Democracy Rising is a series of blog posts on deliberative democracy: what it is, why it’s powerful, why the time is right for it, how it works, and how to get it going in your community. The series originates in the United States but will discuss principles and draw upon examples from around the world. Views and opinions expressed in each post are those of the individual contributor(s) only.
I. The Great Divorce
In 2007 the publishers of the Oxford Junior Dictionary released an updated edition, which alert readers noticed was missing a few things. The publishers conceded that they had dropped some entries which were felt to be “no longer relevant” to children’s lives.[1] These included acorn, adder, ash, beech, bluebell, buttercup, catkin, conker, cowslip, cygnet, dandelion, fern, hazel, heather, heron, ivy, kingfisher, lark, mistletoe, nectar, newt, otter, pasture and willow.
However, to bring kids up to speed with the modern era, the new edition added attachment, blog, broadband, bullet-point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut-and-paste, MP3 player, and voice-mail.
In a nutshell—a word that does not appear in the OJD—this points to one of the deep roots of the polycrisis: we think nature is optional. The 2007 OJD was only a minor milestone in a long history of divorcing ourselves from nature. A few other signs and portents:
- For a couple of centuries now we have been increasing our command of enormous amounts of energy. That energy, and the technologies that leverage it, have allowed unprecedented manipulation of nature, from mountaintop mining and trawling the depths of the oceans to altering the flow of rivers and changing the climate itself.
- Migration to cities over the centuries has resulted in more than half of humanity living in urban environments. Separated from the countryside, many people grow up having no idea where food comes from, and children often suffer “nature deficit disorder.”
- For those bored with the real world, virtual reality headsets and game consoles (not to mention smart phones and social media) allow easy inhabitation of alternate bodies, personas, worlds, and even universes. Global sales of VR games, worth US$400 million in 2017, are projected to rise 17-fold to US$6.9 billion in 2025.
- Frictionless consumerism has helped to create what psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe calls a “culture of uncare”—the product of a “globalized deregulated economy” in which we are more anxious about our next Amazon order than the health of the planet.
- Artificial intelligence has advanced to the point that some observers believe that the arrival of convincing and competent robot servants, companions, and lovers is imminent.
- It is now possible to order a CRISPR kit and start editing genes in your kitchen. Soon, perhaps, nerdy sixth-graders will be breeding glow-in-the-dark hamsters. Or maybe, if they have a grudge, lethal viruses.[2]
Then there is the idiotic enthusiasm for colonizing Mars, which is some people’s answer to the question, so what if Earth increasingly seems past its sell-by date? No matter; we’ll just start over somewhere else. The appeal of this fantasy to 14-year-olds mesmerized by triumphalist science fiction is obvious, but adults should know better. Colonizing Mars would be a staggeringly costly, risky, and misguided effort to make an unlivable planet livable, while we proceed headlong to make a perfectly livable planet deadly.[3]
Our hominin ancestors faced many threats and climate bottlenecks on the road to the industrial age, and many of our evolutionary cousins didn’t make it. Homo sapiens came pretty close to snuffing it as well, probably more than once. We now are approaching another bottleneck, but this one—the polycrisis—is of our own making.[4]
It stems from a fundamental law of ecosystems: a species’ population keeps growing, expanding, and acquiring resources unless it is checked by external forces such as predators and competitors. Without those checks, growth continues until resources are used up and the habitat is exhausted and polluted; collapse inevitably follows. Humans have found, in modernity, a way to accelerate this process using fossil energy. The resulting sense of mastery is temporary and illusory, but everyone alive today has grown up in the industrial capitalist age and most don’t realize that.
Nature finds ways for the infinitely complex web of life to preserve itself, in some form, from many threats. But the biosphere is not Sesame Street. It is not a collaborative of species all consciously striving to maintain a safe and habitable environment for all. Nature and evolution are indifferent to the welfare of individual species, including humans. And as millions of humans living outside of the bubble of privilege enjoyed by the rich can testify, nature often seems malevolent and may kill you if you’re not on your toes, or even if you are.
As the American philosopher Holmes Rolston III pointed out, this ambivalence is built in to reality:
Nature is wilderness yet paradise, demonic yet divine, asset yet enemy, jungle yet garden, harsh yet healing, means for man yet end in itself, commodity yet community, the land provoking man’s virility yet evoking his sentimentality. …[T]he pioneer slays what most he loves. There is oscillation: aggressivenesss/submission, exploitation/respect, struggle/harmony, insular man/man grafted to his landscape, independence/relatedness, man the conquering engineer/man the biotic citizen.[5]
Nature discards species all the time and most that have ever existed are now extinct. Nor does it take a freak event like a huge asteroid strike; past climate bottlenecks wiped out plenty of species by obliterating their habitats. The paleontologist Peter Ward even argues that life itself has more than once caused the mass extinction of life (the Medea Hypothesis). (It seems to be happening again, as humans—which are part of nature—drive species to extinction at record rates.) And life can be short in geologic terms: cockroaches and sharks have been around for hundreds of millions of years, but some species only lasted 1 or 2 million.
Humans have found answers to most of the threats nature has thrown at us, except ourselves. The growth imperative governs all species, but our globalized, industrial, consumerist, largely capitalistic economy—a human cultural invention enabled by fossil fuels—has turbocharged and vastly scaled up Homo sapiens’s pursuit of growth. GIC is terrific for the minority that enjoys its benefits; the only flaw is that it appears to be self-terminating. So now we are staring at the failures of our success.
