In my last newsletter, I wrote about democracy and how it is struggling against both an intent, and a wider perception, that it does not live up to its promise of an equal voice for every person.
While the intent might be acted upon by people we think of, disparagingly, as “elites” or other people in positions of power, the reason why there are any people drawn to the idea of manipulating democracy to their own ends is largely down to the incentives.
In explicit terms, should be be surprised if someone takes advantage, when they live under an economic system that disproportionately rewards a shrinking number of people with health, fulfilment, pride, sex and other dopamine hits? Should we be surprised if someone seizes an opportunity because democratic thinking hasn’t fully accounted for—or is not brave or insightful enough to implement—the ‘rebalancing’ actions required to maintain the sanctity of “one person, one (equal) vote”?
So, not to get too judgy about capitalism here. My beef has generally not been with ‘capitalism’ per se, but rather the style of unchecked capitalism where we fail to apply sensible limits to an, otherwise ok, premise of giving people autonomy over their own lives, via a mechanism of private ownership and profit motivation.
This “checking”—in case it’s not clear—is the sort of thing a functioning democracy is designed to do.
But modern capitalism crept up on democracy slowly, and burrowed away at it in so many different ways, so we really didn’t really see how it had pulled away the foundational ideals until after it was in charge of the whole game.
Regardless, in theory, this could still be rectified. The right combination of ideological politicians, activism, technology, and global cooperation, could absolutely restore democratic power to the people. In theory, you could squash misinformation, change tax laws, use judicial or technological means to ensure transparency, legislate for minority voices, and architect strong safety nets that ensure no person’s livelihood is ever dependent on being subsumed by another’s power.
As hard as all that might be to do in practice, however, it’s nothing compared to fixing an entrenched perception that democracy cannot deliver on its promise.
It’s logical to assume a lost faith in democracy is just a natural outflow from a world where your vote appears to make no difference to your individual life. It just delivers some different coloured party into government, and some different variation on the theme of “your life is harder again this year than it was”.
But I think it is more complicated than just feeling resentful and despondent, because we all feel that at times. The really ‘lost’ people, who give up on democracy altogether, do so because they have flipped a core sense about how they see the world.
In the last newsletter, I described this as leaving them with either Trust or War as ways to relate to other people. I want to go into that a little more.
There’s a high-profile war happening right now in the Middle East (or West Asia, depending on your frame of reference). Like everyone who has been following this, and has a genuine interest in the way history feeds into it, I have some complicated opinions about it. I have no intention of getting into the muddy specifics of any of that here but, obviously, war, power, money, and democracy can never be pulled apart so it’s going to serve as a bit of a jumping-off point for us.
You might wonder why we have war.
Clearly, there’s some power or status at stake, or defence against some power or status grab. Although, generally when our ‘allies’ do war-like things, we justify that death and destruction in terms that amount to “pro-active defence”: Preventing destabilising atrocities or power grabs which could become a problem.
This is despite the whole reason a war happens at all is because there are two sides—presumably both equally-confident in their justification.
Don’t get me wrong. If some deranged dictator is systematically terrorising innocent people, it should be stopped. But let’s not pretend that every time a deranged dictator turns up, the World Police® don their Good-Guy helmets and go to work… And, let’s not pretend when the World Police® do go to work, they’re always in it for the collective good.
And, let’s not pretend that, even in those cases where the World Police® do the “objectively right thing” and stop the dictator, that they then assess what kicked off this shitshow to begin with. How often is “pro-active defence” really followed by a transparent inquiry into how imperialism, exploitation, outsourcing of externalities, or destabilising misunderstood democratic values, factor into the motivations and growth of the Deranged Dictator’s platform in the first place?
We all grow up around different values and beliefs, but fundamentally there really are just two moral ways of dealing with other people:
“An eye for an eye”; or
“Do unto others as you would have them do to you”.
It might be helpful to think of them as War, and Trust.
We like to pretend that second mantra is what mostly drives us but, bad news, team, it’s not!
All the evidence suggests the civilisations that get to write history books are firmly in the “eye for an eye” camp.
This is because ‘EfaE’ isn’t just a moral mantra, it’s a way of thinking strategically. In a world made up of “bloated-anarchical communities”, it’s a way of considering the risks to your survival: You must respond in kind to demonstrate you’re not a walkover; and, equally, if you’ve got any inclination to take an eye to perhaps boost your own status, you’ve got to consider your enemy is thinking the same thing… therefore, the only rational options is to quickly take both their eyes before they get any ideas about yours!
The “Do unto others” mantra sounds lovely on paper, but we never evolved to read minds, so Trust remains a fragile, and certainly not very strategic, option in dealing with strangers. If you are confident you’ll survive an interaction, sure, do nto others. If they reciprocate, it’s win:win; the absolute best outcome. But, if they decide to just take both your eyes while you’re smiling stupidly at them, they actually still kind-of win.
