Political systems, I.

With the rise of technologies, the model of representative democracies is getting broken and exposed, and it is no wonder that knaves, whose knavery democracies are designed to protect from, are finding enough loopholes to overrun them. It is hence that I open a series of posts intended to look at the systems themselves, in order to understand them well, before we can think of something new. My focus eventually will be primarily on India, which is going through a crisis of governance, a crisis that is rooted in what I see as an incompatible system with its traditional ethos and now being milked by the thugs that know how to take advantage of it. I will also focus, secondarily, on China, which I estimate is slowly reaching a critical turning point (which may yet take a decade or more to materialise).

Let's talk about democracy per se. The original democracies of Greece were a completely different proposition than today's representative democracies. The most important distinction is that in a direct democracy such as Greece, everyone had a skin in the game: so you do not want war sitting from your drawing rooms just like that, for it is you or your son who would be out on the battlefield. Today, in countries such as Switzerland, there are referendums on big and small topics, so there is some element of directness, but there is still no skin in the game: people may vote for something even though they do not suffer necessarily the consequences of it (or so they think). Direct democracies have the obvious fault that they are unwieldy to manage. With today's technology, that shouldn't be a problem, but how to ensure that everyone has a skin in the game? It might be possible in some creative ways if a place were to have more or less equal access to resources (education, health, security, infrastructure), but in most countries of the world, there is too much of an inequality in access to resources.

Let's talk about the modern type of democracy: representative democracy. Here, a person is supposed to represent the wills of hundreds, thousands or even millions of people. In a way, the small currencies, the individual wills, are "demonetised" (taking the expression from a 2016 Indian disaster): it's the big note, the representative, that counts and has a disproportional power. Now to cut down the powers to some proportionality, a variety of checks and balances are introduced. These checks and balances, crucial in any democracy, whether direct or representative, but even more so in a representative democracy on account of a de facto voicelessness of the small currencies, basically come from the very Christian, pessimistic view of human nature: the original sin. Since all human beings are considered in Christianity as inherently fallible and sinful, it is important to keep a check on them: thus a system of governance has to attempt to not to give too much power to anyone, and hence an elaborate system of checks and balances, especially more so when a representative system actually does give more power to certain individuals. (Of course, Greece was pre-Christian, but having your own skin in the game was in itself a strong check and balance. The Greek city-states were more, politically speaking, a kind of "tribe", which obviously has all its privileged members sharing all the smooth and the rough, but with the sophistication of a state.) The Christian-inspired model assumes that it is knaves, fools, the greedy, the imperfect who will be governing a country along with some better informed, who may also fall to greed or foolishness any time: a democracy assumes in advance man's readiness to make a contract with the Devil, operates from a complete lack of trust and hence introduces elaborate checks to thwart the contract's implementation. This model worked tolerably well until information technology exploded: the checks and stalemates are too rusted to work against today's technology, which keeps on advancing day by day. (Just imagine when deepfakes become commonplace! We will need to change the term to "disinformation technology.") In first-past-the-post electoral democracies, the problem was always bad: a person chosen by 25 people out of 100 might still be considered to be representing 100, thus not only making 75 voiceless but even maimed. (That calls for another thinking about electoral systems of such countries: should the win in an election be based on first-past-the-post overall as well as at least 50% votes of each significant minority; or should it be a proportional system as in Scandinavia; and so on, but that merits a volume of discussion on its own backed by several statistical inputs.)

An autocracy of course works in a very different way, whether it be the enlightened king, a set of technocrats or an all-knowing party assumed to be wise (like the CCP in China). Eastern societies such as China and India have had the dominant thought of "good" (li or dharm) as being the most important yardstick and maintaining of which is the most important goal. Human beings are not considered fallible but rather considered to have the potential to reach the dao or brahm, the Ultimate Reality: it is not considered impossible to attain harmony in human societies; Ram rajya is not just a myth, but a striving, a goal. China has thus not adopted a system designed for knaves (democracy), but rather a system designed for a set of wise leaders and gurus guiding the country to the goal of a harmonious, stable and prosperous society. Of course, in doing so, through this optimism, the power placed in the hands of its leaders is near absolute, which is very much prone to misuse: for it is one thing to hope that power is being placed in the hands of the wise, but another thing to find that it is knaves who now possess an inordinate power. A preventative could have been a very strong, healthy, debating democracy among the learned, the guiding class (the CCP in the case of China), but the circumstances of modern China's birth and Mao's ruthless consolidation of power after that put paid to that. In ancient India, the learned (the Brahmins) could have taken the power in their hands rather than left it to the kings and created such a society, but that didn't happen for whatever reason, and we were left with the Brahmins rather trying to consolidate their power relative to other segments of Indian population (e.g., via casteism). Modern India is not even in alignment with its traditional thought: it has adopted the Christian fallibility-inspired representative democracy as its political system, and yet living by and large with the Eastern optimistic ethos of aiming for the Ultimate. Thus, India currently lives permanently in a state of schizophrenia, and new tools of information technology are only bringing out the disease so far hidden out of sight. For China, instead of the schizophrenia, it is an alienation that is getting ever more stronger. The sight of the "good", of the dao is now lost with the CCP leaders only interested in a power grab, and thus the CCP exists now merely to ensure the opium of money and a hedonistic lifestyle, which means that many people have started to live in a moral vacuum, not knowing how to find meaning in their lives, not knowing how to express themselves. Meaning-making is essential for a human being to live, for without it we would be merely sated beasts: in schizophrenia, the condition which India finds itself in, you are taught to interpret something in some other way than what you internally experience it, and hence you realise the meaninglessness of the meaningfulness of meanings, and thus a horror is born within the soul; in alienation, the condition which China finds itself in, you learn the meaninglessness of meanings, and thus an intense desolation is born within the soul.

I will continue in future posts.