Democracy Won't Save You

Why must democracies specifically remain small?

First of all, because as the size of a decision-making group grows, consensus democracy - which is the only way to properly balance the interests of everyone equally, protecting each person's autonomy and preventing subjugation - becomes less and less practical. Instead of focusing on being inclusive, hearing out as many points of view as possible and trying to integrate everything as much as possible, majoritarian (and representative) democracy will begin to take over, as people give up caring about the minority in favor of practicality and rapidity of decision-making. Now, sure, even consensus decision-making is imperfect - this is why individual, autonomous, stygmergic action is by far the superior option and should be preferred as much as possible - nevertheless, majoritarian democracy is a categorically different beast. Majoritarian democracy inherently completely subjugates the interests of the minority to those of the majority, constituting essentially a form of mob rule that can often be achieved through simple force in cases where community defense and decentralized power aren't a thing. Majoritarian democracy has the effect of sacrificing a small minority of people in order to serve the interests - including stability and order - of the majority.

Second, because when the size of a democratic decision-making body grows beyond the size absolutely necessary to consider the interests of those directly effected by its decisions, it automatically becomes a form of absentee authority and governance, and begins enacting the fundamental principle of authoritarianism: controlling how other people live their lives and exercise their autonomy purely for the sake of doing so, instead of in self-defense or in compromise with them.

To clarify what I mean here, let me first make a distinction between two kinds of interests:

1.*autonomous interests: * interests that don't inherently require the subjugation of anyone else; that just concern your own exercise of self-determination and autonomy, which includes your own person and the things you use, occupy, or otherwise depend on for that autonomy. Defending these interests may require other people to change their behaviors to accommodate you - such as not harming you or entering your house or stealing your possessions - but they fundamentally do not require those things, only for you to be left alone. 2.*despotic interests: * interests that inherently require not just the cooperation, but the involuntary subjugation of others, that you gain by controlling how other people live their lives directly, or through threatening to take away the things they depend on for autonomy and self-determination. This kind always requires violence that is clearly not in self-defense, but instead in defense of the privilege that you gain from exploiting others.

The classic paradigmatic case of this distinction is that between the occupant of a house and their landlord. If no one else is using a house, it's a direct extension of the autonomy and self-determination of the occupant, something they have an interest in because they need a roof over their head and somewhere to live. Meanwhile, all the landlord gets out of owning a house is the ability to extract rent, which they can do because they are enabled by the state to violently evict the actual occupant of the house. While the occupant's interest in their house are autonomous, because they only require the respect and non-interference of others, and have to do with exercising and maintaining their self-determination as an individual, the landlord's interests are despotic, as they have no real interest in the house itself, since they do not use it and it is not an extension of their autonomy, they only have an interest in what they can gain by controlling the living conditions of someone else.

Another way to examine this distinction is by putting it in terms of authority or subjugation: while the occupant of the house only needs others to recognize and respect their interests as equally important, and so if they all also have places to live, to respect their desire for privacy in their dwelling place, and any limitation of the autonomy of others required by these interests is only in the assertion of the equality of these interests, to make sure they are represented at all, the landlord's interests are asserted to the exclusion of the interests of the occupant, who must rely on the landlord's whims, and indicate special privilege which comes at a cost to the interests of the occupant.

Ultimately, this is about who has control over your life: you - self-determination, autonomy - or someone else - domination and authority -, but trying to strictly delineate every relationship into either one or the other is a fool's errand. These definitions aren't a list of necessary and sufficient conditions, an essentialist taxonomy - instead they are accounts of the social and phenomenological aspects that make these two kinds of relationships importantly different to one's subjective experience of being in such relationships. We assess which of these an actual relationship is more like not by analyzing some essence embedded inside it, but by ascertaining its family resemblance. Furthermore, these are merely two poles on a “spectrum of human relations, which can be more or less despotic or autonomous.

How does this relate to democracy? Well, I think that engaging in consensus-based decision-making with all those that are effected by some decision is a clear case of attempting to represent the autonomous interests of all those involved. The purpose is to ensure that the actions of others don't harm the people who are effected by them, and that everyone's interests are considered equally and represented fairly in whatever decision is made.

