Will We Always Have Democracy?
Democracy on paper sounds great. In reality, it's near impossible to achieve.
Seeing into the future is an impossible task.
New technologies, systems and ways of thinking change our trajectory forever. Imagine explaining to a medieval peasant how our current system works. They’d be dumbfounded. We have sprawling cities with millions of inhabitants with unlimited, readily available food imported from around the globe. Our lives are unimaginable compared to those of the distant past because they were engrossed in their system for so long.
I think we are the peasants of our future selves.
Improvement is inevitable - our current political system included. Is democracy going to stay around forever, or is there a better system for us, one just beyond our imaginative reach?
Before I get accused of wanting to bring back dictatorial monarchs: democracies are great for the most part. They are much better than the authoritarian alternative. For me, human freedom to pursue one’s happiness, without encroaching on other’s rights, is the most fundamental value we should be striving for and democracies are relatively good at achieving this. However, I think in our current age democracies are far from what we initially envisioned them to be. Democracies supposedly allow individual voices to be heard, with one’s vote being no greater than anyone else’s.
My vote is mine and mine alone. I get to choose who to vote for without any outside influence. I say this in jest only because there’s no chance this could be true. And we’ll see how.
I might come off as someone who doesn’t trust democracies, and you’d be correct. This video says simplifies it better than I could.
Political Influence
The problem with democracies is yes, the people are retarded, but above all else: it’s because we are people. We are far too easily swayed and influenced by our emotions to vote for something rationally. We’ll sometimes get it right, voting for what would objectively be best for us as an individual, but rarely is it us making these decisions. There are people whose job is to capitalise on our emotions. Think of product advertisements. They are constructed in a way to get you to buy something you probably don’t need. The colours, the timing of the shots, the font, the slogans - all of this is selected precisely to play on our subconscious emotions.
This is no different to political advertisements. We should select candidates based on their policy. But there’s a reason why they don’t put all their energy into advertising their plan for the future in an easy-to-read and understandable way - because it doesn’t work. It doesn’t hit our emotional hotspots like a good old reliable smear campaign. The candidate that sticks to advertising only their policies, loses. Every time.
Political campaigns need a highly skilled team to create the most effective and influential advertisements to get your vote. Emotions are a weakness when it comes to rational decision making and it is the job of political strategists to exploit them. You likely aren’t voting for someone due to well-thought-out decisions. A million factors come into play, mostly emotional, all of which are influenced by million-dollar political campaigns.
Tell me, when exactly do I get to make my own choice, free from outside influence?
Elections are not decided on what the best policy is, it is decided on who has the best advertisements. It’s decided on emotion. This alone tells you that democracy is not working as intended.
But I’ll continue:
We Love Our Hoaxes
Here’s a shocker: politicians lie. All of them. All the time. And most media campaigns contain some element of deceitfulness. I struggle to watch any of Joe Biden’s campaign videos because they always contain well-debunked lies. The Fine People Hoax, Trump Calls Immigrants Animals Hoax, The Bloodbath Hoax- the list goes on. Every week there’s a new Trump hoax that permeates through the political atmosphere, one that is created by the Democratic campaign and my guess is the people making these know they are purposefully misleading others. Those who perpetuate these messages are either also dishonest in their intentions or are useful idiots who fell for the lie. Either way, dishonesty prevails over truth and straightforwardness.
And it’s not like the die-hard Trump fans are immune to this either. The QAnon movement predicted Trump to rise from the ashes like a messiah and cast out all the evil in DC. I mean this was wild stuff. But they both have one thing in common: the victims are too eager to believe. This results in their biases making them immune to critical thinking.
If a news entity came out and said an anonymous source claims that either Biden or Trump drank the blood of newborn babies, you’d have 10% of the population on the opposite team convinced it’s true. Because as messed up as it is they want it to be true, they want to have their hate vindicated. When people have such massive hate boners for a particular person or group of people, they no longer think straight.
This is another weakness we must fight against, all the while the forces who pump out these hoaxes continue to do so. Because it works. It seems that in order to win, truth must be the first sacrifice at the altar. Why try to win on policy when launching a massive media manipulation campaign is more effective?
We are too easily misled to say our elected leaders - and I use that term loosely - are the result of the will of the people.
Are we deciding who we think is best, or are we just being influenced by those with the best campaigns?
When do I get to make my own choice, free from outside influence?
Big Tech Influence
I think what I’ve been trying to say is: that information is strategically valuable to those who know how to use it. But in a parallel move, controlling what information gets out can be just as, if not more effective.
China has a tight grip on their internet called The Great Firewall, preventing its citizens from accessing certain websites. With this in place, the CCP can scrub their internet clean of anything they don’t like. It is impossible to find coverage of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Fortunately, the internet in the Western world is not quite as restricted. But that doesn’t mean we are free from influence. The main goal of Silicon Valley companies is to influence us. Their business model is mining our data and selling them to advertises. Google and Facebook made around $230 billion in 2019, mostly from advertisements.
Cambridge Analytica was a data mining company that had access to people’s Facebook likes, what groups they were in and who they were associated with. It was set up to micro-target specific people with specific ads to make them change their minds, in the same way that companies use this information to tailor ads to people, so too do political campaigns. If you’re on the fence about something and see a specific ad, you may be swayed to vote a certain way. This all comes down to their influencing campaigns.
Not only that but since there’s such a monopoly on certain services within the Big Tech industry, they become a bottleneck for information to be passed through or withheld. We saw this in 2020 during the Hunter Biden laptop scandal where companies went out of their way to suppress this information, which certainly influenced people’s votes. They choose to make this harder to find, resulting in fewer people seeing the story. This was a clear case of social media election interference, however other times it can be nearly impossible to detect.
You can imagine social media employees reducing the reach of individual accounts or posts by 10%. Due to a lack of transparency, how could you tell? On the other side of the coin, we know that TikTok has a heat button where they can make anyone, or anything go viral. If they want pro-Palestine messages to be amplified, they can hit that and we would be none the wiser.
One minor tweak here, changing the search results there, and Google can determine who wins every election every time. Literally.
“…biased search results could increase the number of undecided voters who chose one candidate by 12% or more.
The effect was largely invisible to the study participants; most had no idea they were seeing biased results. But even if they did, they thought the search engine was merely doing its job and ranking a better candidate higher than his or her opponent.”
Knowing everything I’ve gone over, how can we say we live in a democracy? For all practical purposes, we don’t. We live in a world where voters are at the mercy of companies funded by candidates who have millions of dollars at their disposal.
I am certain we will find a new way to govern. I hope it is one where rules are created from the bottom up. Where you can live with people you want to be around who hold similar values. One built upon voluntary relationships and where 49% of the population doesn’t have to live by the rules that 51% of the people think they should live under.
Democracy is good, but we can do better.