some people have far more knowledge of a particular subject area, some have far more skin in the game, and some people are inextricably involved when others are not. If we want governance on behalf of the people, then different people are not equal in different ways on different issues.[3]
You can see this readily with the difficulties that minority members face in whatever community. I remember vividly a colleague going to live on the East Coast of the US in a town that had direct democracy via town hall meetings. The issue that arose for my colleague and his young family was that in a town with many older and retired people it was impossible to get proper funding voted for schools.
Social systems
There are people who think that the answer is leadership.[4] The whole matter crystallises with populists who simply believe that their own personal leadership is what is required, no matter how badly things work out. We have a crop of “leaders” for whom there can be no evidence that there is a better way. I think, crass though it is, that this belief can be sincere.
Someone who actually values democracy necessarily thinks differently. Democracy, resting on the people, must imply social decision making, socialised governance. This is so deeply unpopular with the dominant narrative spinners today that wonderfully democratic governance in, say Rojava, is perceived as a threat. Just as the French Revolution back in the day was seen as an existential threat by Europe’s monarchs, the actual possibility of governance by people of themselves is not to be countenanced even as a possibility.
Let’s look at this first as a matter of complexity. Today’s populists deny science of various sorts. This is really just a disallowing of alternative poles of authority and truth. Trump attacks people who disagree with him, no matter what the basis of their difference. If we have multiple poles of wisdom and authority, they will not agree in general. If they do not agree there will have to be some real debate and deepening of the understanding of the situation that throws up the disagreement. The complexity of this is real and unavoidable: to the degree people find it uncomfortable they may look for a “leader” to tell them what to think.
But the real issue is this: we are used to thinking about individual qualities and capacities. Does this politician understand the issues? Does that representative have a conflict of issues? But democracy is about social systems, not about individuals. A social system is not a group of individuals. Like any system, it depends on the structure of the connections more than on the nodes that are connected. We can see this clearly in how social media (a different set of patterns of connection) have changed politics out of all recognition.
If we believe in democracy, we believe that the social group itself has an ability to deliver good governance in a way that individuals do not and cannot. On this definition there are very few democrats around at all. The fact that everyone says that they believe in democracy just means that it is a great smokescreen for corruption and governance that is actively hostile to any emerging traces of democratic sentiment and structure. Which is exactly what we see.
Levels of system (again)
This is the same thinking error we have remarked on many times. The social system has its own values, the first of which is to preserve the ability to social system to govern itself, that is its democratic invariant. The point of that is not all that everyone must be a democrat and think alike, but precisely the opposite, that good governance emerges from a system that can harness huge divergences in belief and huge diversity in knowledge and wisdom.
A democratic system will reject a populist “leader” not because they are wrong in what they think about any particular issue but because their claim to leadership is incompatible with the democratic invariant. Such people believe they know better, and in doing so they subvert the ability of social governance to work.
If you believe that international politics in the 21st century consists of countries trying to undermine each other’s ability to take effective action, then the appeal of subverting any tendency to democratic governance by favouring incompetent populists is an obvious strategy.
The thinking error is to pay attention to individuals and their abilities or incompetencies. That is not the social level. At the social level we need to look at the ability of the social system itself to maintain self-governance. Every charlatan will claim that they are enacting the will of the people, but that is some opposite pole from actual self-governance. It may even claim to be rescuing the ability to self-govern but that is the wrong means to that end.
If we take a challenge such as the current pandemic, the question should not be whether this “leader” or that “leader” are taking good decisions, it should be how to release the talents and resources of a whole host of people and institutions to play their part in a drama that has no script. A number of somewhat impoverished countries have outshone rich countries in coping with the pandemic and protecting themselves. The UK and the US have still not realised they are not even on the right page.
These countries have a sense of themselves acting. There is at least an embryonic sense that everyone has a role to play and at least an understanding that unlikely people may need to step up. There is some ability to act as a social system, an ability that the US domestically is inclined to repress and even trash. It is precisely the populist leader’s belief in their own leadership that prevents other people and institutions from doing what they need to do.
