Notes from Elsewhere

On Governance: Authority and Order I

Part 1: The Evolution of Authority

This is Part 1 of 5 in ‘On Governance: Authority and Order.’ This series examines fundamental assumptions about democratic governance through personal experience, empirical research, and historical analysis. Each part builds essential groundwork for the complete argument—jumping ahead will likely leave you confused about key premises and evidence. Links will be added to the series titles as each part is published. If you are new to my writing, you may also want to read my disclaimer about my thoughts. 

Series
Part 1: The Evolution of Authority
Part 2: The Illusion of Choice (coming soon)
Part 3: Individual vs Collective (coming soon)
Part 4: Models of Guided Governance (coming soon)
Part 5: Rethinking Progress and Success (coming soon)

Foreword

I thought myself an anarchist. 17, full of energy, passion, and a general disdain for authority, believing obstinately that I understood life better than anyone who has actually lived it. With myself being the only authority I needed, I was emotionally emancipated from parents, teachers, and God; so headstrong and vehement in my anarchic ideology, a political alignment test somehow confusingly labelled me ‘fascist’. I itched at uniforms, sneered at homework, and scoffed at deadlines (until the night before, when I would stay up all night to actually finish that oppressive essay).

Around this time, I progressed from the school world to the real world, ready to take on anyone who challenged my uncanny ability to be right about everything. However, when one enters the workforce, one quickly learns the importance of adapting to hierarchies. Sure, an “every man for himself” attitude is romantic and dreamy for a kid with a confrontational desire for self-direction, but I wonder how quickly my attitude would have changed in the chaos of a genuinely lawless ‘90s Russia. I wonder if my petite frame and awkward disposition would have held up against gang violence, racketeering, sex trafficking, and nowhere to turn because the syndicates are the police. Too young, too naïve, and too self-absorbed to realise that the absence of effective governance isn’t liberation, but a power vacuum yearning to be filled by whoever has the most guns. Fortunately, I didn’t have to experience that firsthand. I learnt the cushy, privileged Western way: menial work.

My first taste of independence taught me that some rules actually matter (specifically, the ones with enforcement mechanisms that affected my immediate welfare, of course). Thus, the arrogant pseudo-intellectual and pseudo-rebellious me adopted the motto, “I follow rules that make sense,” with all the smugness of a Reddit user named “HomoRationalis”. (Making sense is, of course, the most important thing in life, and I was incontrovertibly the arbiter of what qualified). If I wanted to survive the next month, then following the rules of basic human decency in order to receive my pay cheque seemed like a necessity with which I couldn’t argue (it turns out that some rules taste better than starvation). Similarly, I fell in love with the laws that required my employer to provide me with 28 days of paid leave annually, as well as to ensure that I would not be deprived of food when unable to work. Bend knee, fill belly. (I sense there’s a gluttonous theme emerging here). It seemed to me that “minimal interference” was now the ideal philosophy, and I upgraded from quasi-anarchist to the fine label of sort-of-libertarian-but-not-knowledgeable-enough-to-know-for-sure. Though, this was really just the same faux anarchism with a reality check.

I worked in hell for a while when I hit my 20s. Well, I say ‘hell’, but what I really mean is that I served condescending customers who looked down upon me for being a barista while I earned a measly sum that scarcely covered my diluting-orange-juice-to-make-it-last-longer expenses. For any cocky youth, this is the definition of hell. And it was undoubtedly an utterly harrowing experience for a self-righteous young individual whose pride was so intense that it threatened to choke me if I dared to swallow it. Unexpectedly, amid the frustrating clientele and overbearing overlords, formed a tight-knit team between our manager, my coworkers, and me. Like an extended family, we laughed together and cried together (well, really just that one time when one guy called me a Nazi for trying to make him do his job), argued incessantly (mostly about not doing their jobs), and no one was allowed to disrespect us (except each other).

When our manager left, I, her so-called protégé, became the new, less effective glue holding us all together. I had been promised her position as manager with a pay raise, inflating that youthful conceit I was blissfully unaware I harboured. However, life was ready to humble me by having the autocrats introduce a new regional manager with all the communication skills of a toddler who didn’t get his Happy Meal. I took on all the duties of a manager, but the pay raise was mysteriously delayed. Bureaucracy, you know how it is. At some point, my duties started being subtly pared down, and when the boss offered to kindly take the task of payroll off my hands, my coworkers began quietly not receiving their overtime pay. When I confronted Boss about it, he promised to investigate. Mentioning it again was met with minor irritation and the instruction to just keep working as usual; it’ll be handled eventually. The final time I mentioned it, several months later, a hurricane of nonsensical wrath spewed from Boss’s mouth, and as his rampant saliva rolled off my face, a thought hit me. Who asked us anyway? Who decided this guy should be our boss when he only cares for himself? Why does he get to decide whether our work is worth the pay or not? This isn’t fair.

