For Superdemocracy to work in a large corporation or governmental situation, it needs the right format of management or legislation to operate in. Prescriptive regulations in a top-down system strangle the process at birth.

Jeremy Bentham’s embalmed body

In this short piece, I’d like to consider and obvious example of how bad, nitpicking management can destroy even the most benign situations. It examines the governance of the UK under Tony Blair’s Premiership and how the Utilitarian philosophy of Jeremy Bentham could make all the difference.

Abraham Lincoln’s famous adage, “You can please all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you can never please all of the people all of the time”, is so obviously true you wouldn’t expect anyone to fall foul of its remorseless logic. Yet that is precisely what Britain and some other Western countries have done over the past decade.

It began with Bill Clinton and his obsessive pursuit of minority interests to bolster his poll results and show how caring he is to the wider electorate. In Britain, Tony Blair followed suit under the banner of The Third Way, a neo-Marxist equality agenda of endless social tinkering and mindless bossiness. It was how they would make the entire population love them to bits — they thought.

The Third Way signalled the death of Bentham’s Utilitarianism in British politics and the beginnings of an eerie hero worship of carefully selected in-groups and minorities.

Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832), philosopher and social reformer, paved the way for modern fully-franchised democracy with his great maxim, “The object of all legislation should be the greatest happiness for the greatest number”. It has been the basis of modern society ever since and has clearly worked well. He even provided a mathematical formula for calculating the best possible outcome in every situation.

Then came the Clinton/Blair obsession with “dog whistling” — the pursuit of prescriptive minority rights which are often rolled out at the expense of other minorities and almost always the majority itself.

Let’s look at an analogy of Bentham’s dictum in action. Somewhere in Holland a hole appears in a dyke. A small boy senses the danger and stops the flow by putting his finger in the hole.

His cries alert farm workers nearby who rush to his aid only to find other holes appearing. They stop the trickle with their own fingers. Soon, at the urging of the Mayor, others are rushing onto the scene until the whole village is there with their fingers in hundreds of holes.

“What do we do now?” somebody shouts.

A distant voice cries, “There’s another hole.”

So now the dyke will give way taking the entire population of the village with it. The Benthamite view would be to send a small repair party to the dyke to assess the likelihood of saving it, while evacuating the rest of the village to safety. In other words, it may mean sacrificing the few in order to save the majority.

We know that children are happiest and more stable if brought up in married two-parent families. All the statistics prove this self-evident fact. Why then would a couple with children be financially better off in Blair’s Britain if they were not married? And why are the same “rights” given to same-sex couples in loose relationships as to married families?

Bentham’s relentless logic means that public policy should never be confused with private kindness, which is exactly what we’ve got in Brokeback Britain.

The greater public good has been destroyed in favour of a patchwork quilt of minor prescriptive measures, all jangling against each, causing huge resentment in the so-far silent majority, and destroying all social cohesion in the cities and in the country.

Children run wild at night, tormenting adults who can’t take action because of the Children’s Rights Act. This situation is an example of extensive child neglect in a society that increasingly looks to the state for everything. And that’s not to mention the destructive Human Rights Act which grants British civil rights universally to the whole world in an act of unparalleled betrayal of a nation’s right to protect itself from harm.

If New Labour had foresworn the advice of its militant Marxists, oddball, second-rate academics, and heeded the wise words of Jeremy Bentham, little of this might have happened.

That politics today is broken is clear. Only the resurrection of Bentham’s Utility agenda, allowing Superdemocracy to flourish, can save it. It’s not as if he’s that far away. His perfectly embalmed body, still in his familiar clothes and sitting in his favourite chair, can be seen in a glass cabinet in a London University college.

It would mean the end of prescriptive legislation, social engineering of the many by the few, the massive centralization of power, and the loss of the balm of Superdemocracy.

If you’re coming to this site from Moneyizor network magazine, you may wonder what it’s doing on a finance and business portal.

Superdemocracy is a new system — or art — of corporate governance, aimed largely at big corporations or government service enterprises.

To get an overview of the subject, read : The Superdemocracy Manifesto, which provides a short introduction to the topic.