II. We ❤ Moloch
The big reason for the Great Divorce is that humans have invented and mostly now live in what has been called the Superorganism (Nate Hagens), the Machine (writer Paul Kingsnorth), Moloch (psychiatrist and blogger Scott Alexander), or simply Modernity (Do the Math’s Tom Murphy).[6] Of these labels Moloch is perhaps the most vivid, because it traditionally referred to a terrifying, ancient Caananite god that required human sacrifice, especially of children. Scholars disagree about that, but as a term for “a destructive force or system that demands sacrifice,” it’s compelling in a Lovecraftian way and has long been used to label scary things, ideas, and practices. The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg wrote a powerful poem about Moloch, which Scott Alexander explicated in a long, moving essay in 2014.
So let’s go with Moloch. What’s Moloch?
Broadly speaking, it’s the whole industrialized, globalized, intertied, corporate, comprehensive, inescapable, capital- and growth-driven, high energy and -throughput, consumption-oriented socio/political/economic system within which we are all embedded and bureaucratized, financialized, Power-Pointed, Panopticon-ic and regimented, 8-hour-dayed, no-left-turned, live-streamed, sit-commed, Amazoned and Facebooked, data- and -money-milked, 24-hour-news-cycled, Dairy-Queened, and Star-Linked. This vast furball envelops us psychically like water does fish, affects and touches everyone, and penetrates throughout all aspects of life. It’s amoral, nobody is in charge, and in many ways nobody wants it—but its actions unfold relentlessly according to the system’s own internal logic. “It is its own enchantment,” as Kingsnorth has written. Moloch incentivizes individual and collective behaviors that are ultimately destructive—to us and to the rest of the biosphere as well.
If the Canaanite Moloch was said to feed on children, the modern Moloch feeds on energy. It is massive energy flows upon which Moloch was built and which keep it going. For most of human existence, available energies were all renewable: human muscle power fueled by food, later supplemented by fire and domesticated animal labor. Available energy was thus minuscule until we learned to tap coal, oil, and natural gas, use them to drive machinery, and eventually launch the Industrial Revolution. Every key feature of modernity—our numbers, food, housing, transportation, medicine, science, space travel, leisure, entertainment; in effect, our entire culture—floats on this huge river of energy.
Some argue that we don’t have nearly enough energy and that more energy is always good. To be sure, abundant energy brings many benefits; for starters, energy consumption and economic growth are highly correlated, and billions of people still suffer energy poverty relative to those living in industrialized nations. This lack of energy can be a source of great suffering and misery, not just in retail form—as in having to cook over a smoky fire while choking on fumes and particulate matter—but wholesale as well, as when energy poverty forces masses of people into lifestyles of perpetual drudgery.
But cheap, abundant energy has also had a huge and mostly unacknowledged downside. Economic growth, driven by abundant energy, converts the natural world to the built/human world, in the process wreaking devastation as we pursue our evolutionary strategy of maximizing our presence on the planet. We decapitate mountains for strip mines, clear forests for grazing land and rubber plantations, level the countryside for cities and suburbs, drench our fields with manufactured nitrogen and phosphorus which then runs off and kills marine habitats, over-harvest and acidify the oceans to the point that fish populations collapse, dam rivers and even change their courses, and so on, and on. Moloch, with its unslakeable thirst for energy, is the godfather of the polycrisis. It seems unstoppable.
It’s not, of course: as Stein’s Law famously asserts, if something cannot go on forever, it will stop. So it is with Moloch, which is unsustainable. Its own internal contradictions will eventually shut it down. It would be better for all concerned if we stopped it first in a planned way, but the prospects of that are slim at best.
Not that people aren’t trying. Technoptimists believe that Moloch can be tamed, if only the right suite of current and hypothetical technologies—solar and wind, electrifying everything, massive improvements in energy efficiency, vertical farms, carbon capture, etc.—can be funded, developed, proved, scaled, and built out world-wide by 2030, or 2050, or whenever.[7]
But the prospects of replacing fossil fuels with renewables and/or nuclear energy, while at the same time maintaining our global, high-throughput and high-consumption economy, are dismal. Apostles of the “energy transition” routinely note the declining costs of renewables (the apparent costs, that is—not the true costs) and trot out statistics showing that new wind and solar installations account for most new electricity generating capacity in a given year. But those additions are only for electricity, and they haven’t displaced fossil generation, just added to it as global demand for energy continues to rise. Global consumption of fossil energy rose about 1.5 percent from 2023 to 2024; total carbon emissions rose in parallel. Even consumption of coal, the most reviled of fossil fuels, broke records in 2024. As of that year, fossil fuels accounted for 87 percent of global energy consumption from all sources.[8]
If we can’t readily replace fossil fuels, what are the prospects for reducing them? What about a managed retreat? Couldn’t rising alarm finally break through the surreal complacency and spur a massive program of decarbonization in transport, heating, cooling, and manufacturing? Imagine a scenario in which climate trends continue along current lines, and there are more and more heat waves, droughts, and wild storms with their attendant flooding, plus vicious cold snaps here and there as the jet stream wobbles due to the changing Arctic sea ice’s effects on temperature differentials. And then possibly the already-weakening Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (the ocean conveyor belt) declines further or stops, which could turn western Europe’s climate into something approaching Siberia’s. How likely is it that our response will be to launch a crash project to eliminate fossil fuels and draw down atmospheric carbon?
Hope springs eternal, but even if politicians stepped up everywhere and urged their constituencies to make the lifestyle changes necessary to slash carbon emissions, that would be a very tall order. And carbon emissions and the attendant climate warming are only one aspect of the much bigger dilemma of overshoot: the unsustainable extraction of both renewable and non-renewable resources, the destruction of habitat for other species, the saturation of the biosphere with plastics, “forever chemicals,” and all the other accidental byproducts of modernity, and so on. Reducing carbon emissions without addressing those issues is futile, yet the latter are equally or more challenging.
