“…it’s useful to remember that the history of autocracy is the history of war on the idea and practice of…
“…it’s useful to remember that the history of autocracy is the history of war on the idea and practice of free and fair elections.”
Autocracies are thousands of years older than elections.
To unpack that concept - autocracy. /1
https://t.co/RAe82LOz4h
It’s more an assumption than an idea. That a few people telling lots of people what to do is an intrinsically bad thing.
Except it’s how all societies work, and have always worked. At all scales. If I get an electrical fault in my home, I call an electrician. /2
For electrical work, they’re a thoroughly welcomed ‘autocrat’ when they arrive. Nobody should do their own electrical work.
Many of us *could*, if we trained. And if we wanted to. But most of us don’t want to. /3
The electrician isn’t oppressing me or restricting my freedom. They’re giving *me* the freedom, to not have to understand or do electrical work.
My life can do other things, because of electricians. Extend that to any trade or profession. /4
The more we surrender our agency to do everything ourselves, the freer we get. Go figure.
Now shift the same idea, to what we call politics. Representative democracy, what we in the West mostly live with and misunderstand. /5
Representative democracy is strongly hierarchical. Autocratic, you could say. Officials and elected leaders ‘run the country’, for us.
Every few years we cast a vote. Not to run the country. But to choose the people we want to do it, for us. /6
We happily surrender our freedom to do that, because we don’t know how, and we’d rather be doing other things anyway.
Politicians are political electricians. And really it’s their officials that are, politicians are only a liaison point between them and us. /7
Those who see elections *as* democracy are (sorry), just populists. Wedded to the idea that we all are, literally, running the country every day.
With social media populism is a wildfire out of control. Now we’re all experts, in everything. And we call it democracy. /8
People trained in public health know nothing, now we can go to influencers on social media, who without any training or experience can lead the global response to a pandemic. Which will be no response, unsurprisingly. /9
Find one area of life now where the ruthless ‘autocracy’ of expertise hasn’t been damaged or destroyed, by this explosion of DIY society.
By a proliferation of pseudo-experts peddling things that are completely bananas. /10
The status hierarchies I Tweet about are these same autocracies we want to be (apparently) rid of. Except really our particular team just wants to be top of the hierarchy.
This is the double-edged sword of status. Status, or trust, is how societies work. /11
The widespread delegation of responsibility to others, with expertise, to do things for us. To free us up to have richer lives in other ways.
When you destroy the coupling of that status to actual expertise, it’s the end of your society. /12
Elections do that. There is not one single test an elected leader needs, to win, except to be popular. You wouldn’t hire even a junior staff member, using that metric.
But we use it to run societies. And wonder why they’re spinning into the toilet.
/end