Question Everything

Over the last hundred years, many countries across the world have overthrown monarchies and embraced Democracy. In the timeline of settled human societies, Democracy is like an infant – barely fifty years old in the form that we now recognise.

In Monarchy, people had to accept whoever became King by inheritance. People couldn’t question anything, and they were left to the mercy and intellect of the King. All there was to do was practice acceptance.

After centuries of obedience, Democracy arrived to give newly recognised powers to the people – the power to vote, to choose their representatives, to question and challenge power, and fundamental rights that are inalienable and, until recently, unknown to people.

The primary motive of people is self-interest. Until Democracy came along, self-interest was confined to one’s position in the social pyramid and material well-being, both of which were correlated and hence the same. With Democracy, self-interest extended to fundamental rights. This is the most beautiful promise of Democracy. No matter where you are on the social pyramid, certain rights were equal and inalienable, and protecting this is self-interest.

With a King that one couldn’t overthrow, people had little choice except to back the King to seek material and social development. So whatever the King did, the people could only work on how to exploit the King’s decisions to garner wealth and social status. Because there was almost no chance of equal rights of any form, people accepted inequality in society as God’s design, and focused their energy on exploiting the rules of the Game to further their material self-interest.

In a Democracy, there is a popularity contest on the side of the candidates, and on the other side a utilitarian choice - of the best candidate from a set of imperfect choices. Here power is vested with a set of people who represent the interests and voice of the people. So each representative’s primary duty is to follow the Constitution in letter and spirit, and to act as the medium of communication of the people’s interests.

Let’s now look at the structure of power. In a Monarchy, power comes from birth, and it is assured and inalienable. There is no fear of losing power. While popularity is desirable, it’s not required to retain power. In a Democracy, those in power are vulnerable to the people’s wishes every five years (at most).  Since power is not assured, and the people in power have self-interest to retain power, there is a conflict, between their duty to the Constitution and the people they represent, and their  self-interest in retaining power. This conflict is the primary source of dysfunction in Democracies.

It’s not like the founding fathers and mothers of Democracy didn’t know this conflict. So they instituted checks and balances, like an independent judiciary and (less apparently) independent executive. Further checks include the securing of fundamental rights of the people (exceptions notwithstanding) and the absolute immunity from change enjoyed by the basic structure of the Constitution.

It seems like the founders of Democracy were acutely aware of how power could be misused to further the interests of power. Giving power to a few people thru elections is straight-forward. After that, it’s a slow, asymptotic march of checks and balances on this power conferred to a few.

Quite different from a Monarchy, where people sat back and accepted the consequences of the Monarch’s decisions, the people of a Democracy, thru their elected representatives, influence the policies of the Democratic State. The consequences of the decisions of the State are studied and discussed by the people, and their feedback is communicated regularly thru their elected representative.

Elections are utilitarian decisions made by people. If a voter has independent thought, it’s rare to find a candidate (or anybody) whose principles will be 100% in alignment with the voter’s. So the voter is forced to pick the best available candidate, and this is a utilitarian compromise that cannot be escaped. The elected representative represents the interests of all the people in the constituency, and not merely the ones who voted in their favour.

Having selected the candidate the people have conferred an excess of power in the representative, because power needs to be concentrated for agile decision-making. At this stage the focus shifts to the checks and balances to keep power accountable and working for the interests of the people and the Constitution, rather than the interests of power.

As soon as elections are over, people need to closely observe the people in power, regardless of one’s vote in favour or against. Politics is the system of representing people’s interests, and for that to work, every person must be political, and be constantly engaging with the state and society. People should be aware of what is happening around them, mix freely and discuss the policies of the state, consequences of these policies, educate themselves, and voice their opinions and interests free from fear or prejudice. People should organise social gatherings and form channels to exchange ideas. People in power should be constantly watched. It’s like how someone representing the country in a sport is under the spotlight. The powerful people in politics hold a great deal more influence over the hopes of the people, and face great temptation to work against the interests of the people and in the interest of their own power, so the system demands constant scrutiny.

Now to the question of morality. If you put any 1000 people thru the same conditioning and temptations to abuse power, there are going to be some who succumb to temptations and some who don’t. This doesn’t depend on which random set of 1000 people we pick. We don’t know who succumbs and who doesn’t, so the system is designed to distrust individuals in power. So there is an intrinsic doubt placed on people in power, because the temptation to abuse power is so tempting. It’s like airport security. Since one cannot tell the good guy from the bad, everyone is frisked, because there is an intrinsic distrust which can be allayed by close examination. One can be charming, educated, wealthy, beautiful or popular – it doesn’t matter. Everyone gets checked, and everyone understands that it’s not personal. All people in power deserve a similar distrust, and it’s not personal. It’s their job, and since they have excessive power, they need to be watched, and kept on a leash.

The people who do this questioning, perform labour essential for a Democracy to function as designed. People who are apolitical or indifferent enjoy the fruits of this questioning by others.

In India, most people’s entire lives are consumed in a fight to survive. There is no respite from the drudgery of relentless manual labour which pays just enough to keep one alive to provide the next day’s labour. It’s near impossible to have the time or mind to explore anything beyond survival.

The people who are higher up on the social pyramid are consumed in consumption. There is a constant bombardment of things to consume, ways to show off and gain social acceptance. The means employed is advertising and marketing gimmicks that exploit human psychology. Sportsmen and actors don’t consume cola (not even for an advertisement), yet they urge people to drink cola. All kinds of things are sold by famous people lending their faces to products and services they have no expertise in. People are constantly urged to look ‘pretty’, wear expensive clothes and jewellery, and work on their social status. Cinema and television are filled with people pretending to be someone they’re not, and most humans cannot distinguish and keep separate what they see on screen and real life. We are clearly influenced by whatever we see on a screen even if it’s explicit that they’re pretending. We feed junk to the minds of people tired from the drudgery of work and the endless struggle to survive or consume.

All of this needs to change for a questioning mind. People should have enough to free themselves from this cycle of labour, survival and consumption filling up their lives. We should stop feeding junk to the mind, and only then is there empty space for the molten lava of knowledge to flow, and form rich volcanic earth from which shoots of independent thought, scientific temper and a questioning mind can grow.

It doesn’t matter who you vote for, question everything and everyone.