Some measure of those challenges is given by the history of attempts to rein in carbon emissions. There have been 31 Conferences of the Parties (COP) since the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Summit conference that officially acknowledged climate change and declared it an existential problem for humanity. Carbon emissions have risen every year since then except one (2020, during the Covid pandemic, which sharply curtailed global economic activity).
What about the other aspects of our overshoot? The Global Footprint Network offers a methodology for calculating a community’s “ecological footprint”: how much of the Earth’s resources it uses per capita, expressed in terms of hectares of globally-averaged productive land area. If each person on the planet used no more than the resources produced by 1.7 global hectares, on average, humanity would be living sustainably and could continue to do so.
Now, consider Vancouver, British Columbia, a city that is trying harder than many to be “green.” According to a recent assessment, Vancouver’s per-capita ecological footprint is about 5 global hectares. What would it take to reduce that to the sustainable level of 1.7 hectares?
Quite a lot:
[I]f average Vancouverites followed a vegan diet; avoided driving or flying and only walked, cycled, or used public transit; lived in a passive solar house that used almost no fossil-based energy; and cut their personal consumption by half, they could only reduce their per capita Ecological Footprint by 44 percent (…to 2.8 gha per capita).[9]
Still way too high. (This is a problem of the affluent developed world; elsewhere, hundreds of millions of people are already living below the sustainable average, and suffering for it.)
But further suppose that, somehow, the rich nations managed to enact policies that sharply reduced their carbon emissions and their contributions to the other dimensions of the polycrisis. Things would begin to improve in some dimensions immediately, but in others recovery would take much longer. Imagine voting for such radical change and then learning that the atmosphere will continue to be warmer than usual for decades and sea levels will continue to rise through the rest of the 21st century, no matter what ordinary people do. That’s a prescription for voter rage and political suicide for governments.
It seems much more likely that rich nations will acquire and burn all the coal, oil, and natural gas they can find to cool buildings when it’s sweltering and heat them when it’s frigid, and to pump water from dying aquifers or distant fresh water sources to irrigate crops[10]—thereby further amplifying the polycrisis. Poorer nations unable to compete in those energy markets will simply suffer. Many of their people will leave and look for a better life in wealthier places.
At the other end of the policy spectrum from the technoptimist vision is degrowth. There are varying views on what degrowth means, but the Degrowth Institute defines it as “an intentional downscaling of the global economy for the purpose of achieving ecological sustainability and social justice.”[11] Degrowthers generally believe that the technoptimist vision can’t or won’t happen, or would introduce a whole new set of unanticipated problems, and in any case ignores critical dimensions of the polycrisis. The only effective response, they argue, is to halt and reverse the endless economic growth at the beating heart of Moloch and which is deranging the planet’s systems. Many degrowthers propose an approach called “contraction and convergence”—basically, everyone would edge toward some sustainable middle ground in terms of wealth and consumption, and thus resource use. This would require persuading hundreds of millions of rich people to live simpler lives, thus freeing up resources and ecological space so that the lives of the billions of not-so-rich people can be safer, healthier, and more comfortable. The poor cohort would also have to give up the consumerist life-style aspirations Moloch has encouraged. In every dimension, a tall order indeed.
No wonder people succumb to technoptimist fantasies that comfort us with painless ways to get us to “one-planet living.”
Aggressive pursuit of the technoptimist future might actually speed the arrival of the degrowth/collapse future. Suppose (however improbable) that fusion energy, hot or cold, turns out to be physically and economically viable, and in a few years essentially unlimited energy is available to all. In the past, whenever humans have had surplus energy we’ve used it to reshape the environment to our liking and convenience; the more energy, the more sweeping and violent the changes. To date, cheap and abundant energy has led to the vast expansion of human numbers and conversion of nature to the built world, and thus the compromise and erasure of ecosystems and carrying capacity. There is no reason to think the generations to come will behave any differently. Climate change is only the poster child of the polycrisis and the other dimensions noted above would continue to worsen without other measures.
III. House of Cards
The polycrisis is cracking the foundation of human thriving on Earth, but as if that weren’t enough, we have other problems too. Intertwined with these deep contextual changes are multiple geopolitical threats: political polarization, superpower rivalries and proxy wars, the ongoing and even expanding risk of nuclear exchanges, enormous public and private debt, the risk of rogue unilateral climate engineering projects, and the accelerating development of artificial intelligence, to name a few. Polycrisis-related disruption of agriculture, increasingly turbulent weather, sea-level rise, etc., will only aggravate these risks as they trigger mass displacements of peoples. Cyclical political crises such as the empire end-game political decline which the United States appears to be undergoing[12] will compound these disruptions and ramify across the globe in multiple ways.
We are swept along in a tide of massive change. There are two existential questions here: 1) Can any species, even humans, defy the compulsion of evolutionary biology and actually restrain itself from exhausting its habitat? And 2) Is humanity even capable of collaborating at the scale necessary to confront such a complex and monumental challenge? It will require hugely disruptive action across borders, classes, economies, ideologies, religions, and genders.
The evidence so far is not encouraging. There are numerous examples of small local communities sustainably managing precious resources over the long term, both now and in the past.[13] But there are many more examples of communities and cultures failing to do so and thereby declining, dispersing, and/or disappearing. There are no examples of mass society successfully confronting an existential environmental problem at a global scale (notwithstanding the 1987 Montreal Protocol for the protection of stratospheric ozone, which did not require anyone to make major lifestyle changes).
