Are people too flawed, ignorant, and tribal for open societies?

People of other countries aren't morally better, yet they are at a lesser risk of losing democracy than the US now is. Why is this? It's because the politicians there have to cooperate to form coalition governments. In the US, the deficient voting system is structured such that third-parties practically cannot emerge. When you fix the voting system, third-parties immediately will emerge, at least in some states, and coalition governments will have to be formed at the national level. Coalitions will require a compromise on positions, being less susceptible to extremism and tribalism. Unfortunately, the two main parties are too selfish to want this to happen, not realizing that one of them risks losing permanently to a one-party system due to a partial judiciary. It's a core structural flaw.

For democracy to thrive, the information content extracted from a voter has to be higher in terms of votes cast, points voted on, and the data type of the vote. Currently it is too low in the US. Imagine if you had to do all your programming with a handful of booleans without the freedom to implement any higher data structures.

One of the most important lessons of classical history is that no form of government is suited to all peoples at all times.

When a democracy degenerates into tribalism, it enters into a period of conflict until somebody manages to transcend the tribal conflicts. This individual has the potential to become a king if he so desires.

The king remains in control for his lifetime and his son will likely also hold real power but eventually you get a king who doesn't want to be bothered with the business of government when he can be doing other things like hunting in his personal forests. So the king relinquishes most of his power to the nobility and you get an aristocratic government.

This aristocratic government, at first, wants to rule for the good of the people. Eventually, after several generations, it serves its own interests instead creating a crisis. At this point, the king can re-assert real power and restore an absolutist monarchy. Or the wealthier portion of the common people can decide they want some power too and gradually get some of it from the nobles.

Once the wealthier portion of the common people have power, the general logic of democracy is to expand the suffrage. This is a one way ratchet because no politician can hope to win elections running on reducing suffrage. So you gradually end up with a mass democracy. Eventually, this mass democracy degenerates into tribalism and the cycle repeats itself.

This cycle, which was recognized by Polybius and called anacyclosis, played itself out in both Athens and Rome in antiquity. It is likely playing itself out yet again in our own time. Because human nature doesn't change and all governments degenerate.

Important subject, so-so article.

One decline in democracy: do you belong to any organization where the members regularly vote, make binding decisions, and occasionally fire the leader? A co-op? A union? A club? A homeowner's association? Anything? Most non-profits and voluntary organizations used to be organized that way, but in the US today, they tend to have self-perpetuating boards, ones which choose their successors.

This is a problem for democracy, because Americans don't regularly do democracy any more. It takes practice. You need to see the process work. If people are not familiar with the process, it won't get used.

Democracy is a consensus-forcing process. There's argument, then a vote. Then a decision, which is carried out. The expectation, and this is a tough one, is that after a decision is made, the opposition mostly accepts it, whether they like it or not. That's tough. Countries currently struggling hard with that include the US, France, and Israel.

If voting can't force a decision and action, democracy stalls. This leads for calls for a "strong leader" and some form of autocracy. Countries which failed at democratic consensus and ended up as authoritarian states in recent years include post-USSR Russia, and Iraq.

Then you get a coup or conquest, sometimes you get a revolution, and once in a while, a stable democracy emerges. You have to have people who know how to do democracy to make that work.

It's an unanswerable question, but the only option we have is to try and make them work. At least until the next best system comes about. Regressing backwards because old things lasted awhile is hardly the place we should aspire towards.

This article doesn't mention the biggest solution, that we can directly observe in the healthiest democracies : having a strong free education system.

Switzerland and Northern Europe countries are amazing for that. The political consciousness of the average Joe is incredible in comparison of the average American.

It's a chicken-egg problem. You need free education for democracy to work. And you need democracy to fund free education.

Society is an illusion; "people" is not a singular entity.

Imagine a loaf of sliced bread: so long as the pieces are fairly consistent and sound, it can resemble a loaf.

If one or more of the pieces is unsound, irregular in shape or consistency, the illusion of a singular loaf breaks.

It isn't the nature of "people", it is the imperfect nature of the metaphor of "people" itself.

It's right for everyone to be questioning the foundations of our political order, because our political order isn't working great these days.

My assessment is that the US is a structure built on several solid conceptual pillars, and one pillar that is absolutely broken. The strong pillars are concepts like democracy, civil rights, economic freedom, and science.

The broken pillar is "E Pluribus Unum" - the idea that we'll all naturally converge on some set of shared ethical values with enough reasoning, debate, and discussion. In reality, the opposite happened - we've split into at least two separate nations. There are millions of people in the US who believe that gun ownership is basically murder and abortion is a sacred human right, and millions of people who believe the exact opposite. These groups cannot be expected to share a political structure, especially one that vests such enormous amounts of power in the central government. And this point of violent disagreement is merely the beginning, there are dozens of other bitterly contested ethical issues.

Americans should begin to ask what we actually gain by being locked in a political system with millions of people with moral systems that are utterly different from our own. Remind me why it is so great to live in such an enormous and unwieldy country? What do I gain, exactly?

I believe that those who follow this train of thought will see that the only answer to our present problems is National Divorce. Texas should be governed by Texan values; California should be governed by Californian values.

I don't think that the complexity problem is so crucial, at least if we accept that the society doesn't need to find optimal solutions to complex problems, rather it just needs to avoid the really bad ones.

You need experts for optimizations, but not necessarily for avoidance of really bad solutions.

