The role of a citizen-ruler is important in understanding how we got to our present circumstances; it is essential in what is required to solve our problems and improve our society. There are, of course, other important concepts to grasp for understanding our present situation and building a better society, but none of those other concepts matter if we do not understand and willingly accept the role of citizen-ruler.
Overview
Let us begin with simple facts about society, things that have been true for all of history. Freedom, peace, and prosperity are not natural; it is difficult to create and maintain the required conditions. With the exception of the last couple of hundred years in a handful of countries, almost all people throughout history lived without freedom and struggled daily for survival. Second, the quality of life in a society depends on the rulership. If the rulers are wise, competent, and benevolent, the quality of life will be better than if the rulers lack those characteristics. It does not matter if the society is a monarchy in which a king has absolute power, or if it is a democratic republic in which citizens elect rulers.
Here we see a point that requires careful attention: in a democratic republic, citizens have a dual role. A citizen is ruled and yet a ruler. Most of the time, we think and act as citizens subject to rulers (government). It is easy to overlook our role as ruler. Abraham Lincoln spoke of government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” That is, ordinary citizens may become rulers by being elected to government position through the votes of other citizens and must govern for the benefit of all people.
When we combine the principle that the quality of a society depends upon the quality of the rulers with the fact that in a democratic republic, citizens have a rulership role, we arrive at important—and often ignored—conclusions. The quality of our society depends upon the wisdom, competence, and benevolence of ordinary citizens. We should not think of “the government” as something separate from us because, by our voting, we elect and maintain whatever government apparatus is in place. Stated plainly, we get “the government” we create.
Our freedom extends beyond the political; we also enjoy economic and social freedom. Just as our political votes shape the rulership structure for society, so our economic and social votes shape their corresponding structures. Over time, our votes of different types interact, with each influencing and shaping all structures in society. To emphasize, when we see something we do not like, whether in the political, social, or economic realms, let us remember that the votes of citizens, past and present, caused or allowed its creation and continuation.
From the above, it is clear that the social conditions we see and experience today are the results of the votes of citizens past and present. That is a sobering realization and, at the same time, a reason for optimism.
Why We Vote the Way We Do
As with all action, we vote based on our worldview and our observations of what is happening in the world. Our worldview encompasses all that we understand about how the world works. Our observations could also be called feedback. They are the raw data we process using our current understanding. Given, as we saw above, that the collective votes of citizens have produced the problems and challenges we now face, we must examine our worldview and feedback if we want to comprehend the political, economic, and social voting of the last seventy years.
In my work, I uncovered explanations in both our worldview and feedback.
I suggest we need to change our conceptual framework of how government works. Following World War II (I use 1950 as a convenient starting point), an implicit bargain was forming between the populace and “government.” Stated simply, this bargain came to mean the following. Citizens will elect government officials who will serve as managers who will create administrative agencies which will employ experts, and this structure will manage society for economic prosperity and peace.
This implicit bargain was not unreasonable based on what happened the preceding seventy-plus years. The Productivity Revolution, grounded on “scientific management,” dramatically improved the productivity in large sectors of the economy. It contributed greatly to the creation of a middle-class. The methods of the Productivity Revolution were crucial for the decisive effect of the United States in World War II. Because war is a government-driven endeavor, the rapid military buildup and execution suggested that government could cooperate with private enterprise to produce great results.
Following the War, the United States was in an optimistic mood. Citizens were eager to begin building their prosperous future. It suited the outlook of the time to accept the premise that government and “scientific management” could not only maintain international peace but manage for increasing economic prosperity.
We will look later in more detail at the potential problems with this model of government. For now, a few general observations will suffice. This model minimizes, if not ignores, principles of power and freedom. It ignores, or is overly optimistic about, human nature. It tacitly assumes that if society is managed for continual economic growth, everything else will be good also.
We now turn to the subject of feedback. Why did we not see what was happening? Why were the problems not recognized and addressed much sooner, before they reached the current seriousness?
In every aspect of life, we rely on feedback. We act, we observe what happens, we analyze, we respond. Consider a simple example. You decide to take a different job because it offers better opportunities for development and advancement. Less than a year in your new job, your observations suggest things are not going the way you expected. You talk to your boss who offers a reasonable explanation for what has happened and assures you that it is only temporary. Six months later, however, your observations suggest that things are getting worse. You pause and analyze why reality is not meeting expectations. After digging more deeply, you recognize that when you were making the decision about switching jobs, you did not look at all of the available feedback regarding how the new industry and the specific company were doing financially. More significantly, you now see that the company did not present all of the facts, and some of what they presented were incomplete, maybe deceptive. With better information and observations—both of which are forms of feedback—you will assess whether to continue with your new company or change jobs again.
As citizens, we face a much more difficult situation than the simple example above. But the fundamental processes are the same. We can identify multiple, serious problems in society, many of which have progressed for so long they may appear almost impossible to solve. These problems did not suddenly develop in the last decade or two. All of them began decades ago. Did we not see the feedback signals? Did we not understand them? Were they distorted? Were we willing to ignore them? We must consider these questions.
