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When you separate responsibility from authority, you create a space in which bad ideas can flourish without repercussions.
Accountability is necessary for weeding out dangerous, frivolous, promotions that lower communal trust for personal gain.
Examples include gain of function research, unrestricted AI, massive bureaucratic edifices surrounding economics, cloaking decision-makers and passing failures onto consumers, and political contributions made anonymously.
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A second argument against representative democracy is the bureaucratic management that blocks change and disperses accountability. Meanwhile, the benefit of a monarch is that they should care deeply and be attentive lest their head be removed.
While power can operate behind the monarch, having a singular figurehead allows for a lightning rod and scapegoat; people crave a visible leader and target, not invisible functionaries. However, the risk of notoriety (becoming the figurehead) is rewarded with perceived power converted to real power: the monarch can tyrannically dismiss the puppeteers. This should force a tremulous alliance of mutual use and disdain.
The positive and negative aspects are long-term stability and a deft reliance on appearances to simulate balance and care, something democracy attempted to circumvent and yet has increasingly embodied.
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One argument against democracy is governance by representatives, which means distant strangers who, despite theoretical accountability by voting, have split interests: first, they must promise that they care and will be effective (community solidarity for change), and second, they must make sure to be re-elected (self-interest as stability).
Both involve compromises that must be hidden: to be effective, you must work with the “enemy,” which runs against the cares of your constituents. The representative must necessarily be two-faced: hide compromise or stall effectiveness.
It seems there is a way in which social mores (ethics, values, social status) and an educated populace (reasonable consideration of multiple variables) could remove this antagonism, and yet harnassing a counterintuitive paradox (self-interest as community support) is the brilliance of democracy.
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Being educated can lead to illogic because wanting something—such as to be virtuous, moral, and right—allows your education to become a rationalizing faculty. Ideally, academics or scholars would draw from a breadth of resources, allowing knowledge to shape their worldview. As an authority, they would be capable of framing or debating multiple arguments from multiple positions. (authority instead of zealotry)
However, the counterintuitive dynamic persists where, for the sake of inclusive status, research and authority often mold information to fit personal ideologies. The outcome is predictable before the research begins, resulting in increasingly abstruse and moralistic arguments that fail to create the necessary paradigm shifts.
In this case, academics are not science, though they wish to hold the authority science once held. Even facts are politically reinterpreted, which begs the question of the possibility of apolitical human discovery as an anomaly, if not an impossibility.
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Today’s discourse is typically moral panic, with a pinch of cherry-picked reality to support our side.
The right perceives certain groups and individuals as destabilizing and prioritizes protection, whereas the left criticizes a lack of empathy and emphasizes ethical progress. Both claim righteousness while selectively aggrandizing, an option only available on the back of established, robust infrastructures built by earlier sacrifices. (Morality over reality, luxury morals).
This mirrors historical cycles of societal introspection vs. external threats and should challenge us to reconsider the historically failed first-world perspective as gluttonously myopic. But we won’t until it serves us.
(a nod to Rob Henderson’s “Luxury Beliefs”)
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The problem with winning by identifying with the underdog is the position reversal: once you win, you have moved from identification as the oppressed into a position of oppressor. To maintain your revolt against power you must set yourself up for defeat so that you once again have a bully to fight: put yourself back into the role of oppressed.
You maintain the moral high ground by deferring the actual responsibility (realpolitik) of retaining the high ground.
That is to say, the confusion through identification fails in its role to support, focussed more on the optics of maintaining morality and revolution.
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A liberal paradox: cherishing rebelliousness signifies a break from tradition, yet ironically cultivates instability through its commitment to disruption.
Embracing the underdog role (freedom from oppression) is as patriotic as embodying the victorious "winner" role (an American archetype.)
For us, fighting against the odds transcends typical political affiliations, emphasizing a personal (subjective) quest for success that resonates with national values (transcendent).
This interplay between destabilization and idealism is a conundrum: embracing persistent turmoil as a form of national idealism (undermining authority as it establishes itself) may be the very trait that sustains America’s humanity despite its perpetual, domineering striving.
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In Animal Farm, there is a moment when the corpulent and gluttonous pigs invoke an enemy as a need for restraint. This harbinger required restriction and sacrifice.
When the populace recognizes that this artificially enhanced restriction encourages more opulent gluttony or ill-considered expenditures by the privileged leaders, we may declare, "We will not be fooled again."
And in desperation for reform, we enshrine our liar, our harbinger of revenge to displace their liar. In such repetitive ways we ensure trust is forgotten for tactical victories.
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As a society, we handed over more and more authority to science because its agenda was approaching truth in an investigative manner by acknowledging failures and correcting them.
Over time we placed trust in scientists and doctors, not the discipline, and increasingly handed authority to technocratic expertise: specific knowledge in hard disciplines was earned trust.
Accordingly, politicians and the state, who seek trust and social persuasion, co-opt technocratic puppets. They utilize credentials to push agendas proven to be blindly harmful.
The suborning of science’s trust creates a didactic return to the felt experience, the perceptive phenomenal embodied subjective, as more trustworthy, though that too has been proven unreliable.
Consequently, our state of confusion is valid: we can not trust science, leaders, or ourselves.
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We prioritize quality-of-life advancements, yet often conceal them behind veils of profundity like religion, ideology, or political affiliations, deeming our well-being shallow in comparison to national or human rights issues.
Whether based on social or economic factors, the divide between right and left involves an interplay of literal and heuristic cost-benefit analyses. Accordingly, tribal (political) allegiance does not necessarily imply ideological alignment. Furthermore, a party’s ability to ensure security may overshadow the absurdity of its ideas, until declining quality of life prompts a shift towards opposing camps: my move to well-being and happiness, backfilling our ideology.
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