Mundus vult decipi

Imagine a digital government platform accessible to every citizen, where legislative decisions are delegated directly to the people and there is no parliament. Now, consider two yes-or-no questions: "Do you want to increase public spending on healthcare?"🚑 and "Do you want to cut income taxes?"💰

For anyone, it would be hard to say "no" to either. But how can a state sustain these two desirable yet incompatible outcomes?

This is a dilemma I have been reflecting on, and it highlights the major problem with any form of direct democracy. In fact, even in ancient Athens, which is often taken as an example of a direct system, only about 30% of the adult population of the city had the right to vote, creating an environment very similar to a parliament, where the numbers were small enough to allow for discussion and trade-offs.

When the scale goes up, like in modern states, it becomes impossible to hold these kinds of nuanced discussions. The final outcome would likely be a disaster, as every decision would be treated as a singular, isolated issue. This is where the concept of representative democracy comes in: decisions are delegated to a series of representatives whose job is to voice citizens' requests while maintaining a sustainable system.

Therefore, when leaders make grand, financially unsustainable promises during campaigns, and then fail to keep them once elected, perhaps the population should be relieved rather than angry. Those promises were likely broken due to practical incompatibility (after all, politicians only lose votes by not keeping them). 📉

Ultimately, if these unkept promises are actually good for the voters' future, must we then place the blame on politicians or on those who require unrealistic pledges in order to cast their vote? Is the saying Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur ("The world wants to be deceived, so let it be deceived") a motto worth pursuing?