Apart from climate warming, polycrisis issues are not the stuff of conversation at corner delis or church socials. Mainstream media rarely cover them well, and never see them as different facets of a larger syndrome. Among a limited circle of worried people, there is endless talk about what’s happening, what the right thing to do is, and what options we have—a discourse that presumes we might actually exercise such a degree of collective agency, when in fact we have never done so. Humans are just not wired that way[14]; the vast ecological, economic, and social forces at work may be beyond our ability to steer coherently or even fully comprehend. As with any human enterprise, the bigger it gets, the more problems of coordination and conflicting interests arise to thwart effective collaboration.
It’s hard to resist the conclusion that collapse and degrowth of some sort are very likely. Degrowth, one argument goes, can’t be made to happen, but will happen by itself as a result of the polycrisis. If so, our most pressing task is to lay the groundwork for adapting to collapse as well as we can. Most of this work must be done locally so it can meet the wide varieties of local needs and circumstances.
If effective, collective, mass-scale action is beyond our reach, how might ordinary people respond to such large challenges? A framework for thinking about this was described by Albert O. Hirschman in his 1972 book Exit, Voice and Loyalty.[15] Hirschman argued that dissatisfied members of a failing organization can react either by leaving (exit)—a voter changes political parties, a consumer switches brands, a refugee emigrates—or, short of that, by voicing their complaints to their political parties, their governments, and the businesses they patronize.
Exit has a very long and ongoing history. Over the centuries many people have sought to evade centralized states’ attempts to corral, control, conscript, tax, and manage them, to “bring nonstate places and people to heel.”[16] In ancient times, they often escaped to “shatter zones”—areas that were topographically removed from central cities and difficult to access, such as swampy or mountainous country. This practice finds echoes in the United States with modern “prepper” relocations to the mountains of Tennessee, Idaho, Montana, and eastern Oregon and Washington. In many cases the motivations are similar.
Today, however, perhaps apart from remote tropical jungles, few places are truly out of reach of a determined government.[17] We live in an increasingly hyper-surveilled world. Private and government-run surveillance cameras have been proliferating for years and now number in the millions, not counting doorbell cameras. In China, there is reportedly one CCTV camera for every two people; in Britain it’s one per 13 people. There are also spies, informers, drones, surveillance aircraft, satellites that can read license plates, facial recognition software, infra-red devices that detect bodies through walls or foliage, the mass tracking and aggregation of freely (if unwittingly) offered personal information, and the expanding cooperation of governments and corporations in collecting and sharing data. China recently introduced a government-run digital ID system for the internet, bringing the web activities of the billion Chinese users permanently into the surveillance spotlight. Cities in the United States, led by New York, are assembling “vast, hidden repositories of data” on citizens with “no clear boundaries on how it can be used.”[18] Then there are the hundreds of millions of smartphones that can be hacked with mercenary spyware, and whose users are eager to shoot video of anybody doing anything and then post it on social media. For most of us the exits are rapidly closing.
Voice also has an ancient history, of course. In fact, when humans lived in small bands, voice was routinely exercised every day—living with 50 or 100 other people means you’re probably going to hear what everybody thinks. Perhaps we cherish voice because it’s built in to our sociology and has been for eons. Modern democracies enshrine voice, though in a lobotomized way: anybody can express an opinion and often does, on social media, and every couple of years millions go to the polls to vote for A or B. Once in a while we get to vote on a school bond issue.
This is not a robust use of voice. In democracies, we assume, policy is driven by the collective will of the voters as expressed in elections and subsequently by the representatives put into office. But in fact raising voices in this way quite often makes little difference. For one thing, ordinary people usually have little say in what the choices will be, because elites set the agenda by controlling the political apparatus and by shaping public preferences via corporate media. Voting choices are usually binary: the Republican or the Democrat, the center-right candidate or the center-left candidate (though ranked-choice voting and proportional representation are slowly gaining traction in some areas). And as the history of the United States vividly demonstrates, gerrymandering electoral districts to engineer majorities is irresistible to political parties.
An old graffito says that if voting mattered it would be illegal. That may sound cynical, but consider this: a large study of about 2,000 U.S. policy issues arising between 1981 and 2002 compared the preferences of voters, as revealed in polling, with policy outcomes. The preferences of poor voters (those in the lowest 10 percent by income) had no effect on policy. Surprisingly, neither did the preferences of the far-more-numerous median income voters. What mattered was the preferences of the top 10 percent of voters, and those of business lobbies.[19] Even in cases in which those groups do not oppose certain policies and others actively favor them, the machinery of politics may be tactically manipulated to be unresponsive to the majority’s wishes. Large majorities of U.S. voters favor sensible gun control measures and ensuring the right to abortions, yet both policy arenas are dominated by opponents.
The choice of voice or exit is affected by other factors as well. If exit is easy, people may be more likely to leave (switching detergent brands is simple), but if it’s hard (finding a new job, switching internet service providers, emigrating) or the alternatives are unappealing, protest may become more likely. In repressive organizations protest may be punished and exit difficult, in which case crypto-protests may be practiced: sabotage, evasion, foot-dragging, working to rule, poaching, squatting, starting malicious rumors, making anonymous threats, etc.[20] Loyalty to a brand or a country reduces the likelihood of exit and is strengthened when voice is rewarded by the responsiveness of the organization.
There are many circumstances in which both exit and voice are unviable or dangerous. As noted above, in political settings voice (i.e., voting, protests) is often simply ignored or actively suppressed by those in charge. Voice is difficult to muster at the scale required for major political change and may require years of dogged organizing to achieve critical mass and power.
