Capitalism and democracy have brought us a very long way and been instrumental in rapid advances in technology and human rights and thus quality of life for many generations. They have brought us so far and yet I intent to argue that they are no longer fit for purpose. Society has outgrown and outpaced what they can do for us and we need better solutions for bigger problems now faced by people and humanity as a whole.
Conceptually I am still big advocates of both capitalism and democracy and would seek to include strong components of both in any utopian design exercise. They are just not the be all and end all that society seems to treat them as being. We are blinkered by their historic success. We try and spread democracy like we did with religion in the middle ages as if it were doing people a huge favour, saving them from eternal damnation etc. That we presume our form of government so successful and fit for purpose is a little frightening. Capitalism and democracy are held in such esteem that making a case against them feels like it would be viewed in an almost treasonous light.
What is needed is something more appropriate to handle a world were technological progress is extreme, a world where we are sufficient in numbers and power to affect the whole planet, and one where we are increasingly connected through trade, communication and the actions of others. These three significant factors (our nominal power, rate of power gain, and interconnectedness) are the things that are putting strain on democracy and capitalism and exposing the weaknesses. As systems they demonstrably have flaws but there were no better alternatives and the flaws were minor in relation to the perks afforded. The perks of these systems are certainly still bigger overall from where I am sat but the flaws seem to be increasing in issue at an alarming rate.
The only flaws in capitalism are that wealth has an aggregating tendency and that there is not direct alignment of the interests of people and that of profit. Luckily these are both easy fixes. We have taxes which are the perfect tool for wealth redistribution to counteract the aggregating properties of wealth. These taxes work double as they are also incentives to mitigate negative externalities from the pursuit of profit such as air pollution or unhealthy consumables. Sensible taxes on undesirable actions prevent a lot of them and can fund remedies for the remainder. Taxes can be directly applied in sustainable and fair means with the end of promoting the best advantage for society and should be the responsibility of the government to enact. A discussion about where society should be headed and what is the "best" are certainly important details to be clear on so that a suitable job can be done of things. Rather too big of a topic to branch into here though.
The problems with democracy are more numerous and harder to fix. From them stems the lack of appropriate fixes to the ills of capitalism. If we were to simplify modern society and try and represent it as a board game then government are effectively the designers who right the rules. The aim of the game is ultimately up to the individual however capitalist society very much has money as the points system it uses to determine the winner. It is pretty obvious that a game is rigged when the writer of the rules is playing the game as well and changing the rules as the game is in progress! Big game producing companies don't let their employees enter into competitive events for this reason rather obviously but society lets it's leaders be very involved in the wealth game. This is a source of bias at best and corruption at worst and needs addressing much more than it already is if we want a government that is doing a proper job.
The next issue with democracy is that it is very short term. Parties and individuals do things that get them re-elected rather than what is in the ultimate good of people and society. Mostly these things are aligned but not always. A lot of good things take a long time to take affect and thus confer little advantage to those in power at the time. Equally there are some bad things with long lasting negative effects that give short terms boosts that are all too common in democracies. The solutions to this issue have the effect of making it look less and less like democracy. They involve things like removing term limits and having the only options to remove people from positions of power as firings, resignations, or the old classic of death. You can also do it with fixing single terms with no re-election potential but then you also somewhat need to do away with party affiliation which seems like it might be a tricky extraction.
The final issue of democracy is the scope. You absolutely don't want just one governing body in charge of everything globally even if this would solve a lot of issues. It is for much the same reason you don't want monopolies operating in the economy. They stop working optimally and can stifle emerging competition that might force them back into serving people rather than themselves, or at least just being inefficient and stagnant. This means you want to have numerous governing bodies as we do in the modern world. This however concedes a lot of power, away from people and towards wealth. Governments have to bid for the wealth of the powerful, both companies and individuals, with favourable tax rates and business laws. Essentially this undermines the power we would like our governments to have and lets it reside more in companies than people, more in the few than the many. A large global wealth gap means wealth can exploit poorer nations, often in ways that ultimately come back to affect everyone, again such as polluting industrial practices.