As a result of my work, I concluded that the answer to the above questions is yes. In this article, I will briefly present the most important reasons for not seeing and responding to the feedback.
The most important reason is a natural consequence of the implicit bargain. If our model of government is that experts are going to manage everything, the primary task of citizens is to elect the top-level leaders: the president and Congress. Under the model, citizens assumed they only needed to monitor the broad feedback signal, quality of life. In practice, economic performance became the simple proxy measurement for quality of life. Economic performance, in turn, was represented by GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and price inflation.
A useful metaphor for the implicit bargain is a group of passive owners of a company. Here, passive means only that the owners do not intend to participate in operating the company; they rely on the competence of managers and the experts whom the managers hire. The owners concern themselves only with regular cash distributions from the company. In the following discussion, we will move back and forth between our actual subject of concern, which was the economic performance of our society, and the metaphor just described.
If we pause and think about what the citizens and owners chose as their critical feedback information, we see a lack of proper understanding for their roles. If the owners had a proper understanding, they would have known that current cash distributions are inadequate to assess how their company is really performing. The same is true for citizens; a proper understanding of their role would not allow economic performance as the primary feedback to assess the quality of a society.
Imagine that the owners have been receiving cash distributions for many years. Everything seems great until the distributions begin declining. The managers assure the owners that it is a temporary condition because they are investing for future growth. A few years later, the owners are receiving a small fraction of what they used to get. Finally, the owners are motivated to look at how the company is really doing. They hire independent experts for assistance.
After investigation, the owners learn that much of their cash distributions has not come from true profits but from weakening the company. The managers did not repair and replace equipment, what exists now is old and performs inefficiently. The managers did not invest in the development of employees, many have left and those remaining do not have good training. The managers have been consuming capital in order to maintain cash payments. In addition, the managers began borrowing money to support cash flow.
The owners now have the full story. Initially, the managers were operating in good faith but simply did not know enough to run the company well. When the managers eventually realized that the company was in trouble, they chose not to inform the owners but to further damage the company in order to continue cash distributions so they could keep their jobs as managers.
Reality is now evident. The owners understand that their company is worth far less than they thought and will not be able to pay cash distributions. On the contrary, the owners will need to invest additional money to restore their company. To rescue their company, the owners commit to understanding how their business really works, what feedback is important and how to interpret it, and how to hire better managers and hold them accountable. Now with proper understanding, the owners know it will take several years to rebuild.
How do we map the metaphor to our current situation as citizens? In the early years operating under the implicit bargain, everyone was operating in good faith. Unlike in a company, some feedback information in society is genuinely hard to understand. For example, driven largely by gains in productivity, the population of the world grew rapidly while at the same time the material quality of life also improved. This made it easy to overlook more fundamental developments.
After World War II, the United States was preeminent economically and militarily. In addition to the obvious benefits of that position, it resulted in the world monetary system being based on the dollar. That granted a systemic privilege that few appreciated at the time. The world order in 1950 was radically different from only fifty years ago. As a result, our worldview was in upheaval: our framework for analysis was disoriented. All of these things made it harder to recognize important feedback and more difficult to comprehend what we could recognize.
I believe we are in a time of great transition in which we are in the process of recognizing that our current framework for selecting leaders, government and otherwise, is not working and must be changed. More broadly, the implicit bargain failed; citizens must take responsibility not only for the rulership structure but also the economic and social structures.
The Wake-Up Calls
As the twentieth century came to an end, there were reasons for optimism. The economy seemed good, the stock market was in a continuous upward trend. The Soviet Union had fallen, with attendant hopes of peace and prosperity for more of the world.
However, the twenty-first century began ominously with a massive terrorist attack on US soil—thus began a constant series of war and conflict in the Middle East.
In the 2008 timeframe, the “great recession” arrived. Its significance was not primarily the economic impact on the average American, notwithstanding some (unfortunate) comparisons to the Great Depression. Rather, its significance was the uneasy feelings and assessments that began working through the United States. I believe 2008 was a watershed event that began the questioning of the fairness and effectiveness of our social, economic, and political structures. This questioning continues and is an important reason for the divisiveness and general disordering of society that we observe today.
As if we needed an exclamation point following 2008, the Covid-19 pandemic arrived in 2020 and further fueled the social, economic, and political tensions that had been building over the previous ten years.
We have awakened enough to recognize that our problems continue to worsen and that we need new solutions. We have not yet understood what those should be. Instead, we remain in our long-standing “do something now” mindset. We continue to throw money at problems and thus rapidly increase our national debt. We elected presidents who we hope will save us by concentrating power in their office. Those two elements of a solution are no solution at all. Our problems will worsen until we change our framework for understanding rulership. I submit that the new framework must be that of citizen-rulers possessing proper understanding.
What Should We Be Doing?
Up to this point, I have attempted to explain the framework we are using for government, the one that formed beginning in 1950. This framework is largely responsible for the problems we have today. In a democratic republic, citizens must operate in two roles: citizen as ruled and citizen as ruler. The implicit bargain, under which we delegated many responsibilities, did not work. As it turns out, the delegation was in fact abdication. If we are to solve our problems and create a society in which every person has a chance to flourish, we must reverse the abdication and accept the rulership role incumbent for a citizen-ruler. There is good news: it is not too late to do so, it is still within our power.
