500 Words — Day Thirty-Two: On Democracy
I don’t really have a good topic planned for today, so I might as well bring up one of those potential really controversial or very contrarian believes that I have. To state it in the least controversial way, I think that democracy is overrated. That is not to say I support totalitarian forms of ruling where a single leader makes all of the decisions. But democracies have problems that often lead democracies to fall apart and transition into those lesser forms of ruling. We can pretend in America that we are voting for a president every four years, but are we voting for a president or a king? More on that topic later, but the solution I support clashes with the meritocratic structure that the western culture has led us to believe is the most superior. I honestly believe that a lottery where we randomly select people out of a hat is better than a democratic system.
The question fundamentally rests in the idea of how people vest responsibility in institutions. People are naturally lazy and delegate up the hierarchy when given the opportunity. This delegation may even be to detriment to the individual in the long term, but people are often driven by short term emotional thinking rather than long term rational thinking. When I say that as Americans we vote for a king, just think about the responsibility we vest in the position that is the president. It’s way more than it used to be in 1789 when the position was first held by George Washington. We expect presidents to drive policy when that used to be the legislature’s thing. We expect presidents to drive the interpretation of laws via their supreme court picks as opposed to having an independent court meant to look at laws in the most objective light. We critique other countries for having totalitarian leaders but it seems like we sure want the president to act as one (at least when that guy is on your political team). So, the first issue with democracy is that we have a tendency to contrate power since most people tend to want to delegate responsibility away to a central power. It’s simply easier to think about and manage.
The second issue is that we select our individuals based on what appeals to the most people. It’s a popularity contest, not a qualification one as much as we want to pretend it is. Such contests select for the person that can appeal to the most people rather than the person who can lead others to do their jobs effectively. Because of the sheer amount of responsibility we give some of these folks (see above), the rational and qualified people would avoid the trouble. Thus you are left with the egomaniacs that see the position as a trophy and a measurement of their status. People that aren’t afraid to lie to get want they want. In a game of basketball, you’d never admit to being the last to touch the ball on the way out, why would politicians admit to being hypocrites on positions they vacillate on? They just want to win. Being honest is an unnecessary handcuff. Thus the winners tend to be the egomaniacs that lie the best as opposed to qualified people.
How does the lottery make things better? In a representative democracy, the results of a lottery are actually representative. Less of the effective liar types because lying provides no benefit in the lottery. Now one may argue that you would get less qualified people running the country, but does that actually matter? Less qualified people may have other strengths and having a diversity of leadership may cause different individuals work with each other to solve problems rather than delegate up to party leadership to make decisions for them. They are also more free to think for themselves because they no longer have to run on binary platforms and rely on party money and support to bid for their position. They can do whatever they feel is best. They could be selfish egomaniacs, but again, that’s a problem we already have with democracy.