These three failings of democracy ensure that the flaws of capitalism are not properly tended to which in turn has the effect of making people subservient to profit. Modern society is a support network for companies more than it is for people. In a world with an ever shrinking need for workers this is a fairly scary prospect. There is a lot of anti establishment propaganda that suggests there are cabals of the wealthy sinisterly plotting against us. In practice it is just mis-built systems, the improper alignment of rules and the systems by which we write those rules that naturally makes it look that way. There is no big conspiracy, it can just appear like it from some angles because people are acting in accordance with the incentives. They are not in cahoots, they are just playing the same game. The system has always been imperfect but there is no impetus to change anything so long as things are improving, which they generally have been. There is especially no motive to change when there are no obvious alternatives that are better, nor when things are as good as they can be for those with the power to make real change. The issue is that there is little discussion about these problems. No real end game for people or nations in mind. Humanity is just sort of bumbling along fixated in the now which has historically been fine, if a little slow and meandering. Now it is more of a problem. Now our actions have significant impacts on the future not just socially or economically but on the whole planet.
There are arguably some current social factors hastening the issues with democracy. These are far from self evident and more speculation on my part than anything else. We have information overload making things more about frequency and volume than they are about accuracy. You could also say that social media has promoted a purer kind of democracy where our political leaders are more representative of us as an averaged whole than they are the best of us, as you would want at the helm. There also seems to be an element of increasing political identity and tribalism. As religion declines in most democracies it feels as if politics is taking it's place in many ways. It is quite dangerous when ones identity is so heavily tied to anything ideological like that as it makes any attempts at compromise like personal attacks. None of these things really help democracy function. Ultimately you just want a really well educated society with a really boring governing body at the helm making informed, impartial choices to benefit the people and not those making the choices.
Education is huge for a democracy to function well but it is also one of those really slow effects that doesn't do all that much to help those in power at the time. It seems as if we could really do with improving the utility of our education for modern life, certainly the education I was given aged 10-18 involved learning a lot of fairly useless stuff in time that could have been spent better preparing me for adult life and being a benefit to society. This is rather a topic for a different essay but it is an important point to note. Any nation touting for democracy should be supporting that argument with a top tier and up to date education program. Why do we have teenagers learning about Shakespeare, oxbow lakes and trigonometry? These are fairly niche specialized things that only those with interest should be learning. There are plenty more worldly useful topics we could use that time for that would help people in the real adult world that schools barely touch on such as mental health, political systems, efficient actions, critical thinking etc. Good education should be interesting and beneficial. Useful education needs to be at least one of those two things and yet there is time being wasted on teaching things that to many people are neither.
Back to the main topic, this essay is just asking the question, what should an ideal form of government look like? We are assuming we can apply the simple fixes to capitalism if we can solve the governance problem so we only need to worry about that. It should have elements that ensure long term thinking is used. These come from removing biases from those making the choices. No need to worry about retention of power either so as to as tackle the potential issues with bias and short termism. Discretionary life appointments or fixed duration single terms are the obvious ways to do this (as I am talking about things like running the NHS, the chief of police etc rather than pure politicians we are largely already doing this). No financial gains to be made from choices made is the other big one. This mostly just means people in government shouldn't sit on company boards, have other jobs, have significant investments in any areas, and likely applied to immediate family too. This all gets rather sticky rather quickly. You cannot eliminate nepotism and so putting too much effort into doing so is foolish. Means by which you can help tone down nepotism without adverse costs seem good but not something to get overly hung up on.
I used to think implementing some kind of large jury style parliament backed up by a well run civil service and a referendum style democratic vote of approval system on new legislature was the way to improve things. A kind of purer democracy which took politicians and parties out of the mix. There are certainly some benefits to this idea but sadly I think it is likely more flawed than existing democracies. Experiences of the fall out of referendum politics and how they are quite divisive in society has made me wary of them. More than that it is the total lack of suitability of people to make informed choices. Politicians struggle and mostly seem to fail so what hope do less qualified people have? The world is incredibly complicated. To make good choices you need to be so well informed generally and be an experienced expert in the field relevant to the issues at hand. You then really want a bunch of people exactly like this to debate and discuss the issue and pool their opinions, all without personal bias on the subject. A consensus agreed by such a group has a reasonable chance of making good choices but only if it is an isolated matter, in reality nothing is isolated so you need to bring in more groups of experts to expand the discussion, make sure some fix isn't causing a bigger issue elsewhere. This is not what the public nor the government is, although at least the latter get to listen to such debates before they ignore the advice. What people want is absolutely one of the most important things to take into account when trying to run a country however handing over the reigns of power to the people is less than likely to result in that. We need a system that involves the people and removes bias, but it needs to also involve the best means to make optimal choices. We are probably out of luck even with Plato's philosopher kings as there is just too much to know and understand. They would mostly just have to be masters of delegation these days!