To the extent that democracy in general is the preferred venue for voice, the news is unhappy. Democracy worldwide has been declining for years, as established democracies edge toward autocracy and existing authoritarian regimes deepen their repression. At the same time, the ability of mass movements to resist or reverse these trends also seems to be weakening. Nonviolent, people-power movements, which historically succeeded twice as often as armed rebellions, have seen their advantage narrow in recent decades, and both types of resistance are becoming less effective as opponents have become more adept at undermining, co-opting, or defeating them.[21]
What’s happening now in the United States and elsewhere is distressing but not aberrational. Over the centuries many historians have sought to identify patterns of development in nations and empires, seeking to explain how they rise and why they nearly always fall. A new discipline, cliodynamics, models these patterns by analyzing reams of data drawn from the historical and archaeological records.[22] According to cliodynamicist Peter Turchin, political instability and collapse are largely the result of widening gaps between a society’s elites and everyone else, plus what he calls “elite overproduction.”
Here’s how it generally goes, according to cliodynamics:
- Elites—power holders—typically are those rich enough to largely control their own lives, and at the highest level rich enough to shape others’ lives. Members of elites compete for this power and the social roles that embody and direct it.
- Elites use their power to create a “wealth pump”—mechanisms by which they manage to steer most of the available wealth and income in a society to themselves. This creates “immiseration” and anger, and thus political unrest.
- Elites inevitably overproduce, i.e., the number of aspirant members of the elite grows to exceed the power positions available. In the United States, the number of households worth at least $10 million grew 10-fold over the last 40 years or so (dollars adjusted for inflation). The total number of U.S. households increased by about half, so the share of deca-millionaire households went from 0.08 percent to 0.54 percent. This has happened while the fortunes of the average U.S. family have declined—and in fact has happened at their expense. From 1976 to 2016, for instance, the median real wage only increased by about 10 percent.[23]
- This combination of too many rich people competing for power and too many immiserated people—the hollowed-out middle class, the permanent poor—makes for dangerous political instability.
Turchin argues that restoring stability requires curbing elite overproduction, “…historically and typically by eliminating the surplus elites through massacre, imprisonment, emigration, or forced or voluntary downward social mobility.”[24]
It may be tempting to get rid of the elites, and it has been tried often, generally in coups d’etat or violent revolutions. But what usually happens is that one elite displaces another and keeps the political machinery of inequality going full tilt. There are always elites: “All large-scale, complex human societies have ruling classes,” Turchin says:
“…[T]here is always a small proportion of the population with a disproportionate share of social power….” As inevitably as day follows night, “[g]reat distinctions in power, wealth, and status inevitably follow the increase in the social scale. …A farming society could stay egalitarian, but only while people cooperated in small groups of hundreds or, at most a few thousand individuals. Once the size of a polity grows beyond tens of thousands and, especially, hundreds of thousands, it inevitably becomes hierarchical and unequal. There is no exception to this rule.”[25]
Moreover, the pattern of widening inequality and elite overproduction is routine enough to have been repeated many times: “[C]omplex human societies typically go through an alternation of integrative and disintegrative phases. …Our own age of discord is only starting.”[26]
Occasionally this cycle is interrupted without eliminating the elite. For example, the 1920s in the United States were marked by stock speculation and wild disparities in wealth, but the 1929 stock market crash and the Great Depression, along with the world war that followed, destroyed much wealth and helped encourage ruling elites to accept reforms that leveled the economic playing field. The booming economy during and after World War II brought new prosperity to millions and reduced the wealth gap.
That’s a striking exception to the rule, though. In our own time nearly a century later, things seem to be unfolding according to the pattern Turchin describes—with an additional wrinkle: a hundred years ago there was no artificial intelligence. A.I., among other horrific mid- or long-term possibilities, could dis-employ a lot of elite aspirants—lawyers, doctors, accountants, brokers, etc.—and disappoint millions of young college graduates, many of them hoping for slots at Harvard Law or JPMorganChase. That sounds quite destabilizing.
These developments, meanwhile, are unfolding in a context of unprecedented global ecological stress. The decline of ancient regional cultures was often triggered or accelerated by ecological stressors, such as droughts, soil exhaustion, or forest clearing. But never before now have so many insults been inflicted on the global biosphere with such relentless intensity or at such scale.
IV. Toward a [d]emocratic Crypto-revolution
Moloch is dying; he just doesn’t know it yet. The question is, what comes after? Especially in regard to the crucial matter of how to establish, secure, and exercise the power of governance for the benefit of all? A few years ago Joanna Macy pointed the way: “[Build] the new within the shell of the old. Don’t pour all your energy into defeating what’s already defeating itself.”[27]
Nobody knows the future. What seems to be unfolding before our eyes reflects a pattern, not fate, and resisting the assaults on existing democratic institutions is a worthy cause. But given the weight of historical experience, it would be wise to pursue an additional strategy, one that acknowledges the cyclical tendency of history and accepts that the world of 20 or 50 years hence won’t look like this one. That strategy ought to be a kind of benign subversion. The goal is to redistribute power downward and more fully express the principle of subsidiarity: allocating power in order to address issues and solve problems at the most appropriate level. Deep subsidiarity—engaging ordinary people with more than just local issues in order to create a better informed citizenry and more legitimate policy—would also make the people’s will clearer and enable holding decision makers at higher levels to better account.
Power seems to have certain tendencies. The most famous is expressed in Lord Acton’s dictum: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”[28] A corollary is the Iron Law of Oligarchy, which states that any organization will eventually evolve into an oligarchy, because any person or group that acquires a lot of power will always use it to advance their own interests.[29] Power is literally heady stuff—we see this over and over again in public figures and even among friends and acquaintances. The temptation to use one’s power to lord it over others—“[A]ll men would be tyrants if they could”[30]—or for personal enrichment is nearly irresistible, as is the urge to use power to gain more power.