As soon as we introduce people that are not directly effected by the outcome of a decision to the decision-making process, however, we begin to run into problems. First of all, knowledge, and incentive problems begin to show up, since these new people won't have much tacit knowledge of the matter at hand, nor have much of an incentive to learn about it or engage in the decision-making process, and, most importantly, they won't be subject to the outcomes they cause in any case. More importantly, however, it subjects those who actually have their autonomy and self-determination bound up in something to the wishes of those who otherwise would not be effected by their decisions at all. In other words, it opens up the opportunity for people to extend their despotic interests by controlling things that do not effect them and do not factor into their own personal autonomy and self-determination but do effect others'. Imagine, for instance, that suddenly your neighbors across the street had an equal say in what you did to maintain your house as those who live with you in your house do. What possible interest could they actually have in that, except to control you? What interest could they have in it except a despotic one?

Of course, the relationship of an absentee voter and the rest of the voting body is not precisely the same as that between an absentee landlord and a tenant - to insist that it was would be absurd. In fact, it's quite less severe, as long as most of the people involved remain local to the problem. But the principle is the same, and as the number of such "absentee voters" grows, so, too, does the despotism.

Similar problems face any democratic decision-making process that begins to metastasize beyond it's original problem and situation. Once such a decision-making arrangement begins to exist outside the context within which it evolved, it begins to become reified of necessity. No longer is it a specific behavior perpetuated by specific people who are motivated by the existence of a specific problem; in order for it to be possible to uproot it from the problem it was supposed to solve, the question it was the answer to, it must cease to become a solution, an answer, and become instead a thing in its own right, which raises its own questions. It has to become, in essence, self-contained in order for being removed from its environment to become possible at all. Thus, it becomes an "organization" with a life of its own, which maintains itself as different people join and leave, gets its own name and institutionalizes itself. It becomes a thing quite apart from the people that actually compose it, somehow, by the process that all collectivities do this by, a sort of social epiphenomena that creates corporate forms, and begins to seek the perpetuation of itself. Suddenly, people start to serve it, instead of it serving people.

As a result of this process, it will begin to assert itself in all sorts of situations where the people that compose it are not effected, but are merely exercising the power of authority and control over others. After all, now that it is a self-contained, reified entity, it has no original problem to solve - it must go in search of a new one.

It is crucial that the parties to any decision-making process which begins to become such a collectivity make the conscious choice, and accompanying effort, to destroy it before it begins to wreak real havoc. Otherwise it will turn into the exact sort of Socialist Office of Circumlocutions that most Marxist-Leninist organizations, and even some anarchist ones, tend to become - huge bureaucratic dinosaurs bent on self-perpetuation in the name of preserving the collectivity which everyone must sacrifice in the name of. This commitment to destroying collectivities before they become Organizations must be part of the cultural, conscious leveling mechanisms that any anarchist society must employ, just as egalitarian societies before them did, to maintain liberty.

Representative democracy cannot save us either. If we don't have the time or incentive to research the controversies and problems that need to be solved and draft policies ourselves, what reason is there to think we'll have the time and incentive to monitor the policies and actions of those we elect as "representatives" in enough detail to actually hold them substantially accountable? How would we even begin to really get all that information? Even if we could, the only thing we could do is not elect them again; they'll still have had their stint in power. Thus, once elected, they are largely free to do whatever they please behind closed doors because no one will actually read the legislation they pass or truly hold them accountable for keeping their promises. As long as they appear to parrot the right talking points to their base, they are free to maintain the status quo and gather power for themselves and their station because few will spend the time to look more deeply into the subjects and policies they propose. People, quite rationally, go along with whatever the demagogue who most echos what they want to hear says.

Not only that, but you need a lot of money and, most especially, free time to run for office. Working people, marginalized people, even the middle class, don't have that kind of time. Thus, the pool of who, practically, can actually run for office is limited to a very specific class of people - who will have different interests from the people who elected them. Moreover, those who have the most time to spend on campaigning and the most money to spend on ads will typically be the ones to win - thus, as competition takes hold and does what it is wont to do, heightening specializations, we end up with a whole class of rich career politicians that represent nearly our only choices. Even when we have an option that isn't a career politician, it's someone who has been close with that class for a long time, who tends to be rich and share those interests. Thus representative democracy necessarily leads to an elective aristocracy, usually in service to the oligarchy of rich, famous, and powerful people.

