It is often that we complain about bureaucracy, needing to hop through countless loops to get even the simplest stuff done. Yet it is important to realize that the slow moving, painful bureaucracy is crucial to democracy. It’s not a bug, it is a feature.

To understand why, let’s take a step back and go to the early modern era, the time when democracy waves started to wash over the whole world and democracy became the norm, instead of exception. I would like to argue that, the main point of democracy is that, an individual can never get too much power, and not so much that everyone has power. And how do we ensure this? By enlengthening the time scales, such that the state always converges to the democracy. We introduce checkpoints and artificial barriers to ensue that an idea has many points of interception. So that a person that wants to do something, anything, the society has to be damn sure that they want him to do it. And we make sure that if someone wants to oppose, they have many opportunities.

One of the biggest reasons for the inception of this idea was the replies I got when I challenged democracy. I was usually met with replies to the tune of “Do you have a better solution?”.

Once you remove the failsafe that is bureaucracy, what do you get? You get an authority that can elevate access without hurdle. Without the necessary time buffer to inform the public and prevent the authority from accruing more power than they were given, the system will diverge in autocracy or oligarch over time. Information travels slow, and understanding takes time. With the natural high ground the authority has over in terms of controlling the flow of information, the time frame for the public to understand that the authority is gaining more power than it should gets increasingly longer.

So, how does such a loss happen? It is ironic that the reason for the downfall of democracy is one of its pillars of creation. By alluding to the public opinion of course. It is genius honestly, because it really is the most fundamental principle of democracy: what the majority wants happens. There is no challenge to it. And if you realize that democracy is actually one big feedback loop, you realize removing the friction from the system will take it from overdamping to underdamping once a critical amount of friction is removed. In democracy, you choose the voice you will listen to, you elect the candidate you like the most, and put an authority tag on it and start respecting it as a source of power. This is a textbook feedback loop. A positive one. The only thing that stops this system from resonating into destruction is the restrictions in place; existence of opposition and power to voice your opinion no matter how in the minority you are.

Because it is known that public is stupid. This idea has been discussed countless times. A person is smart, and people are stupid. Mass psychology and all that, there are some sources on it if you’d like to read up on it. And by definition, a person is a minority to the people. And if the person can not keep the people in check, the people are destined to fail.

Also I would like to challenge the idea that it is somehow a good thing to have the population decide on governmental matters directly. There is this notion of having many voices being good for the outcome. In some cases it is, yes. If you can trust the average person on a matter, then it is indeed a valid idea to believe that over many samples the outcome will converge to the correct choice. But having average Joe, instead of experts decide on intricate governmental and political matters is a big mistake. There’s this notion that choosing the person to make the choice for you (also known as the parliamentary system) is the same thing as making the choices yourself. It is not. (Of course this level of depth is long lost in choosing the authority, currently a person is chosen as authority not because his/her merits but because he/she panders to certain people’s beliefs.) But authority poses that they are the same thing. Asking people to make governmental choices makes as much sense as asking bunch of third graders who just dissected a frog to do a three way heart bypass operation. It makes zero sense. But if you asked the third graders who would they want to do the operation, even they would tell you that probably a certified surgeon should do it.

This has become a pretty standard way to bypass the democracy’s barriers in the last decade. Coupled with the information control the authority has over the newest communication tools, it has become so much easier to steer people. People already had the false conception of authority working only for the good of the people. Maybe in Plato’s dreams, yes. But as long as being in the authority has tangible rewards, people will always vie to obtain authority and increase power.

References

• Gees, Aran, Aran Rees, and View →. “The Stupidity Of Crowds | Open For Ideas”. Open for Ideas. N. p., 2017. Web. 29 Apr. 2017.
• “The Crowd: A Study Of The Popular Mind”. En.wikipedia.org. N. p., 2017. Web. 29 Apr. 2017.