Given this tendency, perhaps a rule for allocating power ought to be, Don’t give power to anyone who craves it. (Maybe find them a therapist instead.) This, of course, is the opposite of the principle at work in most current democratic systems, which reward ambitious people so desperate for power that they’re willing to submit to the rigors of the party system and the horrors of political campaigns. Once elected, they often cling to the powers and perks of office for decades.
It’s also been said that power abhors a vacuum. If a powerful actor drops out of a political system or weakens, its power will be grabbed by somebody else. Likewise, power left unexercised can easily be lost. Sometimes it’s even given away; in the United States, the Constitution reserves the power to declare war to the Congress, but America has been involved in numerous wars in recent decades at the behest of the President alone and Congress has done little about it. Likewise, levying tariffs originally was the purview of Congress, but it has delegated much of its tariff authority to the President since the 1930s.[31]
A useful lesson here is that if the people refuse their power, others will seize it. The evolution of culture over millennia seems to involve the gradual loss of bottom-level power as societies expand and centralize.[32] In modern representative democracies, which we like to think are the highest form of democratic governance, voters deliberately give away their power to elected officials. Sometimes voters are allowed to decide directly on an issue via a referendum, but those are highly managed events: clumsy and easily manipulated by parties, lobbyists, and special interests. Voters are presented with yes or no choices, not the opportunity to discuss, consider, and shape issues.
A related tendency is that the larger a specific polity becomes, the more power concentrates at the top and inequality deepens: “Once the size of a polity grows beyond the tens of thousands and, especially, hundreds of thousands, it inevitably becomes hierarchical and unequal. There is no exception to this rule.”[33] Conversely, it’s easier in a small polity to keep power relatively evenly distributed.
There is no silver-bullet solution for these tendencies, one that could permanently check them. Human society is inherently dynamic and especially so in its politics, and fluctuations in the concentration of power may be inevitable. But that very dynamicism means that opportunities for redistribution of power crop up all the time. The uncertainty and instability that loom ahead will undoubtedly create multiple such opportunities.
So is this a storm-the-Bastille moment?
If Joanna Macy is right, probably not. Of course we must resist the theft and corruption of our democracies and continue efforts to reform them, and millions of people around the world are engaged in this vital work of public witness and engagement. But we must also begin building new, better systems within the shells of the old, systems that can mitigate the pernicious power tendencies mentioned above. If we want to erode the influence of the elites, the best way may not be frontal assaults on existing constitutional- and representative structures. A more manageable and less grandiose strategy is to gradually supplant them—with local structures that slowly expropriate their power. One community at a time.
Which brings us to deliberative democracy, the premise and focus of this Democracy Rising series. Democracy should not be just “whatever the crowd wants,” as U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes put it.[34] Deliberative democracy is not just polling people for their opinions or asking them for their votes—it’s about radically altering the process by which people ordinarily engage in politics, that is, actually making it a process and not an isolated, often token act such as voting. The gist of the alteration is to create an ongoing system of calm, moderated, generally face-to-face settings that draw ordinary people in, allow every participant to express their own point of view and to acknowledge those of others, mutually explore common grounds, and define and then enact policies that address the community’s needs.
There are several advantages of this form of democracy over our current systems (some of them are discussed in DR 2). With reference to this essay, we began with an account of how humans have created a cultural bubble within which we imagine ourselves free and independent of nature. Although this belief is catastrophically wrong, most of us alive today have grown up with it and can’t see beyond it. But our social, political, economic, and ecological systems are increasingly under stress and in turmoil, and we need to lay the groundwork for localized governance that is better suited to a future of shorter supply chains, less energy, lower consumption, and fragmented and smaller polities, and therefore much greater reliance on the health and carrying capacity of the bio-regions immediately around our communities.
Another crucial benefit of deliberative democracy is its power to resist the rise of tyranny. The English political philosopher Bernard Crick argued that tyranny is the absence of politics. The converse truth is that politics is therefore “not just a necessary evil; it is a realistic good.”[35] If you wish to avoid tyranny, politics is inescapable, and the essence of politics is dealing with people who are not you and with whom you will inevitably sometimes disagree. As Crick saw it, “Politics involves genuine relationships with people who are genuinely other people, not tasks set for our redemption or objects for our philanthropy.”[36] Entering into such relationships is a way to exercise our social muscles and reduce social atrophy, which arises when we avoid social engagement of all sorts. Such avoidance has become increasingly troublesome in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the proliferation of social media, both of which have deepened the isolation and loneliness of millions. Restoring social muscle by investing ourselves in the practice of deliberative democracy not only would help relieve that isolation but also normalize the expectation of ordinary citizens’ right to make their own community decisions.
For that’s what deliberative democracy aims to do: to cultivate a citizenry that understands, accepts, and ultimately demands its proper role in governing communities—and willfully shoulders the responsibilities of citizenship. The purpose is to put citizens in charge. Deliberative democracy practioners resolutely argue that power is meant to shape policy that expresses the (carefully considered) will of the people. They are not seduced by ideologues or those smitten with the “cult of beautiful loserdom” who only wish to proclaim their superior virtue. Regardless of how and where we house ourselves in the future—megalopolises, towns, rural communes, small family farms, other arrangements—the foundation of governance should be numerous small groups of deliberating citizens. Citizens will have to build this world themselves; ruling elites rarely give away their power voluntarily.
