New leadership of the Western World

I have been thinking about politics lately. Since the time of Ancient Greece, politics and specifically democracy has been a system for equals to deliberate and discuss solutions to problems in their society. There has been a major change recently which I think no one has noticed. This change is specifically the role change of politics and politicians in our democratic system as opposed to the traditional and healthy democracy of the past.

In the past, democracy remained a system that allowed for citizens to deliberate and figure out solutions to problems for the common good. This public space asked questions of merit, questions which answered practical concerns about the world and therefore led to intelligent and spectacular leadership to flourish. Questions concerning the meaning of life, known as praxis to the Greeks, and questions which took actual cognitive practical reasoning to determine the answer to. However, the change I am mentioning in our current democracy in the United States is a major shift from Praxis or practical questions to Techne, or technical questions. The rise of technology and science, empiricism and positivism, has led to a society that cannot think farther than mere observation. The inability to think critically and ask questions that take practical reasoning, has led to the public sphere being poisoned from the inside by citizens who cannot deliberate and cannot successful fulfill their normative function in democracy. Due to the poisoning of the public sphere, through misinterpretation of communicative information, and technological dependence on idea formation, our very democratic system is at risk of failure.

I believe that because the people, the centerpiece of democracy, and the public sphere that dictates what matters to our culture, have lost their way and become simple technical rational beings, we can no longer ask questions that have merit and we can no longer address problems efficiently without self-interests. We have become technical beings, only able to analyze the top layer of many complex systems and phenomena, and this makes discourse and deliberation in democracy nearly impossible.

There in lies the problem. The major tectonic shift is a change from a practical society to a technical one. We not only are failing democracy, but we are failing to fix the problems that matter most to our society. There is a disproportion somewhere in the democratic system, between the need for technical leadership and the practical leadership of the past. The politicians of the present are praxis leaders serving a society that is increasingly techne.

Unfortunately I do not support the direction our society is headed and I am deeply troubled by the direction our democracy is headed. The citizens are technical rational beings and have lost their practical reasoning ability due to the technical cognitive control over our thought processes and technology. The politicians we elect for the purpose of practical leadership, do not function well with a society that demands answers to technical problems. By technical problems I am talking about the economy, oikonomica, and things like how to live sustainably, how to provide water and power to the populace, and how to maintain national defense while cutting the budget.

The problems of present day democracy are clearly technical, and there is a disillusionment with these technical problems, a difficulty in answering these types of questions as politicians. Therefore, politicians we elect and will continue to elect will fail us and our interests as a collective body. I do not like this possibility, but we must come to terms that the road we are traveling is a risky one. My political thoughts are that the monumental change from practical to technical politics means we must adapt and also change our leadership to fit the democracy we are in search of; one that has leaders who can answer our questions and make decisions based on the best argument and evidence from the technology and science that has made us who are today. Therefore this change to technical reasoning calls for experts in the three fields of science: empirical-analytic, hermeneutic, and critical sciences. For example, we ask and demand answers to the economic problems of society, so we should be ruled by a group of economists who are experts in their field. We demand answers to the climate change issue, so we should be ruled by a group of biologists, chemists, physicists, and many others who can collectively make expert decisions on the people's behalf.  A change in the way we think as a public sphere and a change in the types of problems we want addressed as a collective state, calls for this sort of change in administration.
We will always have politicians who can gather mass support and utilize their charisma or oratory skills to run the nation. But we need to come to terms with the fact that we are undergoing serious changes and problems need solving that cannot be solved by popular charismatic leadership alone. I sincerely hope we find a solution to our countries problems before it is too late.

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