The kings and their seed guns

Who does democracy serve now?

So far in this series, we've talked about how people relate to each other, what the moral framework behind it is, how people appeal to each other, what democracy owes us, and how our decisions get distorted.

Now we’re getting more into the real operation of society to determine where democracy can come detached from its purpose.

We have done a bunch of talking in this series about how democracy was envisioned to serve the needs of the overall population. That assumes some risk of majority rule of course, so it would seem that our main challenge is to actively structure it in ways that don’t bury the needs of those with a quieter democratic voice.

Today however we’re going to consider how even a goal as sensible as that is complicated by cultural assumptions. Assumptions that remain despite them no longer matching our lived reality.

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It’s worth reiterating that most people think of democracy as a positive thing, designed around a willingness to share the fruits of our collective labours. You might flip the coin over and think of it as a willingness to support the self-interest of every person in the collective, but it basically amounts to the same ideal.

This, of course, will always sound like bad news to people who would rather just keep all the fruit for themselves! Greed, on paper, has little to do with big-D “Democracy” itself, but it obviously influences the desired outcome of democratic acts.

But let’s come back to that. First you need to appreciate there’s always going to be some conflict between those who want democracy to:

1. Foundationally serve everyone and spread opportunity widely, on the assumption that the more people who get a crack at being great, the more (numerically) likely it is we’ll unleash great people.

Or;

2. Explicitly identify capable people and provide them with enhanced opportunities, on the assumption that this represents the best chance of improving society in ways that everyone else (even the weak) will eventually benefit from.

There’s an imperfect analogy that gets thrown around a bit—in various forms and contexts—where these poles are personified as a “Farmer” and a “Hunter”

The Farmer plants loads of seeds and, while no single seed will grow to feed their family, they collectively can provide both enough and, without much additional effort or skill, both excess and resilience. The basic techniques the Farmer uses are inclusive and easily shared, but can be skilfully developed once mastered.

The Hunter stakes their wellbeing on, in all likelihood, singular perfect shots, where each perfect shot has the advantage of feeding their family well for days or weeks. However, the success of the Hunter—as measured by their ability to feed their family—is as much down to their individual capabilities of discrete movement and patient timing (things which are negatively impacted by the involvement of others), as their actual skill. Like the Farmer, their skills can be advanced once mastered, but the basic skills themselves are not accessible to everyone.

The reason I point all this out is not to position one or other approach as inherently better. Both have a logic to them, and both have inherent risk: The farm could be ruined by drought; the hunter could return empty-handed. Both have their clear place.

Or, should I say, both had their clear place.

See, something happened through the 20th Century, which was that developed societies started to be able to produce substantial excess—largely through “Farming”. Those in the developed world found themselves with excess energy, excess calories, excess experiences, excess consumption, and excess time. Of course, when I use the word “excess” here, I’m talking about things beyond our basic needs, even allowing for an evolving definition of “need”.

For example, I don’t know what sorts of magical calculators are used to conclude horrifying statistics like ‘over 1/3rd of the world’s food is wasted’, but regardless of the detail, I think we all instinctively understand there is no longer a sound justification for things like poverty, modern slavery, and homelessness, in purely objective and amoral terms.

It’s not as if we’ve done nothing with the excess. Our modern social safety nets, public services, and welfare systems are excess in action. But the fact they can exist at all is the point. Even with all that “socialism” [sic] we’re doing, we have so much excess now that many of us think nothing of throwing away a pocket-sized supercomputer every 18 months or so, to replace it with a marginally better one.

In the distant past, someone unable to work would have no choice but to become an ‘appendage’ of another Hunter or Farmer—mortally-reliant on another’s labour. At either end of our lives we all experience this reliance to some degree, even if we are “self-sufficient” during the middle of our lives, so there is a broad acceptance of the idea even now that we depend on each other; our modern disagreements just surface about where the line should be drawn between acceptable reliance and cancerous reliance.

This is, fundamentally, the question of “fairness” that drives democracy. But, more recently, it’s also the cause of a growing contradiction: If technological and social advancements—delivered incrementally, over geographical and timeframes far beyond our lifespans—are now able to provide us all with everything we might comfortably need, why is contemporary fairness even important?

Why do we still feel it’s “fairer” that civilisation’s shared excess gets converted into exclusive excesses?

Let’s get back to those desired democratic outcomes.

What I didn’t mention earlier is there was always a small segment of people who could operate outside the Farming and Hunting paradigms. Eventually, they were the nobles and enclosers and feudalists and landlords, and then the intellectual property owners and the capitalists—but they go all the way back to the tribal bullies who insisted their ‘value’ entitled them to have their share of the work done for them.

