The Demophobes

The saviors of democracy and their self-fulfilling fear of the people

There are plenty of reasons to fear ‘the people’. Crowds become beasts, which supplant and drown out individual discernment and conscience. This is not a new finding, especially where it regards political philosophy. Yes, the ancients knew very well that democracy can turn into tyranny - as easily as monarchy and oligarchy. Thankfully, the Founding Fathers knew the classics very well and founded a constitutional republic. Each time political gridlock in Washington DC saves us from reckless legislative and executive behavior, we have their wisdom in creating, not a governable, but an ungovernable structure to thank.

This introduction is not meant to argue, of course, that the people should not have a voice on how it is governed. It does intend to challenge the ease with which democracy is used as the magic word to define Western societies, in particular in contrast with overtly authoritarian countries. Majority rule is not a moral solution where it is used to subjugate any minority (in particular the individuals who lack support from some pressure group). But what makes the constant appeal to democracy so absurd, is that it is wielded against discontent galvanized in many countries by populist figures who - if the term has any meaning - appeal to sentiments and arguments the people are receptive to. As Martin Gurri has shown in his Revolt of the Public (review here), the information revolution (and especially ‘social’ media) has increased the size and exposure of this populist stage, by eliminating the gatekeeping functions that used to render the distribution of information at scale either very costly or very time consuming. Compared to the cost of a printing press, a radio station, or a film studio and a series of movie theaters, operating your own website or even your own little wall on a third-party platform is minimal, and therefore accessible to just about anyone. But this does not mean that the layer of professionals sandwiched between government and the people has suddenly been supplanted or rendered obsolete. This piece is about this group.

While Gurri’s hypothesis focuses on the uniqueness of the information revolution (or alternatively describes it as a final step in the evolution of language (literacy - printing press - mass media - the internet), I believe it can be helpful to look at our current predicament, not as a unique phenomenon, but as an inevitable one, given the evolution of societies towards more complex models. Far from entailing a defeatist attitude towards a given outcome, acknowledging a risk inherent to social organization can help us identify ways to deal with it and prevent the worst disruptions from occurring. Along the way, I count it will become clear why this is yet another piece about the bureaucratic structures ordering our lives today, though this time from a more sociological angle.

In Gurri’s book, the revolt by the public is directed against - what he calls - the center. Among the rebellious public, this group generally is called ‘the elite’. If these were simply the people occupying the offices of government, they could simply be voted out and a different selection would have a go at showing their capacity to fail at fulfilling impossible expectations. But this is not how (increasingly) complicated societies are organized. A professional class of experts (sounds familiar?) is tasked with executing the organizational and technical components of government and of the priorities it identifies for society. These not only comprise jobs in the administration, or even in the - usually vast - bureaucracies responsible for assuring the continuity of the public authorities. But there are many more institutions without which society as we have known it could not be maintained.

The educational institutions are a prominent part of this societal framework. The press is another one. Museums yet another, and quite concretely so: they exhibit the objects thought to encapsulate society’s values and the lessons we all need to learn. Trade organizations and think tanks also are a part of this structure. NGOs of various sorts can be included, especially the international ones. All these organizations mark the increased complexity and level of specialization of society. In contrast, the Roman republican value system held that civic virtue united man’s essential qualities: one had to be a landowner, citizen, and soldier. The history of 18th-century philosophy shows several attempts to adapt that ancient wisdom to a changing world, and to a timeframe that was no longer cyclical, as they had stated to believe that they differed from the ancients in ways that counted. That economic history was an important factor was recognized by the Scots, who linked the principle of labor specialization to the evolution of civilization itself. Now there is enough to write about (land-) ownership and capitalism, or on militia and the 2nd Amendment, but that will have to wait for some other time. The question I am asking the reader is what effect specialization has had in the information sphere.

Increasing complexity is inevitable if we accept the proliferation of technology and organizational ambition as a given. In part it also is a self-propagating phenomenon: maybe we can no longer imagine living without a hot shower in the morning, a powerpoint presentation in the afternoon, and a quick trip to the mountains in the weekend. But even if we do not give the immense, complex structures required to keep a modern lifestyle going, they are its conditio sine qua non. And if we zoom out a little, and we consider highly specialized fields such as medicine, utility management, information technology, or agro sciences - areas which have implications for our wellbeing, if not our individual rights - it is clear that information specialization creates a level of dependency. And this dependency is only tolerable as long as there is trust among the people.

On the other end of this equation sits the professional class manning the organizations. Concurrent to the specialization between and within organizations which is inevitable - again: in an increasingly complex world - the centralization of these institutions pushes the frame of reference of this expert class away from the people dealing with reality first-hand. This isolation often is emphasized rather than diminished, even at the level of the idiom specialists use to communicate - but strictly within their peer groups. This self-indulgent linguistic isolation is not limited to technical professions, where you would understand that some new finding needs a novel term. You can see the same in Law, in medicine (consider the cliché of the hand-written prescription which required a doctor whisperer to decipher), in the humanities. The development of an own language may facilitate communication within the peer group, it also secures the perimeters of the professional group against invaders. Outsiders will either have to serve themselves of interpreters, or concede authority to a mystic fellowship.

