Stochastocracy (2):
We Are Not The Walrus
by Peterson F. Whalley, dean of Grantchester College, Cambridge,
and member of the NETWork Interested In Telling-it-like-it-is
Previous instalment I am he, as you are me, as you are we,We have argued that political history has been a history of conflict among psychopaths for the rule of a state or empire, and between psychopaths and humans for temporary relief from one form of psychopathy or another. This changed with the rise of liberal representative democracy. This form of political control undercuts the natural advantages of psychopaths in the pursuit and retention of power. Unfortunately, this hallowed period of some 200 years or so shows signs of coming to a close.
As we are all together.– Lennon & McCartney, "I Am the Walrus"
© 1967, Northern SongsWhat are these signs?
There are two major indicators:
The primary evidence of the former is inexorable increase in voter apathy and of the latter, the spectacular rise in the importance of pollsters.
- electorates are signaling a withdrawal of legitimacy from their elected representatives, and
- reciprocally, elected representatives are signaling a loss of confidence regarding their own legitimacy.
To understand these developments fully we need a brief review of the basics of political theory.
The key idea of political theory originates with Plato and is often referred to as "political obligation". Political theory speaks of the "legitimization" of authority. For a group of people to consent to be governed – to be obliged to accept authority – the people must have a shared sense of equality with respect to that authority.
The simplest case, and outside of tribal societies by far the most prevalent, is a shared equality of powerlessness with respect to physical coercion. Even in the simplest case there are two key features:
- the reciprocity of the governed and the governor, and
- dependence of authority on what is in the minds of the governed.
Remarkably, political authority is quite like Puff the Magic Dragon: once those subject to authority cease to believe in it, it fades away.
In liberal representative democracies, legitimacy to govern is derived from two fundamental equalities, as observed by the great Canadian political theorist, C.B. Macpherson. These are:
The former is guaranteed to the extent the state upholds the "rule of law" as specifically embodied in the liberal freedoms – freedoms of speech, of association and from arbitrary arrest. The latter is a legitimizing force as long as the market economy delivers the economic goods, i.e. is able to maintain and increase material prosperity.
- a positive equality as a "free" individual, each able to develop his or her full potential, and
- a negative equality with respect to the Leviathan marketplace, i.e. all are equally powerless in the face of the generalized market economy.
Okay, this is all a bit abstract but, as we will see, it is the breakdown of these sources of legitimacy that is starting to show up in various ways in the more recognizable features of political systems. The way that these abstract equalities are translated into the more familiar terrain of voting and parties, etc. is through the choice of elected representatives.
The dominant basis for representation is, of course, geographical. Our representatives stand in for each of us in matters of governance. There are some obvious difficulties here but we will pass them over for the time being to try to complete the picture.
In practice our representatives do not act independently. They are, with very few exceptions, members of political parties and it is the parties that are able to command majorities in the relevant legislative assemblies that actually earn the right to govern.
Let's just step back a second and compare how legitimacy works in such a situation compared to Plato's minimalist tyranny. In the latter, if you don't like the ruler you have two choices; leave the territory or organize a coup. In liberal representative democracy you still have the first choice but the second is more complicated. You could yourself join an existing party or organize another. You will regard decisions with which you disagree as nevertheless legitimate if you feel that you could, if motivated, replace the government by one with which you're more likely to agree.
In the jargon of political theory, the parties are "competing elites" that are held accountable by the competition for votes determined on the basis of the "policy bundles" that the voters find the most appealing. However, the elites are held to be "permeable" , meaning each individual could become a member of an elite. Such, with a great deal of irrelevant and mindless academic casuistry that goes by the name "political science", is the state of play as regards the theory of how liberal representative democracy is supposed to work, and most of it comes from Joseph Schumpeter, almost 60 years ago.
So, that's the picture. Let's look closer at the crumbling façade. Below are the major categories in which the people are withdrawing their belief in Puff the Magic Legislator.
Crumbling equalities. It's been clear for a long time that individuals are not equally powerless in the market economy, not only because of manifestly unequal wealth but also because of collective bargaining. Similarly, belief in equality before the law has been eroded. As Alan Price puts it,"Everybody wants justice but you have to have money to buy it/You'd be a fool to close your eyes and deny it." We'd certainly all be fools after the 2000 US presidential election.
Impermeable elites. If the party elites are so permeable why are they so wildly unrepresentative of the general population as regards profession, gender, income, and many other important characteristics? Why so many lawyers and so few plumbers? Arranging a coup starts to look simpler in comparison.
Meaningless bundles. After every election it's the same game. Everyone scrambles to declare victory on their "mandate". This government has a mandate to privatize, to legalize marijuana, to outlaw unions, to ban homosexuality, to revoke section23(b) of regulation 57 under the Waffle Act. Everything and nothing. Nobody actually knows because it's a secret ballot and even if it weren't no-one knows, even in theory, how each voter balanced the issues in the "policy bundles".
Splintering equalities. There are now so many groups that have achieved or seek "equality" before the law that it's impossible to tell which is the "fundamental" equality. Am I equally obliged to the government of the land or to groups with which I identify? If bespectacled, fat bigots of anglo-saxon descent who demand the right to be smeared in marmite in public can't get charitable status, like thousands of other groups, do I organize a coup?
I gotta be me! To varying degrees the overwhelming message that bombards citizens of the liberal democracies is of the supremacy of the individual. The U. S. represents the apogee of this. This is the siren song of both the institutions of liberal education and of advertising. A powerful combination. It's hard to think that anyone is like, like ME! So I'm not going to bother voting.
