Zhao Tingyang on Democracy

Zhao Tingyang, “A Feasible Smart Democracy”[1]

Introduction and Translation by David Ownby
 
Introduction
 
Zhao Tingyang is a professor in the Institute of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and is best known for his work on the “tianxia system 天下体系.”  Tianxia refers to the idea of Chinese universalism prior to the arrival of the West, the notion that China was the rightful center of the world because it embodied a moral order that radiated out from China’s center in all directions, inviting all peoples of the world to adopt that moral order, thus becoming Chinese and fully human.  In the context of China’s rise, Zhao has attempted to recycle and renew the concept, and to offer it as an alternative harmonious possibility to the current world order, which is based on the selfish interests of individual nation-states, and characterized by competition and conflict.  Zhao’s work has been extremely popular and influential (particularly but not exclusively in China), and has provoked a great deal of discussion.
 
Zhao’s basic ideas on tianxia are available in English.  See “Rethinking Empire from a Chinese Concept ‘All-under-Heaven’ (Tian-xia),” Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture Volume 12.1 (2006):  29-41; and “A Political World Philosophy in terms of All-under-heaven (Tian-xia),” Diogenese 221 (2009) 5-18.  For an excellent discussion of Zhao’s theory, see William A. Callahan, “Chinese Visions of the World Order:  Post-Hegemonic or New Hegemony,” International Studies Review 10.4 (2008):  749-761.  For a critically sympathetic view of Zhao’s work by a Chinese scholar, see Liang Zhiping, “Imagining ‘Tianxia’:  Building Ideology in Contemporary China,” especially part three.  For a critically unsympathetic view of Zhao’s work by a Chinese scholar, see Ge Zhaoguang, “Imagining 'All Under Heaven:' the Political, Intellectual and Academic Background of a New Utopia.” 
 
The text translated here discusses problems with democracy in the same way that Zhao’s earlier work addressed problems with the current world order, in that Zhao hopes to renew, reshape, and improve democracy by supplementing it with wisdom drawn from the ancient Chinese classic, The Book of Documents.  Zhao’s argument, though long and somewhat repetitive, is nonetheless clear and interesting.
 
Zhao begins by noting that democracy is in serious trouble today, because the consensus required to sustain public trust in democratic institutions and practices has eroded, and without trust, democracy cannot function.   One source of the problem is the rise of the Internet, social media, big data, etc., which Zhao collectively dubs “global systemic power,” a force that manipulates and shapes public consciousness while claiming (often credibly) to provide services that people desire.  

Clearly, Zhao is talking about fake news and information bubbles, as well as influencers and the conflation of consumerism, lifestyle choice, and politics that pervades the sophisticated marketing practices purveyed by social media.  By encouraging individuals to indulge their private desires—and indeed embedding these private desires in larger narratives—global systemic power makes it difficult if not impossible for anyone to see a larger public good, and without agreement on public good there can be no consensus.  Global systemic power has turned democracies into what Zhao calls “publicracies 代主,” (the English translation is Zhao’s) in which fake publics have supplanted the people as the foundation of the political order.
 
Another source of the problem can be found in current political practices in the West, notably, the recent trend to see democracy as a value in and of itself, instead of understanding it as a set of institutions and practices.  Zhao is referring of course to the rise of “political correctness” in Western democracies, and, he, like most Chinese commentators, sees the “aggressive” tactics of those who are “demanding equality” as adding fuel to the flames of the social divisions created and exploited by the publicracy. 

​Finally, however, Zhao suggests that the problem with democracy is eternal, in that the rational mind has never really succeeded in convincing the emotional, yearning heart, and never will.  In this sense, the rise of global systemic power and publicracies have only made more visible the fact that democracies as currently constituted cannot deliver on their promises.
 
Zhao proposes two solutions to democracy’s dilemma, although it is not immediately clear if the two are connected.  The first is technical—a one person, two vote system in which each voter has both a positive and a negative vote, allowing for the expression of both positive and negative preferences.  A candidate’s or a proposal’s “score” will be determined by the number of positive votes received minus the number of negative votes received.  The idea is to encourage candidates or proposals to seek the support of the broadest number; even if this does not produce a genuine consensus, it works against the tendencies toward extreme polarization such as seen in the United States and other Western democracies.
 