This all sounds pretty dark (sorry!), but you’ll be pleased to note that half the world is NOT blind! (you can now cease your huddled-shivering-in-the-corner about the “true rationalisation of (wo)man”)
The reason for this…erm, ‘good’… news is people mostly understand they depend on each other. Literally from the moment of conception, you are dependent on your mother to consume responsibly, and not chug back yard-glasses of beer, cigarettes, and week-old ham left in the sun all afternoon; An infant is a useless bag of flab and goo-goo sounds without some responsible person to take care of them; Children need education; Teenagers need boundaries; Adults need roads and smartphones and debt and purpose; Nations need trading partners…
You get the picture. Poking out eyes willy-nilly quickly turns a bunch of impulsive ‘wins’ into a serious bummer.
Of course, it’s not just that we have a dependency on each other, but also the word “war” needs to be thought of in a more general (and likely less violent) way than perhaps you might have leapt to. Zoom out from the armed conflict that might literally take your eyes, and you can see it is just the tail end of a bunch of previous shunting and conning and exploiting, then a final battle in a long-running ‘War’.
Sometimes what looks like ‘Do unto others’ is still actually ‘Eye for and eye’ anyway. It’s just more… subtle.
Indeed, smart gamers in geopolitics realise if you can suppress a culture, found a religion, disrupt a political system, misappropriate natural resources, or simply scare someone enough with your superior technology and force so they stop acting autonomously, you have actually already taken their eyes.
This, it probably occurred to you, is exactly the sort of thing that forges people into terrorists intent on taking eyes in retribution.
Humans have always been good in little groups.
Once you know someone and understand they have purpose in common with you, and you realise there really is a win:win aspect to your relationships, “Do unto others” is an incredibly easy moral choice.
Unfortunately, we’re well beyond the point in human civilisation where all our interactions have that scrupulous ease. The simplicity of knowing the neighbour’s ‘borrowed cup of flour’ will be returned, as some equivalence at some point, in order to maintain the mutual peace and prosperity of the village, was long ago replaced by a need for detailed calculations and threat-analysis, as we found ourselves interacting with countless passing strangers.
Obviously though, that rapidly becomes unworkable… You could lose an eye!
So, what a functioning democracy does is eliminate the need for an individual to make a moral choice between Trust and War. It essentially externalises “Trust”, by giving people a shared system of justice. And, unlike feudalism or manorialism where, perversely, Trust is imposed upon you under the threat of War, democracy—in theory—lets you have a say in whether you lose an eye.
This is what makes it so important, and why a loss of faith in democracy—at least without an appropriate replacement—presents a fair graver threat to us than a few blocked roads and noisy sit-ins imply.
It may not yet be obvious to the libertarian seasteaders or the home-schooling organic-healthcare influencers, but systems like feudalism or democracy are things that are sucked into existence by a vacuum of Trust.
They don’t exist because some fancy Greek philosopher or religious prophet thought them up. They exist because we inherently understand our lives are safer and better under a system that operates as “I for an I”, rather than an “Eye for an eye”.
So, without fair democracy, that vacuum just grows until some other morality totem gets sucked in to take its place—Authoritarianism, Fascism, Religion, Techno-optimism, Feudalism…
As I mentioned earlier, all Trust is fragile. And our externalised Trust is no less fragile than the Trust we might have once shared between two friends or villagers. If you can no longer recognise a trustworthy system in ‘democracy’, it therefore can no longer shelter you from your own moral choices.
We live in a world now where US politicians and judges own millions of dollars in shares for corporations they regulate, UK politicians have intimate ties to secret offshore tax havens, Australian politicians hand over billions to private contractors and consultants for questionable benefit, and NZ politicians move freely from public sector positions to corporate lobbying ones. I don’t intend to cast explicit aspersions, but these countries stand as pinnacles of our evolved “democracy”.
For anyone paying attention, it’s clear that corruption of core democratic ideals, via things like tax “optimisation”, special treatment, crime, and general lack of transparency, are diluting our democracy.
Who in their right mind would want to do business with a meat pie company that hides what’s in the pies?
Likewise, who, in their right mind, would want to hand off their morality to a system for which the true workings are increasingly opaque?
For those of us outside this exclusive Club of the Culpable—the wealthy and connected who leverage this opacity to unbalance democracy for their own ends—we’re essentially left with hope, willful ignorance, or detachment. For many people, finding their lives increasingly hard, ignorance is perhaps a kind of bliss. But with the ‘detached’ growing, we may find this bliss can’t last forever, and a time may soon come when we need to fight for something we can Trust.
-T