Observer effect:
the disturbance of a system by the act of observation.

A perfunctory glance down the history alley is enough to convince us.
Democratic decision making is slower than any of the alternatives.
Yet, over the longer time frame, it begets better results.

Democratically run systems are more likely to survive, as long as they manage to preserve their democratic nature.
While autocracies collapse, under their own weight, sooner rather than later. Because of their autarchic nature.
Those running an autocratic regime – a small group to start with and growing smaller and smaller as time passes because that’s how autocracies work – don’t understand the observer effect.

But what is this famous ‘democratic nature’?

Each democratic ‘event’ has three ‘stages’. Like all other decision making processes.
Information gathering, making the call, assessing the outcome.

Electoral campaign.
‘Political scientists’ use the above mentioned term to designate the democratic ‘fact finding phase’.
Leaving aside the fact that people – potential voters – actually live. In the very circumstances they are called to vote about. To evaluate at the ballot box.
Which highlights for us to the first ‘chocking point’.

Individual voters have a limited experience.
Each of us gets in touch with a limited portion of the reality, remembers only some of it and tries to figure out only what each of us is interested in.
If actual voting would take place in ‘absolute darkness’ – each of us voting based exclusively on our own, individual, experience – democracy would be demoted to ‘mob rule’. The largest group of people would run the show according to its own, specific, interest. While all the rest would be sidestepped. Not a sustainable way of running business. Specially when the business at hand is of a social nature.
Hence democracy depends upon a continuous, honest and respectful exchange of information between all the members of a democratic society. People need to know what their neighbors feel about things before voting one way or another. Furthermore, and even more important, people need to care about what other people experience in their daily lives.
‘Political scientists’ – well, some of them – are convinced that ‘efficient campaigning’ is enough to do the trick. To convince enough voters to do as they are told. This conviction has transformed democracy into a war of words. Into a conflict fought inside a space defined by language.
Fighting that war brought us where we are now. For the better and the worse of it.

‘It doesn’t matter what people vote.
The important thing is that votes are counted by the right people.’
I rephrased here a quote attributed to Stalin. The communist dictator.
Si non e vero, e ben trovato. The ‘original attribution’, “It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” aptly describe Stalin’s attitude towards his subjects. The attitude demonstrated by the consequences produced by his actions. By his actualized decisions. His public positions on the matter? Read one of his discourses… He was lying through his teeth? Said one thing and done the very opposite? Judging by the very consequences of his reign? That’s what I meant by saying ‘the autocrats don’t care about/understand the observer effect’.
Enough about vote rigging. The second ‘chocking point’.

Casting the ballots – and counting them, one way or the other – takes us only this far. Where we are ‘now’.
‘Going forward’ we also need to ‘evaluate’.
You might think that evaluation is an integral part of the first phase. It is. The evaluation of the consequences. Before a new round of elections we need indeed to evaluate what the confirmed candidates had done.
I’m talking about another evaluation.
Very soon after the votes had been counted, the confirmed candidates ‘loose’ their masks. Relax their pretenses and start acting their truer selves. That being the moment when we need to evaluate our decisions. Our choices. What we have voted for…

Very soon after they get elected, the vast majority of the confirmed candidates start blaming their predecessors.
‘Things would be far better if the guy before me would had done that. Or refrained from doing the other that’.
‘Yes, I know. That’s why I voted for you! But you’re not delivering. Everything you promised…’
This being the moment when we, each of us, need to evaluate our own actions. Our own decisions!

Yes, ‘they’ have their share of guilt. ‘Had they done everything they promised…’
But first we need to figure out how, and why, WE have fallen for their ‘lies’.
Cause, after all, we are the ones who have put our faith in their promises!
And we are the ones experimenting the consequences.