Democracy: What's the Point? (No, seriously…)

i received a seemingly absurd
question from the audience and i'm going to do the man who asked the question and all of you in the audience the favor of treating it quite seriously and not dismissing it as observed and that question is democracy what really is the point what really fundamentally is the advantage i'll read his precise wording in just a moment but let me let me steal man the question for you this way if we were to admit that a kingdom or a despotism is only as good as the cluster of men who happen to be ruling at the top wouldn't it be fair to suppose that a democracy is only as good as that cluster of men who are ruling be they at the bottom or the top or the middle if what we're talking about in government really is the goodness of the people who happen to comprise the government and how well those people can work together very interesting criterion what really would be the advantage of democracy what's the advantage of having a larger number of people in government which has some obvious disadvantages and then also if they're all terrible people anyway you know would you rather have a despotism by a highly educated highly enlightened highly erudite few or would you rather have government by the many if they are perhaps very poorly educated or of particular religious and social values made his growth let's make this a lot less impalpable and talk about afghanistan let's talk about even indonesia you know let's talk about egypt you know how much popular democracy do you want if you're in a country where the majority of people are conservative muslims and where there is perhaps an erudite enlightened educated minority who have more secular more modern more pragmatic values would you prefer to live in iran if iran has democracy and they do today they have a mixed or imperfect democratic system but iran has elections iran has freedom of the press you know but you know who the people of iran tend to elect they tend to elect governments that reflect their own deeply conservative muslim values and agenda right so it's very easy to look then say oh i personally would be more comfortable living in iran if it happened to have a dictatorship or happen to have a monarchy that more closely resembled my own western secular supposedly enlightened values hmm yes how easy this line of reasoning is very few people really think this stuff through rigorously partly just because every political persuasion left right and center is forever praising democracy you will find that both communists and fascists even when they criticize democracy will very often turn around and pretend or presuppose that their own political agenda is leading to a more perfect democracy a more authentic democracy that they represent the true democracy even while they're screaming to tear democracy down i've certainly heard communists with absolutely zero irony claim that um in 1917 the leninists by killing all the people who won the election were doing something much more democratic than allowing the people that won the elections to rule because really it's only the factory workers who have should have the right to vote anyway people deeply commit to different ideas and ideals of democratic legitimacy and they can more easily switch between one ideal than another then they can challenge the fundamental preset positions of democracy as such and ask wait is it what what was this advantage of democracy supposed to be why is it that we suppose a democratic society is the best kind of site all right the actual the actual wording of the question i received from maximilian was quote i would be interested in knowing what the benefits of and philosophical basis for quote unquote democratic decision making would be a close quote he then gives a whole list of uh sources that he's read that are criticizing and cross-examining democracy and expressing skepticism about the rationality of voter behavior and the viability of democracy as an ideal as such and he very vaguely says to me that he's interested in alternatives that are neither democracy nor dictatorship but more market-based solutions so i assume that's some kind of capitalist libertarian ideal he's talking about i i genuinely i genuinely can't imagine okay the problem with your approach maximilian is that you are thinking of government in terms of ruling and you're not thinking of government in terms of asking questions in terms of active research and informed opinion and without insulting you maximilian you probably do not have experience living in or studying or researching non-democratic societies and the normal course of government in completely non-democratic systems how that unfolds how what is that power operates where nobody can ask questions where nobody can initiate new forms of research and inquiry uh within government or by independent government independent bodies using that research inquiry frankly to shame the government right i remember reading a detailed account from vietnam surreal to read about the politics of vietnam from their long hard unapologetic communist period which i would say basically hasn't ended they still have a communist government but with a capitalist economy now and at one of these meetings who were the senior military commanders the generalissimos in this dictatorship they sat down this is an annual meeting where they had a series of bullet points for discussion and one of them was basically about poverty and the guy in charge of the meeting remarked when he saw this on the agenda of things they were going to discuss and said oh this is the first time we've discussed a social issue at one of these meetings in 12 years someone had gone and looked when was the last time we talked about poverty or last time one of these elite level meetings it's in myanmar currently they're having protests in the street about whether or not they will have any democracy but just a few years ago i'm sorry i could have googled this to get the date correct but just a few years ago i was following the politics