HAIM HARARI

Democracy
may be on its way out. Future historians
may determine that Democracy will have
been a one-century episode. It will disappear. This is a sad, truly dangerous, but very
realistic idea (or, rather, prediction).
Falling
boundaries between countries, cross border
commerce, merging economies, instant global
flow of information and numerous other
features of our modern society, all lead
to multinational structures. If you extrapolate
this irreversible trend, you get the entire
planet becoming one political unit. But
in this unit, anti-democracy forces are
now a clear majority. This majority increases
by the day, due to demographic patterns. All democratic nations have slow, vanishing
or negative population growth, while all
anti-democratic and uneducated societies
multiply fast. Within democratic countries,
most well-educated families remain small
while the least educated families are growing
fast. This means that, both at the individual
level and at the national level, the more
people you represent, the less economic
power you have. In a knowledge based economy,
in which the number of working hands is
less important, this situation is much
more non-democratic than in the industrial
age. As long as upward mobility of individuals
and nations could neutralize this phenomenon,
democracy was tenable. But when we apply
this analysis to the entire planet, as
it evolves now, we see that democracy may
be doomed.