A more fundamental solution, however, requires a “reboot” of democracy, so that it will come with “pre-installed” intelligence (Zhao’s text is full of computer references, including “smart democracy” in the title).  Zhao proposes that the reboot be based on a passage from the Great Plan chapter of the Book of Documents which discusses risk-management in the handling of state affairs. 

The Great Plan suggested a decision-making process consisting of five “votes:”  one each for the king, the ministers, the people, and two for the shamans who would consult the heavens twice.   In the modern version of this process, the people would vote (with their two votes, one positive and one negative) to establish a range of possibilities, and two “knowledge committees” would subsequently weigh in to establish feasibility and make the final choices.  The goal is to arrive at a “knowledge-weighted” smart democracy in which independent, neutral experts intervene to try to find a feasible consensus that will serve the greatest good of the greatest number, instead of allowing the desires of the masses to run amock, thus destroying democracy.
 
Zhao’s text is highly abstract, as is much philosophical writing.  He mentions contemporary France and the United States, but not contemporary China, so it is difficult to tell if he thinks that China is already democratic (one might see the Party as playing the role of the “knowledge committees,” but the people are surely not voting to set the agenda), or if he is pinning his hopes on democracy’s surviving and thriving outside of China.  If such is the case, it is not clear what mechanisms would have the power to push the publicracy aside and impose the neutral “knowledge committees.”
 
Favorite quotes
 
“Contemporary post-modern democracies are being torn apart internally and social consensus is gradually disappearing. This suggests that there is a ‘Trojan horse’ inside democracy, attacking its institutional vulnerability. This shows that democracy is not as mature as we have thought, either in in theory or in practice, but rather is flawed in terms both of concepts and techniques. Therefore, there is still much room for improvement in democracy.  ‘Publicracy’ is democracy’s Trojan horse. I use the term ‘publicracy’ to refer to the distortion, deconstruction, or misuse of democracy through democratic means, that is, a self-defeating way of leading democracy astray with the very tools of democracy. In contemporary times, publicracy is manifested in the existence of an overwhelmingly influential system for the manufacture of public opinion in society, a powerful system that uses psychological techniques and marketization to dominate the values and ways of thinking of the people, thereby producing a vast amount of pseudo-public opinion that is inconsistent with or even contrary to the common or public interest, and that replaces the public opinion that is supposed to be a true reflection of the common or public interest.  Once public opinion deviates from the public interest or the common interest, it will produce an anti-democracy masquerading as a democracy.”
 
“Through high-powered technologies such as the Internet, mobile Internet, artificial intelligence, big data, globalized logistics, etc., contemporary systems have reconstructed the order of the universal connection of things.  The revolutionary result is much more than what people initially imagined in terms of universal interconnection, in the sense that any one thing has multiple properties or functions at the same time, each thing being a superposition of multiple properties. Thus, one thing is many things at the same time, and one problem becomes many problems. Any commercial or cultural activity, such as lifestyle, cultural interest, daily use objects, wilderness landscapes, city-scapes, clothing and hairstyles, interior decoration, gyms, healthy living, cultural identities, popular discourses, etc. that are 'server pushed 推送' by the algorithms of big data and artificial intelligence, are accompanied by political, religious, and values-based activities, also promoted by these algorithms.  In other words, promoting a lifestyle is also promoting a kind of politics, ideology and values. With the help of big data, commercialized promotion of a life concept via algorithms is well received, and people easily see the promotion as a message that they had been waiting for, so this kind of commercial promotion disguised as service-provision has been incredibly successful, far more successful than political propaganda, religious preaching, or traditional advertising.”
 
“The good to be pursued in post-modern democracy (after 1968, roughly speaking) emphasizes equality, and continues to expand the concept of equality from equal rights to equal opportunities, and subsequently to gender equality, racial equality, equality of sexual orientation, and equality of outcomes. The concept has even expanded to include the idea that all individuals are of equal value and deserve equal recognition, which in value terms virtually abolishes the difference between the worthy and the ignorant, differences of ability, natural differences, physiological differences, differences in knowledge levels, in abilities to work, etc.  In other words, all differences are in fact regarded instead as value discriminations. It is clear that the path followed by contemporary democracy has evolved from seeking to protect the equality of everyone, i.e., a ‘negative equality,’ to a stance where everyone is aggressively seeking their own individual equality, i.e.,  a ‘positive equality’…It would be nice if everyone got what they wanted, but the problem is that this is not within humanity’s capacity, and people have different and conflicting understandings of what good things are.”
 
