We saw in a
previous post that traditional politics (may be I didn’t make it clear enough
that we were talking about representative democracy) seemed to have exhausted
its capacity for aggregating the opinions of collectives of any size, as shown
in a number of situations I considered highly telling. We mentioned then that
there were three lines of analysis to be pursued: what is it about desiderative
reason, the current dominant reason worldwide, that makes it especially
incompatible with traditional ways of organizing groups (of which the most
advanced and most widespread one would be representative democracy); to what extent such incompatibility may
extend to other forms of government (i. e. is autocracy better suited for
directing large groups of people educated in such form of dominant reason?) and
finally, if the answer to the previous question was in the negative, what changes
should be made to both the dominant reason and the system for aggregating
individual preferences into collective decisions to better align them. I want
to start tackling them in this post.
Let us begin,
then, with what is probably the least publicized aspect of our dominant reason:
it’s incompatibility with the long term cohesion of the group in which it
develops. Such incompatibility offers a nice paradox, as the reason it evolved
and was selected in the first place, let’s not forget, is its ability to help
the group produce more material goods (and services tradable in the market) and
thus outcompete opposing groups in a scenario of international competition. It
is not lacking a certain delicious irony, a certain poetic justice, that the
ideology that has proved most able to propel the groups that embrace it to the
forefront of international scene (the ideology exemplified by the current
hegemon, the USA) carries in itself the seed of its own destruction, as after
cementing the military superiority of its standard bearer its making that
standard bearer ungovernable (and, fallowing its path, every other polity that
has followed its example). But such is life, and since the classical Greeks hybris is always and swiftly accompanied
by nemesis.
Although I’ve
described that ideology elsewhere (calling it “desiderative reason”, as I was
back then more interested in its aspect as underlying premise of all apparently
rationalistic discourse within our society: Elements for a Critique of DR)
I will remind my lazy readers of its main features:
·
The
only goal of life is to satisfy desires (and those desires are axiologically
neutral: they arise in us mechanically, and deterministically, so nobody can be
praised or blamed by harboring any of them, and nobody can claim moral
superiority by resisting one or yielding to another)
·
The
only socially sanctioned desire is to better your social in a strictly ordered
social hierarchy. This only apparently contradicts the previous tenet; you may
wonder “didn’t you just say that all desires are understood as morally
equivalent? Then if I want to fuck rabbits all day long, or smoke weed and do
nothing else, and those can not be compared with what anybody else desires,
aren’t my desires also somehow socially sanctioned?” nope, thinking that just
shows you don’t understand what “social sanction” means. What it means is that
to be understandable by others, to be accepted and even encouraged, they have
to be implicitly translated to the language of social betterment, so your
rabbit-fucking tendencies will be construed as an attempt to show your sexual
prowess in an environment where such prowess is highly valued, and your
pot-smoking inclinations will be explained as signaling your credentials within
a culture of slacking and dropping out that values (and recognizes as
respectable) precisely such attitudes. Such explanation will also involve the
construction of a “just so” story about our evolutionary environment within
hunter-gatherer small groups in the African savannah, and how such exhibitions
of prowess and signaling helped our forebears to have more descendants which
are not strictly necessary for our present argument
·
There
is only one criterion for determining the position in the social hierarchy,
namely the amount of money you have (technically, the amount of material goods
and services whose enjoyment you can claim exclusively for yourself). !”Aha!” I
can hear you exclaiming, “Now I’ve really caught you in a contradiction! if
having moolah is the only criteria of success then my purported rabbit fucking
and pot smoking, which provide no income, were not understood as valid (if that
is all being socially sanctioned means) after all!” Not so fast, buddy. If you
watch closely what the injunctions to “be yourself”, “march to the beat of your
own drum” and “set your own individual criteria of what a life well lived
means, screw what anybody else thinks” you can always detect a whiff of “but if
you can not monetize such authenticity somehow you are a total failure”. So
even the most ardent rabbit fuckers and potheads are expected (for their
pursuits to be socially intelligible) to upload their exploits in Reddit and in
Facebook and in Instagram and in YouTube and in Twitter and in Pinterest and to
create a group in LinkedIn and to have as many followers as possible and, with
time, to be able to sell something to them (or to sell their data to some
marketer or other). Weren’t they to engage in such publicizing and attempt to
derive some material gain from their otherwise peculiar preferences the apparent
enthusiasm with which society applauded their decisions would be much subdued,
to the point of turning into outright censure and disapproval (which proves my
point, by the way)
But again,
after having devoted almost 500 pages to how such type of reason became
dominant I don’t feel like explaining it and defending it from hypothetical
counterarguments (I feel I’ve repeated this particular claim more than enough),
so you’ll have to accept my word for it… Assuming that is the case and you are
already convinced that is how society molds its citizens (from the very first
Disney movies they are shown to the hue everyday news in the media are tinted
with, going through the narrative of the most successful books, movies and
popular songs), what does such molding imply regarding the most convenient way
of reaching collective decisions and setting collective goals? I’ll focus in
two aspects of the problems it presents for the way under discussion: agency
and manipulation through information overflow.