In the process, it is not only ‘the people’ who have become deprived of access to information. Ironically, by shaping their own set of terms and references to describe the world, concrete experience and the empirical input from the individual, the local, and the particular become hard to fit in. Once you’re in the rabbit hole, you can no longer cross-reference against a different paradigm, or check back what the state above-ground actually is. You can only keep going through a pathway which follows its own logic. It is easy and attractive (polemically) to describe the dominance of narratives in the press and in public administration as the deliberate application of propaganda to complex situations. But it might be possible that the professional classes have perfected the tunnel of their own bureaucratic mental state (as I described here) to such a degree, that dissonant noises from the streets are perceived as an existential threat. And so they have no choice but to fear the people and to renew their faith in the slogans they issued to consecrate their position in the social hierarchy. The ‘saviors of democracy’ actually are demophobes.

We could consider the Reformation a comparable event, though America’s fight for independence would serve the purpose just as well. What makes the Reformation particularly enlightening is the fact that it followed a previous information revolution, following the introduction of the printing press. Printing and the increased literacy the press was catering to (where reading and writing were previously reserved to the clergy) gave a voice to people who had previously been easily ignored. A centralized bureaucracy in Rome was unable and/or unwilling to integrate the feedback from the outskirts of this religious empire. I would add that centuries before, the Church of Rome had, on the contrary, excelled at doing this, as evinced by the many local (pagan) saints and rites being incorporated in the liturgical framework. What had resulted was a series of localized denominations which did not renounce Christianity but found ways of professing the same faith in manners corresponding much more closely to local experience and mentality. Indeed, bureaucracy and other institutions behave very much like the clergy: by the grace of their position in society’s hierarchy, they consider themselves invested with (moral) authority. To check back with the people on the ground to see how the 5-year pledge of faith is working out for them is perceived, quite literally, to be beneath them. If the people did know better, they would frequent the same halls, offices, and conferences they do.

There are plenty of examples today which follow a similar pattern. The gang rape scandal in the UK is one. Though it is tempting to describe this as a case of a particular political party failing its traditional constituency, the longevity of the abuse and the failure to intervene by the authorities at every level implicates politicians of all kinds and colors, and makes it inevitable to consider social class as a factor. The ruling upper class would rather defend the fairy tale spun to maintain the belief in their own morality, than confront the abysmal truth of people not quite that privileged. A common sense principle which tells us that crime, if unchallenged, is bound to fester and grow was disregarded for decades. Of course it is easy and ideologically satisfying to blame all of it on the horribly misguided tenets on the Left. It makes us feel morally superior in turn. Maybe you are prepared to believe that tens of thousands of politicians, public officials and police officers are psychopaths, but if you’re not, considering this as a case of a deeply bureaucratic mindset might be helpful. Observation and common sense have been replaced by a model of reality which must be maintained by the rituality of actions. Actions or speech threatening the model - i.e., people’s belief therein - are to be eliminated. Cries of discontent may reach the rabbit hole, but these can be disqualified as immoral speech and the hole is left intact.

There are more examples of organizations, manned by a specific class of people, ‘behaving’ in similar ways. Take the European Union. It was conceived to facilitate trade and the free movement of persons and goods, with the idea that this would make war on the European continent more unlikely. It may have attained this objective, relatively speaking, though we do not have an alternative, control-history to check against, and horrible wars have occurred since its foundation. Now, however, the organization resembles most a run-away train which cannot change tracks and cannot be stopped, either. It has been noted that both in economic growth and in innovation, the EU is outperformed by the US and China. Instead of breaking down barriers, the EU has become a regulation factory. The connection between the two has not landed in Brussels yet, probably because the lavishly paid EU bureaucracy can only conceive of one task: regulating. The unified continent does exist, but only in their minds and in the posh Brussels offices where it is decided what Europe should look like ten years from now.

As the ambitions of the Brussels bureaucracy have grown, the distance to the varied realities experienced in the extremely different constituting countries and regions has skyrocketed, doubtlessly aided by war in the East and economic adversity as well. The inevitable outcome is the electoral success of Euro-sceptic parties. The unsurprising - but still exasperating - response from Brussels has been a refusal to acknowledge any validity to the peoples’ complaints. People are literally in the cold due to unsustainable energy policies, but the center is unable to look through any other prism than that of end-of-days climate hysteria. The other issue causing apprehension and anger is the unrelenting mass immigration that several societies are unable to accommodate and absorb either economically or culturally. In those cases where electoral decisiveness seem to turn this tide, it turns out the judiciary is not ready to comply with the will of the people. The demophobia is evident in the extreme rhetoric employed to keep any populist plan in check. The claim the center tries to save ‘democracy’ by doing so again shows the mental construct is sacrosanct, and not unruly facts on the ground.

The question I wanted to leave with you is whether labor specialization, and in particular information specialization entails the risk of a mystic ruling class. As this class closes itself off from common experience and common sense, its confrontation with ‘the people’ becomes inevitable. I believe some such tension is unavoidable in a society which is highly specialized and interdependent. Arguably, technology has at long last succeeded at giving a voice to all of us. And I am not blind: bloodthirsty mobs are mobilized easily on the web as well. But unless we find ways to open up the bureaucratic structures and rabbit holes that our clergy find increasingly difficult to abandon, the bloody crowd will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. It is time for the demophobes to start listening to the people, lest they become the first - though definitely not the last - victims of democracy.