Thoughts on Democracy

In many ways democracy has become a new religion. People say the word (like God) and ascribe all sorts of attributes to it and don't look behind the word/veil to see what that really means. Often the word is used as an anti-thesis to some other disliked idea / philosophy. The antitheses to democracy are communism, fascism, monarch, empire, tyranny, etc.



Since our early beginnings, we have been trying to find ways of grouping, creating more complex groupings - band, tribe, village, town, city, state, empire, ... The issue has been what is a good way to create such groupings and maintain some degree of stability of the groupings. Along the way we have been learning and growing as a species.

The way I think about democracy is that it started with a seed as a way to harness multiple perspectives in the governance of the group. We see an early example of this in Greece. However, only certain perspectives were allowed to be part of the governance - adult, male, with military service. The voters voted directly, not a representative governing body. This only works to a certain size. Then you need to modularize and have representation / surrogates. This is simply a way to manage the complexity of governing millions of people.

Democracy in the US started similarly with only white men with property allowed to vote. Over time women, minorities were included in the voting process.

This points to one of the underlying principles of democracy - the source / right of governance comes from the governed. Who is included in the governance control group is what has grown over time.

However, what needs to be kept in mind that even though this is an espoused principle of democracy, it is not necessarily the active principle. Once a governance structure gets established (a bureaucracy), it does everything in its power to maintain its existence, ignoring all overarching principles when necessary. Take for example every single so-called democratic country - people vote every so many years to elect representatives and have the illusion that they are governing themselves. Except for the occasional vote, we live in tyrannies: Once a representative is elected, he/she is subject to the Zimbardo principle, the functional role becomes the major determinant of behavior. The functional role is one of hierarchical control.

• every business, work group, ... has a boss. The boss is basically a tyrant (good or bad). People have little to no say in what affects them for a major part of their lives.
• a lot (most?) of families are tyrannies - the ruling tyrant being a parent, grand parent, ...
• almost every organization is hierarchical with control and power concentrated with tyrants at every level of the hierarchy.
• governmental organizations are hierarchical tyrannies as well.

So, if we think about this - people spend 99.9% of their lives living in tyrannical structures, vote once every so many years and are under the illusion that they are living in a democracy. Which in some measure they are.


One can think of this principle of democracy as pretty universal, i.e., the source of governance comes from the governed. The form that this principle takes can be varied. The US form is just one of many. Western European countries have different forms. India has another form, etc.

There is sometimes a claim about imperialist meddling when peddling democracy. What is being pushed is not democracy. The structures within a democracy, as mentioned above, are not democratic. They want to increase their influence, capital, control, ... They use the propaganda of democracy to exert control and influence.


There is a deeper structure to democracy. One can interpret a democracy as:

• a noun - it is static, fixed in time. Some people define it as what the Greeks had, what the constitution says, or what the magna carta started.
• a verb - one can look at democracy as a process. And this gets at the dynamic nature of the activity. It is a form of governance. A control system for a society, a nation.
• a ? - we don't have a word for the next layer of dynamism. It is when a verb changes as it moves through time. One can think of an evolutionary process as an example. There are emergent phenomena from the changes. These were never intended / included in the original word / definition.

However, the way we think is often static. It is hard to deal with this level of dynamism cognitively. So, we can assign characteristics / attributes to what we think a democracy is. However, what that means is changing. Greeks thought they were quite democratic with a rather large slave population and powerless members of their society. The framers of the constitution thought they were democratic with slavery, no votes for women, and other segments of the population. We currently think of democracy differently.

This is the first layer of the deep structure. The next layer has to do with how we as a species operate. We are a territorial, hierarchy oriented species at this point. Those who get up in the hierarchy want to maintain the hierarchy. They use whatever words, propaganda, etc., they can to maintain that hierarchy. For example, the soviets claimed they were for the people, by the people, and of the people. However, the reality was quite different. Similarly, we are under the illusion that our government is for the people, by the people, and of the people. However, that is quite clearly not the case. There is the occasional statistical aberration where one individual gets some redress against the hierarchy. However, the hierarchy is very effective at maintaining itself. Bureaucracies tend to grow indefinitely. Max Weber's great fear was that bureaucracies will eventually run the entire system. In that context, using the right marketing words such as democracy, liberty, freedom, due process, law, constitution, keeps most of the society satisfied with the governance.

The story that is told is not the story, as the Tao Te Ching points out, much to the dismay of our cognitive illusions. We perceive vague forms and in our imaginations give them substance, allegiance, and value. What fascinating minds we have.