“One can imagine a strategy that maximizes mutual benefits: given any participants X and Y in a game, there exists an institutional arrangement in which a reciprocal equilibrium of benefit sharing can be reached between X and Y, where X profits when and only when Y profits, and X loses when and only when Y loses, so that promoting the interests of Y becomes the preferred strategy for X to achieve its own interests, and vice versa. Of course, this is an idealized goal, and reality only seeks to approximate but not fully achieve this goal. The original inspiration for this idea comes from Confucius' principle of ‘he who wishes to be established himself, seeks also to establish others 己欲立而立人，己欲达而达人,’ so we will call it ‘Confucian improvement’ or ‘Confucian optimization.’  Confucian improvement is obviously superior to Pareto improvement, because Confucian improvement is equivalent to everyone’s achieving Pareto improvement at the same time, or, to put it another way, when anyone receives a benefit, everyone must receive it at the same time.” 
 
“The idea of smart democracy can also draw on other intellectual resources. Although there is no tradition of democratic practice in China, there is the kernel of an idea hidden in the Great Plan 洪范 chapter of the Book of Documents. Of course, this is a retrospective reconstruction of the origin of a theory; in fact, the ancients were not talking about democracy, but rather the institutional design for resolving doubts in affairs of state, but the germ of the idea of smart democracy is embedded in the theory.”
 
Links to other texts on this site
 
For texts related to the theme of Confucianism, click here
 
For texts related to the theme of democracy, click here
 

Translation
 

A Feasible Smart Democracy
 
A Serious Problem with the System

Any system that loses the trust of the majority of people is difficult to sustain, or to put it another way, the survival of a system is based on trust. Money, for example, is one of the most intuitive institutions or man-made orders, and once people no longer believe in money it becomes worthless. Natural order is a given set of physical laws, while man-made institutions are open to choice and changeable, and their stability depends on the collective psyche. Thus, the certainty of the system is only a function of collective trust.
 
If the expression of the natural order is physical, the problem of institutions lies in psychology.  Information, social mobility, and knowledge diffusion are much greater in modern societies than in traditional societies, so the effectiveness of modern institutions depends increasingly on collective trust, or in other words, the weight of collective trust is ever greater in the efficiency formula of modern institutions. Under modern conditions, democracy is often considered to be the most rational institution in relative terms. However, the fundamental problem of institutions is the same in almost any system, democracy being no exception, and is again based on collective trust. If trust disappears, democracy collapses in its wake.
 
The problem of collective trust is the weak point of any system. In ancient times, the issue of collective trust was whether the "hearts of the people" were for or against the system, and the hearts of the people have always been one of the most unstable dependent variables, sensitive to many factors, whether it be the distribution of benefits, the distribution of opportunities, technological progress, or natural or man-made disasters—any of these are sufficient to cause changes in the popular mood.

Democracy is said to have institutional advantages over traditional systems. For example, in contrast to autocracy, democracy can bring freedom, equality, fairness, and even economic prosperity. Based on so many presumed advantages, democracy has been considered the basis of political legitimacy in modern times. However, some of these advantages are overstated or merely apparent, and in practice they are much in doubt. In fact, democracy has never fully or necessarily achieved the promised freedom, equality, fairness, and prosperity, and has even at times undermined those promised benefits, such as during past moments of radical insurgency or today's disorder.
 
The defense of democracy tends to emphasize that democracy is already the "least bad" system, even if its promises are never fully realized. The truth or falseness of this proposition is difficult to prove. This is because there are many variables involved in the success or failure of institutions, meaning that it is not easy to distinguish the relevance of various factors.  Moreover, because human beings have not yet exhausted their institutional imagination, it is impossible to exclude the possibility of a better system, and perhaps there is room for improvement in democracy itself. But democracy is undoubtedly better than dictatorship, especially since it is more compatible with modern social conditions.
 
But this has been known for some time, and repeating a time-worn argument has no theoretical or intellectual relevance. The question that needs to be considered today, given that existing democratic theories are no longer able to deal with the practical difficulties that democracy encounters, is whether there is a better system than democracy, or if it is possible to invent a better democracy. Here I will discuss the possibility of a better democracy, called "smart democracy."