Legitimacy
We are supposedly governed by consent and policed by consent. Politicians rarely act as if this is true,[5] and police honour the principle as much in the disrespect of it as in seeing it as foundational. The armed services and the intelligence services frequently do not act democratically. We should see these lapses as threats to our ability to self-govern. Largely we let them pass or protest infringements of our liberty, which is not really the fundamental issue.
A colleague of mine says he does not get involved with conspiracy theories. I read recently that the term conspiracy theory was coined by the CIA in the 1960’s to smear anyone whose narrative they did not like. Basically, so the concept goes, only a deranged person could possibly believe that this happened or that it happened for those reasons. And of course, very many of the narratives castigated in that way turned out to be largely correct. Don’t expect apologies.
There are organised campaigns to undermine self-governance. Lobbying is nothing if not organised and its objectives are not above board. Someone quipped recently that if the oil price fell further the industry would have to pay off half of Congress. (Oops it just went below $0!) [6] What self-governance has to defend itself from is precisely the subterfuges that attempt to smuggle undeclared agendas in, dressed as legitimate interests. The crime against governance ability needs to be punished as such: by excluding people who are not honest in their systemic roles.
Legitimacy is not the same thing as legality. The laws and rules may or may not be systemically aware and may not be well-formed.[7] Legitimacy is being able to demonstrate the connection to the self-interest of the social system. It is about being able to argue clearly and on the record why a decision or an action is appropriate. In the age of regulatory capture, laws and rules are more likely to be yet another smokescreen for Illegitimate and subversive action.
Robert Macfarlane is arguing that the pandemic returns us to an understanding that necessary action is legitimate, that ownership of our own involvement in the social system is being returned to us. From which we can see the flip side, that we need to step up to those necessary actions, quite independently of official instructions and mandates. And when we step up, we see quite unmistakably when official decisions and actions are not legitimate, however legal they may be.
Differences in kind
A self-governed system is different in kind to a system where governance is conceived as external, the colonial model if you like. They are simply not the same thing despite all the blandishments to get you to believe they almost are the same. Of course, all natural systems are self-governed in ecosystemic fashion. Excesses produce balancing changes so that the overall system still works. Deficits create new niches and creative solutions.
The vital skill or sense that we need is being able to distinguish, under pressure, these two things which are actually different in kind. We are sold economics as a sort of value-free way to understand what is in our own interest and it turns out to be fairy tales: there can of course be no such thing. We are sold narratives about our place in the world and how good we have things: but that is all nonsense. We just need to be sure that we can act in our own interest to keep the system honest and therefore democratic.
Macfarlane is saying very clearly: can we do what we need to do? Graeber is saying very clearly: when all the bullshit jobs fall away, then we can see what is important.
[1] Perhaps relevant, in French the word populace refers exclusively to the “lower classes”
[2] Like turkeys voting for Christmas…
[3] Contrast the notions of equality and equity. There’s a whole series of cartoons if you search for images about ‘equality, equity, and justice’. In the first version I saw, justice is described as “without supports or accommodations because the cause(s) of the inequity was addressed. The systemic barrier has been removed.”
[4] They just do, no matter what the question.
[5] Did you notice last week’s retroactive expansion of UK criminal offenses, by diktat of the Home Office, during a time when Parliament was sitting and was perfectly capable of considering the changes to the ‘emergency’ regulation. Passed off as a ‘clarification’, David Allen Green called it “a bit naughty” and pointed out formal and constitutional concerns with the manoeuvre and the wording.
[6] Negative prices on West Texas Intermediate, who’d have thought it? A structural artefact of the contracts, as I understand it, which involve the purchase and actual delivery of physical product. If you don’t actually want a tonne of corn or a barrel of oil, you’d best offload the contract before it comes due. But as storage containers fill up, nobody else wants it either…
[7] Speaking of badly drafted and not well-formed; that ‘clarification’ the Home Office made? In the UK currently it’s legal to leave your home in order to go to work, but a criminal offence to stay at work once you arrive…
