[Article] The Decline and Fall of Democracy and Personal Freedom
The Decline and Fall of Democracy and Personal Freedom
Hypothesis: Democracy and personal freedom may have to be increasingly limited in the near to moderate term if human civilization is to survive in the long term.
The term democracy, often used with the adulation and respect reserved only for gods and the dead, is lovingly linked in Western culture with the meme of personal freedom and indeed each enables the other in a lot of ways. As government is at its heart in the business of limiting personal freedom, democracy is, in ideal form, the style of government with the least limit of that freedom humanity has yet devised. But, of course, a quick check of how ‘democratic’ governments actually work shows the ideal democracy isn't used anywhere. I think we all know why – the fickle, inexpert, easily manipulated and often tyrannical whims of the typical human are no basis for sensible government. That is, most people can't be free enough to govern themselves because they would likely screw it up, or at a minimum run afoul of their neighbor, which is the whole basis for needing a government in the first place. So instead we use elected representative government with divided, mutually checked powers administrated by professional bureaucracies. And with this form of government for the last few centuries we’ve steadily loosened the social bindings our culture places on its individuals, resulting in the current time of more personal freedom for more people than at any other since people were first ruled by government (citation needed J ). But this system of government, and the freedom we've granted ourselves with it, have their own problems, both the time-honored and the frighteningly new. And these newer problems threaten to challenge the future of human civilization itself unless the freedom that enables them is rolled back.
Globalization is one chief culprit in the threat against freedom. The Information Revolution is another. And the general growth of our technological power is a third. To take the first, the mixing of the world's cultures has created great economic and social friction and has cross pollinated memes that have grown into the horrors of planes flying into buildings, of suicide bombers blowing up funerals for victims of other suicide bombers, and of the occasional precision guided bomb blowing up a gun popping wedding party. A (relatively) free culture works very well when everyone living in it is bound by memes of conduct letting most people live in relative safety, and when the 'other' is kept outside. By safety I mean from crime but also from other forces the individual cannot protect himself from, such as product safety, workplace hazards, environmental ills, and all the personal threats that regulation of economic activity and social interaction are designed to mitigate. But globalization exposes free cultures to the 'other,’ to toxic, infectious or alien memes for conduct that would exploit a culture’s freedom for advantage in the struggles globalization inevitably breeds.
The Information Revolution threatens us in at least two ways. The first is very straight forward. Knowledge is power and those willing to kill, and die, for a cause, and who are resourceful to begin with, become all the more dangerous with access to more knowledge. The internet offers the 'how-to' resources, communication tools, and intelligence sources that enormously empower the 'bad guy' to do harm.
Second, the internet has fractured, and continues to fracture, the news sources with which free-ish peoples inform themselves and their free-ish actions. Not long ago the news outlets were comparatively few and fairly easily held accountable to standards of quality and responsibility. Today 'news' sources are multiplying every day and their quality, integrity, and motives are often difficult to divine and beyond redemption. Many highly focused, yet myopic, agenda-driven political editorial outlets masquerade as objective news outlets. Dozens echo each other, lending ideas and claims that a generation ago would have been quickly dismissed by most as outlandish, the appearance of fact and legitimacy. And given the nature of humanity, our craving to see information that we already agree with, our thirst for the outrageous and the inflammatory, this new ability to keep to only these kinds of sources, and in great and satisfying volume and variety, is devastating for a political system that requires voters to be at least somewhat objectively informed in order to function properly.
Humanity is easily manipulated, by virtue of our basic nature, and modern media, especially the internet, is ideally suited for manipulating. With the onset of the Information Age, and with the broad freedom to use its tools at the basest level of integrity, we corrupt, polarize and geld the government's ability to perform its most basic functions. When the governmental system based on freedom can no longer function because of the underlying culture's personal freedoms, then the system either must slough off some of those freedoms, or face failure in even more severe ways.
Lastly there is the growth of technological power. If I were to discuss the super flu, gray goo, or the terminator, you might reflexively dismiss this line of thought as science fiction. But consider another genre of fiction that found its way into reality. Before Al Quaida flew planes into the World Trade Center under the leadership of the arch-villain Osama bin Laden, the idea of a super wealthy, super powerful international criminal organization that could threaten the international community remained safely tucked away in James Bond fiction. But now we have those once fictional villains, though unfortunately not the James Bonds to counter them.
Consider what might have happened had Osama been less technologically restricted by his own hyper-religious culture. He at one point had enormous wealth; what if he had invested in biotechnology, founded a company, thriving or otherwise, in the United States with access to the most cutting edge technology? And what if he siphoned that technology and expertise into, say, secretly weaponizing virus' and then unleashed them on the West for a 12 Monkeys style disaster? Is that so far fetched? Consider we've been tailoring virus' in the laboratory for gene therapy for over a decade. Which of these labs couldn’t instead tailor pathogens?
What other technologies are out there, freely available to corporate America and like entities in our globalization economic partners, that might be taken advantage of by an innovative and driven nut job? Gray goo's the best of the best. But that's not even particularly imaginative these days. I'm sure there are enormous dangers right in front of our faces that we would never consider until the metaphorical second plane hits the second tower. Then of course, it's past too late. If you consider that the first priority of any government is to take reasonable measures to protect its people from reasonably likely threats, one wonders what governments of free societies ought to be doing.
As the world’s cultures interact and wrangle for dominance, as the voting publics are increasingly manipulated and polarized, crippling the effectiveness of government, or worse, enabling the subversion of government for ends that do not serve the citizenry, and as technology enables greater and greater threats from non-governmental actors, one wonders about the future viability of freedom. We know we all became 'less free' after 9/11, though my guess is few of us know how much less. We also know that a democratic style government and broad political and social freedoms are not necessarily required to have a thriving, prosperous society.
Does 'live free or die' make sense? Would 'live sort-of free and without abuse' be enough so long as it meant that we would be much safer from self-destruction? Is it possible to be free of abuse when you're not free to change your government? Does the want of the individual to be free trump the need for humankind to continue in relative prosperity? Likely we will never have the opportunity to seriously consider whether to act on these questions, having either met our end with some grand- scale act of terrorism or, on the other extreme, having found ourselves under a government that can stop that terrorism but will not tolerate such musings.
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Originally Posted by ar81
