THE West – a metaphor abused and rarely understood – is nearing its end. Its decline is no longer exceptional but emblematic. In fact, credible augurs claim its demise is no more than 20 years away. Democracy, for its part, never truly rose from the grave after its passing more than 2,000 years ago.
What is democracy? On paper, it is an arrangement grounded in unconditional pluralism and unreserved respect for individuals, administered by honest civil servants in an atmosphere of frugality, transparency, uprightness, strictly limited terms of office for all officials – elected or unelected – alongside direct citizenship participation. The individual – not the pack, not the people, not society – is the cornerstone of any community worthy of the name. Over body, property and mind, the individual is the uncontested sovereign. True democracy upholds the indisputable supremacy of the individual over the collective. Yet today it is a chimera rather than the system proclaimed to be in force.
The polymath Herbert Spencer saw the drift early on. ‘In our day men do not remember,’ he wrote in 1884 in The Man Versus the State, ‘that, in one or other way, all the truly Liberal changes diminished compulsory co-operation throughout social life and increased voluntary co-operation. They have forgotten that, in one direction or other, they diminished the range of governmental authority, and increased the area within which each citizen may act unchecked. They have lost sight of the truth that in past times Liberalism habitually stood for individual freedom versus State-coercion.’
Across the Western world, liberal democracy took root with unusual speed as the old aristocracies collapsed, especially after the end of the First World War. The dawn of a new order promised fairer conditions for the common man – for those with no access to the mansions and country houses where decision-makers in white tie laid out their plans over Cuban cigars and French cognac. Yet the transformation changed the setting and the props more than the substance of the regimes that preceded it. The cornerstone of the new system’s legitimacy was one person, one vote, a slogan that from the start turned out to be well-meaning but deceptive. History shows that not all the ballots are worth the same. Without that illusion at work, the whole arrangement would collapse like a house of cards.
Old aristocrats were replaced by another breed of elites and the man on the street found himself, again, left out in the cold, watching the show through a double-glazed window. True to tradition, the worst possible combination persists today: a mix of hereditary oligarchy on one side and restless mob rule on the other – a paradoxical blend in which a select few, usually inept and unreachable, constantly pander to the crowd in order to retain the control of the levers of power. The absence of authentic politicians at the highest decision-making levels remains the unbroken constant.
Liberal democracy – indeed an imaginary creature – has become a failed experiment in social organisation because it promotes conformity rather than dissent. Although almost a truism, few dare say it publicly: genuine democracy is incompatible with vast, anonymous populations ruled by an entrenched cadre of bureaucrats. As it stands, democracy is largely an exercise in futility. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to call it ‘deimocracy’, after Deimos, the god of dread and terror in Greek mythology? Fear is life’s ruling vector and ruthless victor.
The old order is withering by the day. Its beneficiaries – strata of bureaucrats embedded everywhere inside the shady labyrinth of the state – know it, and they cling to power with every tool available, always ready to reinforce strict control over a population increasingly aloof from the monopoly of the state and its relay stations: the news and entertainment industries, publishing houses, the education system and multiple other ideological terminals devoted to shaping a uniform and subservient society.
Spencer asks: ‘How is it that Liberalism, getting more and more into power, has grown more and more coercive in its legislation? How is it that, either directly through its own majorities or indirectly through aid given to the majorities of its opponents, Liberalism has adopted the policy of dictating the actions of citizens, and, by consequence, diminishing the range throughout which their actions remain free? How are we to explain this spreading confusion of thought which has led it, in pursuit of what appears to be public good, to invert the method by which in earlier days it achieved public good?’
As administrative systems slip further into automation, power is migrating quietly from citizens to procedures, and from procedures to algorithms. Against this backdrop, one question looms: how far will the endangered elites go – and how brutal will they dare to be – to protect their privileges? Yet even their fiercest efforts may prove futile. The coming replacement is not political but computational. Sooner rather than later they will be substituted by mathematical structures living on silicon and running on server farms – endless fields of GPUs, CPUs and memory chips housed in data centres large and complex enough to freeze the bones of the most cynical man ever born.
We are only minutes away from being displaced by big statistical minds without bodies – singular consciousness that may spawn an entire race of machines built to reason, explain and analyse without the hindrance of impractical emotions or preferences, that never rest, sleep or feel depressed. Human sovereignty is already being deposed, not by bloody revolutions, but by silent, peaceful servers.
The end is nigh, even if we pretend not to notice and look the other way while licking an ice-cream that drips down our hand.