Lazy pricks in other words. The real “Beneficiaries” in society.

That might seem harsh. But, in modern terms, it’s pretty fair. These are people who, nowadays, live on investing money and having other people do their Farming and Hunting for them. It’s not that they don’t provide any economic value within our system, but their survival within the system depends on them extracting excess from it.

To give them some credit, these people may have done one or two really good things to relieve us of some form of ‘scarcity’. They might have happened across a nice warm cave; or inspired a torrent of rage in their army that resulted in a historic victory for their people; or applied for a patent for ‘shopping on the internet’; or, you know, cheated and killed a few indigenous people and acquired a bunch of fertile land for their country…

But, as often as not, they simply emerge into this world from a lucky hole.

Either way, their personal perception of their value is their allowing others to Farm and Hunt in their after-glow.

Back when Farming and Hunting was kind-of a coin toss still, these people could rightly point to the trickle-down benefits of their once-in-a-generation successes. Maybe it came from a Farmer developing a new, more productive, growing practice or a Hunter inventing a more effective trap. Maybe it was something to benefit both groups: “I secured all this great land, and my largess will trickle down to benefit our whole society, so it’s unfair that I should now have to Farm/Hunt it; you lot can all just share your excess with me!”   

And, I don’t know. In many cases, maybe that was fair enough? If we’re talking about scarce resources that can require a lot of effort to acquire or develop… Like, if you’ve risked your life sailing around the world (without GPS), to share smallpox with the “natives” in return for some of their land, maybe you do deserve a quiet, catered, retirement for your efforts in helping found a new ‘nation’?

That was a dark joke, but it’s not so far removed from the way capitalism is designed to work: You “invest” in the risk of building something new and your reward for that risk is a compounded (and maybe perpetual) return extracted from the labour of others. To justify that, we have to assume the Beneficiary was uniquely able, among all of contemporary humankind, to deliver society this ‘gift’ of excess.

Maybe you believe that—I’ll concede we all have our unique abilities—but I still think we’d have smartphones by now with or without Steve Jobs.

Regardless, the problems really started when powerful people started to realise that there were two ways that a thing could be scarce: There could be not much of it and it could require a lot of effective Hunting or Farming to get it; or, they could acquire it themselves and manufacture scarcity by not sharing it.

The first sign of trouble started way back when lands were captured and enclosed by feudal lords, regardless of whether they had done anything to ‘earn’ it.

But it got worse when, as excess grew exponentially during the last century, it became clear that the scarcity argument was no longer going to fly. It started to become really obvious that, through agriculture, energy, transport, and industrial innovations, the Beneficiaries were increasingly able to get much-much more back, even from an impressive act or initiative, than they really deserved or needed. And, because even the greatest acts were still leveraged off the collected fruit of human civilisation, that additional return was being carved off at society’s expense:

Sure, you cleared some farmland but, now we’ve collectively worked out how to get 10x more yield from farmland than we could 100 years ago, do you still deserve 50% of the crop?

Or, in a more modern context:

Sure, you built a better social media platform back in the day, but now we’ve collectively built social media into social infrastructure, do you still deserve the impunity to prevent competitors from accessing that infrastructure?

These sort of questions are clearly a threat to Beneficiaries. And, to cut to the chase, they answered the threat with neo-liberalism: The grand proposition that if everyone just Hunted it would plant a lot of seeds in the Farm.

It sounds like I’m joking, but that really is the logic.

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This all sounds like too-obvious nonsense, but it worked because it shifted the focus subtly, via the work of The Market economists, politicians, think tanks, and privately funded propaganda, to become about the 'Principle of the Hunter’, but the ‘Promise of the Farm’. We all bought into it because we were sold on the idea that the Hunt is the most ‘moral’ approach—“individual success begets social benefit”—while more inclusive resilience, success, failure, or fairness were largely beside the point.

…Be an exceptional individual, focused on great shots, and you’ll fill the soil with healthy “wealth creator” seeds…

While all this was happening though, the Beneficiaries themselves were extracting most of their riches not from the skill of the Hunt, but from the new excesses of the Farm.

Morality has always really been the driving force behind any political movement. It is the thing that drives us to War or incentivises us to Trust. But morality alone will never deliver us on a straight line to good outcomes, because human nature is simply too chaotic. And, even within the relative security of Do-unto-others Trust, the actual actions that people “calculate” will deliver a desired outcome just vary too widely.

A perfect recent example is the strong push-back against being “woke”¹. The strict moral outcome of greater equity and inclusiveness is clearly laudable and likely supported by essentially everyone on its face. But the resulting alienation, division, and misunderstanding from many of the actual actions taken—justified by this moral outcome—have proven to be extraordinary own-goals.