The term “agency
problem” describes a situation when a subject A acts representing the interests
of another subject B, but such representation entails some conflict of interest
that leads A to act in his own benefit, rather than in B’s. The basic
understanding of our current political system is that the representatives we
elect act as surrogates of ourselves, choosing what is best for us and keeping
our best interest in mind in any decision they have to take. Such arrangement
seemed sensible (indeed, as the only viable alternative to being wholly
excluded from the government of the common goods, as in despotism) when
communications were slow and costly (it took a proverbial week to get from the
Gironde to Paris, where the national convention was taking place in times of
the French Revolution, hence the Girondins found it more convenient to send
some delegates representing them than to go en
masse to decide for themselves), and even today it is widely accepted that
the administration of the “public thing” (the res publica) is so time consuming that we are better off leaving it
to some designated agent, even assuming that he would not choose exactly as we
would, given we have some means to control him (like removing him from office
after a short time if he consistently decides against what we consider is the
best course of action for us). However, given the current state of technology,
plus the course that the dominant reason has taken, it would be worthwhile to revisit
such assumption.
I.
The
politician as agent of non-agents
When the French
were tearing down their ancién régime
in their 1789 Revolution, or when the
British started extending the franchise with their 1832 Reform Act the Western
world had already transitioned from Baroque Reason to Economic Reason (Abridged History of Western dominant reason)
The overarching goal of life did not lay in another realm any more, thus
freeing energies to unabashedly pursue material well-being (soon identified as
the reward for producing distinctly appreciated commodities for consumption).
But when it came to assigning precedence in the assignment of tasks and the
allotment of the rewards of the social product it was still very much a society
of orders, where each person’s “station” was determined by birth and lineage.
It was natural then that, as had happened for millennia, the few found it natural
to give orders and the many found it natural to obey. Many desires were still
socially sanctioned, and thus understood as both legitimate and distinct, so
the political principles of political liberalism (economic freedom above all,
so each individual could pursue the satisfaction of the combination of desires
he found more congenial and better adapted to his tastes) were a natural
extension of the rationality of the times. Following iterations of such
rationality extended the amount of people who should participate in the
decision making (the abstract concept of the homogeneous “people” for which
nationalism invented a conveniently unified history and the even more abstract
social classes for which Marxism similarly invented not just a unified history
but an even more implausible unified set of interests and goals) and tweaked a
bit with the desires it contemplated and the criteria for determining the
social hierarchy, but nothing in those developments impeded the basic idea that
undermines the very definition of a dominant reason: having a set of shared
criteria that facilitates the coordination of a vast group, so jointly they can
reach better outcomes than each of its members acting separately.
However, something
funny happened between the first decade of the XXth century and the end of WW
II, as the new, extremely potent, set of principles of the latest form of collective
rationality gained hold in the USA and (belatedly) in Europe and its former
colonies: although those principles led the members of the societies that
embraced them to a veritable frenzy of material production (with the side
effect of allowing them to manufacture the most powerful armed forces history
had ever seen, forces that would defeat alternative world views either in the
battle front –Fascism- or in the home front –Communism-) they corroded the
ability of such members to coordinate between themselves, consistently
degrading que quality of the institutions tasked with articulating such
coordination: political parties, parliaments, even judicial power and the press
are growingly distrusted and scorned by the citizens of most advanced
democracies.
The
explanation of such distrust is relatively straightforward: to represent another
person, to act as her “agent”, you need first to recognize her as an autonomous
and free agent also, and you need to share with her a common set of values, a
common understanding of what it is for her life to go right, so you can further
those values and enhance such life. If you see everybody as a set of automatons
trying to deterministically maximize the pleasure they feel (trying to satisfy
axiologically neutral desires) it’s going to be awfully hard to really try to
identify with their ends and to honestly give your best to their achievement.
The maximum you can aspire to coherently do is to maximize the fortunes of a
certain group at the expense of others (that is the definition of what a member
of a political organization does, btw, as developed in my classic Theory of the Organization III - Types),
understanding such maximization as taking a greater percentage of the goods and
services at their market value. And understanding the membership in such group
as the only feature that can be taken into account, so for example a workers’
party would supposedly take decisions that would benefit generic workers,
devoid of any individualizing feature they surely may have (it would favor
things like high taxes on capital gains, as workers typically have few shares…
if you are a particular worker that happens to have many for whatever reason,
tough luck), even at the expense of other classes (I maintained elsewhere that
homogeneous classes do not exist, they are not even a convenient fiction, I’m
just trying to make my point more easy to understand through a somewhat
cartoonish example, for Chris sakes).
