“There will be no end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself, till philosophers become kings in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy thus come into the same hands.”

- Plato, 'The Republic'

For aeons people have considered the following questions to be the primary problems of organising a society:

How should we make large-scale decisions?
What system of governance should we use?
What/who should have power?

As loose thinking on the subject accumulated into the field of political philosophy, many ideas converged on a fantasy: power should be bestowed upon the wisest, what is optimal should be considered and decided by the best thinkers. In this light, a political system is judged on its tendency to select for the best politicians. A king may not be wise, but the elected can be. And in order to avoid the biggest follies of humans - conflict and self-interest - we should all have equal say. Voilà, democracy.

But there are fundamental misconceptions in that story. The above are actually secondary problems of organising a society. The primary one is not how we should make decisions, but rather how we should move on, once bad decisions have been made.

Moreover, Plato is wrong in implicitly idealising an end to the troubles of states, or of humanity itself. As far as this end exists, it is completely undesirable. Such a situation - with no troubles - could only occur in lifeless stagnation. Life, if it is joyful, vibrant, and creative, is riddled with problems. I’m using the word problem in a wider, Deutschian sense here: a conflict between ideas. This can be culturally counterintuitive because the common meaning of the word fixates on an unwelcome or harmful situation. Some problems are indeed bleak by nature, just as some ideas are, but in the wider sense, the existence of problems is good in principle.

The richer the world of ideas becomes, the more problems arise. Thus solutions create more (better) problems. The true assessment of a political system is contingent on how effectively it allows a society to transition between different problem-solving attempts. In essence: we try something, we fail to some degree, we are unconstrained to try something different.

This is why, in the tier-list of political systems, democracy stands alone. Not because when given group choice ‘th...

Posts

Wikitag Contributions

Comments