This ordeal was my introduction to the problem of illegitimate authority. He waltzed in, usurped my throne, and barked nonsensical orders, and all without any input from us about how we run things. I thought that I may have been a dictator at work, but at least I was a reasonably democratic one. In his case it was pure power and cronyism without competence, respect, or accountability. Enter: democracy. Team votes, collaborative goal-setting, democratic project structures, and inclusive decision-making that believes everyone has a good idea within them. If we couldn’t have beneficial leaders imposed on us, perhaps we could choose, or be, them ourselves.

Bouncing around various jobs over the next lot of years, eventually I found myself running an online community during the pandemic. This seemed like the perfect laboratory to test my newfound democratic ideals—a voluntary consociation where I could create the idealistic, participatory, egalitarian environment I’d yearned for in those suffocating workplaces. The workers should have a voice. They should decide how they’re ruled and how they live. All ideas are valuable; all values matter. I wanted so much to provide a platform for people with similar experiences to share them with each other and maybe create the initial cosy family feeling I had at the aforementioned job. On a small scale, we largely succeeded in achieving that goal. A handful of us got to know each other well, we checked in about our daily lives, I hosted raffles and collaborative games, and we even started a book club. But as the community growth significantly inclined, some veteran members became so well-known that their voices gained authority among the neophytes, sometimes rivalling even mine. Eager to please, like any erstwhile edgy teenager who secretly just wants to belong, I tried to give them everything.

Over time, the effect was becoming less than desirable. Too many topics and groups diluted engagement, too many differing viewpoints partnered with poor social skills led to drama, and even newbies started feeling entitled to make demands too. People with no experience running a community told me how to do my job. Others, with no knowledge about the structure of the community, became revolutionaries that convinced the ignorant working class of my community that they deserved freedom from my oppressive reign that merely asked them to respect one another. I realised I needed to tighten up the rules and make some changes to the structure so that instead of controlling activity, I merely nudged them in the right direction. Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler had convinced me, vis-à-vis their book Nudge, to consider what they termed “libertarian paternalism”—the idea that choice “architects” can preserve freedom while steering people toward better decisions through environmental design rather than coercion.

The concept was seductive: it suggested giving people the illusion of autonomy while ensuring they would almost certainly make the correct choice, all while believing they had arrived at that conclusion themselves. Highlight constructive comments here, create a hall of fame for friendly posts and users there, and you start shaping an environment where social value visibly flows from constructive behaviour. Users who must pledge respect before participating tend to honour those commitments. Badges and roles based on contribution create hierarchies of social pressure, while privileges and private spaces for productive members naturally exclude those who don’t meaningfully participate. It was behavioural psychology masquerading as democratic participation, as I quietly centralised my authority and stripped privileges from my moderators and the senior members.

But nudging the community members wasn’t enough in the long term—the culture itself had rotted from the inside. Behavioural economics assumes that people are rational and variables are predictable. It doesn’t account for misfits, power seekers, and bad apples. It also doesn’t always consider the cultural context wherein you’re trying to implement these interventions. Did you know that when apples start to rot, they produce more copious amounts of a gas called ethylene than healthy apples, and this gas is absorbed by nearby healthy apples? The accelerated ripening of the healthy apples inevitably hastens decay, meaning that one bad apple really does spoil the bunch, and pretty quickly too. Some members of the community were too obstinate or entitled, or they had naturally accumulated social power that they wielded irresponsibly, misting the rest of the community with their naïve noxious notions. I’m not without fault: I had compromised my values (and common sense) to accommodate their demands for too long, and they had become spoilt children who threw tantrums whenever an idea was rejected and rallied others to their causes when I didn’t bend. Democracy and community referendums had given them the dangerous conviction that their every whim and opinion mattered equally, regardless of how uninformed, destructive, or self-serving it might be.

Many of these people genuinely didn’t understand what was best for the community’s long-term health and were ready to revolt at any moment. The community I bred turned against me, ready to topple my belatedly erected effigies. Like a child who needs to touch the stove to understand it’s hot, I had learnt the hard way. So, I refused their latest demands: another thread, banning a perfectly friendly user who hadn’t broken rules, relaxing guidelines they found inconvenient, or promoting their personal projects. But toxic ideas spread like contagion, and destructive behaviour became viral. Mobs with their proverbial pitchforks would emerge during witch-hunts of members who perpetrated a minor social faux pas, as defined by whatever the toxic echo chamber had formed that week. The very democratic processes I’d introduced to prevent arbitrary authority had allowed them to create their own tyranny. Tyranny of the loudest, most persistent voices. This would almost be poetic if it weren’t so veritably predictable to anyone who’s historically literate. I wasn’t wise enough nor mature enough to handle it effectively, so I shamefully and discreetly abdicated, handing over ownership to my second-in-command and nuking my associated accounts. But the trial had taught me something important: sometimes the choice isn’t between effective and poor governance, but between imperfect authority and destructive chaos.

All these mundane-yet-subsequently-profound experiences culminated into a hindsight cultivating several foods for thought, which were difficult to swallow for an idealistic naïveté, but necessary for collective sustenance:

Now, I’m quite cognisant of the fact that managing an online community bears limited resemblance to governing complex societies, but the fundamental dynamics I encountered—like the gap between democratic ideals and practical governance, the tension between individual preferences and collective welfare, and the challenge of making decisions with imperfect information under pressure—scale up in ways that demand at the very least serious examination. The progression from anarchist to paternalist wasn’t just personal evolution but practical education in what actually works when you’re responsible for outcomes rather than just theories.

