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didn't have any credible WMD to deploy, to halt or delay the invasion last year. And Mao never understood that it was his own misguided scientific policies (as promulgated by Lysenko), which were responsible for the terrible famine that killed millions and millions of Chinese mid-20th Century.
The fact that democratic processes lead to better outcomes for complex problems is not too surprising because it models how the world works. Scientists have found that nature is filled with entities made of many cooperating individual participants leading to complex systems, which continuously adjust to any new incoming data encountered by the participants. Nature excels at designing effective feedback systems. Examples of this include the earth's atmospheric system and all biological systems. One timely example is how we are losing the battle with infectious diseases because they are adjusting (i.e., evolving) to the antibiotics we have devised.
Today as our world confronts some of the most complex problems mankind has ever faced - global financial and economic systems that are entwined and capable of catastrophic failures, extraordinarily lethal weapons and materials that are available to the angriest and most alienated individuals (you don't need a state to have a nuclear weapon capable of blowing up a city), intolerance and violence that seems to be ratcheting up every year, an increasingly worrisome situation in the middle East, growing populations putting pressure on the capacity of the world, and then there is global warming looming over all of our futures - it seems we humans must start using the most effective methods for charting our path through the next few decades if we are to survive.
This means we have to start using and trusting democracy to find the best solutions and come up with the best decisions on each step of the way. None of us, not even the smartest, can do this alone. This means we are all responsible for finding solutions to our problems. It is not enough to wait for our leaders to set the course - they might not even see the right path. No one will have enough information to solve the problems on their own, but working together, pooling our knowledge and our insights, we can find a path through the thicket of catastrophes waiting to debilitate and damage our world and our futures. Today, we are all leaders in this together and we are all responsible for contributing to solutions to our problems.
Next month, I'll write about some ideas about how we can help make this happen and some of the minimal requirements for making democracy work for us.
[1] Philip Slater, A Dream Deferred: America's Discontent and the Search for a New Democratic Ideal, Beacon Press, 1991, page 11.
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