Opinion Sur
A new risk has risen as the year begins: we have entered an interdependent world which is both post-democratic, dysfunctional, and with no one at the helm. Only the collective subject named “the markets” steer the system, and they do not steer it well.In the Western world of the XIXth century and in the midst of democratization, the sharpest analysts –among whom were Alexis de Tocqueville in France and John Stuart Mill in England- feared that people’s massive involvement in the process of collective decision making would have a negative effect, that is: the onset of irrational policies, guided more by passion than by reason, and the expression of common prejudices over ideas pondered calmly and responsibly. They called this danger ‘the tyranny of majorities’ and proposed solutions that could guarantee the minorities right to opinion and avoid a populist and short-term stampede that would sweep the entire political and social system. In the XXth century, left and right wing totalitarianisms confirmed the suspicions of the XIXth century thinkers.
In the current century, heir to the previous two, an important novelty has emerged, unforeseen by our predecessors. We find ourselves facing a very different risk, which has little to do with a presumed excess of democratization (populist or not), and related instead to a deficit in democratic participation, with the following characteristics, which I will number.
1. Countries, economies, and cultures have become more and more ‘hybrid. The interdependence of information and communication systems (i.e. globalization), makes national decisions, inside each country, and democratic as they may be, subject to forces and pressures that no country (not even the most powerful) can entirely control.
2. The complexity of flows and networks creates a concentration of knowledge, information and technical decisions that are not up for debate or within the reach for public opinion.
3. The dissemination of commercial culture and massive entertainment promotes and augments ignorance regarding important problems, rational citizen thought, and fosters an excessive attention to spectacular though secondary events.
4. The Internet and cell phones, which have an enormous rational and democratic potential, are an easy prey for an opposite development: a culture of frivolity with subliminal and manipulated ideological undertones.
For these reasons (and other less evident ones that deserve further analysis), we stand, in my opinion, in a post-democratic era. The symptoms of post-democracy are clear.
In the Western world, if we focus on Europe, we can tell that both individually and collectively, countries cannot face an economic and financial crisis in a rational way. The interests of each nation –insufficient to solve the crisis- are strong enough to avoid –only economically- the necessary pooling of debt and a redeployment of investment. In the collective order, the European Union is a self-selected club of technocrats and bureaucrats that only agrees on ignoring popular claims and postponing sine die and ad infinitum the most crucial decisions. Instead of establishing – through democracy or even through more authoritarian means – the true common and necessary institutions (among them, a serious central bank and a regional Treasury), they hyper-regulate secondary details such as emergency staircase exit signs in public places, or the pasteurization of cheese.
In the United States, the wise power balance designed by the founding fathers in the late XVIIIth century has become a traffic jam due to arbitrary and opposing interests and ideologies. Mutual vetoing and offenses have paralyzed the government. Only the certainty of an imminent crisis can, occasionally, align wills. The system only works from one crisis to another, in a permanent state of emergency.
In the emerging world (part in the East and part in the global South) more concentrated power systems –some outright authoritarian, others more democratic, but with delegative democracies- have taught governments how to stay in power, but they have not taught them how to guide countries into a sustainable future. Facing a global crisis, they are as impotent as Western countries to design and implement solutions, which are no mystery to anyone who thinks, but that the different systems turn into almost utopian pipedreams.
Facing this multiple paralysis of strategy in a very integrated world that lacks a central brain, for the time being the collective referee that causes decisions and disciplines social actors and political administrators, is the anonymous subject everyone calls, in plural, ‘the markets’. But it is hard to think that this alleged subject is anything other than a headless horseman: it is strong but inconstant, brutal in its maneuvers, volatile and often unpredictable.
The Hobbesian humanity of the XXIth century has left its fate in the hands of a brainless Leviathan, which like the ancient Leviathan also rises from the sea. But this time it is not in the form of a whale, but as a school of desperate little fish.
