People feel relevant when their opinion determines how humanity functions, as in a democracy, every vote counts equally. Democracy is like giving the people bread and games, or Panem Et Circenses during the Roman empire, a pacifier to quell an uprising from the mess a flip-flopping democracy has spawned.
Democracy, by virtue of its complexity and misunderstanding alone, has devolved into shallow populism. The vote from a person who spends a lifetime figuring out how democracy and legislation work counts the same as a person milking the cows all day.
The sheer volume of lazy ignorance in democracy easily outvotes hard-fought knowledge and imagination of how nature, to which we are subjugated, works. Given the effort it takes to keep up with some 240 years of downstream suboptimization and the increasing legislative complexity of democracy, the votes of the majority of people proverbially milking the cows all day, unaware of what it all means, win in the end.
While giving every human a voice seems like a good idea; human wants do not serve human needs. In the same way, asking a child what they want to eat every day does not comport with the nutritional requirements for the child to live a healthy life. The damage of ignoring nature’s rule comes calling eventually, so witnessed by my optometrist noticing the scraping of the smallest veins in spoiled children, in their eyes, the early onset of heart attacks. Nature’s dictatorial rule does not yield to elective human consensus.
But, for the sake of the subject of this article, let’s shelve those two disclaimers of democracy and debate its presumption of a system from which desirable outcomes can be achieved. First, we must define what a system is, why we need it, and how it functions.
In the spirit of Richard Feynman (1918-1988), everybody names everything wrong. We call many things systems that are not. We abuse the definition of a system when we call a “weather system” a system. Weather is a pattern, a consequence of many natural causes.
The most well-known example of a system is the engine in a non-electric car, called a combustion engine. The engine uses the theory of combustion to use a specific type of input (gasoline) to produce the desired output (torque). Hence, the first lesson to learn when calling something a system is an ability to refer to a theory embedded in the system, the theory of combustion in this case. The second lesson is that only discriminate input can yield the desired output. You best not pour water into the tank and expect the car to drive.
Now, let’s go back to democracy. Name me, the theory of democracy that produces the desired output from a selection of input. What does the system of democracy aim to achieve? What is the evolutionary theory embedded in democracy? What discriminate selection of input produces what outcome? I demand answers from anyone voting for democracy. The burden of evolutionary proof belongs to a government promoting democracy as the ideal system to improve human adaptability to nature’s entropy.
Democracy, the way we implemented it today, coagulates human solipsism of who becomes the winner of the above circenses, putting humanity on a trajectory of unsustainable self-interest incompatible with nature. A democracy detached from an evolutionary theory misrepresents how input converts to output. And without a theory to guide the development of a system, democracy is a rebel without an evolutionary cause.
A humanitarian system worthy of producing regenerative, evolutionary value embeds a theory subjugated to nature’s first principles. For at least three reasons outlined above democracy we deploy will not improve but numb humanity into self-indulgence. It is time to use our unique intelligence to build better systems with a modern evolutionary theory that, in the words of Albert Einstein (1879-1955), determines what can be discovered.
Welcome to EVA.
