A week from a federal election here in Oz. A reality politics stocktake on the performance of electoral…

A week from a federal election here in Oz. A reality politics stocktake on the performance of electoral politics (all sides). Find me one area of public life where current systems and processes aren’t catastrophically broken, with no hope of repair. /1

Climate change, transport, education, health care, aged care, energy, public health, defence, demography, etc. An objective look at the *material realities* in these areas will show all of them on their knees. With no meaningful plans or identified resources to fix them. /2

Yes people who run for office have some policies on these things. Band-aid solutions. None come within a million miles of addressing the scale of what’s required. Why are we so reluctant to see this, and call it out? Electoral democracy doesn’t work. /3

How did we ever think it *would* work? Why would adding a popularity contest as a thin controlling veneer over the top of all of these material realities not just make it all worse? Which is what’s happened. Elections use these problems as fodder to generate votes. /4

There is not one way a popularity contest has any connection with the material realities of our lives. If you grant ultimate status and power in a society to the most popular, the only thing you will then do as a society, is try to win that popularity game. /5

How is this not obvious? People are reluctant to see this because of a bizarre belief that ‘democracy’ *is* these popularity contests. That ‘the people’ (never defined) drive democracies via the vote. That people will vote for what will fix material realities. /6

Because (the thinking goes), that will be the most popular thing. Horseshit. Humans are social animals, and what drives them above all else is status. Humans vote the same way they do everything (literally, everything). To maximise their social status. /7

Alan Kohler has written some excellent columns in the past year highlighting the absolute chasm between what needs materially doing in Australia, versus what political parties are offering. No amount of voting will fix that, because we don’t vote to fix material realities. /8

We vote for the same reason we do everything else. To maintain a continuous status game. To get our team over the line, like Premier League football. Not an analogy, it’s the same social mechanism. Voting causes the problems we try to fix, with voting. /9

‘The people’ is not a thing. Look at what the belief in it produces. In electoral democracies, it produces a proliferation of competing teams or gangs, endlessly fighting one another for top status (election wins). A highly stratified, hierarchical system. /10

The exact opposite to what belief in ‘the people’ aims to achieve. Look at actual outcomes, not at what people say. The same for social media, which is a technological implementation of the same ‘the people’ ideas. /11

These platforms aren’t some gloriously ‘flat’ social structure, free of hierarchy. They’re intensely stratified, hierarchical networks with ‘influencer’ hubs that drive most activity. Again, look at the reality, not the spin. /12

Everywhere ‘the people’ ideas pop up, they produce the exact opposite. It’s reality telling us the ideas are bullshit. Humans create status hierarchies, it’s what social animals do. They will turn everything into these hierarchies. /13

Some ask ‘so what’s an alternative’? Bizarrely, an alternative is what we already had. Our democracies never were run by ‘the people’. They were always run by public institutions, regulating. Regulation = democracy. A hierarchical system, but oriented to the public good. /14

The fundamental act of a democracy is to PASS LAWS. To LEGISLATE. To regulate social life, for the public good. Not to vote. Voting is destroying democracy, by allowing populist status games to bypass our regulatory systems. /15

Democracy is millennia old. Universal voting is about a century old. It’s an idea that has failed catastrophically. Democracy won’t survive voting. /end