Death of Democracy
It is unlikely that Democracy will be a popular form of government a hundred years from now. Mainly because of its greatest flaw — it gives people an illusion of power.
This flaw of democracy is not a new idea, in fact, Socrates was deeply suspicious of democracy. He believed that common folk can be swayed easily using persuasive arguments resulting in widespread demagoguery. Additionally, taking decisions based on majority and not based on consensus was a divisive way forward — not unifying. He must have noticed that the loudest or smoothest voice is often heard well and assumed true, and thanks to the internet, today’s loud voices can get incredibly loud, heard throughout the globe . Most democratic governments are not democratic in the true sense , the power to greatly influence the lives of billions of people still lies in the hands of a few people who we trust and elect to make big decisions for us. However, the internet, primarily social media, has made it far more efficient(and effective!) to simply advertise your position to the people than to prove your points to be valid. The bedrock idea of democracy is still true — having a conversation and trying to find a sensible conclusion, it’s the idea of voting as a means of conveying opinion and arriving to the said conclusion that is growing increasingly irrelevant.
Everything works fine as long as the influential few have a consensus regarding the future of the people. Problem begins when a rift forms within the circle of influential people. Now, democracy does not work to close the rift but to widen it. Because democracy dictates, the party that wins, is a party that can garner a larger following and not necessarily a party that speaks the truth. This is a problem because democracy assumes that the majority has a sense of the truth. However, the reality is, most of us don’t know the truth and perhaps we don’t even think about it. It is possible that one day the majority and the truth won’t be aligned, and that will be dangerous. The new governments of the future must be based on consensus rather than simple majority.
Last week, on 3rd November 2020, we witnessed one of the most divided elections in US history — counting of votes went on for days after the election because the votes did not offer a clear majority. Ultimately couple of days back, Joe Biden from the Democratic Party was announced to have a marginal majority over Donald Trump. The progressive world cheered the victory of democracy over tyranny but they seem to forget how close the battle was. the US population of voters were almost evenly divided at 50–50 on the question of who should be the next president of the United States. Democracy may have won but it had to fight for the win till its last breath.
Yuval Noah Harari fears a future where the external entities can incept an idea in a person’s mind systematically. And I agree, the technology to incept an idea into people’s mind would be an extremely powerful tool that can lead humanity to its greatest riches and to its worst ruins, however, right now, having large swaths of information freely available to us is actually reinforcing ideas rather than incepting them, because we simply ignore the ideas we don’t believe in. It is this organic reinforcement of ideas that is making us all more extreme rather than moderate.
By offering practically unlimited information, technology has stroked our confirmation bias to make us extremely rigid and ultimately blind. Contrary to what Harari believes, it might be incredibly hard to incept a new idea in a general mass of population in the future. The greatest movements in history, both the good and the bad, happened because people could be successfully convinced of a better future. In this perspective it may be a boon for humanity to have advanced inception techniques at our disposal — if you can’t change people you can’t really help them.
Finally, I think the influential people should constantly focus on how to arrive at consensus. If they don’t, there will be a large amount of bloodshed not inspite of democracy, but because of it. Democracy in its current form is essentially a primitive conflict resolution technique, that is no substitute to real progress which is conflict resolution through civilized consensus. The idea here is that you should not only be able to contribute and absorb, but also create insights and hence grow in a dialogue.
One should believe that such a resolution is possible and it lies in the truth, and to get to that truth one must travel through civilized conflict. The truth essentially lies on the other side of the conflict. That is the price of truth and everything else is a lie. That’s why we are all deeply divided regarding some basic ideas, and most of us are trying to figure out which camp each of us belongs to, where instead we should be willing to pay the price of truth by peacefully asking: “Why are we disagreeing at all?”.
Education, especially primary education, will play a big role in building the future we want. A 21st century mother’s greatest challenge would be to raise a child who knows how to effectively participate in a conversation about the present, the past and the future.