The Problem With Democracy

The problem with democracy is that it returns the popular opinion, not the most sensible.

How can we let the popular opinion dictate our lives?  We’re not responsible enough to vote responsibly.  We’ve voted for a dog to win Britain’s Got Talent – twice.  We were asked to name an important new scientific research boat and the popular opinion was ‘Boaty McBoatface’ – interestingly in this case a different name was eventually chosen (so much for democracy).

Families aren’t run as democracies, businesses certainly aren’t (I’m sure there are one or two examples out of millions that are the exception to the rule).  In a family with two parents and three kids you don’t have a democratic vote on what’s for tea/dinner every day otherwise you’d be eating pizza and ice cream non-stop until you ended up on statins and insulin.

Instead you, as responsible parents, make the judgement call because you have more knowledge, experience, and information than the kids and you know what’s best for them.  You have more balance of Id and Superego – borrowing Freud’s theory on the human psyche – to make the right decisions.

This is what we expect of our politicians.  To do the right thing for the benefit of the majority of people.

It’s what we expect of business owners, our employers, to do the right things to keep us in a job.  If you want a perfect example of how business and democracy don’t get on then look no further than the break-up of the trade unions by Thatcher in the 80s.

There are politicians who don’t act in the interests of the people.  There are business owners who don’t care about their employees (Thomas Cook anyone?).  There are (sadly) parents who don’t act in the best interests of their children.  But this doesn’t mean that businesses and families should all start operating democratically – nothing would ever get done.

When you allow popular opinion to affect such significant events and actions through voting, the system is open to abuse.  The influence on people’s thoughts and actions can be so imperceptible that people are outraged when you suggest they’re being influenced.  But as any marketer, psychologist, or data analyst will tell you, it IS possible to make people think and do different things.

Nudge theory, behaviour change, big data, NLP (neuro linguistic programming, not natural language processing btw) – all used to make people do things and think things that they might not otherwise have done, or thought.

Now this might all be too much for some people to take.  The outrage you might have that people have fought and died for the right to vote – the right to have a say.  That’s an incredible sacrifice that I can’t possibly understand.  But this right to vote should come with its own health warning.

Even our political system with general elections every 5 years creates problems.  Five years is too short to implement real change in almost all areas of life.  To make many things better, there usually needs to be a period of unsettling change and sometimes a little hardship.  The benefits of real change may take 10-15 years or more to come to fruition.  Not fast enough for a government working on a 5-year cycle to stay in power.

As we stand, several years after an event that might be one of the most defining moments in the history of the UK, there is a minority of politicians acting against the will of the majority to push for an exit from the EU, regardless of the impact on the general public.

This is a flagrant dereliction of duty by MPs – people tasked with acting in the national interest.  There was, and still is, no obligation to leave the EU following the results of the ill-conceived and illegally-contested referendum.  It was advisory.  Taking the ‘temperature’ of the public at the time.  A temperature that has cooled considerably since June 2016 now that the significance of the impact is finally being realised.

People were manipulated in the build-up to the referendum.  Whether that was through targeted Facebook advertising, pressure from friends and family, or through decades of consuming propaganda from right-wing euro-bashing newspapers.

Do we really want to be controlled by popular opinion?  Do we really trust ourselves to choose the right path?  Do we have enough knowledge and information to actually make an informed decision, rather than one that comes from a learned culture and environment?

The solution may well be to abandon democracy once and for all.  To find a genuinely lovely person and instate them as a benevolent dictator over all the world with a grandiose new title befitting of the level of responsibility they’d have.

Dicky McDictatorface perhaps?