Worldwide Deterioration of Democracy || Will Democracy Thrive? || Big Problems Ahead :: Part-I

NOTE: This article is the first part of a series of articles called “Big Problems Ahead”.

 

Human beings are social animals, and like any other social animal, they have well defined social structure and distribution of labor and economy and means of overall development and surviving as a species and not an individual. This thing has been proven advantageous over lone hunter and gatherer type lifestyles and that’s why we settled down to form society type of things and began our journey in the path of civilization.

 

 We, the modern human (Homo sapiens sapiens) are here on this planet for only about some 15 thousand years approximately, but in actuality as a species, we have gathered a better and sound knowledge on how to survive and realize our full reproductive potential as a species by using that knowledge to use resources most efficiently. But, unlike other social animals, we didn’t stop right in that spot, we started hunting knowledge to satiate our insatiable hunger for knowledge and that thing led us to a deeper understanding of the universe and is constantly leading us in that way. These all huge boulder-sized achievements have not been achieved by any other species on this planet (can’t tell anything about lives on somewhere else in this universe).

In this very long pathway of civilization, we came up battling very apocalypses in past both natural and man-made. 

In past, we have thrown out kingship, monarchy, and dictatorship and brought in democracy for a world where nobody is exploited by the few powerful. We have banned things like slavery and the slave trade to ensure respect for every individual of our species. We started the industrial revolution to revolutionize the way of our living. We as a species took initiative to stop war among ourselves. We brought regulations to check monopoly and unsocial activity in a society. We started the internet to revolutionize the way we communicate.

These all have been proven as better survival practices for a species as a whole. And these things worked.

In very recent days, the trends are not the same as in the last 50 or 70 years in world history, when the factors from the above paragraph are taken into account. 

Only two generations ago the world was a completely different place. There were two most futilely fatal wars in history that were going on at that time with a global communication system at its embryo stage (it was not even global at all). And before the wars, they saw kingship and monarchy and something that we call “intense violation of human rights”. Slavery and colonization were common enough to be ignored at that time. And, the concept of democracy was also in the embryo stage at that time i.e. under renovation and amendment and unimplemented at any part of this planet for a very long time. So yes, they were the ones who took the concept of democracy more seriously and showed the courage to implement it to throw out their pain and sufferings and hunger of decades along with the autocracy or monarchy or dictatorship or anything like that, and it was one of most challenging experiments taken to be conducted out of desperation to make the world a better place for the next generation. 

They congratulated themselves by celebrating democracy

Source: Wikipedia

and by nourishing the baby democracy.

These days have seen immense improvement in health, lifestyle, life expectancy (in this time humans have doubled the genetically predicted life expectancy), education, and a lot of other factors. This development was largely a result of an improved educational approach and improved methods and means of maternal care. Better investment and innovation started the chain reaction required to stay paced on the path of civilization. Some of its results include lowered frequency of war, increased life expectancy, lowered child and maternal mortality, and these all triggered the population explosion, unseen in the history of mankind.

Increased population paved the way for previous problems to come back that include unequal resource distribution and this led a fragment of society toward illiteracy. With literacy went the logical approach to understanding the importance of democracy.

As they inherited this democracy from their parental generation they merely looked over nourishing it, although that is at a very young stage that is about only 50-60 years old in comparison to the 10000 years old civilization.

This lack of nourishment and protection thing paving dictatorship and autocracy in countries all around the globe causing an overall deterioration of democracy worldwide. And this is a matter of serious concern as we have seen those dictatorship, autocracy, monarchy, kingship type of things and we have also seen what they have caused to the lives of people. And we have also seen the impact of democracy and its effect on population explosion which is an accumulative result of great reform and improvement in fields that improve the lifestyle of humans that includes education, healthcare, resource distribution like things. 

And having seen all those and after reading historical records, we can easily compare which form of government did contribute the most to the development of human beings as a species. Democracy wins this battle. And it is also in the records that democracy came up to take over the previous system that was based on exploiting people’s bodies, literally. And not as a supplement to all those blood-sucking forms of governments, where power is concentrated to a handful of people.

So, with democracy came the changes which favored the development of all together. So, with democracy, this thing is also deteriorating rapidly, and it’s not my words, these are reported by some of the most prestigious institutions devoted to the protection of democracy. These institutes include Freedom House, Reporters without Border, Radio Free Asia, etc. 

The mentioned institutions carry out experiments and surveys to assess democratic practices by countries and publish their findings openly, and they are quite a reliable source of such information as they are not involved in the formation of governments and they do not rely on governmental advertisement as a source of money and they are mostly public-funded. 

So, on this reliance, we can say that “Democracy is deteriorating”. It is not that it is not recognized, it is even named the “Democratic backsliding”, and this thing is on the rise in the last decade, i.e. in the 2010s, and is continuing. 

And it is happening in front of our eyes. Sometimes as the formation of illiberal democracy in Poland and Hungary,

Source : London School of Economics Blogs

sometimes as direct overthrowing of democracy (twice) by “military junta” in Thailand, 2006 & 2014, as the implementation of one-man dictatorship in Cambodia through the dissolution of opposition in 2017, and on some other times as de-democratization of the Maldives in 2018. As of 2020, the number of people living in democracies is less than the figure, that was present at the end of the cold war. These are merely the consequences and not the cause.

The cause lies in the previously mentioned “democratic backsliding of the 2010s”, this thing brought economic inequality and social discontent, and personalism to levels closer to the pre-democratic era, aided by factors such as government manipulation of civil society by toxic polarization, racism, nativism, foreign disinformation campaign and taking away of power from oppositions.

These causes make things worse for democracy and thus are unhealthy for the world. Records say that no form of government does development better than a democracy, and hence these reasons should be uprooted. The best way to do that is by uprooting those things from the mind of the citizens, and there are thousands of ways of doing that. 

The most important part is that IT SHOULD BE DONE to protect what we inherited from our parents and want to pass on to the next generation.

And we need to understand the word of Alex Moore well, that 

“People shouldn’t be afraid of their government, government should be afraid of their people”.

And this truly depicts the power of citizens in a democracy.