Modern liberal democracy is praised in a universalistic Western view as
the best political system and a quasi-prerequisite for full acceptance
by the community of traditional hegemonial States. However, democracy is
fully developed in only less than five percent of States globally, and
in decline in most Western countries. In this book, democracy is
presented as a political system in danger due to its intrinsic flaws and
tendency to self-destruction. The major flaw is that "human nature" is
not adequately considered in democracy's conception: its citizens, "We,
the people", as individuals and as crowds, are liberated into a
dangerous ideology prioritizing "freedom from society" over "membership
in society" and thereby causing decline in libertinism, hedonism and
polarization in divided and finally broken societies. Proposals to
resolve the rapidly growing crisis include education of citizens into
the ethics of reciprocal altruism, grounded in evidence from biological
sciences and humanities, professionalization of politics, and a
fundamental change of politics towards evidence-based decision-making,
thus ending politicking, politicians' personality affairs, and the cold
war of political parties, the representative of class warfare in the
sheep-skin of "interest-group pluralism". The author uses his background
in human biology and psychology to discuss the relevance of
philosophical and politological issues around democracy raised in past
and recent literature, and to highlight the prospects of using
scientific knowledge for evidence-based socialization of the "human
factor".
