If you want to understand why democracy isn’t working, we have centuries of empirical trials to draw upon.…

If you want to understand why democracy isn’t working, we have centuries of empirical trials to draw upon. The Romans. Their civilisation flip-flopped between more democratic forms, and ‘authoritarian’ Great Leader rule (kingdoms and emperors). So - which worked better? /1 https://t.co/iQkMYKBP1Y

The Roman republic governed by a Senate was the closest thing to modern democracy. Not a democracy, but not far off, elected magistracies to a governing Senate. Voting was heavily restricted to elite members of society, but ours was too until not long ago, historically. /2

The Republic was sandwiched between The Roman Kingdom, where Rome was ruled by kings, and the Roman Empire, where Rome was ruled by emperors. This is where it gets interesting. Of those 3 main periods, the republic was far and away the worst time to be a Roman. /3

The Roman republic existed in a state of more or less perpetual war. The contrast was so marked with the empire which followed it, that a term was even coined for it. Pax Romana, two centuries of unprecedented peace that followed the replacement of the republic, with emperors. /4

There are deeper social questions here, about how humans organise. Right now we’re living through another experiment in the belief that ‘the people’ should run society, what we think of as democracy. /5

It’s worth pointing out that since universal voting was introduced in our own societies, relatively recently in historical terms (about a century ago), we’ve had two global wars where more than 100 million people died. And right now we’re refusing to fight changes…/6

…to climate that could wipe out our entire species, and pretending we’re living with a pandemic. All under a governance schema where we say that populations, the people, are in the driving seat. Or at best we say the people are being obstructed by vested interests. /7

Meanwhile in the US and elsewhere, easily the most notable development is the huge rush to elect completely unhinged populists, in a cult of the Great Leader that is equivalent with old Kings or Emperors. I suggest the idea of ‘the people’ driving democracies is the problem. /8

The people is not even a thing, an agency capable of acting. It’s just all of us, a counting statistic. And we’re seeing clearly in every modern democracy that if you offer them something much closer to a King than a Roman Senator, they’ll fall over themselves to have a King. /9

Something Dennis Altman analysed very well in his book. And he’s not a monarchist. It’s time we got a bit brutal with our ideas around democracy. As I Tweet about a lot, I think all societies, at all times in history, actually operate the same way. Socially. /10 https://t.co/DOC6iQy89G

Humans imitate one another, and specifically they imitate those they see as having higher status. This forms groups, aligned around the high-status individuals. These groups then compete against other groups. This same mechanism operates at all levels of society. /11

From a tiny committee running a soccer club, right through to a Nation State. Team sports, as I sometimes call it. Status shifts constantly according to shifts in human desires, leading to new ‘influencers’ and new status hierarchies. Fashions and fads. /12

If you don’t offer this mechanism to people, they will run it themselves. What we call the democracy of the past century, where we say we’ve replaced status hierarchies with aggregated votes of millions of individuals, has been riven by status-driven chaos. /13

Everything becomes dominated by elections, popularity contests, both at election time and between elections. The jostling for social status, via popularity. And as above, leading to a world of Trump, where leaders are hard to distinguish from ancient Kings or emperors. /14 https://t.co/HWCtQRkJt5

It seems difficult to escape the conclusion that we’re fighting the most basic social realities of human existence, in our attempts to replace status hierarchies with an idea of populations governing themselves. As a result we’re getting the worst possible outcomes. /15

Populist wannabe Kings who are up there with some of the worst excesses of imperial and monarchical rule in history. None of the checks and balances of a cascading, structured nobility, holding the sovereign to account. No culture of noblesse oblige. /16

We forget that the earlier origins of modern democracy in our times was these structured nobilities rising up against tyrant Kings, creating systems of checks and balances. The Magna Carta, for example. Societies figured out how to tame their status-driven fundamentals. /17

There will never be utopias, because human desires are never stable, and all of this mechanism is driven by those desires. But if we’re realistic about how groups of people, of any size, operate, we will at least be able to sand the rough edges off inevitable excesses. /18

I look on every day at people hopeful electing somebody else will fix our problems. That’s this same ancient social mechanism operating, people look to be LED out of the wilderness. But at the same time we’re bogged down in the fantasies of ‘bottom-up’ change. /19

That this leadership will emerge from the daily percolation of everybody arguing with everybody else. Now on social media. As the Roman Republic discovered, all that leads to is perpetual argument and war. Gangs jostling for status, trying to reinstate a status hierarchy. /20

For today’s problems, we need to give up the idea that progress will be more of the same endless consultation, discussion and debate, to ‘bring people along’ with the facts. While they faff about with that historical fantasy, bad people offer the people new Kings. /21

Like Trump. Who lay waste to societies with completely unbridled populist rule, shed of all checks and balances. Good people need their own Kings to counter this shift. They need to recognise how societies have always operated. /end