Brian Eno's Theory of Democracy

Democracy & separation of powers stand for something simple: Over long horizons, everyone is wrong.

Take any governance system that is in power for too long. It becomes rotten and it serves its own purposes. Democracy breaks that downwards spiral.

It is not a stable system, it is not predictable, it is not cheap to operate, heck it’s not even guaranteed that it will work. But it prevents the certain path to self-destruction.

I'm a fan of Joseph Tainter's analysis around organization of societies and issues around collapse being related to diminishing marginal returns. I think there's a lot to that position when you look at the general political party agendas. Technocratic solutions trying to squeeze more blood from the stone while providing less and less to participants (I have less of a theory on effectiveness for any given action, this is more of an observation).

https://risk.princeton.edu/img/Historical_Collapse_Resources...

Unfortunately, this is a little too simplistic.

A democracy doesn't exist in a vacuum; there are competing nations that are at work to undo or subjugate yours, and this never stops. We've lived a charmed life these past 80 years that are unlike any in the history of the planet.

American wealth and power are what brought this unprecedented stability to the western world, but it has been eroding.

As it erodes, the flaws in the American system begin to show, and then fray. The very means by which Americans elect automatically pushes it into a two party system, which is by nature polarizing, especially when external pressures come to bear.

It's also incredibly difficult to change course safely when so many people are involved (this affects all organizations, which is why startups can eat their lunch). Assuming that you can dynamically rise to the challenge is naive at best.

Federation only amplifies the problem, as you simply add more uneven competitors to the national riches.

Ah, so it turns out the solution to the centre not holding is to create as many falconry schools as possible, hoping to yield a dynamic system of falcons in a variety of overlapping gyres, so that at least some remain in hearing distance of a falconer? Big if true.

> This post’s title is a little cheeky. Brian Eno does not have an explicit theory of democracy that I know of

Well I do know he's politically active and worked with Yanis Varoufakis and Noam Chomsky. So it's more than a little cheeky.

The degeneration of American democracy seems an obvious conclusion to the basic premise set out there. Both parties in America are bad, they know they cannot be replaced because of the two party system, and therefore when they lose power, they can be assured they will gain it back again in a few years once people become dissatisfied with the alternative. There is no incentive for parties to better themselves because being bad at their job nets them valuable and necessary private donations from lobbyists with an interest in disabling the proper function of government.

> Democracy, then, will be stable so long as the expectation of costs and the uncertainty of the future give the losers sufficient incentive to accept that they have lost.

Brilliant, and provides a foundation for an idea that I've seen elsewhere: that the true test of a new democracy is not the first democratic elections, but the first transition of power, i.e. the first subsequent election where the incumbent loses.

White boys will do ANYTHING but take seriously dialectical sciences. It might be crazy to most readers, but major societal events like wars, riots, economic crisis and revolutions, can be predicted way in advance (to some extent). This article is just the equivalent of vibe-coding but applied to polsci.