Is democracy really a good idea? — one wonders

© 2016 Peter Free

 

03 October 2016

 

 

Premise

 

Democracy's success as a form of governance probably depends on having a healthy ratio of well-intended knowledgeable people to a small minority of caustically ignorant dopes.

 

However, humanity's composition seems to run the other way. Which makes democracy, at least arguably, problematic.

 

The usual and intellectually lazy retort (to this problem) is that democracy is better than every other form of government. With the usually tendered evidence taking the form that more autocratically benevolent forms of government break down during the process of regime succession.

 

Democracy, so this pro-people argument goes, transmits its governance mantle more reliably to elected, purportedly competent rulers.

 

But what if what is being passed on increasingly sucks for most people?

 

 

My two (allegedly randomly chosen) doubt-inducing examples

 

Those of you not chained by conventional wisdom may appreciate the following instances of artistically rendered pseudo-evidence.

 

 

"Random" Sample 1

 

The Washington Post's Stephanie McCrummen did a genius level hatchet job on a Donald Trump supporter. Her interview and observation of "Melanie Austin" is hilarious, honest, sympathetic, murderous and depressing at the same time.

 

The portrait starts this way:

 

 

She was a 52-year-old woman who had worked 20 years for the railroad, had once been a Democrat and was now a Republican, and counted herself among the growing swath of people who occupied the fringes of American politics but were increasingly becoming part of the mainstream.

 

Like millions of others, she believed that President Obama was a Muslim. And like so many she had gotten to know online through social media, she also believed that he was likely gay, that Michelle Obama could be a man, and that the Obama children were possibly kidnapped from a family now searching for them.

 

© 2016 Stephanie McCrummen, ‘Finally. Someone who thinks like me’, Washington Post (01 October 2016) (paragraph split)

 

 

You can tell already how this is going to go.

 

McCrummen's article is long, but worth reading. Especially for those who admire the art of skilled, admittedly slanted and propagandized portrayal.

 

With regard to democracy being the supposedly supreme form of government — multiply "Melanie Austin" by tens, hundreds and possibly thousands of millions of people.

 

 

"Random" Sample 2

 

Consider the real world implications of this one:

 

 

Colombians have rejected a peace deal to end 52 years of war with Farc [see here] guerrillas, throwing the country into confusion about its future.

 

With counting completed from 98% of polling stations, the no vote led with 50.23% to 49.76%, a difference of 61,000 votes.

 

Both government and rebels have repeatedly said that the deal was the best they could achieve and a renegotiation would not be possible.

 

© 2016 Sibylla Brodzinsky, Colombia referendum: voters reject peace deal with Farc guerrillas, The Guardian (03 October 2016) (extracts)

 

 

Those of you familiar with FARC and Colombian suffering will know that this deal is not at all a trivial issue. Yet a virtually non-existent majority of voters will probably be permitted to undermine it.

 

Pertinent to our "democracy is good argument" — we can intuit that Columbian voters are divided between the two sides and very probably also ignorant as to the negotiation's achievable specifics.

 

 

The moral? — The longer our American experiment in democratic governance continues, the less likely it will prove its "Public" worth

 

As I have written before, there seems to be a population size beyond which democracy either (a) vanishes, having been seized by the powerfully avaricious, or (b) stumbles into chaotic stupidity.

 

If there is a case to be made for wide-spread artificial intelligence, governance may be it. Imagine constantly fair-minded, knowledgeable rulers. Perhaps the answer is a human ant hill run by mega-computers.