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Incentives Determine Outcomes
Why qualification-free representative democracy inevitably engenders dysfunction and ultimate collapse
We humans tend to get confused between what we’d like to happen and a realistic comprehension of why things actually turn out as they do. Due to an as-yet not understood series of subtle genetic changes that seem to have occurred long ago in our evolutionary history, we humans live primarily in a world of fantasy and only secondarily (if at all) in a way connected with external reality. This is why most people who have ever lived have believed in invisible magical pixies whose existence is incompatible with everything we know to be true about the universe in which we live. It’s why we doggedly persist in certain actions, always believing that somehow the next time will be different (some call it prayer, some call it gambling). And it’s why most people are very confused about the inevitable outputs generated by our modern-day systems of representative democracy.
As the West is rapidly spiraling down to its ultimate collapse it’s worth looking at why, pace Plato, democracy must always end in tyranny.
It’s a cliché that democracy is like communism: an excellent idea that would work perfectly if only human beings were completely different in every possible way from how we actually are. And as we shall see, the failures of representative democracy are nearly identical in cause to the failures of communism.
To understand why this is the case, we need to remember that each of us is basically a complex DNA machine that’s evolved to push DNA into the future. To accomplish this, the average person is hardwired to attempt to improve their social status in order to attract more mating opportunities and thereby succeed in having offspring that will carry 50% of their DNA into the future. All living things are essentially executing the same set of core instructions in this regard; it is merely the details of how each species attempts to achieve this goal that differ.
Of course, it’s not glamorous to see ourselves in this way, but once we understand evolution (a concept taught in civilized nations in their schools, but notable by its absence elsewhere) it’s an inescapable conclusion. And from this we understand that…
