First, I’d like to announce my fall course: Zen & the Art of Meta which begins Thursday September 12 at 11:30-1:30 pm PT. We’re doing two, two-hour sessions per month now instead of four single-hour ones to allow for deeper explorations. Click the link and/or reply to this email to learn more.
In the spirit of this subject, let’s apply some meta to what is regarded as the best form of government: democracy.
The political climate today raises concerns about the preservation of democracy and in the tradition of “Josef ruins everything,” I’d like to offer an offensive point of view to get you thinking.
Democracy was born in golden age of Greece when the founding fathers of western philosophy, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, saw the problems of tyranny and created democracy as a solution.
Actually, that false. Did I fool you?
Actually, these ingenious and prescient philosophers were against the idea. The founder of Athenian democracy was a guy named Cleisthenes who was born around 570 BC and helped overthrow the tyrant Hippias. When Hippias fell, Cleisthenes competed for rule with Isagoras who gained the upper hand with the help of the Spartan king. Cleisthenes was exiled from Athens as a result.
Isagoras (“here comes the new boss, same as the old boss”) became a tyrant himself and a revolution ousted him. Many exiled Athenians were recalled, including Cleisthenes, who assumed leadership and, having been hurt deeply by tyranny, reformed the government to ensure it would never happen again.
Athenian democracy lasted (only) about 200 years. Wars with neighbors took a toll, but there were problems with democracy itself. The city-state was unable to fund a police force and tried to implement a system of self-regulation to compensate. Economic problems were partly solved by attracting wealthy immigrants to Athens, not exactly a sustainable solution.
Persuasive, charismatic speakers swayed the masses, but often took Athens closer to military defeat to Macedonia, which ultimately happened. The emphasis on power to the people created unmanageable churn in leadership where it became increasingly common for leaders to be impeached, exiled, and even executed. Hmm. Increase in impeachments?
Policy changes became confusingly frequent as the will of the people was manipulated by persuasive demagogues who easily influenced the less intelligent. In other words, a system designed to give the people power was manipulated by individuals who wanted power.
Sound familiar?
Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, the most brilliant minds of ancient Greece, saw that it wasn’t working. Socrates, in tragic irony, was sentenced to death by a democratic vote for challenging people’s values and making them uncomfortable with clever questions. This is now called the Socratic Method and widely used in myriad ways.
We’ve had a lot more experience in our world with tyrannical dictators than democracy, and there’s a general agreement that democracy is better. As Churchill famously said, “Democracy is the worst form of government…except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time….”
But there is a form of government that has not yet been tried.
What if a leader should not represent the wants of their people? They should represent the actual needs of the people.
Lower consciousness and intelligence can’t tell the difference. Their votes ought to matter less. Public training and education would be offered to help those less able to become so. Voting isn’t a birthright, it’s the privilege for those who are mature enough to wield the power healthily.
Democracy would work if intelligence and consciousness were distributed evenly, but it’s not, and this is the elephant in the room we cannot publicly discuss because it loses (uninformed) votes.
The premise of democracy is that our leaders should represent the people which is mutually exclusive from leading the people. If a leader represents the people, then their values, assumptions, needs, and wants are the same.
A leader by definition moves someone from where they are to somewhere else. That’s what leading is. Representing is something else: it validates where the person is and doesn’t require them to change in any way. So you can’t have a leader who represents the people. That person is a representative.
In government we often use these terms interchangeably and this is the problem. We have to decide one way or the other, or else when the will of the masses is great but misguided, the leader must collapse into representation.
This is precisely the achilles heel of democracy. A leader in our government can never be more than slightly more conscious or intelligent than those whom they represent, or they alienate their supporters and are removed.
If the gap between the most and least aware and intelligent people were small, democracy might work, but because it is so large as to be inconceivable to the average person, it does not. For the same reason we do not let children vote, we cannot let adults who think like children either.
What is it we think happens between age 17 and 18, anyway? And does it happen for everyone? Merely an age requirement for voting is obviously insufficient and was an over correction to avoid tyranny and also worked around the problem of defining criteria for intelligence and maturity, created as it was 2500 years ago. Add to this the teenage consciousness of the United States, which defined itself in rebellion against the English monarchy. In a way, we repeated the same path as Cleisthenes and made the same, all-too-common human error: over-correction.
It’s time for us to realize that democracy was understandable over-reaction and that we’ve thrown the baby out with the bathwater. The solution to tyranny isn’t democracy, its maturity. We need mature leaders who aren’t seduced by power and are incorruptible. This requires a new model for what maturity is, which is a prerequisite for assessing it in our would-be leaders.
Current systems of democracy allow pursuers of power to pander to immature voters who are easily manipulated. Do you think a blind person should be allowed to drive? Do you think someone who can’t find their country on a world map should be allowed to vote? What should they have to know? And who decides that? (I’m raising my hand)
These are challenging questions but they can be answered. At the moment, the only criteria for U.S. president are being an American citizen and 35 years old. Perhaps not all of us are smart enough to see these criteria are demonstrably not enough, but if the minority of us are, should that not matter?
Majorities can be wrong and often are. We have a name for this: the bandwagon fallacy. If you don’t know what that is, I don’t think you should get to vote, sorry. Is it more difficult to carefully establish fair criteria for our leaders and voters or just let it be a free for all? Democracy was the relatively easy way.
It would take time and energy to design and test this new system of government, but guess what? It’s already being tested around the world…in business!
Business is almost never a democracy. Hierarchical organizational charts with equity holders at the top who hold the most risk and have the most experience, intelligence, and awareness are benevolent dictatorships. Leaders in these organizations are incentivized to take the opinions of their followers into account because it improves the culture, but they don’t pretend those followers know better than they do when they don’t.
Business follows Plato’s model for the Philosopher King/Queen better than any other organizational model that exists today. Are there still problems with it? Yes, because criteria for maturity are not at play, but there’s no contesting that a benevolent dictatorship is far more focused, productive, and agile than any government. If you applied business efficiency metrics to a government, you’d be appalled. Democracies run in the red, have too many employees, too many meetings, and the need to compromise dilutes decisive action.
Democracies vacillate on issues like abortion and gun control for decades, ensuring we are always behind and backed up, because the governing dynamic for addressing these things is about representing the people rather than leading them to a deeper truth, making them smarter and more aware, so maybe one day they could earn the right to vote.
This is my meta message to you today. We don’t need to save democracy. We need to evolve it into something better because the threat to it isn’t because of bad people, it’s because the system is broken to begin with.
Don’t agree? Then try making your most important life decisions based on a majority vote. Give your kids, friends, and/or your employees equally weighted votes for your biggest decisions and see how that goes. Maybe you’re smarter than the founders of western philosophy.
Do you want to be? Consider joining my Zen & the Art of Meta course. See through the illusions so many fall prey to. Dare to take the red pill.