The material accumulating on this site will eventually form the basis of a book by John M Evans to be published by Dial Publishing.

The UK Home Secretary has said that the Home Office is “not fit for purpose”. It has lost control over almost every aspect of the criminal justice system, the prisons and immigration.

The root of the problem is the Blairite Human Rights Act, passed in jubilant self-congratulation in 1998, plus a delegation policy that places key people in post by political persuasion rather than competence. Both break the fundamental principles of Superdemocracy.

The idea of a Rights Society is all the rage in Labour-dominated Britain. It sounds good. We all have defined rights which mean we’re free, yes?

NO.

Freedom is not about giving everyone and anyone “rights” without checks and balances. Many of the rights we have we make for ourselves, through hard work and merit. Merit brings us wealth and allows us the freedom to enjoy the best things in life without too much worry or disturbance.

Basic rights, like equality before the law, God and the ballot box, are the rights of all citizens in any democratic country. Some of these rights should not be given to anybody who simply turns up on its shores. Civil liberties don’t travel beyond the jurisdiction that defines them.

Cast these rights liberally around to everyone on the planet and they will act as magnets for mass, unstoppable immigration of people who know only two words of English, “My rights”.

The so-called Human Rights Act allows anyone who enters Britain full rights to the treasure of its citizens, even as far as mandatory housing, health care, schooling, legal bills, and a “salary” for life. Since newcomers have not earned these “rights” they just impoverish the country’s citizens, without adding a jot to the nation’s well-being.

Of course, if you say that, you risk sounding rather mean-spirited. That’s the weapon of choice in destroying the truth in this case. The government has woven new taboos against challenging any of its equality agenda, even embedding them into statute law. Never mind that this kind of equality : equality of attributes, needs a totalitarian regime to enforce, you are stigmatized if you complain.

The reason for this Home Office-induced catastrophe is that decisions are taken by greenhorn, starry-eyed politicians and their political appointees, who see themselves as benefactors of mankind — albeit with other people’s money and lives. They have no idea of the complexities of the case, nor of the huge response they are initiating.

Moreover, nearly every agency in Britian is now run by knee-jerk Blairites who act according to political received opinion rather than careful, dispassionate, and expert consideration of the situation.

Merit is the way out of this morass of incompetence and waste. A common cry in England now is “Nothing works anymore”. That’s because the “All shall have prizes society” is run by dolts and slackers, as could be predicted before it was imposed on us.

When each critical decision, no matter how small, is taken at the point of maximum competence, near enough, everybody in the community benefits in an cumulative way. The small increments of improvement mount up over time, completely transforming the landscape and the way it operates. That’s Superdemocracy.

So-called Human Rights are a way of moving resources from the competent who have worked for them, to the incompetent who have not. It depletes a society’s level of expertise and tilts the slope of impoverishment ever more steeply downwards.

The Rights Society should be replaced with Superdemocracy, especially in the public sector where chaos finds its natural breeding ground. The Home Office is just one example that needs to be addressed in haste.

Superdemocracy is an idea I had a long while ago while musing on the optimum hierarchy for any organization. It’s really a variation on meritocracy — so despised by the postmodern crowd.

Imagine if you will the billions of decisions taken daily in businesses, agencies, governments, and other organizations up and down your country. Most of them will be made at nodal points where power has settled and accumulated over time and where empires are ruthlessly defended. In other words, they will be taken well above the level of optimum efficiency — the Point of Maximum Competence.

A little thought reveals that almost all decisions are made at points where the taker(s) are not fully aware of the complexities of the task. In today’s technical society, that disjunction is growing all the time.

If each decision is depicted as a small arrow, it’s not hard to visualize most of them pointing downward, albeit by a tiny amount. Day after day, these billions of small decrements add up to a massive efficiency deficit, which can only be supported by vast quantities of public money propping the whole edifice up.

Small businesses, by contrast, develop the expertise to avoid this tendency or they die, which is why they are usually the most dynamic elements in any economy.

Big businesses become more like governments as they mature, even creating social security and foreign affairs departments — look at Microsoft.

