The term democracy has a principal concept, but in common use includes a collection of subjectively weighted aspirational features, such as egalitarianism, justice, freedoms, rights, and voting for representatives.
The principal concept of democracy is 'government by the people', i.e. authority exists in citizens to affect policy that controls their country. This is sometimes referred to as pure democracy. As it was originally practiced in Ancient Greece, authority was not given to all citizens. Later, influence through representatives was introduced, which has become known as representative democracy. Much later, influence for all citizens through representatives was introduced. This final adjustment to representative democracy, along with some caveats and aspirational features, is currently considered the pinnacle of development of democracy.
Although for practical reasons voting for representatives has been required, it is not pure democracy. Indeed, voting for representatives has negligible effect on policy and so implements the principal concept of democracy badly. This has given rise to the direct democracy movement as an attempt to move closer to the principal concept of democracy. Some versions of direct democracy use internet based technologies to further improve the influence of the individual.
For a small population of citizens, pure democracy can be used effectively, with each citizen voting on each issue. This is particularly true for simple civilisations which have intrinsically simple systems. As the number of citizens grows, and the sophistication and concomitant complexity of society grows, it becomes increasingly difficult for pure democracy to manage. People become occupied in managing their own increasingly complex affairs, and affairs of state also become increasingly complex, so making informed decisions on all policies rapidly becomes impractical. Modern technology can restore pure democracy, but it cannot resolve this complexity issue. People will never again have the time to effectively understand and vote on each issue.
As noted above, representative democracy offers negligible influence for citizen over policy. Indeed, with such large voting populations using increasingly diverse and tactical voting techniques, a single vote even has a negligible effect on which candidate gets to be a representative. For these reasons and others many people no longer even use their vote. Politicians themselves even dissuade people from voting for a third party in a general election, citing it as a 'wasted vote'. As the population increases, the value of a vote will become still smaller. Even though politicians as professionals have more time to dedicate to understanding the matters they deliberate on, even they have progressively less understanding of increasingly complex issues. This is evidenced by a continual stream of disastrous consequences of poor government decisions.
In the future the number of citizens is expected to increase and the sophistication and complexity of society will also increase. Representative democracy will inevitably fail more seriously and more often. It is important to address this problem now by advancing to the next version of democracy, which is Expert Government.
Expert Government distributes influence to ordinary citizen again, but it recognises that it is no longer practical for all members of government to deliberate on all affairs. We have the answer in the well developed and proven in technique of specialisation. Expert Government uses that undeniably successful technique, but aspires to employ the most skilful specialists, i.e. experts.
Definitions of civilisation as a concept vary, but centre around ‘a stage of human social development and organization’. Civilisation is a relative measure of sophistication in everything, rather than any particular artefact. It has been observed that civilisation tends to advance with time. It is assumed by most that advancing civilisation is good.
It is easy to make a system with a certain level of sophistication more complex, but it is difficult to make it less complex. Thus, as civilisation advances, so it tends to become more complex. Indeed, it can be argued that any change in complexity has a commensurate effect on sophistication, but that some of that sophistication is not necessary and so it only appears that there is some looseness in that coupling.
The most advanced examples of civilisation have evolved as a collection of independent specialist subsystems that hide complexity from one another via simple interfaces. Connections between these subsystems are not permanent and mostly are not controlled by an authorising third party. Indeed, civilisations that change either of these two features tend to be less advanced. This may be because the well-known difficulty for people to predict what will be useful in the future, combined with a natural reluctance to change a successful formula, requires flexibility in those connections to seek out more successful combinations. For example, for any business to be successful it must be free and willing to adapt to changes in civilisation. These changes will generally resolve to complexity hiding and cost reduction mediated through specialisation and standardisation. There are numerous examples of once successful businesses failing because they did not adapt.
The organisation of existing forms of government is in contrast to the characteristics of other aspects of an advanced civilisation. They tend to be composed of a fixed set of subsystems with a top-down application of authority. Thus greater authority exists in less specialised subsystems and imposes inevitably poorer decisions on them. Expert Government instead uses the successful techniques developed in advanced civilisation.