> On the one hand, the costs of becoming politically informed—learning about politicians, issues, policies, and relevant social science—are very high for individual voters. It takes a lot of time and energy, which could be spent on other important—or simply more fun—activities. On the other hand, the negligible impact of individual votes means that being informed has little benefit. Given this, political ignorance is rational.

I have been toying with the idea of a system that allows voluntarily delegating my vote to someone who I think is rational, more informed than me, and cares about things important to me, more than me. I would love to know the flaws in such a system.

I think people are simply too little "social" (in the real world sense) for open society: modern societies tend to concentrate people to a point of starting some real-life human variant of an old experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Behavioral_sink and that's why we see many flawed, tribal behaviors IMO.

Aside I suspect that most people are unable to know/understand the purpose of a society, why we do anything, so they do their best to avoid any change and anyone who is "different" as a way to "remain on the right track". However this seems to be always the case at least in large part of known human history and in the past we have had many open societies so such behavior while presenting many social issue should not be a showstopper for an open society anyway.

Yes.

I argue "people don't scale". The only time you see large amounts of people accomplishing big projects is in a military context, with constrained individuality, explicit chains of command, and authoritarian, top-down leadership.

And why might that be?

John Lennon answers: "You may say I'm a dreamer".

Yes, John, you and the various idle rich humming your tune are just that.

Your dream does not encompass the full spectrum of human experience, to include all the dark, chaotic stuff that makes scalability so terribly hard.

The current noosphere doesnt have good autonomic defense systems. Every impulse sent our way comes unguarded, as a dark forest of signals being sent at us.

My hope is that we can start to emerge some larger tools & networks to help give us meta-review, of who else argues this & what folks say about arguments like this. What have these people warned us about in the past, what have their concerns been over the past 10 years & how many of those were right or wrong?

Being endlessly blown about by fear & popularism has been the name of the game on Fox News & talk radio for decades. Bill O'Reilly was on a very hot Daily Show recently, decrying polarization, & it was amazing to see such a cheer leader for disdain & disgust trying to say enough (in a way dripping with disdain & disgust) and him & John Stewart having this hostile chat even though they sort of are trying to say some similar things. https://youtu.be/h7qZE4C_neo

It's amazing how little progress we've made getting sharp at thos online world. But notable things were terrible in the old broadcast world too; we were defenseless there too.

There are plenty of open societies that are working just fine right now.

It's American society that isn't working.

We as a society are incredibly hostile to the non-wealthy individual American, and not in a "you should feel guilty for being white and christian" kind of way like the right claims.

We have a massive number of laws governing individual behavior, a justice system that incarcerates more people than any other country in the world in total or per capita, and is almost entirely focused on being punitive rather than reformative despite plenty of evidence the latter works better and costs less. Meanwhile, we let the leadership of corporations murder people, engage in widespread environmental pollution, etc and rarely to never face criminal punishment - usually just a financial slap on the wrist.

We heap benefits and freebies onto corporations with almost nothing required back in results or documentation, and give little to nothing to our poorest while requiring them to go through more paperwork and rules and conditions for pittances in aide.

We refuse to treat medical care, shelter, water, and food as a human right - ditto for a livable wage for work performed (despite being one of the most productive-per-worker countries in the world) has been an unmitigated disaster. Very predictably, more and more of Americans are slipping into poverty. But phew, good thing corporations have the right to a "voice" in politics (because apparently the leadership of the corporation doesn't...)

Most of the ills can be directly traced to the grossly oversized influence rural midwestern Americans have politically.

They're highly religious, uneducated, bigoted, selfish, vindictive, gullible, and arrogant (they are the 'real' America, they are 'hard working' and 'earn their keep'...despite being a net negative in federal revenue vs spending, hilariously enough. The quiet part: "unlike those people in the cities").

An important aspect of the human psyche is that we can band together around arbitrary ideas, both negative and positive

There are many reasons we can point to as to why we don't see changes in society that will bring a about a better place for everyone.

Maybe it's because capitalism doesn't allow for it, or only in its later stages and we are just not there yet.

Or maybe because there still needs to be a revolution that will feed the masses that are starving both physically and mentally.

There are many thinkers trying to point to flaws in the current way of viewing things that might be blocking us from moving forward. Byung-Chul Han, Slavoj Zizek, Michael Sandel...

I really enjoy the podcast Philosophize This, the author does a nice job of introducing many concepts that are important.

In my case, I wrote a recent essay that might fit this discussion: https://xd1.dev/2024/07/against-political-realism

In it I try to extend the concept of Capitalist Realism to the realm of politics to use it as a motivation to call for a kind action in the private sphere that could increase the odds of us having meaningful debates in the society about the kind of changes we want to bring about for the next generations to come.

Nope. For decades if not centuries people were just fine and could function in societies.

The main problem of the last ~15 years.

Multiple dying political movements, kind of all at once and its a bit of a meltdown for those who still believe. They see their proposed idea as dying and going away, which makes them think that democracy is ending or something along those lines. Which is absurd at best.

Cynically, people collectively are a sum of their evolutionary lessons. Evolution is never wrong.

my guy, people are too flawed, ignorant, and tribal to select a cellular telephone, let alone participate in society

Open Society: "Its ideals include commitments to the rule of law, freedom of association, democratic institutions, and the free use of reason and critical analysis."

Interesting that this set doesn't include the one thing that seems to be required for Civil Society: high trust. In other words, an general internal locus of control and set of shared morals that essentially allows you to leave your doors unlocked.

If a classic sociopath can completely agree with your set of ideals, perhaps you shouldn't complain about the outcomes?