But government is the principal problem for Superdemocrats. In the UK, central government operates the highly technical National Health Service, with predictably dismal, and costly, results. It also runs the state schools, transport and other big areas of public concern. It now takes 43pc of the national income and employs 25pc of the workforce. In the world of Superdemocracy, we call this Decremental Drainage. The losses are fabulous and continual.

Let’s nail the problem then: governmental decisions are taken at the Level of Minimum Competence. In the UK, we also have the even more remote European level in Brussels — the Level of Maximum Incompetence. Why would any decisions beyond multi-cross-border issues ever be sent to Brussels?

What’s the alternative? Superdemocracy!

For a moment conjure up a vision of decisions being taken much further down the food chain at the point where all the complexities and variations of the case are fully appreciated. See all those billions of arrows beginning to point upward, albeit just a tad.

Jump forward a year or so and listen to that faint, distant rumbling of a tidal wave just visible on the horizon. It’s a tidal wave of MONEY.

Think I’m kidding? Look at any successful operation and you’ll see decision-making at the Point of Maximum Competence. Look at any failing organization and you’ll discover decisions being made well above those levels by fat cats ensconced in positions of conceit and self-delusion. There is no exception to this rule. Decisions, like cream in a milk bottle, will always rise to the top.

All decisions therefore should be taken at the Point of Maximum Competence. The CEO role should comprise nothing more than shaking the milk bottles all day long.

Of course, we need a decent algorithm to determine where that Point is in any organization. This is the next step.

Superdemocracy and representative democracy
Representative democracy, our standard political institution in the West, is vital for two reasons:

1. It spreads decision-making thinly, ensuring that power doesn’t concentrate in too few hands, and
2. It allows ordinary people to feel they are represented in the highest taxing and lawmaking councils of the land.

But, as Churchill implied, you wouldn’t appoint a CEO of a major organization by a kind of Pop Idol, televised, beauty parade. “Democracy,” he said, ” is a bad form of Government, but it’s better than any of the others.”

We have to recognize that most politicians are rank amateurs at what they do — and it shows. Seizing on a dangerously-small stock of information, while being blissfully ignorant of the complexities of every case, they often make huge, irreversible blunders in the name of the People.

Clearly, representative democracy is necessary. But it needs to be modified still further to limit the amount of decision-making available to these hick-town dilettantes and amateur actors who rise to the top of election process.

That’s where Superdemocracy comes in. Superdemocracy occurs when decisions are taken at the Point of Maximum Competence. It is almost always situated many levels lower than the norm in both the political and business environments.

Using Superdemocracy as a principle of governance across a whole society would naturally rob the robber barons of power, and add a huge efficiency increment to a country’s earning power.

Here then is the natural way for the West to meet the challenges of China and India and the other nascent superpowers. The world’s wealth needs to be held largely by the most sophisticated nations, who have at least some wisdom in determining its dispersal.

The current danger is that — like the discovery of oil in the Middle East — massive industrial growth in non-democratic regimes, will bring great dangers to us all in the 21st century.

So, are you a Superdemocrat? You simply have to be.

To hell in a handcart
Why is it that politicians now try to protect us from what used to be called Acts of God?

In that great book, Zen in the Art of Archery, Herrigel asks a Zen master what Zen actually is. The master motions him to sit down on some sand overlooking a garden. They sit in silent meditation for three hours. Later the master points at the spot where he sat — it’s a perfectly formed depression with well-defined edges. Then he indicates where Herrigel sat — a much larger area with sand flung out untidily.

It was not your body that moved, said the master, but your mind. Your restless Western mind thinks that if you aren’t busy at something, the world will stop turning and chaos will take over.

But look, the grass kept growing, birds flew about in the sky, people went about their business. Nobody missed your presence, least of all the world.

When Presidents and Prime Ministers are sworn in, they should be made to read that passage. If they ceased restlessly interfering in our lives — and it’s much worse in Europe than in North America — Superdemocracy would be naturally present in society and most things would be done at the Point of Maximum Competence, or nearer to it than now.

Right now, the politicos and their armies of role-stealers are sending us to hell in a handcart.