That is worth understanding, because it warns that even the most neutral democratic aims will always be subject to these chaotic mechanics; with things like money and attention and popularity all feeding them. But you can play on that chaos if you’re in charge of the game. That’s why it’s so important to understand that any rulership (democracy included) only really exists as a means for allocating scarcity.

If you doubt that, imagine a society where there was neither a shortage of basic needs nor a shortage of the willingness to share them according to need. What role would democracy serve in that society?

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You can probably already see where this is going. If democracy is about allocating scarcity, and there are two universally-acceptable ways of alleviating scarcity—Hunting or Farming—plus a general acceptance that, if you can enhance the efficiency of the Hunting or Farming, you should benefit in some way from that social contribution, then what happens once we have more than enough?

An anarchical society of that sort is an interesting thought experiment, albeit a clear stretch-goal for most of humanity! Even collective consciousness of all this excess, and awareness of how unbalanced it is, the consensus appears to be we still need democracy, autocracy, or some other bureaucracy to continue to allocate the fruits of society, or at least give that aspiration a good ol’ college try.

And then there’s the self-help gurus, the landlords, the self-depreciation merchants of marketing and advertising, the giant food conglomerates, the intellectual-property-ists, the politicians, the entertainment giants… These are Beneficiaries dependent on everyone else continuing to believe in scarcity, because otherwise they’ll be out on their arse.

The best-case-scenario then, for many people, appears to be some variation on a utopia, where all needs are met via some “evidence-based” solution; on a spectrum from highly-effective bureaucracy to ultra-low-tax private empowerment (depending on whose ‘evidence’ you’re reading).

These things appear about as far away from each other as possible, but both still share the common believe that “smart people” can devise a series of sequential steps that will deliver us into this utopia. This is the way the Beneficiaries have designed it, because their skillset is not in Farming or Hunting, but in being “smart”. As long as we keep believing our wellbeing requires smarts, then our wellbeing will always require them.

Thomas More’s original “Utopia”, we forget, was satire.

I’m not sure if that’s a little depressing, or if we just need to accept it’s human nature? We almost certainly could all be comfortable, leveraging the knowledge and excess we have now, in 2024, tinkering and creating and collaborating and tending to each other’s needs. We instead choose to compete for artificial scarcity, then maintain the illusion-of-necessity for some variant of ‘cracy as a tool to allocate it fairly.

“You may say I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one”

Corny as it seems to be, I always personally like the deceptively-simple sentiment in John Lennon’s “Imagine”: The idea of no countries, possessions, or exclusive religions to fight over. No matter how good our democratic system is—no matter how fair the system of allocation—it’s still never going to change the fundamental civilisation requirement for some variation of Farmers and Hunters. But we don’t have the same perpetual need for new warm caves or further land consolidation or inspirational pre-battle orations, in a ‘post-scarcity’ world; a world without things to fight over. Those point being, the things that Beneficiaries once earned their ‘rest’ from no longer provide the social value that they once did: When technology allows the construction of 15-floors of apartments, plus a barber, coffee shop, and florist on the same square of land that once could barely house a single family and their vegetable garden, the value of that land to its Beneficiary should be less.

That clearly isn’t happening!

But it’s worth us asking why. After all, many of these Beneficiaries would subscribe to the gist of John Locke’s 17th Century arguments that the Hunter/Farmer value-enhancement of land was so important to liberal society that, if unowned land was not being used intensively (e.g. it was a commons, a reserve, or part of a regenerative nomadic grazing cycle) it should be privatised in order to be selfishly worked and have its ownership ‘earned’. That hardly seems compatible with the sort of blatantly manufactured scarcity we apparently depend on to incentivise our supply:demand economy now.

My sense is, once things like exceptional risk and luck stopped being needed to sustain the human engine, it made sense for people to invest in the acquisition of power, because power protects you. It’s like a moat against the threat of being unmasked as nothing more than a Beneficiary.

But where this hits democracy is, investing in power is cheap. It’s much cheaper, time and energy-wise, to keep directing society towards moral frameworks that maintain your spot as a Beneficiary, than it is to actually learn to Hunt or Farm your way to an equivalent lifestyle—just think about the salary of a management consultant vs a lifetime-social-value consultant (read: “primary school teacher”). The only way that Beneficiaries can retain their ability to chip away at the excesses, and therefore avoid having to get their hands dirtied by soil or animal pelts, is to keep people believing in the democratic foundation of scarcity.

And Beneficiarying right now is good… next newsletter.

-T

1. A thing that, not so long ago, we were calling “political correctness”.