liberalism is a dominant ideology of our age nowadays it represents the status quo and it is responsible for spreading the system of liberal democracy throughout the world however both its critics and its truest Believers will admit that it is a very fragile system in the 20th century we've seen countless attempts to establish democracies that have failed miserably but why is democracy liberal democracy such a fragile system this will be the topic of today's essay foreign with the Enlightenment and the general skepticism that followed it the system of Divine Right monarchy started to lose its credibility this meant that other theories of government had to be found to replace it which was a great problem since almost all previous civilizations were based on the concept of divine right the only two exceptions were the Roman Republic and the Athenian democracy the core idea of both of these systems is that the government is legitimate because it represents the citizens and their interests the intellectuals of the early Enlightenment use this fundamental idea as an inspiration for their own systems the social contract is the First Fundamental idea of modern democratic thought the core idea is that the legitimacy of a government comes from protecting the health of the people before civilization humans lived in a state of nature where they were free to do anything including raping and murdering each other however in order to have civilization we had to give up some of these freedoms to the government in exchange the government has the duty to protect the people and their interests and if it were to fail to do so the social contract would be broken and the government would become illegitimate Thomas Hobbs developed the first version of social contract theory even if he was a monarchist and a strict one at that his main idea was that the worst possible thing that could happen is anarchy he called such a state the war of all against all and it is understandable that he thought like this since he lived through the English Civil War and because he had such a pessimistic view of human nature he believed that humans are naturally selfish violent and cruel to one another and only a strong State can bring them into line therefore the state should do all in its power to avoid this state of Anarchy the title of his magnum opus was Leviathan it refers to the view of the perfect strong and all-encompassing state however he left one fundamental right to the people if the king did not hold his side of the contract if he did not protect the health of the people then the people had the right to oppose him although this was a very reactionary world view because he was a monarchist and the government was absolute it was still very very revolutionary for the time because that meant that the peasants had the right to throw the king out the second key writer is John Locke who accepted hopp's idea of the social contract but liberalized it First Lock did not have the same idea of human nature as Hume did therefore he was not as drastic in his philosophy his vision of the social contract states that all humans have the right to Liberty and that they willingly give up part of this right to the state which should work is nothing more than an impartial judge to safeguard the natural rights of the citizen and that the state should represent the people because of popular consent he holds that man has natural rights to life liberty and property you can see where the American Founders took their Theory from essentially he is to liberalism what Marx is through socialism the third and final writer that I will talk about is Jean-Jacques Clouseau he introduced the idea of the general will which is the second fundamental idea of liberalism the idea of the general will is probably nothing new to us living in the most democratic time in human history but to an outsider it must be quite strange the core idea is that the legitimacy of a government comes from representing the wishes of the people the people have a collective will and this will can be interpreted by asking everybody to vote based on these votes we can establish illegitimate people's government to give a quick definition liberalism is in its most basic sense a materialist ideology that derives its legitimacy from the people both by being elected by them and by caring for them in the 20th century liberalism has become the ideological hegemon of the world through military and economic conquests even today the typical enemies of liberal democracy dress in their language for example the Democratic People's Republic of Korea even the Warlords of this world pay their tribute to democracy the power that they won through the sword is later justified by holding staged elections and calling themselves president even though they are de facto dictators but despite the success that liberal democracy has enjoyed it still has one fatal flaw two of the ideas that were developed by the enlightenment philosophers are at odds with each other and this discrepancy is the reason that democracy is and always will be a fragile system modern liberal democracies have one strange irregularity the word democracy is a very positive word but a synonym of democracy does not enjoy the same praise quite the contrary it carries a very negative connotation this synonym of democracy is populism the key idea of both democracy and populism is that political legitimacy comes from the people and their interests the only difference is that populism is used in a derogatory sense well democracy is not populism is commonly used against movements that have popular support that are against the status quo the established institutions are not ready to let the paroles run the show even if they have a majority but this strange contradiction reveals something deeper about the philosophical base of democracy the social contract is good on the grounds that it acts for the health of the people it is for the people the general will is good because it represents the wishes of the public it is by the people but what happens when the people want something that is not good for them what happens when they want things that will bankrupt the economy or what if the majority of the people are in favor of discriminating against the minority it is not difficult to imagine scenarios where the health of the people and their desires are contradictory therefore the two pillars of democratic thought the health of the people and the general will are in constant tension and in such a conflict one value has to reign supreme and now my dear viewer if you're a True Believer in democracy you must choose which one is more important if the health of the people is more important then you will drift towards epinevolent and paternalistic dictatorship that will protect the population from their own desires if the general will is more important than the health of the people then you will have movements that will wield absolute power in the name of the people but not always to their benefit the fall of the Weimar Republic was a perfect example where the general will defeated the health of the people and the country basically destroyed itself and was a willing participant throughout the whole process in other cases the health of the people defeats the general will and the government becomes paternalistic and authoritarian like in Singapore you cannot have two principles for the base of an ideology and this will be a recurring theme Nietzsche said that virtues are jealous beings you cannot have two because they will forever