Democracy, in the Western world, has come to be a concept that is practically worshipped amongst its people. It makes us feel as though we have a choice in certain matters or, usually, a choice in who the individuals or entities are that comprise our governments. In the East, this concept is not quite venerated as much, a phenomenon explained through myriad justifications of cultural differences or, unfairly, lack of education. The East tends to favour monarchical or dictatorship systems, much to the dismay of the USA.
Particularly in America, fighting for democracy — or, at least, a voice — is seen as something that is integral to the people. Without this ability to make yourself known, whether you are a farmhand or a real estate mogul, is reason enough for the people to take up arms against their own ruling class, thanks to the rights afforded by the Second Amendment.
People who live within a democratic system are unafraid to express their opinions and vote for what they believe in, to a limit. However, a conventionally controversial opinion in politics can seep into your personal life or even your career, as it is increasingly popular for conservative opinions to be shunned by employers whereas liberal opinions, no matter how extreme (possibly right up until the point of actual violence), are tolerated and even celebrated. But this is not what I want to dwell on for this article; perhaps another time.
State Secrets
A key word I mentioned in the second sentence of this article is that democracy makes us feel as though we have a choice.
Let’s think about this. The world, politically, is becoming increasingly more complicated. It has developed significantly in terms of technology, where the art of espionage has been refined to suit the modern world and does not entirely comprise of handsome polyglots roaming around foreign lands and gleaning key information through cunning infiltration (although this, no doubt, still occurs constantly). The global population is increasing exponentially. Our relationships with other nations, whether it’s the Special Relationship between the USA and the UK or whether it’s the palpably tense relationship between the USA and Iran, make themselves known to the people in dribs and drabs. Of course, everyone knows which countries get along with whom, but rarely exactly why.
In short, political matters are so much more complex than they used to be with many more state secrets concealed from the people, usually for our own safety. So, to the crunch: why do we think that our opinions, our protests against war, our debates about the relationships we have between nations, and thus our choices, are important?
For example, the UK has an unusual relationship with Russia. I often find myself defending Russia, even as British citizen, where many of my British cohabitants would be quick to condemn Russia for all sorts of transgressions such as that incident in Salisbury in 2018. Maybe I am wrong to defend Russia as a state that puts itself above all others, and the UK’s tentativeness towards Russia is completely justified.
The truth is that our governments are more privy to information than we, the citizens, are; of course they are. But we as people also need to drop this idea that our public opinions are therefore important and will make a real difference. If the USA goes to war with Iran tomorrow, it will be a decision made obvious to the government for more variables than an individual could understand even through years of study on the subject.
Now, this fact does not matter in a democracy. It does not matter that an individual will not dedicate their entire lives to learning politics and, even if they did, they would still not have the government intelligence to appropriately guess a solution. All secrets lie behind closed doors and, should they ever be declassified, are declassified many years after the event, such as cracking the Enigma code, which was kept a state secret for around thirty years after the Second World War had concluded.
The question, then, is this: how can a person living in a democratic state reasonably have and express opinions on things on which information is largely withheld for their own safety?
Uninformed Voting, ergo Dishonest Politics
With growing populations across all nations, hand-in-hand with both the issues discussed above and a generally disintegrating culture due to the corruption of our moral fabric, the votes arising out of a democratic system are increasingly irrational. Anyone can make their voice known, too, in the era of the Internet. In order to get your voice heard prior to the internet, you would have to become influential in journalistic spheres or engage in protests, but now even a snide 280-character-maximum remark can go viral. What’s more is that e-communities form and perpetuate views, often to the point of falsehood, and reinforce these ideas forever. With this assurance that they have the agreement of their bubble, their opinions are firm and go without challenge and, when challenged, leads to hysteria rather than discussion. This is what happens at least once every four years in the USA. Emotion has a firm grasp over us all.
It is unclear, too, what a person should be voting for in a democracy. If a British political party suggests that taxes should be increased to 90% on the earnings of people who earn anything above £100,000 and somehow forbidden from migrating to another country to escape this tax, and bearing in mind the average Briton earns around £25,000 per annum, this tax does benefit the average person. However, would the average Briton think this is a good idea? I doubt it, but the average individual would certainly benefit from such a steep tax and could be used to improve British infrastructure. So, then, the individual may well vote for what he believes to be in the interests of the nation rather than himself. But not all individuals will feel the same way and may vote for this colossal tax.