of myanmar as they made the transition from total military dictatorship to this kind of mixed managed system where they they did have a parliament and they did have some freedom of the press and the parliament was able to ask questions of the military tissue but but by the way the military dictatorship never really went away it became a military dealership with some some democracy and a sort of parliament and one of the very first parliamentary sessions in this period of burmese history somebody got up and started asking questions about electricity how much electricity was being generated and where and the military dictatorship had been controlling the government for decades basically they made a transition from um a socialist system to a military dictatorship that didn't have the pretensions of socialism but the socialist period also was basically despotic one of a better term from tyrannical socialism that right military leadership so the decades and decades and decades with no no semblance of democracy whatsoever and what they found was nobody had the numbers nobody was doing the math they did have power stations generating electricity and of course they had people complaining that there wasn't enough nobody had ever gotten out a map or oh how much electricity are we generating in each place and of course the obvious question is that enough and who's satisfied who's not and should there be more power over here and less there and where should we build the next station and where do we need to build more power lines there was absolutely no questioning now these examples are kind of easy and if you stop and reflect on the absence of questioning in completely non-democratic institutions within your own life starts to become much more disturbing hospitals are completely non-democratic completely authoritarian institutions universities are completely non-democratic completely authoritarian institutions who's in charge here you're not allowed to ask why is that guy in charge nobody has to tell you why what were his credentials how was he selected given that he never was elected who is he responsible to who is he accountable to what if nobody in the department of chinese is actually learning chinese what if the guy in charge of the buddhist studies department is a drunk or a drug addict not unprecedented university professors become alcoholics university professors become drug addicts we had one guy in canada he basically became a nazi stated in power for many many years was in the newspapers spreading his so-called race realism for decades it's ridiculous um you know but they may not have been at the time they were hired right oh well there was a hiring committee at one point that decided this person should be a professor but once they were anointed once they were elevated to this level of being a university professor nobody is allowed to question them nobody's allowed to cross examine them and questions of organization questions of research and its effectiveness and its outcomes all right you really have to spend some time not just doing the research but living with universities and appreciating the loss of human potential like what it is that's being squandered there to realize that from my perspective at least the best run universities are something like the best run tyrannies the best run despotism in that there's something terrible and tragic being lost at all times even when there's nothing in particular going wrong now on university campuses nobody starves to death right universities don't produce their own food yeah we don't run farms the same way we run universities we don't run supermarkets the same way we run universities um however if you look at the finances of any given university and you look at it the university is a sort of miniature society dealing with just a few problems you know it's very select and narrow way so well they don't have to deal with food they don't have to deal with generating electricity they don't have to deal with sewage treatment they're providing running water all the university has to do is provide a room with a chalkboard and a man or a woman who holds the chalk and stands there and gives a lecture some chairs right like the responsibilities of the university really very narrow and very limited indeed and yet nevertheless they're perpetually going bankrupt they're perpetually demanding more money from the government more money from their own students and in a very real sense when you run the numbers they're bankrupting the whole of society i wish i could say to you that we have a free capitalist democratic society that produces so much abundance that we can tolerate a kind of despotism within our society namely the university campus but we can't it's bankrupting us all it's not just student debt on an individual level it's making beggars of the whole society i remember reading an inquiry into fraud in the american university system who were the people who were basically doing elaborate paperwork to try to prove that their children were more poor than they actually are in order to get lower tuition in university and this included things like people having their own servants adopt their children can you imagine this in the united states of america wealthy people putting down on paper that they are not the child they are not the child's parent but their their housekeeper their nanny their mechanic their driver is legally the child's parent having phony adoptions like this now what this report discovered or concluded is it is not the poor who are defrauding the university system this way it's millionaires but it's people who have just one million dollars their name it's people have only a few million dollars to the name because if you have five kids and you are talking about university tuition of minimum fifty thousand dollars per year per child and the real cost could be in the united if you are a states even if you are a multi-millionaire right this can bankrupt you this can ruin you and these are people some of them who are willing to engage in