Of democracy, dialogue, and definitions

Yuval Harari opines that democracy is primarily about achieving a dialogue than about one-man-one vote. Different citizens or groups that subscribe to different worldviews must forge a workable compromise that all groups can support and with which forward progress can be achieved.

There are three preconditions for fruitful dialogues: 1.) all groups must subscribe to the notion that they each can be better off within the collective than out of it; 2.) they must agree to a mechanism for legitimation that breaks logjams of disagreements, that is, participate in, and abide by, the outcome of the mechanism; and, 3.) that no group believes that it has a monopoly of the truth. All these can happen with or without majoritarian voting.

In the era of the divine rights of kings, the king, whose authority was cultivated as coming directly heaven, was such a mechanism. The Bourbon absolute monarchs cultivated the old “fiction,” inherited from Aristotle’s Republic and reaffirmed by Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, that “apres moi, le deluge.”* That life without a monarch would be “nasty, cruel, brutish, and short,” was for millennia enough to garner for monarchs a virtual “consent of the governed.”

The political tectonic plate began to heave on the eve of the French Revolution. The big question: can the Bourbon monarchy be replaced by majoritarian democracy? Would life under the latter escape being “nasty, cruel, brutish, and short”? The French Academy scientists addressed the issue as a scientific question by boiling the problem down to whether a monarch always beats majority voting in judgmental competence as implied in Aristotle and Hobbes. The result was the “Condorcet Jury Theorems” (after Marquis de Condorcet, 1785): vox populi vox dei: “The judgmental competence of a competent electorate deciding by majority vote between two alternatives A (say, airport) and B (say, an expressway) will exceed the judgmental competence of any monarch as the number of voters becomes very large.” But its corollary also holds (vox populi vox diaboli): the judgmental competence of an incompetent electorate falls below that of any monarch chosen randomly. The genie was out of the box. J.S. Mill in On Liberty (1859), the bible to many modern libertarians, opined accordingly that democracy was appropriate only for an electorate “in the maturity of their faculties” (his take on “competence”); not otherwise.

In the modern era, majority elections/referenda are the favored legitimacy mechanisms. But the condition of competence proves onerous. The jury theorems are vitiated if citizens do not vote judiciously but are stampeded into a particular vote by fear, loathing, or monetized penury. As it’s clear now, in our modern age of information surfeit, the electorate can be herded into thought bubbles that brook no dialogue since subscribed to the belief that other groups are purveyors of perdition. “Dialogue skedaddle!” If “we alone” possess the “truth,” majoritarian exercises that produce outcomes at odds with “us” are captured trojan horses of falsehoods (the “Trump card”). Abidance with such outcomes is “morally wrong.” Autocrats who are quicker to exploit the frailties of the information superhighway are being legitimized by majoritarian ballots! As dialogue signs off, the democracy slinks away. Hobbes and Aristotle beckon.

Besides a shared vision, a good dialogue requires a shared language. In Genesis 11: 1-9, it is written that God, displeased by the prospect that the community building a tower that touches heaven would herewith consider nothing as impossible (thus becoming virtual gods), imparted upon them many languages in place of one. The resulting confusion aborted the project and dispersed the one nation into many. Democracy too is an ambitious project that requires a shared language to facilitate dialogue. Shared language does not mean a single linguistic strain like English or Filipino but a shared definition for “critical words” within that strain.

The continuing local discourse on oligarchs and oligarchy is attended with confusion for a lack of shared definitions. This problem resurfaced when President Rodrigo Duterte hastened to blame oligarchs for the April 2019 water crisis (see Romeo Bernardo’s excellent column, “Water Woes: Just the Facts,” December 2019, BusinessWorld Online) and was obliquely implicated in Senator Frank Drilon’s crusade against “political dynasties.”

The classical definition of oligarchy as “the rule by a few” goes back to Aristotle who wrote in Politics Bk 3 that, “Oligarchy is when men of property have the government in their hands; democracy, the opposite, when the indigent, and not the men of property, are the rulers.” Aristotle’s own favorite compromise, the “oligarchy of virtuous men” proved impractical though some regimes construed to produce them by castration (eunuchs). Among the Greeks, democracy equals chaos while oligarchy, being of the propertied men, would be more prudent by virtue of “skin in the game,” echoing the modern corporate governance of “one-share-one-vote.” Among the Greeks, the term “oligarch” did not serve to pejorate, unlike today. But abuses of the richest controlling oligarchs prompted for a while the use of lottery to determine who among property owners would become government controllers by 400 BCE (Herman, 1991). It did not prosper.

If you are a high net worth individual, you are an oligarch by Aristotle, though there is no associated culpability. As a pejorative epithet, this is not far removed from the socialist Proudhon dogma, “Property is theft.” Oligarchs must have “hoodwinked” the nation through rule-bending using political weight and must thus be treated guardedly if not altogether expropriated.

Senator Drilon, by contrast, subscribes to a very different definition: “It is not in wealth that you are an oligarch; you are an oligarch if you use your power to promote through the political system your own interests.” (July 15, 2020, Online Media Forum). A true “oligarch” a la’ Drilon requires three elements: 1.) having disproportionate wealth, 2.) employing wealth to acquire political power, and. 3.) deploying political power to advance or protect exclusive interests. Drilon’s behavioral definition differs from academic Winter’s more commonly accepted definition: control of “…massive material resource that can (italics mine) be deployed to defend or enhance… your exclusive social position.” (Winters, 2011, Oligarchy). Drilon’s “behavioral” definition refers more to oligarchs as actors, while Winter’s refers to oligarchy as a governance regime. This makes a critical difference on apportioning blame for society’s ills.

It is easy to identify present and past oligarchies by either definition. The USA during the Gilded Age (1870-1900) was clearly an oligarchy: the so called “robber barons” controlled economic policy by bankrolling the election of lawmakers. This practice continues to this day making the 21st century USA an oligarchy within the rubric of a formal democracy. The Philippines is oligarchic in the same way: wealth is readily leveraged in the political sphere to bend rules for exclusive interests. But whether in the Philippines, the USA, and other formally democratic countries, wealth alone does not qualify one for membership in the oligarchic club. Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos are “not oligarchs” by Drilon’s behavioral definition. In the Philippines, MVP and JAZA are not oligarchs by Drilon’s definition. But Kapitan Lucio Tan clearly was. Note that membership in business organizations that lobby for non-exclusive policies such as lower power cost does not qualify as crossing the economic-political divide.

A polity to succeed needs a shared vision and shared definitions. How we define our terms and our shared vision is subject to our biases. My own bias is towards scientific clarity and by that metric, Drilon’s beats Duterte’s.

*According to Wikipedia, this is “translated by Brewer in the forms ‘When I am dead the deluge may come for aught I care,’ and ‘Ruin, if you like, when we are dead and gone.’” — Ed.

Raul V. Fabella is a retired professor at the UP School of Economics, a member of the National Academy of Science and Technology, and an honorary professor at the Asian Institute of Management. He gets his dopamine fix from tending flowers with wife Teena, bicycling, and assiduously, if with little success, courting the guitar.