We cannot avoid the question of the vulnerability or "robustness" of a system, which are two sides of the same coin. Robustness is the common meaning for something that can withstand any test, that can stand firm in the face of change.  In academic terms, if a system, an institution, or a theory is insensitive to any external variables and its stability is virtually unaffected by them, then it is said to be robust. Otherwise, it is fragile. Systems display a phenomenon that is difficult to explain:  the unique strengths of a system are often where its vulnerabilities lie. That is, if a system has a single, unique advantage, it is often difficult to ensure the robustness of the system. Why this is so is not known.
 
It is generally believed that democracy's unique advantage lies in having achieved popular sovereignty through universal suffrage. Another of democracy’s profound institutional advantages is that it largely circumvents the danger of violent political revolution, but this is a relative probability; democracy does not necessarily preclude violent revolution, especially when it is has been damaged. In short, the low probability of violent revolution is democracy's most unique institutional advantage.
 
Strangely enough, people prefer to talk about other, not necessarily unique, advantages of democracy, while ignoring this particular advantage. The secret of the fact that any system other than democracy is more prone to violent revolutions that cause deep social trauma is that the government of these systems possesses full authority over  the state's public power.  This full authority automatically promises a level of social responsibility equal to the power that the government holds, and in the event of a disaster beyond the state's ability, such as a serious economic crisis, a natural or man-made disaster, or an external invasion, if the state's power is incapable of assuming its social responsibility, a movement demanding accountability may lead to a violent political revolution.
 
In contrast, democracy gives the government limited and proxy powers, which means a separation of powers and responsibilities. The people have the power to take responsibility for their own choices, so even if they mistakenly choose an incompetent government, there is no legitimate reason to start a revolution, because they must take responsibility themselves. In this sense, democracies are stronger.
 
But it is this very strength of democracy that at the same time creates its vulnerability to exploitation; if powerful political forces have control over finance, media, and information dissemination, and even the institutions that run the system,  they can use democracy to gain real power without accountability. In the democratic model to date, it is neither the people nor the government that has gained the most in terms of benefits, but instead powerful groups (especially capitalist groups). To put it more bluntly, the real beneficiaries of democracy are the powerful groups who have the ability to manipulate the market and public opinion.  They are the "shareholders" of the society or the state as a whole and gain the most benefit and power, while leaving limited managerial power in the hands of the government and, above all, social responsibility in the hands of the people.
 
Thus, although democracy is likely to avoid violent revolution, it is very vulnerable to political struggles, divergent values, ideological confrontations, cultural conflicts, and even social divisions. The deeper problem is that if society loses its basic consensus, democracy will not be able to achieve the common interests of the people, but will instead divide the people into multiple opposing groups, the people's right to vote will become the power of some people to oppose others, and the capitalist groups will be able to gain the most benefit no matter who opposes whom, as democracy morphs into anti-democracy.
 
From Democracy to “Publicracy 代主”
 
Contemporary post-modern democracies are being torn apart internally and social consensus is gradually disappearing. This suggests that there is a "Trojan horse" inside democracy, attacking its institutional vulnerability. This shows that democracy is not as mature as we have thought, either in in theory or in practice, but rather is flawed in terms both of concepts and techniques. Therefore, there is still much room for improvement in democracy.
 
"Publicracy” is democracy’s Trojan horse. I use the term "publicracy" to refer to the distortion, deconstruction, or misuse of democracy through democratic means, that is, a self-defeating way of leading democracy astray with the very tools of democracy. In contemporary times, publicracy is manifested in the existence of an overwhelmingly influential system for the manufacture of public opinion in society, a powerful system that uses psychological techniques and marketization to dominate the values and ways of thinking of the people, thereby producing a vast amount of pseudo-public opinion that is inconsistent with or even contrary to the common or public interest, and that replaces the public opinion that is supposed to be a true reflection of the common or public interest.  Once public opinion deviates from the public interest or the common interest, it will produce an anti-democracy masquerading as a democracy.
 
This deterioration of democracy is possible because democracy is not immune to "publicracy," which is latent within democracy and even part of its DNA. "Publicracy" respects the legal form of democracy and operates within the legal procedures of democracy, so it is difficult for democracy’s firewall to identify it and block it. The object the firewall is designed to block is traditional authoritarianism, and it is mainly used to restrict the power of traditional modes of government. The rule of law restricts the space in which power can function, the decentralization of power limits the operation of power, and the government is selected by universal suffrage. Therefore, power cannot seize a monopoly in the traditional authoritarian sense. 
 
