After being a (digital) nomad for the past two years I have been dropped into over 100 distinct communities. After touching so many people and cultures it seems like a community is defined as a group where a desired behavior and character is enforced/supported. People from everywhere want the same thing… a better life for themselves and for their offspring. For the sake of this post let’s determine ‘better’ on the metrics of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:
The difference between communities and people is how they achieve a better life for themselves/their offspring. The why is also different but to me less important – it can be because of moral duty, religious beliefs, selfish desires, etc.
A new theory on Democracy vs Authoritarianism?
The theory rests on the supposition that governments and heads of communities’ main task is security for the groups they preside over. Security in terms of physical, mental, financial, etc. By deduction, the pursuit of growth is an underlying effect of the cause for security. As Ven from Malt Liquidity said:
“the role of govt is to dampen societal vol – you don’t want either the -2 or the +2 sigma outcome. Imagine how hard a society is to control if it keeps randomly hockey-sticking growth!”
If we agree on this, the theory would claim that democracies are systems with more stability around the mean of the growth trend (society gets better over time so the net positive metric on the Y-axis is slightly irrelevant) whereas authoritarian states are more volatile/unstable. Authoritarian systems are more efficient in the short term compared to democracies but also lead to wilder swings which require a stronger top-down power to keep it in place.
Ideally, we have many experiments for each system. All systems that are alive go through thousands of decisions, permutations, and combinations which given enough time can lead to wildly different outcomes.
Once again I will push for lots of experiments and shots on goals. Let’s have a healthy competitive market for small direct democracies so that the best-evolved system wins.