There is more information available to us than ever before. We moved from oral story traditions to the printed word, then to widely available media and education and now to the internet being in everyone's pocket. The access and volume of information available to us is increasing exponentially. At the same time, people's capacity to interpret information is not increasing. We are as smart as we have ever been (perhaps even a little less so). With busier lives we have less time to analyse that information; overall our capacity is probably diminishing.
Depending on your point of view, we may be drowning in information. There must have been a knowledge inflection point in history, perhaps sometime in the 19th or 20th century, when the available information matched our ability to absorb and analyse it. Before that people were ignorant, knowledge blocked to them. During this inflection point, people were not perfect, but they were able to understand the world around them and attempt to act on it in an informed way. The gap between their knowledge level and reality closed. After this point, we are not necessarily worse off, but we are at risk of being overwhelmed. We have to consume and analyse so much to stay informed of our environment and we may not be able to keep up. As a crutch, we may rely on authorities, experts or snap decisions. They can all lead us astray - intentionally if they are another person, or from ignorance if its a decision based on missing information.
Democracy is decisions. Specifically, who makes them; the deimos or the government. We always face a risk that we may make bad decisions. But now, because we may not have the time to properly analyse the choices available to us the risk may be higher than expected. If we do decide to trust voices of authority, we are back at square one, since we have to analyse them and decide if they are trustworthy. They may be biased or have hidden agendas. Finally, making snap decisions, often based on prejudices, while expedient, can also lead to errors.
The cynic might say that; life is a farce, and that democracy is little more than the lunatics running the asylum. How true that statement is depends on a few things. When in history are you looking? What is the governing system? How well informed were the people; was it around the time of the knowledge inflection point? Most western countries are representative republics, not full democracies. For a full democracy you would need proportional representation, ideally with a referendum on every decision and law proposed by the government. Is it a problem that we don't have full democracies? No. At the same time, we should not take for granted the voting process in electing representatives that align to our values (for example MPs in the UK).
We need to keep one thing in mind. There is a gap between the knowledge of the overall population and the reality of any situation (as best as we can understand it). That knowledge gap can be on anything; for which party to vote for, climate change or how to balance the economy. And this gap is a variable. If the gap is getting wider, people will find it harder to figure out what the right choices are. How close we become to the metaphorical lunatics becomes uncomfortably relevant. I don't have an easy answer - AI perhaps but that isn't an answer. Be mindful, critical, take the time to analyse things and don't be suckered in by any person or group. The last place we want to end up living in, is the asylum.
