Divided by Democracy
Why the world has become so much divided once we networked it?
It is hard to criticise democracy because the unimaginative start labelling you as fascist or communist depending upon whatever is the latest hate in fashion. Democracy as an ideal is great, the problem is with how it works in practice.
Ideally it is a battle ground for ideas where political parties try to impress upon the people with their programs and they win or lose based on how well they judge what people want. This might have been true sometime in the past, but it is questionable to say the least in recent time. Why do we see so much hatred and factions in the world right now?
Photo by Ming Jun Tan on Unsplash
Democracy has been problematic from the start itself. Once it got captured in definition as just majority representation, it raised but never really offered any answer to the question of minority representation. Civil wars, genocides and partitions have been the only real solutions to making democracy work when the population of the state is not homogenous. Twentieth century offers plenty of examples of these repercussions in countries where democracies were unleashed post collapse of British Empire. Partition of India on religious line came directly from the experience of pre-independence democracy where Congress refused to share any power with Muslim League once they got majority. Partition gave 100% representation to Muslims who became part of Pakistan whereas within India they were destined to get 0%.
Politicians have been the first to understand this inadequacy and exploit it by clever demographic alignment along identity/religion/culture lines on the majority side to come to power. Hate and fear can mobilise more people than any other financial or political reward. Further: hate provides leverage. Once started, hate compounds like jungle fire until it destroys everything. Hate is the cheapest and most effective political weapon. All it take is few words and perhaps a small incident, just like a spark and then it reproduces and grows itself without any extra effort. Politicians who understood that they only need majority and not the whole nation with them, used hate and division (on the majority side) to fulfil their political ambitions. This has happened at many places where populations where historically divided, but this is becoming widespread and taking shape at places where people had no such divisions. It appears that we have gone over to the other side of the hill where democracy will only divide. The division process is recursive. If we eliminate the current difference, it doesn’t means it will stop politicians from not inventing new differences to divide. It is turtles all the way down.
With the rise of internet and mobile and twitter and WhatsApp, hate has become easy, faster and targeted to spread. Each one of these characteristics matter. Every day about about 28K people die in India on average with about 400 deaths per day because of motor accidents, accounting for about 1.5% deaths. If someone sends photos of these motor accidents to any person on WhatsApp, just 3 accidents every day (less than 1% of accidents with deaths), this person would have “seen” more than 1000 accidents in one year. Chances are that in his real life the same person will probably see may be 1 or 2 accidents with death in one year. What I am trying to convey is that WhatsApp and Twitter and Facebook alter our sense of reality by cherrypicking the reality they want us to see. We see more than what real life has to offer, but we see something cherrypicked. What we miss is not the truth, but the context adjusted for how it relates to our practical lives. We don’t really need fake news. Even completely true news is fake in the sense that it is not adjusted for its appropriateness and relevance and importance to the person and his life. The person who watches photos of 1000 real motor accidents in one year, will have a totally unnatural and wrong sense of threat of death from transport, astronomically outsized over the real risks. He will probably never drive or even walk on the footpath. His sense of risk is completely insane and inappropriate to the practical risk of motor transport. And all he has seen is just 1% of the truth and nothing else. It is not the truth that is the problem, it is missing the rest of it what is causing the problem.
The problem with fake news is no longer fake, it was and is the news.
Thanks to advancement in communication technologies over the internet, the same cherrypicking can be done by anyone and done to any WhatsApp Group or Twitter Followers and it doesn't even needs to be fake. This alternative “reality” is not true or false or fake, it is just disproportionate. Fact check and truth don’t cut the crap anymore. The question that we need to ask now is: why are we talking about this? What should we be talking about instead? We need our weighted priority list as a society and some metrics to guide the importance and granularity of our concerns and conversations.
Politicians are not bad people. They are just smart people playing the game of democracy to win, by its very rules. Hatred and division is an externality of the business, not the cause of it. We need to change the game if we want to change the outcomes.
To summarise, the world is so divided because politicians want it that way and that is so because democracy is a game of cutting it in a way to get the major cut as required by majority based definition of democracy. Why is it happening now? First, it was always this way but now because our tools to fabricate reality (media and broadcast) have been supplemented with even more powerful arsenal of social media and private groups where any version of true reality can be painted by cherry picking data and stories and targeted broadcasting to reinforce parts of the normal reality, disproportionately. Fake news just makes it more effective. This is only going to get worse or may be the next generation will learn to take nothing seriously, in which case they will have some other set of unimaginable problems to solve. Shudder!