Something that has always called my attention with respect to democracy is its unintentional self-destructive capacity, which although undesired, is often effective.
Kennedy said that democracy is the superior form of government, because it is based on a respect for man as a reasonable being, perhaps his very strong point is his greatest weakness. Man can be a rational being, but not for everything and not all the time.
I believe that man, rather than being a purely rational subject, is quite emotional, and only responds to reason when it is in tune with his emotion. Reason applies to man as long as it is not against his most intimate interests.
When we go to an election we do not choose between the best political program, or the best ideas, we choose the best leader, the person we see most capable of running the country.
Howard Gardner, a psychologist and professor at Harvard University, developed the hypothesis of multiple intelligences, which dictates that intelligence is not a unitary set that groups different specific capacities, but a network of autonomous, relatively interrelated sets.
Gardner argues that there is a wide range of cognitive abilities, but that there are only very weak correlations among them. For example, the theory postulates that a child who learns to multiply easily is not necessarily more intelligent than a child who has more difficulty on this task. The child who takes more time to master multiplication may best learn to multiply through a different approach, may excel in a field outside mathematics, or may be looking at and understanding the multiplication process at a fundamentally deeper level.
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In this way, and to simplify it, a footballer and a mathematician, for example, can be equally intelligent, but in totally different fields. Despite there being several strong detractors of this theory, I adhere partially, and don't believe in a classification of universal intelligence that can classify us all as equals, why we are not.
Well, just as intelligence can occur in different fields, I believe that people can rationalize correctly in different fields, that is, a person can not know the information necessary to make a correct rationalization in politics, and let themselves be guided by their emotions in the time of the elections, without that means that the person is irrational.
Hence the error in the current democracies, since in spite of effectively recognizing man as a rational being, the rationality of man depends on many factors, such as the field in question, the personal, physical, mental situation, etc.
Voters, for example, are more than just rational people, they are usually quite emotional people, and they let themselves be guided by their feelings rather than by the facts.
When everything is going well in a democracy, people are happy, have options, freedoms and maybe a good life. It is easy for people at the polls to maintain the same system that is benefiting them so much.
But on the contrary, when there is a crisis in a democratic country things take a little dark, people are no longer happy, have lost comfort, and in turn, freedoms, so they are more likely to try to change the " problematic and defective system" in one more efficient. While the more critical the situation becomes, the more willing people will be to sacrifice freedoms and decisions to allow someone to take charge and solve problems, this is where history repeats itself and democracy is left aside.
By entrusting democracy to the rationality of people, they may at some point be the scarcest, and therefore, democracy itself begins to be jeopardized by popular vote.
What happens if most people vote for not having democracy?
Although it is crazy, democracy is so delicate that this happens many times, and happens when people, upset by a crisis or the system, vote for someone who is clearly anti-democratic. These people usually get the effective majority, and therefore, establish a dictatorship of the majority where the minority (and I do not speak of ethnic minorities but political) is strongly attacked.
There we can see a typical case of democratic self-destruction due to lack of rationality in people. However, emotional people are not the only ones who can destroy a democracy, rational people can easily and with more lasting effects, end a democratic system.
This happens when rational people realize the danger of indiscriminate populace voting in elections, and how all the advances can be lost by allowing "less rational" people (in politics) to have the power to choose the destiny of the whole society. In these cases, democracy is left behind and we enter into an autocracy, an aristocracy or a monarchy, it should be noted that the simple fact of being a rational person does not mean that he is right.
In both cases, democracy self-destructs, by its very nature.
