In every day life, the sequence of people's political desires is well defined. First of all, people desire order. Without order, life is chaotic and people die.
Next comes law, so people can predict what will happen. Law is not necessarily just. The key is that it provide enough predictability for people to survive.
Dictatorships usually provide order and law.
After coming to believe they will survive, people seek justice.
Since much of a sense of justice comes from what people learned as children, traditional societies can often offer justice, even if they are not in any way democratic. Similarly, modern dictatorships sometimes offer justice in a few areas.
Justice is an accepted limitation on the arbitrary rights of a ruler. Injustice means that a ruler `has the right to swing his fist' anywhere. Justice means that the ruler's right to swing his fist `stops at the end of the subject's nose'. In traditional or dictatorial societies, the realm of justice may be limited, but many see that realm as better than nothing.
However, with changes in technology, traditional forms fail.
The disadvantage of traditional authority or dictatorship is that it may be inflexible. Perhaps a `benevolent despot' is flexible. Certainly everyone who thinks of themselves as making a good ruler will think that. And some will be. But what of the second or third generation of rulers? What of the son of a `good king'?
The inflexible need to leave. An advantage of democracy is that people in it can eject a government without civil war. A new government can change the laws and provide more justice.
Some governments fail to provide order and law. In that case, people group together to provide their own. Clans take on importance. So do villages in which people who grew up together look suspiciously on outsiders.
These solutions work to an extent. But they do not scale. You cannot depend on clan connections when you deal with strangers. You will never experience childhood with everyone in a city, only with a few.
One political response to increased scale is to increase hierarchic control. Traditional China is an example: its mandarins and military ordered clans and villages. But China failed to adapt to the new technologies of the 18th and 19th centuries. Its government failed. After decades of civil war, a new government came into power in 1949. Over the past 20 years, the new government has shown remarkable flexibility. But the question still remains, how well will it adapt to conditions two and three generations from now? Or will it freeze conditions?
A hierarchical control system can succeed so long as there is little or no change. The main problem comes during the succession. If a family does not gain full control, as in a monarchy, competing groups may fight. Such a civil war destroys both order and law. Often in history, a family or clan gained power in a civil war, succeeded for a period, and then became excessively corrupt or lazy. These failings enabled a new dynasty to gain sufficient support to enable it to win a civil war and replace the old dynasty.
However, even with dynastic change, hierarchical political systems fail to adapt well to change: their very success causes failure. They are similar to the companies that Christensen and Raynor describe in The Innovator's Solution 1. A company's management, its ruling group, institutes methods for employees to follow. Middle managers, the equivalent of captains and colonels in an army and of middle level civil servants, learn enough of their company's culture to prevent anyone higher up from learning about many propositions. This filtering prevents those higher up from being overloaded. Consequently, many a successful company carries out only actions that fit what the company has already been doing successfully.
Christensen and Raynor suggest ways for a company to avoid losing to a smaller, but faster moving competitor that achieves success by following a process that the previous success rejected as too small or too inadequate. Essentially, the new way means setting up a new organization that is separate from the old, with different cultural values, different rewards for success, and different goals.
As a political system, democracy does the same: it enables an opposition to become the government. The opposition may well have different cultural values, different rewards for success, and different goals from the previous government.
When you view an `opposition' as a part of an overall political system, then its step into power is like the elevation of one division, previously small, into the lead in a corporation.
(As Adam Przeworski said, this means we need
... a clear party system with stable parties, a vigorous opposition ....
(Without them, the overall political system fails.)
Interestingly, the idea of a flexible political system arose before the notion of a flexible corporation. In the past, the overall economic system was presumed to include many corporations, some of which would die. Flexibility lay in the competitive, free market economic system as a whole, not in its components. The Christensen and Raynor solution enables a component, a corporation, to thrive.
Incidentally, Abraham Maslow spoke of a hierarchy of needs:
The sequence of order and law provide for survival and security. Justice enables a person and family both to establish a meaningful society and for people and groups to feel properly esteemed. Democracy enables a society to offer survival, security, social, and esteem, even during periods of fairly rapid change.
Unless powerful governments stop or slow change, for example, by hindering innovation, or a catastrophe damages us enough, over the next few generations, democracy will survive. This is optimistic!
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