How might this happen? Here’s one scenario, among many possibilities: imagine that a group of neighbors decides to meet informally but regularly, like a book club, to discuss issues of concern to their community. The organizers are savvy enough to design these events to be pleasant and rewarding—e.g., with refreshments, child care, follow-up and outreach, etc. This group persists and over time takes the shape of a neighborhood council, offering commentary and providing feedback and advice to officials about local policies. It begins to scrutinize the actions of bureaucratic staff and point out when they fail to support official policy. As it grows in membership and influence, it inspires similar groups elsewhere in the community, activating a kind of crowdsourcing, the tapping of “an immense intelligence,” in John Dewey’s words, that is freed when “it possesses the local community as its medium.”[37] Together the groups come to represent a sizeable number of the voters in that community, thus giving them informal political clout via candidate endorsements and knowledgeable critiques of official action and inaction. Perhaps each group even evolves into a kind of shadow cabinet—a counterweight to entrenched bureaucracies, cadres of officials, and political parties. Maybe they also eventually enter into power- and budget-sharing arrangements with local governments. All the while, the value and potency of deliberating bodies drawn from ordinary citizens becomes clearer to all. Next stop: a standing citizens assembly!
There are already thousands of practitioners, scholars, activists, and organizations supporting and midwifing deliberative bodies all around the world (many of them are listed in DR11 and referenced in other DR posts; see these index pages). This quiet hive of activity is helping to create an atmosphere of normalcy around the ideas of citizen engagement and participation—and educating ordinary people into the powers and satisfactions of citizenship conceived in this way.
We would be smart to deepen this sense of normalcy as rapidly as possible. Collapse, if it comes, will take many forms and unfold at different rates in different places. It will be disruptive to some degree for everyone, but some communities may emerge decades hence in relatively good shape, while others may succumb to chaos in the form of chronic banditry or predatory warlordism. A strong, pre-existing culture of civic democratic engagement could help protect communities from the latter fate, and we should nurture deep roots for democratic practices while we can.
A cautionary note: While the potential of deliberation is great and mostly untapped, let’s not get carried away. Like all other forms of governance, it’s a human enterprise and therefore flawed. Localized communities or polities can go off the rails, no matter how deliberative they are; deliberation is not a guarantee against tragedy, just an assurance against unexamined, unconsidered action.
But surely it should be possible to link our neighborhoods, towns, and cities in “communities of communities,”[38] helping to temper excesses, seeking locally appropriate adaptations to polycrisis-driven change, and making common cause with other polities when that is sensible. Where deliberation takes root, the community social capacity thus cultivated will better enable those polities to survive and prosper in a world in which an increasingly deranged biosphere stresses global social, political, and economic systems.
The hour is late to get started on this project, but the need has never been more urgent. In an era of strife and disruption, there is an ache for a system of governance in which citizens take a larger role in managing their own communities and contribute more meaningfully to the governance of the larger polities of which they are members. Millions of people have become heartsick and cynical about the narrow and impoverished character of our political discourse, and that’s what draws them to deliberation. The experience of deliberation shows that when people come together in a calm setting to think and talk about the issues that concern them collectively, interesting and positive things unfold: learning happens, and views shift and evolve. Sometimes people change their minds. Frequently they decide that people who disagree with them are not evil. They even become less susceptible to the kinds of one-dimensional and emotion-driven appeals that typify modern public politics, and less willing to accept the outcomes handed down by the hidden machinery of backroom governance.
Sometimes they rediscover, exhilaratingly, that the infantilizing institutions that cement deep hierarchies in control are not the only option for shaping community life.
Humans are status-seeking social fire apes, and we have to work with that. Three million years of hominid evolution have hard-wired us for functioning in small groups that are relatively “flat” in organizational terms, and are highly capable of self-organization and of checking the occasionally pathological impulses of some members. The jury remains out on whether this legacy equips us to confront and cope with complex, global problems requiring systemic thinking and collective action by billions of people. But it is mainly our institutions that both channel and mitigate the good and bad tendencies built into our hard wiring, and there are far more types of systems available to us, as demonstrated by the anthropological record, than we think. We owe it to ourselves to tap that history and refine our governance institutions in ways that align them with our evolutionary biology. These are “projects of collective self-creation.”[39] Perhaps our long experience of sitting around campfires together and talking about what’s going on in the world around us, and what we ought to do about it next, can be recovered and put to good use again.
[1] Robert Macfarlane, Landmarks (Penguin Books UK, 2015), p. 3.
[2] Bullet list adapted from Tom Prugh, “Deliberative Democracy and Gaianism: Natural Complements,” May 8, 2022: https://gaianway.org/deliberative-democracy-and-gaianism-natural-complements/.
[3] Mars is vastly far away; it has soils like toxic powdered glass and an atmosphere mostly of carbon dioxide; and it is blasted by planet-wide sandstorms and bombarded continously with lethal solar radiation owing to a lack of a magnetosphere. In 2016 NASA estimated the costs of a manned mission to Mars at about half a trillion dollars (about $640 billion in inflation-adjusted dollars in 2025). That’s just for getting somebody there and back, not trying to establish a permanent base—which would require repeated re-supply from Earth indefinitely. It’s also a rule of thumb that cost estimates for large engineering projects are always low. For a comprehensive review of the problems with colonizing Mars, see Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, A City on Mars (Penguin Science, 2024).
[4] “Polycrisis” here means mainly the many-faceted problems created by a human presence on Earth that is so large, extractive, and insatiable that it is straining the planet’s capacity to supply our needs and wants and to absorb our wastes. It includes the broad categories of climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, freshwater shortages, species migration, nitrogen and phosphorus overproduction, and so on. However, these are only the roughest groupings of possibly existential crises we face; for a short review of dozens of more specific issues, see Florian Ulrich Jehn, What Could Go Wrong, Resilience.org, July 16, 2025.