With such a limited pool of choices, all from the same inbred, interrelated, colluding class, do we really have the option to choose someone who will truly act in our interests? Or do we have an oligopoly to choose from, just like we have in the economy - a few huge options that are all fundamentally similar and essentially automatically cartelize just by the nature of their socioeconomic position.

By its very nature, reified democracy puts all of the power in society in the hands of the majority or plurality in that society; ultimately, whether you have direct democracy or representative, first past the post voting or ranked choice, proportional representation or winner takes all, it is those who make up the largest section of society that will have ultimate authority. This puts marginalized people forever on a knife's edge: we are forced to appeal to the sympathy and higher moral feelings of the majority and hope that in their lord-like authority over our lives, which has the power to crush and erase us just as much as the power to lend aid, they choose to do the latter. This places the marginalized and oppressed perpetually on our knees, begging those who benefit from our oppression, who have little interest in our liberation, for permission to live. Even when we win, it is not solid or permanent, and neither does it represent true liberation, because it was not an expression of our equality, autonomy, and power: it was alms granted by an authority over us.

This means that we cannot rely on reified democracy to protect the interests of the marginalized in society, because it all depends on the whims of others. Defenders of the sacred "democratic ideal" will argue that if only democracy were more perfect - more representative of the majority, more responsive to the "will of the people" - it would be better, we could trust the majority to take care of us, but the reinforcement of marginalization is an inherent problem with democracy. It can only be exacerbated by making the majority even more powerful. Marginalized people are marginalized as a product of our different experiences and interests: the axes of oppression are constituted by the different experiences and needs that we have from the many. If everyone votes in their interests, marginalized people must remain marginalized, and why should we expect them to do otherwise? The majority cannot deeply care about our needs - for them, ignorance and apathy is rational, because the issues that threaten to crush us are abstract discussions to them, things that happen far away, mostly to people they don't even know. Often, they don't even know why we need what we need, why it matters to us, or even what we need, and they fundamentally will never understand, because we have fundamentally different experiences. At best, for them, voting to help us is an exercise of charity, something they do to feel better about themselves - but how strong of a motivator is that, really? Can we truly rely on the majority of people to feel that way? The people that make up “"the majority", like everyone else, are necessarily caught up in their own needs and struggles. How can we rely on them to overcome their rational ignorance concerning what we need, and the free rider problem concerning voting, just to help us, when they can barely do so for matters that directly effect them?

Guardians of the sacred democratic ideal will argue that if only the marginalized were able to clearly make their case before "the people," the majority would be swayed by their case and choose to vote to help them, but if any view is utopian, it is this one. Voting is not a matter of objective rationality. Morality is not an objective thing that you can demonstrate logically or scientifically: each person's morality is shaped by their culture, lives, experiences, and interests. Tolerance of queer people is just something that benefits us, and that some allies have come to like either because they know queer people or because they like it aesthetically. There is no rational argument that will convince a bigot to stop being a bigot, that will establish tolerance as the ultimate principle of morality, or that will convince people to care about issues that don't really effect them. The best we can do is appeal to their empathy, as opposed to their own interests and rational apathy.

Even if morality were something that could be used to objectively prove that everyone should care about the plight of the marginalized, since when did we expect pure dialectical rationality to win out among the majority? Again, it is utopian to think that people will be more interested in abstract argument, in rationality, in philosophy, in being "morally right," than their own interests and the rhetoric and tribalism of demagogues. Rational arguments don't have any inherent metaphysical power that ensures that they must "win" with the majority of people. Everyone votes for their own interests or in favor of their own sacred ideals.

Nor is the solution - as the neo-reactionaries would have it - to return to aristocracy or oligarchy or monarchy: these merely create an entirely new problem, granting absolute power to those who are already powerful in society and perpetuating it. The reason democracy seems better than aristocracy or monarchy is directly tied up with its fatal oppressive flaw - it makes most people in society happy. But just because it makes society more stable by serving the interests of most people, so that there is no longer any revolutionary fervor, so that fewer people are ground beneath the heel of the state, does not mean we must accept it. Why should we accept our sacrifice on the alter of the sacred democratic ideal just so that “"the majority" can rest comfortably? Why must we remain permanent second class citizens, serfs of the lordship of Numbers? There are other ways than simply rule by many or rule by few.