This is my second blog post for democracy. Done during the holidays =) ...

Many people like to joke that Democracy may be the worst form of government, even in the United States, when American citizens pride themselves on being the oldest constitutional democracy. Yet, many people think they should limit their democracy, especially during perilous times. Many people in the US find they are frustrated with democracy and think that things would be better if they could just let a few smart people make the decisions.

Today, the fear of terrorism has encouraged people to blindly support the President because they believe he must know more about what is going on and so can make the right decisions for us. Many people are looking for a strong leader who boldly makes decisions even if these decisions go against the will of the majority of people. Many people define this as leadership.Yet, is it true that a few smart people or one strong leader will do a better job than groups that make decisions democratically? Should we entrust our future to a small group who will make the most important decisions for us? Decisions such as whether we will go to war or not, or how our economy is run? My answer is no.

After World War II, an MIT researcher, Alex Bavelas, conducted a study about different communication networks and how their structures affected the ability for groups to solve problems. He designed one group to use communication that was essentially a circular chain where each person could only communicate with his immediate neighbors. This group was forced to use a democratic process to solve the problems.

Another group used a star-like model where one individual could communicate with everyone. Yet, they could only communicate with each other through that central person. This modeled the classic authoritarian process. When he asked them to perform simple tasks, the authoritarian group was much faster at coming up with the answers to the problems given. What Bavelas found was when the task was made more complex and had more subtle issues to resolve, the democratic group was consistently able to solve the tasks more rapidly, with better outcomes and the members of the group maintained higher morale. The authoritarian leader is blinded by his own sense of power and a belief that he has all the answers.

Since then, other studies have shown that groups using democratic processes are much better at reaching good outcomes on complex issues than authoritarian groups. Furthermore, history has shown that authoritarian societies carry fatal flaws that cause them to eventually destroy themselves. One example is looking at the failures of Nazism under Hitler and the collapse of the Stalinist communist states of the USSR and China in the 20th century. Saddam Hussein was also victim of this problem as his “subordinates” didn’t even inform him that he didn’t have any credible WMD (weapon of mass destruction) to deploy, which if he knew that, might have led him to halt or delay the invasion last year. And Mao never understood that it was his own misguided scientific policies, 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 natural world works. Scientists have found that nature is filled with entities made of many cooperating individual participants which lead to complex systems. These complex systems continuously adjust to any new incoming data encountered by the participants. 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 to the antibiotics we have devised.

Today as our world confronts some of the most complex problems mankind has ever faced, like 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, intolerance and violence that seems to be ratcheting up every year and lastly, 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. We are all responsible for finding solutions to our problems. It is not enough to wait for our leaders to set the course. 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 for our problems. Because if we don’t, then who will? (838 words)