There Is No Such Thing As Democracy

It is not news to anyone reading this that democracy is not in practice rule by the people.

But the more I ponder the matter the more I think there aren’t multiple forms of government anymore. Everything we consider a “form of government” is just a story some particular hierarchy tells itself. I mean “form of government” fully generally here to not just include nation states, but corporations, everything all the way down to your 5-person friend group meetups. All governance, official and unofficial. It’s all the same thing, recursively.

The only form of government is “messy intersecting hierarchies”. What story the hierarchy tells itself about itself is of minimal relevance.

Not all hierarchies are the same, so there are still characteristics they must be varying along. It’s just that these characteristics have little to do with the attributes we’ve been taught to look at.

A stab at some of the most important characteristics that do matter:

• Reciprocity: All hierarchies expect obedience from the top down; is there a flow of any social good back down the hierarchy?

  For example, fuedalism nominally has the noblesse oblige. However much it may have been violated in practice, most of the hierarchies I’m enmeshed in today don’t have this at all.

• Fluidity: How are individuals allocated to the various hierarchies, and levels within the hierarchies? Are they jammed into one slot at birth? Can they move up and down, and in… or out?

• Proclaimed Beliefs: What are the things you must publicly proclaim a belief in? How near or distant to the Good, the Beautiful, and the True are they? How big are the beliefs?

  This determines how hierarchies interact within a given individual. I belong to a church, a corporation, several levels of government, and a couple of clubs. My ability to be in all of these at once comes from none of them requiring me to proclaim contradictory beliefs.

  By contrast, “All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” This is less about all the hierarchies under the state being under the full power of the state than that all hierarchies must incorporate the top-level hierarchy’s beliefs explicitly into their own, so if you don’t agree with them you are evicted not just from the government but from the entire society.

• Rule of Law vs. Rule of Man: All messy intersecting hierarchies are far more Rule of Men than anyone would ever like to admit, but there is still clear differences in the ability of an individual to get redress from some hierarchies versus other.

Even though the differences in those characteristics, and probably others, matter, I don’t think that top-level government classifications have any meaning because in practice in the modern world the hierarchies are all huge and deeply intermixed. You can live under a state judiciary that has a high rule of law, a federal judiciary that is pure rule of men, a club with a clear concept of reciprocity, a city government that sees you as a cash cow and nothing more, a fluid corporation, a state that won’t even let you leave without paying them a ransom fee, and a group of friends that requires extreme, detailed, and loud fealty to a highly specific political orientation, all at once. Who cares whether the largest but also most distant involved some supposed opaque voting process in which millions of people supposedly voted?

This was to me one of the major lessons I took away from Discourses on Livy; the sheer scale of the modern world and its resulting hierarchies means that there is no glib characterization of my experience with real-world governance that is possible. While nothing Machievelli said is wrong in its context, there’s a degree of scale that he did not see when he lived in Florence, a significant power at the time, with population 70,000. What he saw when he looks up and what I see when I look up are qualitatively different. He may have been able to characterize “Florence” as a democracy or not, but in my world, 70,000 people doesn’t even get to the county I live in.

Am I under totalitarian rule? Do I live in a democracy? These questions are effectively undefined now because the messy intersecting hierarchies are so large and complicated now that they defy any such characterization, even if you try to confine it just to what one would traditionally call “governments”. The answer is yes and no and a lot of things in between all at once.

All there is is a complex and ever-changing mix of arguing hierarchies claiming varying degrees of control over me, changing far more rapidly than our labels for them do.

So when I say there is no such thing as democracy, I don’t mean that there are hierarchies that are telling themselves a story about how they are a democracy, but I say they are lying.

I’m saying the term has no meaningful referent at this point.

Except perhaps at very small scales, labeling something a democracy is more likely to inhibit understanding than to promote it. It has insignificant predictive power. There’s just Messy Intersecting Hierarchies. Such variations as there are in the world are just ever-shifting positions on the axes above (and probably others) but words like “democratic” or “authoritarian” are simply too inflexible to even point at the truth anymore.