My views on Democracy

One thing I find fascinating about humans is that we are all so much different, yet we take it so much for granted. We tend to forget that being different doesn't make us better or worse than others, however it leads to the suppression of others' perspectives in favor of narratives favored by the prevailing hegemon.

However we are also very much the same in that we are human, and being human comes with pro social factors. These factors are what have the potential to unite us. The ability for humans to be galvanized into action by convincing narratives. Many prefer a collective based approach to politics, while some are more concerned with the individual.

Focusing on only ourselves leads to problems because political decisions affect everyone. Therefor if people instead choose to act selfishly, we can't have a functioning society. Whether politics should be centered around individual liberties or collective welfare is one prevailing concern of politics.

When the question of democracy comes up, as an American it's typically seen as an axiomatic virtue. But I've noticed for many years now how people don't think about political issues very deeply, but instead seem to gravitate towards tribal warfare.

I don't even believe that most people have the slightest clue how to even live their own lives, let alone have the capacity to know how to best influence others' lives. Tasking us all to decide how a society with millions of citizens should operate sounds absurd to me.

 According to the philosopher Walter Lippmann, public opinion should not be the driving force behind political action because people are ill equipped to decide what happens to their country. The reason for this is because voters aren't deeply attached to most political concerns, so their attitudes derive from ideology because it makes this process much easier.

 

Back during the days of our founding fathers voting was exclusionary. It was a time when only wealthy white landowners could vote. These voters had a vested interest in understanding their local communities. This is because the decisions made by political leaders would have a direct affect on their land. So the primary focus of citizens would be to support the immediate subcommunities they were beholden to.

Today we largely construct simple models to understand politics. Models which we construct based on our environment and its material conditions. Lippmann calls these models 'pseudo-environments.' To create one we observe our reality and construct a collection of stereotypes about political narratives which we then use to construct an uncompromising view on a subject matter. 

So when we are faced with the complex, nuanced reality of a convoluted subject with a deep contextual history, we construct a simple mechanism to foster an immediate solution to an otherwise complex problem we are ill equipped to solve. This makes politics easier for us but also leads to many concerns.

To Lippmann, public opinion is just the "crystalized version" of everyone’s collective pseudo-stances on the world, based on stereotypes. But where do we even get these stereotypes from? Political media sources with a clear agenda, the entertainment industry, friends and family, schools, and so on. 

To Lippmann, if you're interested in forming an opinion on a subject, you have to hear about events that you don’t experience, events which you have never seen, and events which are out of your field of choice, and yet somehow you're expected to form a non-emotional, unbiased response to these unrelatable issues. An example be.. maybe.. a fossil fuels advocate who doesn't care about climate change or experience the effects of heavily polluted environments because he lives far away from heavy emitters.

 The events of the world are always filtered through this collection of stereotypes, so how would a person actually come to an informed opinion on subjects they don't naturally care about? We often expect thought leaders, people on our favorite team to help us solve many of these problems.

In our world, the media helps us create and shape our 'pseudo-environments'. These sources present us information through a very narrow medium, and they resort to sensationalism and mass hysteria because it tunes people in to their product. 

For-profit political mediums only gain to benefit greatly from turning politics into a sports game, pitting working classes against one another while carefully refraining from any mention of who the true villains are, which are some of the most insidious political issues and how to combat them. People are kept ignorant and their priorities become very skewed.

All of these reasons are why democracy at times becomes questionable. There are simply too many issues and too few people have the knowledge to answer them. My belief is that social unification is the answer. For people to value one another to where all can come together to come to the best solutions, rather than individual people pretending to understand everything.