Groupthink: How Democracy Maintains Evil and Injustice
by Benjamin Studebaker
This morning an entirely new line of attack on democracy occurred to me, and I feel an intense pressure to share it with all my readers. In the past, I have argued that democracy has a tendency to result in the political preferences of the median voter being realised. There is, however, a related implication that did not occur to me at the time of writing and which has such spectacular implications so as to deserve a post unto itself for explication.
The core of the idea is groupthink–the tendency for organisations with large amounts of disagreement to tend toward some sort of acceptable consensus view. In democracy, in order to produce a government that is more or less agreeable to the masses, the government cannot take a position that differs radically from what most people believe. In other words, democratic regimes cannot violate or change social and cultural norms.
Think about what a social or cultural norm is–it is a belief or practise common to most people within a given society. By its very definition, the majority in a given democratic state will support current social and cultural norms, and so the government the majority elects is overwhelmingly likely to support such norms as well. If it did not, how could it expect to stay in office?
One might say that this seems to be begging the question as to how societies reform and change at all–when the majority slowly comes around over the course of many years to new social and cultural norms, it will elect a government that reflects those changes. The democratic government does not change norms; it reflects them.
The thing is, often times, what is considered socially or culturally acceptable in a given society is actually extremely unethical and immoral. Subjugation of women, slavery, racism, militant nationalism, all of these things were at one time considered socially and culturally acceptable in western societies, and many of them continue to be acceptable in other countries or even within select communities within our modern countries. What is most important to note about these sorts of things is that it is not as if we wake up one morning and suddenly a majority realises that they are bad and the democratic government responds accordingly. Long before a majority of people recognised these evils and injustices, individual philosophers and intellectuals saw them to be wrong.
Consider Plato. Plato lived several thousand years ago, but he nonetheless advocated that women be educated in the same manner as men, said that many women were more skilled than many men in many areas, and advocated the formation of Platonic friendships between men and women so that they might learn from one another. Plato’s only concession to the sexism of his day was his claim that the very best of men were better than the very best of women. His beliefs were rejected by the democracy of Athens. Consider how many years passed before a majority of people took on Plato’s views. Consider how many women have lived poorer lives because gender equality was not implemented until a majority of people were willing to agree to it.
Consider Thomas Paine. Paine lived in the 18th century and was an early opponent of slavery and racism, along with some of the founding fathers of American democracy, like John Adams. Because the views of these men were not supported by a majority of people, slavery remained part of American life for nearly a century after the founding of the country, and racism has a legacy that stays with the United States even to this day. Consider how many African-Americans, Hispanics, Asians, and other Americans have suffered for that.
The same thing can be said for so many other ideas that we now consider more or less essential to a just and good society–everything from the social safety net to universal health care to public education had advocates decades, centuries, and sometimes even millennia before they were implemented widely. Tremendous injustice happened because the majority was permitted to rule on the basis of its social norms and values irrespective of their real moral or metaphysical value. People suffered and died as a result.
Throughout history, always there has been grave injustice and moral evil. There is no historical society we could look back upon as modern people and go “yes, here was a society that was brilliant and just”. Yet, right now, there are many people who more or less accept the social norms that we live under today, and who believe that the democratic governments that sustain and fail to challenge those norms are good governments. It would take the greatest historical conceit and arrogance to say “all societies that have gone before me have contained terrible evil and injustice about which nothing was done, but my society is the first to be different”, yet this is what we do when we support democracy.
There are numerous ideas out there, held by minorities mostly consisting of intellectuals, philosophers, and academics, all of which are considered wrong for the very reasons opposition to slavery, racism, sexism, poverty and all the other injustices were historically dismissed. You’ve heard the dismissals. They’re unrealistic. They’re economic suicide. They’re just weird and uncomfortable. Public opinion is only now just turning on homosexual rights. Imagine if you had brought up gay marriage a decade ago, or further back than that. You would be dismissed as a radical, a socially deviant person with unrealistic and dangerous views, and no one would have voted for you or those who held your position. You could travel back in time to 1776 and argue passionately for the abolition of slavery, you could even tell everyone precisely what would happen if they failed to listen, and they would label you a lunatic and ignore you completely.