I used to think that the wisdom of the crowd theory was enough justification for democracy to be the best solution. In practice it clearly can't be. In a guess the weight of a cow at the fair event your data would be meaningless if you had to submit your answer in an entirely unknown unit of weight. Wisdom of the crowd only works if people are informed and aware of the parameters. We know what a kilo is and can see the cow and can have a rough stab at how those things relate! That is far too simplistic of a comparison for it to apply to democracy. Rather than the average cancelling out noise as it should when people are making informed judgements you just get chaos as you do with the unknown unit of weight measure. For democracy to function in accordance with wisdom of the crowd you need very specific questions with expositions on expected outcomes for each possible vote. That or some other clever means of involving the people and giving them voice and power but not in a way that lets them steer you into a ditch or just running round in circles. Voting on preferred experts as executives is a good way to do this but it becomes more of a popularity contest than a proficiency one and moves you in the direction of party politics.
What I now see as the best direction to go in as far as governance goes is a little bit more dissolved and certainly not at all mapped out. I think you ideally want to take certain elements as globally as possible while making other aspects small scale. Ripping the responsibility of governments in twain and sending them in opposite directions. Local councils would gain more power as would NGO style bodies. If you could have more and more nations on the one hand joining up to trade pacts, freedom of movement pacts, standards pacts, etc, and on the other hand dissolving power internally towards local governments it would allow for a transition towards a sensibly run world. Ultimately if we can create a kind of tax body which is independent of nations and governments then there is no place for companies to hide and exploit people. They cannot play regions off against each other and so profit can start to serve people again. This would need to be an opt in system which feels like it would then need to come with some significant incentives.
To have any sort of system where you have independent bodies responsible for important areas of society you are going to need a checks and balances system with means of oversight. There needs to be a power cycle from people to local government to global bodies to courts and regulators. There would also seem the need for a funded news, facts, and information service that was a lot like that arm of the BBC. Much like education, you can't hope to usefully involve the people if they are not informed. With misinformation so rife there needs to be a reliable means of finding out facts. We have seed libraries, places where weights and measures and kept. It seems like we need one of these for truth. Sounds like a scary prospect trying to get a publicly funded truth department. Very dystopian in feel if not intent. It too would of course need to be overseen with checks and balances.
We are doing most things correctly or nearly so. We have systems already like those that seem most suitable. The changes required are much more like bug fixes and updates than they are akin to revolution. While we are seemingly on track to eventually get there in terms of a utopian society that really does serve the people it is neither assured nor getting there fast enough for the problems at hand. We need global action as soon as possible as far as the environment goes. This could help kickstart a powerful NGO with a means to collate funds and redistribute them as a means to tackle climate change that could then morph into one capable of managing a (partial) global tax and wealth redistribution system. It wouldn't need to be the only system of taxation by any means, it would just need global reach. Local governments would likely still source most funding from their jurisdiction. Much as this is a bit tangential a route from where we are to where we want to be is essential. You can make plenty of utopian systems to rule over society but without a means to get there they are either outright failing or at best causing severe disruption, setbacks and tumult. Or we could just let it go to ruin and rebuild with the benefit of hindsight and the convenience of significantly reduced numbers to rebuild for... That would be an easier thing to do but it is going to be an unpleasant journey to the starting point. Really the task is simply to smooth out and coordinate power while reducing conflict. These are all quite tricky as people never wish to relinquish power and people naturally have tribal biases. This is a fight not just against systems of power but also human nature embedded within our ambivalent selfish genes. When put in those terms it does feel as if we have done pretty well to come as far as we have.