Our first step is acceptance. We require a different framework for understanding government. The implicit bargain must be replaced with citizen-ruler responsibility for everything in our society. Assuming we accept that reality, we must immediately have enough wisdom for caution and patience. Just as the owners in our metaphor needed time to analyze the situation and then gain proper understanding to fulfill their role as active owners, we require the same as citizen-rulers. Just as the owners could not rescue their company simply by firing all the managers and hiring new ones, we cannot expect to immediately do a better job of selecting elected leaders. The nature of society is hugely more complex than the nature of a business. A business can be managed; a society cannot be managed—more precisely, it cannot be managed for flourishing. Thus, the understanding appropriate for the role of citizen ruler is different than for the role of a business owner. It is of a different kind, and it takes longer to acquire. If we rush into acting in the new role, it is more likely that problems will get worse rather than better. We are better served to rush into understanding our new role.
Most importantly, we must understand that we are in a long game. Our current state of affairs developed over decades; we are not going to fix things in a few years. If an elected leader promises otherwise, we can be confident they do not understand what has happened.
We can all work to improve the mood and attitude in our country. Divisiveness and polarization are preventing progress. Too many of us have abandoned discussion, persuasion, and compromise. Instead, each group is in a race for power. One group wants power so they can force others to accept a particular solution. That is, one group wants to coerce another. Naturally, the group that feels under attack races for power to protect their values. Another group wants power so they can destroy everything they see as unfair. Not only will this prevent solutions, existing problems will get worse, and new ones will be generated. A free society cannot withstand the current tone and behavior in our country.
Therefore our most important and urgent task is to improve the emotional climate. This cannot be accomplished from Washington. It is the work of citizens. Two things can begin immediately. We cast social votes every day. These votes are foundational to the mood of the country. Too many of us say and write things that are adversarial, condescending, and contemptuous. We can change that, we can look for ways to communicate cooperation and respect. As part of this change, we can endorse and support leaders in all areas of society, not just politics, who are trying to bring about a spirit of calm and compromise.
The second thing that can begin immediately is related to the first, but is directed specifically at the political arena. When given the choice, we can vote for and support in other ways, those elected officials and candidates who are truly interested in talking with those who disagree with them. At present, there are few of those individuals. Instead, some are intentionally belligerent while others speak the words of moderation, but with no credibility.
In our role as citizen-rulers, it is absolutely crucial that we understand a basic requirement for improvement. We cannot move forward if we have significant numbers of citizens (1) who feel threatened because other citizens want to force them to give up cherished values, (2) who want to force their solutions and their values on others, or (3) who, for whatever reasons, want to totally destroy what exists and start over.
We will find the above tasks difficult. Some of the reasons for the difficulty will be obvious, for example, legitimate conflicts of interest. The core difficulty, however, is the reality of diverging worldviews among citizens. This divergence that began decades ago has greatly accelerated in the last decade or two. As a society, we are just beginning to contend with the implications. While we do not currently know how to deal with worldviews having competing elements, we do know that we will not make progress unless we tone down our mood.
In addition to the tone-setting work above, each citizen-ruler requires a set of essential principles that will guide future thinking and assessments. See Principles for Citizen-Rulers.
Working Together
Our world is so complicated, specialized, and integrated that no one person can know enough to make good decisions in every area. We must rely on the knowledge and expertise of others. We are accustomed to this in everyday life. We are constantly hiring specialists such as doctors, plumbers, and auto mechanics. We develop our own means of assessing and choosing expert help. How can we do this in our role as citizen-ruler?
Returning to our metaphor of company owners who had to become more active in their business, what did they need to learn? We can be sure they did not attempt to become machinists, database analysts, or metallurgists. They did need to learn about the basic functions and processes in their company. They needed to learn about their industry and about marketing and selling in it. They needed to learn how to hire managers and hold them accountable. Fortunately, the owners had enough wisdom to hire outside experts to help them understand and learn what they needed to know.
Although a society functions much differently than a company, as citizens we must do something comparable to what the owners did. We need trusted, competent resources from which we can learn, get honest information and reliable opinions, and obtain competent expertise and analyses. This is not an easy task; just think how much effort we invest in choosing our everyday-life experts. At the society level, it is far more difficult in the best of cases, and we do not enjoy the best case. We have divisiveness and a centralized, very powerful federal government, a combination which creates a race for power and a winner-take-all mindset. Our circumstances were plainly evident in the general election of 2020 and the Covid-19 pandemic.
A primary task for citizen-rulers is to learn how to assess, select, and make use of trusted and competent resources for the many decisions we must make, whether those decisions are of the everyday variety or we are electing government officials for the next four years.
Sometimes, a single phrase captures a great deal. Alexis de Tocqueville, an early and astute observer of American life, observed that Americans behave with “self-interest properly understood.” That phrase serves as a motto for us as citizen rulers.