These are all tendencies, we need to stress. To some extent, the last two categories contradict each other but, paradoxically, they are two different manifestations of the same process, which tends to undercut liberal representative democracy in either form. Nor are all of these trends "bad things". On the contrary, civil rights and collective bargaining have been among the most progressive features of social change over the last 200 years. This only adds to the crisis, which is representation. If I am not he, he not me, you not we and we are not altogether, then the Walrus no longer represents us. How can we restore our trust in the Walrus or, alternatively, find some other animal that does represent us?
Cutting across all of these tensions in liberal representative democracy is the aforementioned rise of the control of the electoral process by corporate money and the resurgence of the psychopaths. It is not coincidental that, in addition, the legitimacy of government has been under relentless attack. We have described elsewhere the underlying economic causes of this corporate campaign. We note here a truly Grecian irony. The legitimacy of corporations rests on the legitimacy of the states that create them as legal persons. Once the erosion of state legitimacy is complete the corporate order itself will disintegrate. This is a double irony, because it implies that avoidance of a totalitarian nightmare requires a rapprochement with the detested corporate order.
The results are now commonplace. People have a cynical distrust of governments fed by a relentless media that regards scandals as the only currency of politics. No wonder fewer people bother to vote. Or that the elected politicians both genuinely doubt their abilities to represent their constituents and/or pander to the malaise.
The overwhelming result of all of these assaults on representative legitimacy has been the prevalence of polling. In effect, leaders have turned over their "representativeness" to "scientific" polling. Given the iconic status of science in modern society it was inevitable that the politicians would turn to a new set of shamans, the "spin-doctors", by which we mean the cadre of firms and individuals that use polling and its interpretation to influence both politicians and voters.
Polling is a fraud. Leaving aside the many purely technical shortcomings of polling, let us look at two key considerations. First, our old friend, the distribution. Remember old Gaussie? Remember our boxes of apples? What the spin-doctors are trying to do is say the equivalent of; based on our ten apples, 40% of apples are nice. In technical jargon, are my apples a "random sample" from the population of all apples, assuming the population is normally distributed?
Well, hold on a second. I bought the apples from Uncle Bert and I think he probably gave me nicer apples than he would to someone he didn't know and certainly than to third cousin Petey, with the yappy dog and that appalling trilby hat! How do the spin doctors know that the people who didn't tell the telemarketers to screw off have the same views, on average, about abortion than those who did? Or that they would give different answers if they were having "bad hair" days? Well, they don't and they don't care, either.
More conclusively, a number of experiments have been done by those of a more dispassionate approach to opinion polling which clearly show that people's attitudes, which are what underlie any opinions they may give to pollsters or anyone else, are very unstable. Reported attitudes have been shown to be heavily influenced by such matters as: the tone of voice in which the questions were asked; the physical conditions in which written surveys were answered; etc.. In other words, factors that would not affect measured attitudes if they were really measuring anything worthwhile. This is all the more so if the elicited attitudes are about topics about which the subjects may not have thought very much, like the interest rate elasticity of government debt.
Focus groups have taken this sham to a new level. Focus groups don't even pretend to be "representative". Rather, the spin-doctor gurus search for meaningful revelations of the underlying angst of the populace as revealed by the verbal entrails of people at the mall with nothing better to do for a few hours. This may be okay for developing new and better Tupperware containers but nothing more exposes the deep loss of confidence among U. S. politicians in particular in their ability to represent than the increased reliance on "insights" derived from focus groups.
The crisis of representation is quite general but has reached disturbing levels in the United States. Aside from the ever-increasing apathy, shown in the declining proportion of the electorate who bother to vote, the 2000 election debacle and the California recall fiasco are signals that the great liberal democracy, while remaining quite liberal, is sliding into something less than democracy. In this regard, all snickering aside, the appointment of Dubya as President by the Supreme Court represents a watershed. In the other liberal democracies this would simply not have been tolerated, if it could happen at all; in the Land of the Free it was shrugged off. Put bluntly, Americans now apparently grant the Courts more legitimacy than their Legislatures. This warms the hearts of psychopaths.
Stochastocracy is the next logical step to rescue us from the descent into Spinocracy and, as such, the only way of plausibly retrieving democracy. Instead of subjecting elected representatives to an endless use of polls as a way to gauge their "representativeness' on issues, let's just skip a step and constitute political assemblies by random selection . Unlike the issue-by-issue sampling problems we have very strong reasons to believe that politicians chosen by random selection will be as near as representative of their constituencies as is humanly possible. We're drawing directly out of the actual population, making no assumptions about sampling. We're just saying, "pick me some apples and let them represent all apples". As long as the picking procedure is unbiased we can say that. We acknowledge that the innocent word "unbiased" packs a powerful punch; it's not such a simple idea but we will come back to this later when we address the practical issues in implementing stochastocracy.
Macpherson thought that a transformation of property rights could work to retrieve democracy but the evidence is that the tide is moving in the wrong direction. At least for the time being , we see the state enlarging the sphere of "private" property rights.
Before leaving C. B., his ideas allow us further insight into the threat posed by the return of the psychopaths. One of his major contributions is known as the theory of "possessive individualism". The dilemma of liberal democracies is that the creation of citizens in the mold of homo economicus - the perfectly self-interested consumer - destroys political legitimacy based on equality of personal development but to break the mold might destroy the economic basis for political legitimacy. Homo economicus, beloved of economic theory (regarding which, see our Economics for Humans series on this site), is the perfect psychopath. We face not only the prospect of statistical selection pressures discussed previously but that our society is "evolving" the generational production of psychopaths at a higher rate of prevalence than in the past.
Next, some answers to the obvious questions of how to make stochastocracy work.
Next instalment Posted March 4, 2004
Stochastocracy (2): We Are Not The Walrus © Peterson F. Whalley, 2004
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