Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

In a democracy as such, the total feedback control from the governed to the ruling is in the order of a few bits per year at most. Certainly, any process to satisfy millions of people with diverse preferences requires much more information than that. What is worse, the ruling class itself largely gets to define what those bits encode. And what damns the whole system, the individual incentives are for the ruled to not acquire such costly useless (to powerless them) information, and for the rulers to spread propaganda that will extend their power.

In other words, the powerful are pretty much out of control of the citizens. Certainly, a few bits per year of information might sometimes be better than none at all. But not for long, since the meaning of those bits is soon to be controlled by some variant of a two party system. The knobs controlled by those few bits will never allow to change the one thing that matters mosts: the irresistible growth of the power exerted over you, the fact that whoever is likely to be elected is a power hungry bastard backed by an organized predation system. Preserving and extending the power of politicians and bureaucrats upon citizens is a bi-partisan issue.

Inasmuch as some democratic societies work and others don't, it isn't due to democracy as such, but to other institutions completely independent of democracy, disconnected from it, and actually slowly but surely corrupted by it and destroyed by it as well as by any other form of political power: individual rights (as opposed to collective claims), common law (as opposed to statute), the rule of law (as opposed to the arbitrary power of politicians and bureaucrats), a culture of honesty (as opposed to having to weasel around imposed regulations), widespread self-reliance (as opposed to a sense of entitlement), and other personal moral values (as opposed to compulsory submission to "moral" rules edicted by others). These are the institutions of a market society, one where each one earns his living out of mutually voluntary cooperation.

Occupying a long series of some of the most beautiful streets in downtomn Mexico-City, the partisans of the left-wing loser of recent presidential elections have for the last six weeks organized a permanent camping. Under giant tents covered with marxist slogans, posters and placards, musicians and peddlers attract passers-by, while propagandists with loudspeakers either shout slogans or teach the socialist catechism to small assembled classes.

Often, some people will argue that democracy requires citizens who are informed, educated, and able to reason, so that they may vote properly. Damn right it does require people who can argue. But it produces people who can't.

And I've explained why in my essay Government is the Rule of Black Magic, section The Law of Eristic Escalation.

Logical reasoning is the product of civil liberty, and not its premise. Civil liberty is a state of mutual respect for each other's life, liberty and property. When civil liberty reigns, you cannot extract benefits from other people by force or fraud, and you have to resort to persuasion. Because people constantly try persuade each other and to not be persuaded against their own interest, they develop the critical skills that help them filter the bad arguments, and the creative skills that help them create good arguments: they learn logical rationality.

On the other hand, political power destroys reason. Political power is the power to force other people to do what you want, whether they like it or not. It is the opposite of civil liberty. When people have to obey anyway, and suffer when they object, they unlearn the skills of logical argumentation; they focus their intelligence and energy on where these can actually be useful -- like finding how to maximize benefits and minimize burdens given the current laws and masters (which becomes a prevalent concern as political power expands). But whether or not the government is making the best decisions, and what precisely the government should or shouldn't do -- that's a skill that's of no matter to them, since they cannot decide any of it, and can only suffer by disagreeing.

You don't argue between slaves and masters. You only argue between tradesmen. Peaceful argument is the fruit of the institution of voluntary cooperation: the market. In a democracy, citizens qua citizens are not tradesmen; they are mutual masters and slaves. They are ordinarily slaves to a government the decisions of which they hardly ever influence: once every so many years, they can each tip the results by one vote out of millions toward the least evil (according to each of them) between the two (or three) most probable candidates; and in as much as they are a decisive part of political lobbies that may indeed control the decisions of governments, they become masters who don't have to argue with whichever political minorities they are able to exploit.

Reason may be the requisite of a functioning democracy, but democracy, like any political power, destroys reason, and thus destroys the prerequisite of its own functioning properly. This is why any democracy is doomed. Any democracy will see rational debate disappear faster as political power grows, until the regime is a cleptocracy headed by an establishment of droning parasites, and there is no meaningful rational debate left; then the country goes downhill and ends up being conquered by an inside dictator or an outside invader.

Democracy is yet another example of the self-defeating concepts defended by people who indulge in static thinking and who are incapable of reasoning in terms of dynamic consequences. And sadly, humans seem to be genetically predisposed to be victims of such black magic thinking.

Since I'm processing the backlog of my blog notes, here's one piece about a topic that has been at the center of several scandals this year yet surprisingly little open public discussions: genetic differences amongst human beings.

La démocratie, c'est quand la majorité des représentants a tout pouvoir pour disposer de la vie de quiconque au nom du bien commun. Le libéralisme, c'est quand même des ordures totalitaires ont le droit de s'exprimer librement, tant qu'ils ne sont coupables ou complices d'aucun crime. Le procès de Socrate (possiblement une ordure, à juger par les dits et actes de ses disciples fascistes Platon et Alcibiade) nous indique qu'Athènes était bien une démocratie, et pas une société libre.