more or less elaborate fraud to try to get their children an education despite that so a democracy can it tolerate in this sense a death business and let me ask you you know very simply if a university were run on democratic principles for whom would it work who would it serve not the professors not this tiny elite of the president of the university and a small coterie of his colleagues right if a university will run on democratic principles it would serve the students and it would serve the demands of society as a whole now in the same way that the beginning of this video i said to you there are these very obvious fundamental questions that just don't get asked in non-democratic society and myanmar nobody's allowed to ask about electricity generation nobody's able to debate these things and criticize the government so on the questions don't get asked so the quality of government necessarily is very very poor i would point out to you that all of the most important questions in universities cannot get asked right the university wants to make as much money as possible by giving as many phds as possible to people in history canada 30 million people how many people with phds in history can we possibly employ how many dentists how many engineers when you just ask wait wait what's this what's the strategy here who decided how many resources would go into teaching each subject and how many seats there would be like how many places there would be for students in each area of expertise and specialization guess what for the whole of the united states and canada the western european democracies there is no plan right this was handed over to a self-serving non-democratic elite to pursue their own self-interest to just do whatever would make them the most money or whatever be the least work whatever they would find the most gratifying this is the way universities are operated our part of the world and as a result obviously even the best universities are producing people with the wrong credentials and in many cases they're producing people with with hollow credentials we did a lot of research in the last two years about business schools and about credentials very closely linked to the stock market i'm using this wording because there's more than one term for this becoming a stock broker in plain english which can fall under several different headings not necessarily the study of economics not necessarily the study of business i'm somebody with a background in buddhist research i studied korean ojibwe first nations languages i have studied some things that are very obscure and marginal and that nobody makes money out of studying right so when i turn my attention to something relatively mainstream and with a lot of money involved i think oh okay so the defects and problems of academic organization i'm not going to find them at all over here now right now we're talking about business school now we're talking about the stock market and i find exactly the same tragic problems of organization i can see that these are these are institutions that do not work for the service of the students they do not work for the service of society they do not function in a democratic matter at all they work in the interests of a power elite at the top those people may not perceive themselves as an elite party those people may not perceive themselves as an aristocracy the students may not perceive them as and may not resent them as some kind of oppressive elite right but nevertheless in the function of the institution with time that is indeed what they are and you can tell by the outcomes all right uh when you look at the progress of society in thailand contrasted to laos still a communist dictatorship to this day contrasted to cambodia formerly a communist dictatorship now just a corrupt capitalist dictatorship contrasted to myanmar history of which i've already summarized this video okay what was the advantage that thailand had for all those years and there are a lot of disadvantages with thailand including a terrible university education system by the way you know um it's not the case that government is merely as good as the people who happen to participate in it it's not the case that a despotism is as good as the 10 or 20 guys at the top making the policy and doing the research and making the decisions nor that a democracy is as good as the 3 000 people who are really participating in many cases it may only be a few thousand or the thirty thousand or the three hundred thousand or the three million however many millions it's not the case that democracy is as good as those participants right because what you have in democracy is a much greater capacity for doubt for questions and challenges to be raised right for government to recognize problems problems with what it's doing problems deciding for the whole of society's curiosity to be canvassed to be harnessed to be engaged in the question of how is this university supposed to work what is this supposed to be and for people to voice the opinion this is intolerable it's intolerable to spend a hundred thousand dollars a year and get nothing in return or in myanmar in the humble village where people would say it's intolerable that the next town over has electricity and we don't on this simple level you know yes um having procedures in government that allow and instigate and encourage dissent that give everyone the opportunity to doubt and question and make proposals and examine what's wrong with society right that is an advantage that with the passage of time explains the remarkable contrast between the communist countries of eastern europe and the democracies in some cases were physically on the map culturally and linguistically right next door to them it explains the vibrancy of thailand as a society today in contrast to laos next door it explains the depth of the difference that we see now between north korea and south korea two countries that linguistically and culturally were completely homogeneous before they took separate paths one democratic the other despotic