My journey through these political philosophies wasn’t driven by abstract reasoning but by the collision between idealistic frameworks and stubborn human nature. With every “okay, now I finally understand”, only to later realise I didn’t, life humbled me and my rebellious core, exposing the flawed revolutionary romanticism with such raw, humiliating nakedness, I had to learn not to spit the word “authority” out of my mouth. The desire for complete and utter freedom was the skin of unworldliness that I needed to shed to realise the world was much bigger than me and my every whim and desire, to realise the grain of sand I am among the many required to make an ocean floor. Each metamorphosis revealed new problems while creating others, and which kind of problems are worth having really matters. Perhaps the question isn’t which system is theoretically best, but which aspects of each can most effectively balance competing frameworks to build a functioning species.

Introduction

“Democracy is the most difficult of all forms of government, since it requires the widest spread of intelligence, and we forgot to make ourselves intelligent when we made ourselves sovereign.”
—The Lessons of History by Will and Ariel Durant

My journey from idealistic anarchist to reluctant advocate for guided leadership reflects more than a basic personal evolution, but it also reveals intrinsic flaws in how we as people have learnt to think about freedom and governance. These inherent limitations stem from an irreconcilable gap between democratic theory’s requirements and the architecture of human cognition and can’t simply be fixed by education and institutional reform alone.

Prominent American political scientists Christopher Achen and Larry Bartels have spent decades demonstrating how the “folk theory of democracy”—i.e., the belief that informed citizens can effectively guide policy through elections—rests on fundamentally flawed assumptions about human decision-making. Their research reveals that voters consistently exhibit retrospective bias, prioritise social identity over policy analysis, and engage in systematic ignorance despite having abundant information at their fingertips. As Achen bluntly states, “That really, really doesn’t work. People don’t have the time and interest to follow issues, and they make serious mistakes and harm themselves in the process.” What’s most damaging to democratic theory is what their research on “blind retrospection” shows: voters systematically punish incumbents for events that are entirely beyond governmental control. That includes natural disasters, economic shocks, and even shark attacks.

The problem extends far beyond information deficits; there are fundamental failures in causal reasoning that no amount of education can address. Rather than policy preferences flowing upwards, from citizens to leaders, “ideas flow downwards to the people,” with voters openly yet unconsciously expressing their loyalties and identities that are central to understanding what happens in elections. These aren’t merely bugs in the democratic system but features of human psychology that no institutional tinkering can overcome. Looking at contemporary democratic systems, particularly those of Western incarnations, it appears they have failed to deliver on their core promise: that popular governance will save humanity from itself. In fact, they’ve demonstrated that complex societies necessitate experienced leadership, with real authority, tempered by institutional safeguards, to achieve stability, prosperity, and genuine progress.

Voter Ignorance

The average person steps into the voting booth without understanding the complexities of economic, social, or geopolitical decisions whereon they’re voting. Studies consistently show that the less people know, the more confident they are in their opinions. This sort of pattern renders democratic accountability as not just ineffective but actively harmful. Voters almost invariably lack basic knowledge about policy positions when casting their votes. Instead, they tend to focus on social identities and party affiliations. In cases where voters do pay attention to the performance of political candidates, they often focus most heavily on recent events rather than making a comprehensive analysis of their own.

Achen and Bartels have documented such an effect in their analysis of the 1916 New Jersey shark attacks, where voters in affected beach communities essentially punished President Woodrow Wilson by approximately 10 percentage points despite the fact the government couldn’t have prevented nor controlled the attacks. This is a considerable impact in electoral terms. The impact was nearly as significant as the swing against Herbert Hoover during the Great Depression. “Blind retrospection” extends even to droughts, floods, and other random events throughout the 20th century, indicating that voters systematically misattribute causality when assessing the performance of the incumbent.

And this isn’t a problem that education neatly solves. Information availability doesn’t correlate with better decision-making because citizens filter information through partisan lenses. They rely on social cues over policy analysis and engage in motivated reasoning to confirm existing beliefs. At the risk of sounding repetitive, information scarcity is not the issue, but instead how humans inherently process political information. Different democratic structures, such as proportional representation or ranked-choice voting, still rely on the same flawed individual decision-making processes, howbeit it is not about how we count votes but the quality of the judgements being counted. “Blind retrospection” undermines democratic governance by reducing the incentive of those in office to focus on the welfare of their people, since arbitrary events will often overshadow policy performance.

Since humans are fundamentally tribal rather than rational policy analysts, democratic decision-making remains essentially flawed regardless of institutional design. Systematic ignorance logically points towards the desideratum of experienced leadership, insulated from the mood swings of popular opinion and capable of making decisions based on expertise rather than pressure.

Look out for the second part of this five-part series coming soon.

→ Next: Part 2 - The Illusion of Choice (coming soon)

#politics #thoughts on