[5] Holmes Rolston III, in Phillip O. Foss, ed., Environment and Colorado: A Handbook (Colorado State University, 1973), p. 45.
[6] As conceived by their authors, these are not necessarily exactly the same thing but their characteristics extensively overlap and are grouped here on that basis.
[7] Not just tamed, either: “We believe in nature, but we also believe in overcoming nature. We are not primitives, cowering in fear of the lightning bolt. We are the apex predator; the lightning works for us.” From The Techno-optimist Manifesto, by Marc Andreesen (https://a16z.com/the-techno-optimist-manifesto/).
[8] See Energy Institute, Statistical Review of World Energy 2025, https://www.energyinst.org/statistical-review.
[9] Jennie Moore and William E. Rees, “Getting to One-Planet Living,” Chapter 4 in Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible? (Island Press, 2013), p. 45. See this reference for a fuller description of Vancouver’s ecological footprint.
[10] Which is already happening. See, for instance, Kurt Cobb, “Proposed East Texas Water Pipeline and the Growing Thirst for Distant Water,” Resource Insights, November 30, 2025; https://resourceinsights.blogspot.com/2025/11/proposed-east-texas-water-pipeline-and.html#more.
[11] Degrowth Institute, Has the Economy Outgrown the Planet?, June 2025, p. 6; https://www.degrowthinstitute.org/challenge-growth01.
[12] See, for instance, Peter Turchin, End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration (Penguin Press, 2023).
[13] See, for instance, Elinor Ostrom, Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action (Cambridge University Press, 1990); also the story of Tikopia in the Solomon Islands.
[14] “We have stone-age emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.” Edward O. Wilson, 2011 commencement address at the University of North Carolina; https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2021/dec/27/edward-o-wilson-naturalist-modern-day-darwin-dies.
[15] Albert O. Hirschman, Exit, Voice, and Loyalty: Responses to Decline in Firms, Organizations, and States (Harvard University Press, 1972).
[16] James C. Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia (Yale University Press, 2009).
[17] One astonishing exception is Zomia, a large highland region in Southeast Asia with as many as 100 million inhabitants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Southeast_Asian_Massif#Zomia.
[18] Elizabeth Vasquez, “The N.Y.P.D. Is Teaching America How to Track Everyone Every Day Forever,” New York Times, September 15, 2025: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/09/15/opinion/nypd-surveillance.html.
[19] Turchin, note 12, pp. 129–30.
[20] See James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts, (Yale University Press, 1990.)
[21] See Erica Chenoweth, “How AI Can Support Democracy Movements,” keynote address delivered at the conference on Artificial Intelligence and Democratic Freedoms, at Columbia University, April 11, 2025; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zzXieDRh3E.
[22] See Turchin, note 12, and Luke Kemp, Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse (Knopf, 2025).
[23] Turchin, note 12, p. 63.
[24] Turchin, note 12, p. 106.
[25] Peter Turchin, Ultrasociety: How 10,000 Years of War Made Humans the Greatest Cooperators on Earth (Beresta Books, 2016), pp. 139–140.
[26] Turchin, note 12, pp. 112 and 171 respectively.
[27] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bQAYVKqTkKo
[28] Numerous sources. Wikipedia also mentions other notable quotes from Acton, i.e., “Great men are almost always bad men….”, and “There is no worse heresy than that the office sanctifies the holder of it.”
[29] Turchin, note 25, p. 159.
[30] Letter from Abigail Adams to John Adams, March 31, 1776; https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Adams/04-01-02-0241.
[31] Richard Walawender, “Can the President Impose Tariffs without Congressional Approval?”, National Law Review, December 3, 2024; https://natlawreview.com/article/can-president-impose-tariffs-without-congressional-approval.
[32] See David Graeber and David Wengrow, The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021).
[33] Turchin, note 25, p. 140.
[34] Bernard Crick, In Defense of Politics (Continuum, 1992), p. 69.
[35] Crick, note 34, p. 141.
[36] Crick, note 34; cited in Ezra Klein, “This Is the Way You Beat Trump—and Trumpism,” New York Times, November 2, 2025; https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/02/opinion/democrats-liberalism-elections-crick.html.
[37] John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems, cited in Scott London, “Organic Democracy: The Political Philosophy of John Dewey”; https://scott.london/reports/dewey.html, no date.
[38] The remaining paragraphs are adapted from Tom Prugh and Matt Leighninger, “Conclusion,” in Lorelei Hanson, Ed., Public Deliberation on Climate Change: Lessons from the Alberta Climate Dialogue (Athabasca University Press, 2018), pp. 235–6. The phrase “communities of communities” is from Herman Daly and John Cobb, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Beacon Press, 1989).
[39] Graeber and Wengrow, note 32, p. 9.
Democracy Rising posts are curated by Tom Prugh, a former senior researcher at Worldwatch Institute and the editor in chief of World Watch magazine. He co-directed the Institute’s State of the World 2008: Innovations for a Sustainable Economy, State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible? and State of the World 2014: Governing for Sustainability. In 2013 he was also lead writer and editor for the Royal Government of Bhutan’s New Development Paradigm initiative. Tom is the lead author of two books: The Local Politics of Global Sustainability (with Robert Costanza and Herman Daly) and Natural Capital and Human Economic Survival (with Robert Costanza, John H. Cumberland, Herman Daly, Robert Goodland, and Richard B. Norgaard).
