The nature of democratic systems
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A bill of memes?
Although Great Britain has chosen not to, for reasons that you will see in the section on national culture, most nations have a formal written constitution that defines what the state exists to do and sets out the principal ways it will do it. Often, and most notably in the United States and France, they define the state as a protector of the rights of the individual.
From the meme's point of view, a written constitution is good because it ensures copy fidelity; it acts as a container for the strategically important ideas, and it also spawns laws that act as a set of tactical memes and an immune system.
Take the Constitution for the United States of America. This contains clauses that guarantee freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom to worship, the people's right to keep and bear arms; the freedom of assembly; and the freedom to petition. It also prohibits unreasonable search and seizure; cruel and unusual punishment; compelled self-incrimination and double jeopardy, establishment of religion and deprivation of life, liberty, or property without due process of law - it's positively ).
It's interesting that freedom of speech and freedom of worship were included by the framers of this constitution. These were amazingly radical ideas for the middle of the eighteenth century, and it's almost as if they wanted to create a crucible from which the truth would emerge. Of course, what emerges is not the truth but the most effective set of memes, a topic we will return to in the section on Organisations.
Let's look at the opening of the American Declaration of Independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed, by their Creator, with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.
Those first few words are very clever: if you don’t accept these ‘truths’, then you aren’t one of ‘us', and if you want to be one of ‘us’, you must accept these ‘truths’.
However, the point I really want to make here is that there is no such thing as a universal bill of rights, as constitutions both define and are defined by the society they come from. While many people (including me) find this Declaration of Independence admirable, a good proportion of the world’s population would not accept that the truths are at all self-evident, or even true, or even a good idea. Consider the viewpoint of a society where the dominant memeplex is Confucianism. In this complex and well-established system of ethics, your duty to others is defined by your relationship with them, and the safety and happiness of the people is ensured as long as everyone follows these duties.
Virtuous leaders generate (and deserve) loyalty, and a good leader acknowledges that all men are self-evidently not created equal and encourages a meritocracy to allow the best ones to thrive. I am not claiming that Confucianism is better than the American version of democracy, or vice versa, but merely pointing out that both are long-lived, self-consistent memeplexes, and that they are entirely incompatible.
Our beloved leader?
One concept that we should not allow to pass by while looking at politics is that of the 'Head of State'. The head of state is not just someone whose picture you can put on your banknotes. In fact, they are more of a symbol than a person, a set of memes on what the nation stands for. Charles de Gaulle said the French President should embody 'une certaine idea de la France'.
Of course, a lot of what the head of state does is ceremonial, and the head of state often has religious and military roles in addition to political duties, tying the various memes of the state together. The role of the head of state is regarded as so important that some countries, such as Canada, Andorra and Australia, borrow someone else's. The extreme deference with which the head of state is sometimes treated belongs to the role rather than the person. In extreme cases, such as the King of Thailand, they are treated as minor deities. At the other extreme, the late Queen Juliana of the Netherlands was often seen bicycling around her cities, showing a closeness to group behaviours that we will explain in Self or group?.
The head of state may have considerable executive power, as in the United States, effectively taking the role as the CEO of the country or they may have very little real power, as in Ireland. The role of supposedly powerless constitutional monarchs like Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom (head of state for 65 years at time of writing) is akin to that of a chairman of a public company, and they exert considerable influence by providing a degree of consistency across changes in government in addition to personal knowledge of many other heads of state. This chairmanship role can be highly effective: in 1981, the then Spanish king, Juan Carlos stopped a coup dead in its tracks by publicly refusing to recognise the new government.
And may the best idea win…
Democracies are an elegant memetic construct in that they allow ideas to compete. If you want to get elected in a representative form of government, you need to present ideas that will make you attractive to a majority of the population. Opinion polls are thus invaluable to democracies as they are a way of testing the fitness or otherwise of particular ideas.
The set of memes presented by the putative leader need not be attractive to everyone, nor need it be entirely self-consistent. Take the interaction between religious belief and electability: a USA Today poll in June 2007 showed that two-thirds of Americans said creationism, 'the idea that God created humans in their present form within the past 10,000 years', is definitely or probably true. Given these figures, it would as hard for an avowed atheist to be elected to high political office in America as it would be a person who professes to be 'guided by God' to be elected in Sweden.
This does not mean that all candidates for political office in the USA need campaign on an openly religious or anti-science platform, just that they must profess enough religious belief to ensure that they do not trigger an allergic reaction from potential voters.
Sadly, the environments in which these competing memes are tested are our flawed brains. There is always a temptation for a leader to wield 'strong man' memes, even if they are ineffective or counter-productive. For reasons we will get to elsewhere, we find it hard to make rational decisions when we are afraid, and politicians and newspapers know that pain and fear memes get more attention than more positive ideas. It is also interesting, and wholly depressing, to see the extent to which xenophobia and fear has come to dominate Western elections. In the 1950s and 1960s, leaders like John F. Kennedy painted bright pictures of the future and inspired the electorate to hope. Recently, politicians have taken a different tack, justifying illiberal policies on the back of vastly overstated (and sometimes wholly non-existent) threats. Hopefully, a new generation of leaders will arise that can persuade us to stop acting scared, and maybe the material on this site can help them do it. Until then, in the words of Stanford's Professor Sam Savage when he read this section, 'Hmm. Looks like we have nothing to cheer but fear itself'.