Unsplash

This is my entry for the Season 1 Round 32 Information Finding Championship on the topic of Freedom by @apolymask and @ifc.

Freedom and Democracy

_{"Indeed, 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." Churchill quoting an unnamed source in "Churchill by himself"}

Of all the forms of governance that have been tried, the current Western style of Representative Democracy in it's various incarnations has been the one that has been most intertwined with individual freedoms. Thus, it is the angle that I wish to take with the idea of "freedom".

In it's current form, it is the idea that the will of the people is taken as a snapshot once every few years, with a representative individual from a unit of population going to the Parliament (Congress or whatever Americans call these things!) to "represent" the wishes of their particular chunk of population. To date, this system has functioned relatively well, however, it was perhaps a system that worked better in times of slower communication and travel, as it alleviated the tyranny of distance and time. Perhaps there is scope for a further fine graining and development of this fundamental form of governing in the more modern age(this is a post for a different time, I have the ideas bubbling around for a post or two).

End of History

Unsplash

In his essay (later expanded into a book), "The End of History and the Last Man", Francis Fukayama put forward the notion that democracy (in it's various forms) was the natural endpoint of the evolution of Governance. The idea that an outwardly "weak" looking states were able to outlast seemingly "strong" states in the 20th century appeared to be a consequence of it's internal institutions and balances rather than it's ability to make decisive actions.

In the late 20th century and the early 21st century, this idea was taken up by the American Neo-Liberals in an attempt to justify the "export of democracy and political freedoms" to the rest of the world. This was when my interest in the writings of Fukuyama was stirred, I often like reading opposing points of view, to better inform my own knowledge. So, with this backdrop in mind, I read the "End of History" and it's accompanying essays (I highly recommend it for anyone interested in this sort of thing!).

Unsplash

As far as I understood, the Neo-Liberals understood the essay to mean that democracy was a political point of stability, and that by placing (enforcing) a democratic system of governance upon a state, it would remain in that point of stability.

However, I understood it more in terms of a chemical equilibrium. That the system (a state) would find it's own equilibrium and that it might find temporary plateaus of stability (like strong man dictatorships), but it would eventually find the "ground-state" level of potential energy (democracy) which would be more like the stability of the bottom of a bowl. In my understanding of the essay, you wouldn't be able to "force" the state of democracy, as the essence of it's stability lay in the fact that it needed to fall through the various forms of temporary stability to find the true "bottom" (of the energy well...). As anyone who has dealt with chemical equilibrium reaction knows, you just wait for the mixtures to find the stability, adding more or less of a reactant only causes it to find a different equilibrium than the one you were trying to "force".

Thus, I would come to the conclusion that democracy (and the freedoms associated with it) are not things that you can "export". Rather, it is the lowest energy state of a particular nation state that will be found eventually over time. In other words, the best way to export democracy is to do nothing.

Problems with democracy

Unsplash

Remember, the internal strength and balance of a democracy is gained via it's institutions and checks on power. This deliberate limiting of power concentration is the thing that makes a democracy "weak" in appearance, but "strong" in stability. Recently, Fukuyama himself had started to doubt the stability of democracy, due the slow erosion of the fundamental institutions of the democratic state.

I think it is definitely possible that the consolidation of power by democratic states, corporations and vested interests have damaged the checks and balances that were drawn up to ensure the stability of the system. In my reading of the "End of History", this is not necessarily a problem in the long term. "Weak" democratic states can be knocked out of a point of stability by enough force (just like a ball in a bowl is not stable given enough agitation), it may find a period of "strong" state like behaviour, but it will eventually fall back into a state of democratic stability.

However, this ideal theoretic view ignores the fact that such pristine dislocation of governance will invariably cause an inordinate amount of human suffering!

Time for an upgrade?

Unsplash

So, to protect our democratic freedoms, I have been interested in upgrades to democratic system. I still believe that democracy is still the best form of governance and I would never advocate any form of "strong" state governance. Even the idea of a benevolent dictatorship, whilst tempting, is a recipe for longer term disaster.

The current form of democracy was born from an age of limited travel and communication. Two ideas that I have always been interested in was the idea of random representation (sort of like a jury system) and the idea of direct democracy.

The first idea is a solution to the fact that the political class is just not representative of the unit of population that they are meant to represent. We don't have 5% of the Parliament having experienced true unemployment or poverty, we can't even make up the roughly 50% representation of women! A random selection of people (that changed over time) would go a great length in solving this problem.

The second idea is one that has come up more recently as the advent of cryptography and crypto in general has made the idea workable. This would solve the other problem of representative democracy, namely the lack of choices in the candidates. If you think about any party that you have voted for, can you truthfully say that they represented 100% all of your political ideas and priorities? Not likely, you would be lucky if you got more than 50%. The idea of direct democracy enabled by crypto could go some way to solving this problem, think of the witness voting on Steemit as a proto-version of this system.

Tying up

So, trying to extract the key points of this ramble:

1. Freedom is linked to our governance, and the governance that allows the best expression of individual freedom is democracy of some sort.

2. Can democracy be exported or is it the natural evolution of a particular state in it's own time? I believe the answer to this, is that the best way to export democracy is to do nothing and allow a particular nation state to find it's own ground state (democracy of some sort).

3. Democracy is not without it's faults, I believe that there are ways to upgrade our forms of democracy to bring it in line with a more modern age, but these are posts for the future!