Expert Government structure is organised into well-defined specialisms that make use of the appropriate experts. Every expert has the same level of influence, so specialism structured Expert Government is not hierarchical, and no more influential roles than expert exist. This structuring approach is designed to make the best possible use of experts, and to avoid the problems of hierarchical influence structures.
Hierarchical influence structures inherently suffer from two kinds of problem. Firstly, the roles at one level in the structure have less opportunity to consider a matter than the more numerous roles at a lower level. Therefore, the higher level roles are at an increased chance of acting unskilfully. This problem can be offset with techniques like employing more experienced people in higher level roles, and providing them with summary reports created by lower level roles. However, such techniques mitigate rather than correct the inherent problem. Secondly, the concentration of influence toward the top of the structure tends to be accompanied by increasing abuse of that influence, as egos are satisfied and money directed to non-egalitarian objectives. It also makes changes that diminish the influence of roles more difficult to enact at higher levels in the structure. Indeed, higher level roles are more likely to award themselves more influence, exacerbating the problem. Again mitigation techniques can be employed but cannot correct the intrinsic problem.
Nonetheless, hierarchical influence structures are ubiquitous. Some people like to lead, while others like to follow; this tends to encourage differential influence and so ultimately the formation of self-endorsing hierarchical influence structures. The more established these structures become, the harder they are to challenge. Hierarchical influence structures are simple to understand and construct, but are capable of administering systems.
Expert Government uses non-hierarchical influence structures to avoid the problems inherent in hierarchical influence structures. In doing so it creates other problems that must be overcome. Chief among these is the issue of oversight of distinct areas of specialism with competing claims on finite resources. For example, the division of a budget between competing concerns. The simplified answer to problems of competing concerns is to create new specialisms that deal only with the treatment of those competing concerns. Experts in that specialism allocate the resources.
Stability and security are derived from the stability of the structure and the systems it puts in place, along with the authority to act unilaterally and predictably. Naturally these qualities are diminished where multiple systems exist, especially where they do not act with unanimity. Systems based on adversarial rather than collaborative strategies are therefore less stable. Hence it is important that Expert Government is a monolithic collaborative system with clearly defined interfaces between its various specialisms.
Borrowed wealth is used to enable acquisitions of needs and wants. With the increasing wealth of civilisations and technological advances, more wealth is available to borrow and it is easier to lend. That opportunity combined with the mutual enthusiasm of lenders and borrows has created an expansion in borrowing.
Borrowing enables debt competition, in particular for important classes of asset which have limited availability, such as housing and education. The increased availability of loans combines with debt competition leading to debtors paying a greater proportion of their earnings to service their debts. This tends to cause greater wealth disparity as wealth pools with lenders.
It is now not sufficient to use traditional redistributionist measures such as taxation to tackle wealth disparity. Debt competition must be restricted with debt limits. No entity (e.g. individual/family/organisation) should be allowed to take on a debt greater than some multiple of its income. Naturally many special cases will need particular treatments, but debt limits are becoming essential.
Currently some civil rights and human rights are restricted based on age. This protects the young from their own naivety and abuse by others, but also protects others from the errors of the young. In addition, some rights are rescinded under special circumstances, such as the right to drive when convicted of some driving offences, or the right to liberty when convicted of serious violent crimes. Further, some people give up the rights voluntarily, for example, the right to speak on certain matters in exchange for some state paid jobs. Clearly all rights are not universal at all times, nor should they be, the situation is more subtle than that.
Should rights be allocated more progressively so as to encourage better citizenship? Perhaps rights are an under-utilised tool in the development of society, and so a more sophisticated approach is now needed. Placing more restrictions on rights needs care, but it is already used effectively and could deliver still more benefits for society. The main problems with such a scheme revolve around the unjustified restriction of rights. In line with the principal concept in Expert Government, the influence needed to restrict rights must be devolved to many specialists to minimise the unjustified restriction of rights.