What I’m
trying to say here is that a rationality whose main premise is the
incommensurability of every citizen’s preferences provides very little
guidelines (none at all) for crafting policies towards the common good (good
for who?) and for directing limited resources to the ends collectively
identified as better. In a society where every individual provides himself with
whatever rules he pleases, and where any appeal to tradition is considered illegitimate
(an attempt to impinge against sacred autonomy) the only agreed rule can be
non-interference. But non-interference doesn’t take you too far when it comes
to any shared purpose that may exceed any individual’s capabilities, or, God
forbids, redistribution for poverty alleviation or simply to help those that
have fallen upon hard times through no fault of their own (luck, and bad luck,
exist, as much as traditional and neo liberals would like to deny it).
II.
The
opacity behind the (apparently) fully transparent
A possible way out of such
conundrum, frequently invoked by techno-optimists of any stripe, is harnessing
technological development to help with the integration of such incommensurable
preferences. The reason we are stuck in such suboptimal social configurations,
and so many people is dissatisfied with their multiple representatives is
because we are stuck with low-bandwidth channels for conveying them our most
current, finely grained preferences. We just vote every four (or two, or
whatever) years according to a most schematic “party platform”, and we are
regularly polled about what we would like to collectively achieve, or how
popular are the different alternatives somebody else design for us, when we
could provide real time information about each of the minutest details of what
arrangement we would like to see implemented, and about what decisions we want
to collectively take. Kind of referendum-oriented democracy on steroids, the
whole electoral of each country could log in to vote on every single bill that
was presented by enough proponents, immediately rendering parliaments and
senates obsolete, and ensuring the collective will is formed truly giving each
citizen an equal voice. If we have grown too diverse and too autonomous for
traditional representation to work, let’s give direct democracy a chance and
let everybody participate in the decision they may be affected by, getting rid
of the representatives that are not needed anymore.
Sounds simple, doesn’t it? One can
not but wonder why nobody, at any point in the political spectrum, is already
advocating, or even proposing it. Seems that really letting the people have an
unfiltered voice gives most commentators the jeebies. Not surprising, given
that the limited experiences with referenda (even the small, homogenous,
reasonably prosperous places like Switzerland or the Nordic countries that have
toyed with them have a tendency to produce results that are grossly misaligned
with the preferences of the elites). It seems that paying lip service to the
abstract idea of democracy and “one man, one vote” is preferable to actually
implementing the darn thing.
The real reason is not hard to
fathom: it is easier to manipulate a body of a few hundred congressmen and
senators, a handful of judges and a small cabal of newspaper editors than to
really take into account the multifarious needs and preferences of the whole
population, so unsurprisingly in an age of instant communication we still
choose our representatives as if they had to take a week to get from the
Gironde to Paris, and as if deliberating about how to spend the public monies
(and to define the right laws) could take their full attention year after year,
and only consider substituting them every four years (for which we spend an
unconscionable amount of money and time physically going to a few locations to
cast our vote almost simultaneously, just to make things harder and more
inconvenient). It works like a charm and doesn’t require anybody actively plotting
to keep the poor disenfranchised and the middle classes (the few remaining
ones) banging their heads against the wall because of the paucity of options
they can identify with (or taking refuge in alcohol, opioids and finally
suicide with ubiquitous firearms, as in the USA). Nobody has to explain growing
swathes of the population who feel like history has passed them by and they
have less and less control over their lives, stuck in a wave of economic
recoveries that seem indistinguishable from the previous recessions, choosing
not to reproduce because a) who can afford to have a toddler these days and b)
if life is shit anyway, who would like to extend it… nobody has to explain
them, I say, that the reason they are not trusted with the ability to
participate directly in the decisions that are daily shaping their lives is because
they could actually turn them for the better, but such turn would come at the
expense of the high rollers that have been doing exceedingly well for the last
four or five decades.
And they don’t have to explain it
because it is hidden in plain sight, for everybody with eyes to see. The
amazing effect of too much public information is that nobody sees anything. The
internet and a culture of almost infinite transparency, of everybody sharing
every little aspect of their lives, is an almost impenetrable opacity not just
of how the vast majority live their lives (the “quiet desperation” presciently guessed
by Henry David Thoreau) but of how alternative ways of living could be first conceived,
and then actively pursued.
But how would that pursuit look like?
Accepting that the political system is irreparably broken, how should we
organize to restore a modicum of dignity to the public sphere, and maintain a
spark of hope that things may get better for the majority? What form would the “good
fight” take, what should substitute for what in times of yore was achievable
only through political action? That can only be, after so many words, the
subject of another post.
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