Rationality and Democracy

Rationality is not required in a democracy. People can be as non-rational as they want to be. They can even be irrational. As long as the participants in the process are abiding by the rules and are not creating outcomes that violate the vital organs of democracy — freedom of political speech and a democratic distribution of political rights — it is still democracy.

When I say people can be non-rational I mean they can base their participation on things like beliefs and emotions, rather than rationally thought-out positions. There is nothing illegitimate about that.

It is telling that people who do that invariably strive to place a fig leaf of rationality over their politics. Not only is that unnecessary, it is actually bad for democracy.

Democracy is at its best when its participants are seeking rational outcomes and using rational persuasion to achieve them. Otherwise, it will usually boil down to whose beliefs are going to be imposed on whom. As long as the democratic process is not violated, even such outcomes are legitimate, but the less of that, the better.

Retrofitting a purportedly rationality to non-rational bases of participation in the political process debases rationality. I think that is what’s causing the most angst among those who are fretting for the future of democracy.

Yet, falsely claiming rationality for non-rational motivations also debases one’s emotions and beliefs. Neither is any cause for shame (so long as they do not threaten democracy itself or any human beings).

Beyond being non-rational, beliefs can be blatantly irrational when they contradict material reality as the believers themselves experience it. Denying the reality of a changing climate due to the activities of human beings is an example.

As my rational faculty eventually forced me to accept, however, (from Michel Foucault) human beings are entitled to their own realities. Even so, if one’s personal reality diverges too far from material reality, positive material outcomes are not to be expected:

To deny that the climate of this planet is changing, and that it is overwhelmingly probable that the outcomes to be expected for humanity are too dire even to be stated, much less overstated — beginning with the collapse of civilization, i.e. laws protecting persons and property and the public enforcement of those laws — is to bring upon one and all the most complete man-made disaster possible, this side of a total nuclear war.

Democracy is the ultimate application of the ‘law of large numbers’. All human beings have a rational capacity. If every person who is eligible will simply VOTE, democracy — and civilization — will survive.