There are many issues that the people in a democracy must face which are much more subtle than the extreme example above, but are similar in nature. A good example is that of the UK’s membership of the European Union and there were good reasons on both sides of the argument: we should stay in because of our enhanced trade relationship with the European Union, or we should leave because the control of laws over our nation is slipping between our fingers and the EU’s laws take supremacy over our own. However, there were also bad reasons on both sides: some people wanted to go on holiday to places in Europe without having to wait a little bit longer to get through customs, and some people despised foreigners so much that they wanted to forbid their entry as much as possible. Many of the people in the Remain campaign lambasted democracy shortly after this referendum result and, although I voted Leave myself, I do agree. It is wrong that the result of the referendum was swayed by irrational voting, but this is sadly a side effect of such a system.
Finally, political campaigns are a form of salesmanship. When a politician or any other individual represents a campaign, there are invariably sections of the campaign which do not meet the approval of the people. This is handled in one of two ways: either matter-of-factly, stating that compromises must be made in order to achieve a bigger goal, or evading the matter entirely, like Matt Hancock was forced to do when asked why he voted against free school meals where, once pressured by a footballer (for political purposes, an average man), he expressed that he was “glad it was put into place” repeatedly, thereby attempting to evade any sort of scrutiny that he supposedly voted to deprive children of free school meals.
On that note, I wanted to elaborate slightly. I did not keep entirely up to date with the free school meal scandal, but it was a source of public incredulity that the Conservative government “deprived children” of food. But how accurate really is this? When you consider the enormous size of the welfare state in the UK as it is, and how much we all contribute in taxes and National Insurance contributions towards benefits and housing, the onus should then be on those who receive benefits to keep their children fed. But, of course, the British public is more prone to emotional outbursts and decisions and so will not listen to any justification. Much like the NHS, it is an issue where the government, once beginning to fund these things, is practically unable to withdraw support, thus engaging our governments and our taxpayers into colossal sums of money to pay as these contributions accumulate piece by piece. It is slowly getting to the point where our big taxpayers are migrating abroad and our self-sustaining people are growing discontented with the nation. All this from a Conservative government; heaven knows what will come from a Labour government.
So, the remaining questions: do we vote in our own interests or for the interests of the state? If the former, how do we prevent people from voting irrationally? If the latter, why are the people entrusted to such a responsibility?
The Economic Inefficiency
The European Union is a good demonstration of a (pseudo-) democratic system whose own inefficiencies mean that decision-making takes enormous amounts of time. Often, an idea put to the forum in the EU would take years to actually execute, and sometimes even longer to straighten out the kinks and get right.
A better demonstration is the way in which most elections are held in the Western world. There is the issue of creating polling stations, spending government money to advertise when this voting will take place and paying stewards to collect these votes in a highly-prescribed and formal manner, the act of counting and sometimes recounting these votes. In the end, the decisions made by the people are possibly not even the best ones for neither the country nor its people. In the UK, the cost of an election (whether it’s a General Election or a snap election) costs in the region of £150m which, as one can imagine, could have been spent on many more worthy causes.
The NHS, which I will dwell more on another article, is backed in the UK by any political party. They do not have a choice, even if they disagree with the methods or the funding of the NHS, as criticising it is the equivalent to political suicide. It is impossible for politicians to have an honest conversation about the direction of the NHS without compromising their own careers.
Why spend all this taxpayer money on campaigns when it is unclear to the voter why, exactly, the current government is doing the things it is doing? Further, why support the views of a competing political party whose views and promises may change once elected?
The Alternative
We need to be honest with ourselves about our own ineptitude, through no fault of our own necessarily, about our place in a modern democratic system. State secrets mean that we cannot make informed decisions even if we wanted to. Uninformed voting means that the entire result of an election or referendum are subject to question no matter what, knowing fully that a political campaign tends to be dishonest when it suits.
Democracy, while it worked in a different era, is tainted with propaganda with every decision at every turn. Propaganda and emotional appeals are probably not what the Greeks had in mind when inventing this idea.
But we mustn’t be hopeless about this. The first stage is admitting to ourselves that there is room for change, and the second is to stop complaining and to plant the seeds for a new future, and the third is to have the common courage to speak up and dismantle old ways in favour of new ways. We want our nations to make the right socio-economic decisions, we want our nations to be safe, and we want to be proud of the nations that we have settled into by birth or by choice.
The UK in particular needs to abandon democracy and, in its place, install a brighter, more efficient, and more intelligent solution: technocracy. A national council comprising scientists and engineers, economists and small business owners, philosophers and clergymen, and so on, would execute decisions on behalf of those people while having the privilege of access to ordinarily highly secretive information. It would be a new kind of civil service designed to benefit all, making truly informed decisions and we, as the people, sacrificing our little votes to a much more meaningful cause. Our fate as a country will be steered not by us but, in this complicated world, by the informed. Our nation will run more efficiently and the emotional games of politicians will terminate.
Why don’t we admit that democracy is not the be-all and end-all of civilisation and political development?