There’s a logical fallacy for this–argumentum ad populum, the fallacy of thinking that the existence of large numbers of people who believe a given thing is evidence of its truth. Common sense is either nonsense, or it’s none too common.
Somewhere out there, a few individuals are having ideas that, some decades, centuries, or millennia from now, will be considered absolutely essential to a good and just society. People will sit and talk about the people of the 21st century, as we sit and talk about the people of previous centuries, and ask why they were so wicked as to permit those injustices and evils to flourish. The answer will be democracy. It will be that they chose governments not of the wise or of the visionaries, to lead them to new truths, but of those who were like themselves to preserve the ideas already ruling. They institutionalised their social norms, and set them to rule over all. What ignorance, and from that ignorance, what wickedness.
This issue isn’t necessarily restricted to democratic regimes but the human race as a whole and whatever regime they live under, whether it be democratic, aristocratic, monarchic etc.
All of these regimes rely on the perpetuation of a ‘noble lie’ to maintain the status quo. Many monarchies are founded on a ‘divine right of kings’, aristocracies on ideas of natural superiority of a few, and democracies on a supposed ethical pre-eminence founded on ideals of liberalism etc. No regime can last long without such arguments as they sustain the ethical legitimacy of such governments, without them people would have no inclination to maintain them.
As such, ALL political regimes, not just democratic ‘cannot violate or change social and cultural norms’ as you put it. In short, you make a fine objection but one I would argue is more applicable to human political regimes as a whole as opposed to just democracy. It is an argument that applies to the democratic nature of consent that underpins all governments, not democracy itself.
I agree that this mentality is not restricted to democracy–monarchism requires that a majority buy into the silliest of all social norms, the concept that one deserves to inherit the occupation, property, and titles of one’s father for no other reason than familial ties.
However, I would not agree that this is inherent to all regimes and governments, just most of the ones that have been tried. If we were to adopt a social norm of deference to expertise and produced a selection process of sufficient quality that these philosophers who had these bold new ideas about justice would have the opportunity to rule or influence those ruling long before their ideas became mainstream, perhaps we could break the cycle and achieve something better much faster, and accelerate our rate of moral and social progress. If we can shift legitimacy to being about results and outcomes rather than processes and agreement, we might manage to do better than we have done in the past. I at least think it’s worth attempting.
I think that to claim that every regime is founded upon some sort of ethical foundation that posits it as the best form of government is fairly uncontentious.
The issue arises more in whether we’d consider the foundations of your Sophiarchism as flawed as those others. I think talking of ‘accelerating’ our ‘moral and social progress’ implies far too much of an end for moral development. I would probably suggest that this claim is the truth/lie upon which Sophiarchism is founded. To prevent it falling foul of the same argument you raise in this article it would need to show that it can realise this promise.
To fail to do so would simply leave us with a system of government which finds popular support in its promise of furthering moral and social progress (like democracy, or in monarchy’s case achieving such progress on account of God etc.) whilst being unable to realise this promise on account of being the wrong form of government in the first place.
I suppose I see the primary purpose of the state as the promotion of the good, as reason and philosophy determine it to be. To that end, I employ in sophiarchism a system designed to select a government based on characteristics that seem reasonably connected to making one more likely to rule on these bases. Were a sophiarchy instituted and were it to be unsuccessful in achieving those objectives, it should lose its legitimacy and collapse. The fundamental thing is that such a system has never been tried in seriousness, and such an attempt would need to be made to confirm or deny its potential in the area in question. I do think there are sufficient theoretical reasons for it to be worth attempting, particularly when it is compared to the systems under which we presently govern ourselves, which not only do not tend to produce the kind of social good that I would hope my sophiarchy concerns itself with, but often does not even do what it claims it does–taking all citizens seriously as free and equal people. I would hold that, even were the democratic objective of free and equal treatment the prime principle rather than social good, sophiarchy would serve that objective better than democracy presently does.
[…] Problem of Groupthink–often there is a lag time of decades or even centuries before a new good idea catches on with a large enough portion of the population to be enacted even if it remains popular with a minority (see here). […]
[…] Problem of Groupthink–often there is a lag time of decades or even centuries before a new good idea catches on with a large enough portion of the population to be enacted even if it remains popular with a minority (see here). […]