fight for Supremacy whenever they have different answers to the same problem when it comes to making a decision you cannot have two answers because you're not treating us cat there is only one course of action either you go left or you go right whenever you have to make a decision and you have two different answers from two different values you will have to choose which one of these values is more important to you this sort of ideological schizophrenia is not good any sort of contradiction will lead to a poor capacity to take action every ideology can only have one main principle and all others must be subservient to it or the ideology will be indecisive and fragile however the choice between the health of the people and the general will is not an easy one and therefore is avoided and indeed the whole state apparatus of modern liberal democracies one big Contraption to avoid this very choice to avoid this contradiction we have a system where in theory the people have all the power but in practice they are just given enough power so they cannot do anything stupid with it in the real world the general will is primarily constrained by the Overton window the Overton window is the range of acceptable opinions within a society and the opinions that are outside this area are seen as radical when an idea is outside of the window it will not matter because nobody will follow it at least publicly even if the majority of the population holds this idea privately few will admit it nobody in East Berlin would admit that they wanted to demolish the Berlin wall but when they could they did the Overton window is such a fascinating topic because it has to do with intuition In Crowd psychology everyone has a rough idea of the opinions that are inside and outside of the overtone window in our current political climate we call such opinions that are outside of the window Politically Incorrect which is by the way a Soviet term if you're reading this essay chances are that you have felt the feeling of knowing that your opinion is something outside of the Overton window this causes an inner split between our true opinions that we personally hold and our visible opinions that we believe will be accepted by the people around us the emotion at the core of political correctness and of the Overton window is fear of exclusion whoever can apply social fear to certain ideas can ban them without even having to lift a finger and it also works in Reverse whoever can apply a social praise to certain ideas can instantly make them popular if you had the power to decide which opinions are within the Overton window it would also be possible to move the visible public opinion in One Direction while their true opinion remains hidden and will only come out with their friends with the help of three or four glasses of wine this great power of moving the Overton window and controlling the visible opinions of millions belongs to the press the Press has the power to decide how the population perceives a certain event and as a result the Press has the power to shape public opinion the consensus of the main newspapers will be the future opinion of the public this is a domino effect the more people that shift their visible opinions to be politically correct the stronger the pressure will be to do so of course there are many institutions that try to move the Overton window to one side or the other but some carry more weight than others CNN carries far more weight than something like Fox News and let's not even talk about like Breitbart or something the general will can be constrained but it cannot be rendered powerless without losing political legitimacy in a concrete sense all democratic governments have to give in to popular demand to a certain extent if a politician wants to be popular he has to do two things promise things that the electorate desires and avoid the problems that the electorate does not want to face the best example is the debt problems the many countries have nowadays there are many examples but I will focus on the U.S the U.S debt has been accumulating for many years now and the deficit tends to get bigger every year so why is it that this self-evident problem has not been addressed for the past 40 years well cutting deficit means defunding existing institutions and programs and no matter what you take somebody will not like it so budget cuts are essentially political suicide when it comes to campaign promises all politicians try to dangle treats in front of the voters to try to get them to bite it is plain and simple marketing to the masses there is no more complexity to it so there is no more need for me to talk about in the words of tocqueville the American Republic will endure until the day that Congress discovers that it can bribe the public with the Public's money liberalism is the most successful ideology in the 20th century by much but I believe that in the 21st century its weaknesses will become more and more evident due to the incredible amount of wasted money and energy needed to maintain its inherent contradiction I cannot imagine a world where everything stays stable but the biggest problem that liberal democracies will have to face is they cannot take decisive decision and action when problems arise for example how can a such a fragile system cope with something like basic artificial intelligence let's imagine that we create a program that can take over all jobs that require less than 90 IQ points this means that the people who have less than 90 IQ points about one quarter of the general population are not profitable anymore sure a couple of them could make manual labor as plumbers or construction workers but the inevitable result would be that Millions would be without employment and they would not be profitable to employ this would mean that a large percentage of the population would still have to live somehow this will probably lead to a large part of society living off the government I would imagine that having millions of people with nothing to do is it not not really a recipe for a healthy Society but how can a liberal democracy deal with this problem would it restrict the use of AI in the economy and even if that meant economic stagnation in becoming internationally uncompetitive would the government simply try to buy its problems off with increasing welfare or would the government restrict the liberty of the individual and tell him that he has to work even if it's not profitable I don't think that A variation of this problem would be Unthinkable in the next 50 years it's already happening to a certain extent in the industrial towns of the West due to automatization and third world labor I mean Detroit used to be a booming City do you think that our current system could manage a serious problem like that if it cannot even manage its own deficit I don't really think so because such a problem would force a clear decision when the government has not made up its mind to what value is most important to it then this system cannot take decisive action and therefore cannot deal with real threats the world does not treat half-assed work kindly all systems think that they will last forever but no one has done it yet and I really doubt that our liberal Democratic status quo can manage it I have not even gotten into the other pressures that it will face in the coming decades like demographic decline resource scarcities and Wars I would be surprised if most of our dear liberal democracies do make it into the 22nd century especially if they do not fix their weird schizophrenia