Imagine that you had just been elected President, and were settling into the Oval Office for the first time. What would be your first thoughts? Perhaps you would notice that your predecessor had disgusting taste in soft furnishings. All those tacky velvet curtains would have to go. But never mind, curtains can only stand about four years of being breathed on by foreign leaders, or being hidden behind by White House interns. You can replace these with some cream damask ones – practical enough to last four years.
Once you have sorted out the curtains, you might then start to think about policy. You could fiddle with the tax code a bit, and allocate some funds to build a new airport or a few bridges. You might up the benefits of military veterans, or designate a National Park or two. That ought to be popular. What about reform of the medical system? Nah! There really is no point, because anything you do will take at least six years before any effect is noticeable, and by then you may not be in office; so no point in touching that one then. You will just have to make do with expressing your concern, so everyone thinks that you really care about it. Reform of retirement finance? Again, no point! It would take at least twenty years for any change in policy to have a noticeable effect, and most of the people who elected you are either too young to care about their pension, or too close to retirement for anything you do to make a difference. So again: some well-chosen words, delivered with a furrowed brow should do the trick. Carbon emissions and reforestation? Forget it! Whatever you do there, you will be dead before it makes any difference. By then, everyone will have forgotten that it was your idea anyway. Best to skip that one too.
“It has been said that Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”239 So Winston Churchill told the British Parliament. Democracy is one of our best ideas yet. But what happens if we forget its shortcomings?
Shortcomings, for example, like elected leaders being given a fixed time to make a difference. Any policy you implement must have a measurable benefit within a single term of office, or it is pointless to adopt it. As a result, all democratic countries gradually accumulate a whole host of problems where the fix will take decades. No elected politician has an incentive to tackle it. China, whose leaders expect to rule until oblivion, does not have this problem.
I am setting out a theory of how beliefs work. A political ideology is supposed to be a system of ideals that forms the basis of the political and economic management of a society. It starts out as a theory that is written down (generally quite a well thought out one – whatever you might think of Marx, Adam Smith or Lao-Tzu) but then it gradually morphs into a behavioural feedback loop where the written theory gradually disappears from relevance. Isn’t democracy supposed to guard against this sort of ideological smoke and mirrors? A democratic election is nothing more than a crude process for measuring the average belief of the voting population. However, since most of us believe in democracy, democracy is actually a belief about beliefs. It is the belief that if the government reflects the beliefs of the people, then somehow everything will work out OK.
This belief is an illusion. I am arguing that all beliefs will ultimately become destructive to the people who believe them, so democracy will ultimately result in the masses voting for their own destruction.
If the beliefs of the people are determined purely by a mechanism of behavioural feedback, then to get elected all you need to do is play upon that behaviour in your campaign. Let us consider the generic ideology of the grotesques of the modern democratic age – Berlusconi, Putin, Obama, etc. It can be defined thus:
This is what I believe family means: Hugs of wife and children on the stage, while scanning the back of the theatre for the TV camera;
This is what I think of my country: Standing to attention with stern expression and jaw jutting determinedly; right hand on the wallet in your left breast pocket;
This is what I think about Freedom: Firm gaze at the horizon with a single fist held aloft (but not so high as to look like a salute);
This is what I think about God: Standing relaxed with eyes raised straight ahead in an expression of wonder about thirty degrees above the horizontal, and both arms spread out wide and raised about sixty degrees above the horizontal.
A man like this is considered to have values. But they are defined entirely by gesture – completely lacking analysis. They are devoid of analysis by necessity because the only question worth asking – “How does this benefit mankind?” – has become unanswerable. To answer this question, we would need to discover the emotional impact that such ideology had on humans, but this is impossible because everyone is acting out a tableaux of what they think their ideology implies a human nature ought to be. They do this because affecting the concept of human nature that the ideology implies is the best way to thrive within that ideology. Their leaders merely ape that with the added practised strut of looking “Presidential”. Democracy can only protect against this sort of illusion if more than half of the population realise that it is occurring. Sometimes, this is not the case.
Emotions are mostly products of evolution by natural selection, and they have been selected over hundreds of millions of years to optimise our social interactions. A belief causes the behaviour to shift, and the optimisation is therefore compromised. A democratic campaign (as typically run by political grotesques of the late democratic age) causes this behavioural shift to be reinforced on national television. It becomes more important than any political theory, which is why modern electoral campaigns are so policy-lite. This results in a wholesale distortion of nature’s mechanism for regulating our interactions. Democracy does not protect a society from self-destructing because a belief propagates and destroys this mechanism. The precise path of perversion of the original belief is almost impossible to predict. What happens if, for ideological reasons, pity is switched off for a subsection of mankind – the unemployed; Muslims; black people? Then we are rushing headlong towards Thomas Hobbes’ vision of “warre, as is of every man against every man”.
A democratic country’s ideology gradually snowballs emotional behavioural distortion until its self-destruction is ultimately inevitable.