HAIM HARARI, a theoretical physicist, is the former president of the Weizmann Institute of Science.
Democracy may be on its way out. Future historians may determine that democracy will have been a one-century episode. It will disappear. This is a sad, truly dangerous, but very realistic idea (or, rather, prediction).
Falling boundaries between countries, cross-border commerce, merging economies, instant global flow of information, and numerous other features of our modern society all lead to multinational structures. If you extrapolate this irreversible trend, you get the entire planet becoming one political unit. But in this unit, antidemocracy forces are now a clear majority. This majority increases by the day, due to demographic patterns. All democratic nations have slow, vanishing, or negative population growth, while all antidemocratic and uneducated societies multiply fast. Within democratic countries, most well-educated families remain small, while the least-educated families are growing fast. This means, both at the individual level and at the national level, that the more people you represent, the less economic power you have. In a knowledge-based economy, in which the number of working hands is less important, this situation is much more nondemocratic than in the industrial age. As long as the upward mobility of individuals and nations could neutralize the phenomenon, democracy was tenable. But when we apply this analysis to the entire planet as it evolves now, we see that democracy may be doomed.
To this idea we must add the regrettable fact that authoritarian multinational corporations, by and large, are better managed than democratic nation states. Religious preaching, TV sound bites, cross-boundary TV incitement, and the freedom to spread rumors and lies through the Internet all abet brainwashing and lack of rational thinking. Proportionately, more young women are growing up in societies that discriminate against them than in the more egalitarian societies, increasing the worldwide percentage of women who are treated as second-class citizens. Educational systems in most advanced countries are in a deep crisis, while modern education in many developing countries is almost nonexistent. A small, well-educated technological elite is becoming the main owner of intellectual property, which is, by far, the most valuable economic asset, while the rest of the world drifts toward fanaticism of one kind or another. In sum, the unavoidable conclusion is that democracy, our least bad system of government, is on its way out.
Can we invent a better system? Perhaps. But this cannot happen if we are not allowed to utter the sentence “There may be a political system that is better than democracy.” Today’s political correctness does not allow one to say such things. The result of this prohibition will be an inevitable return to some kind of totalitarian rule—different from that of the emperors, the colonialists, or the landlords of the past, but not more just. Alternatively, open and honest thinking about this issue may lead either to a worldwide revolution in educating the poor masses, thus saving democracy, or to a careful search for a just (repeat, just) and better system.