However, these functions employed to limit traditional power have little effect on new types of power, and they are unable to identify, let alone stop, the "Trojan horse" that is using democracy to undermine democracy. In other words, the "new virus" leading to the degeneration of democracy not only is a legitimate genetic modification of democracy that not only abides by to the rules of the game, but even conforms to the nature of democracy itself.

​All public platforms available in contemporary society contain the original gene of democracy, that is, the gene of the public square (agora). The traditional paper media and television, the more efficient Internet, the freely interconnected mobile Internet (smartphones), and especially all Internet-based platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and WeChat, have all become tools available to the "publicracy" and are even incorporated into the "publicracy" system itself. The "publicracy" system itself is finally leading democracy to something which is the opposite of democracy.
 
Contemporary Internet platforms are bringing about an epochal, qualitative change in society. This qualitative change can be understood as a kind of "superposition,” a post-modern state completely different from modernity.   Modernity has carved production, markets, social structure, knowledge systems and ways of thinking into functional divisions, what we call a division of labor. The division of labor is an anti-natural construction, dividing things or lives that were originally unitary into multiple things or multiple lives with independent meanings. This man-made order is the basis for the efficiency of modern society.
 
However, through high-powered technologies such as the Internet, mobile Internet, artificial intelligence, big data, globalized logistics, etc., contemporary systems have reconstructed the order of the universal connection of things.  The revolutionary result is much more than what people initially imagined in terms of universal interconnection, in the sense that any one thing has multiple properties or functions at the same time, each thing being a superposition of multiple properties.
 
Thus, one thing is many things at the same time, and one problem becomes many problems. Any commercial or cultural activity, such as lifestyle, cultural interest, daily use objects, wilderness landscapes, city-scapes, clothing and hairstyles, interior decoration, gyms, healthy living, cultural identities, popular discourses, etc. that are “server pushed 推送” by the algorithms of big data and artificial intelligence, are accompanied by political, religious, and values-based activities, also promoted by these algorithms.  In other words, promoting a lifestyle is also promoting a kind of politics, ideology and values. With the help of big data, commercialized promotion of a life concept via algorithms is well received, and people easily see the promotion as a message that they had been waiting for, so this kind of commercial promotion disguised as service-provision has been incredibly successful, far more successful than political propaganda, religious preaching, or traditional advertising.
 
In the contemporary era, service is power, and the best service generates the most power. With the exception of those that possess Kantian autonomy in terms of intellect and morality, most people's consciousness is actually the consciousness promoted by the algorithm, not their own consciousness. When one says "I think X", in fact we are saying that "according to the value X that the algorithm chose for me, I think X."
 
When the consciousness promoted by algorithms creates the general social consciousness, what we call public opinion is nothing but algorithmic consciousness, and democracy has been transformed into a "publicracy."  Contrary to Kant's advocacy of the “public use of one's own reason,” publicracy is "the public misuse of collective unreason” in public affairs, i.e., the algorithmic promotion of consciousness creates collective irrationality and thus controls the public sphere. As a result, in public affairs, the principle of reason is replaced by the demands of collective irrationality.
 
The public square in ancient Greece was an early public space for public debate on public matters, but in another sense it was a public marketplace of competing opinions (the word “agora” was originally a pun on “square” and “market”). The public square is a good public space for rational people who have a basic consensus. In reality, however, the public square has from the outset foreshadowed the potential dilemma of modern democracy, namely that its public nature will inevitably be exploited to create a publicracy.
 
Theoretically, open and reasoned debate in the public sphere can liberate people's minds from arbitrary dogma or prejudice. However, people are more psychologically inclined to fiction than to fact and reason, and in matters of interest they cater to their own selfish needs. Thus, the square of public deliberation, which is the positive side of the agora, can easily be transformed into its opposite, the marketplace of opinions. In other words, the original purpose of the public square was to construct a rational public space, but in the absence of a corresponding rational system, it can easily be turned into an irrational marketplace of opinions, providing a bigger stage for more eye-catching prejudices, stereotypes, jokes, rumors, and lies, while the public sphere, which lacks the ability to defend itself, is unable to defend rationality. As a result, a democracy that seeks social cooperation will not be able to avoid degenerating into a "publicracy" seeking power and profit.
 
If the original gene of "publicracy" is rooted in the public square of ancient Greece, another of its important genes comes from Christianity. Christianity profoundly changed the concept of politics, and thus changed politics itself. Within Christianity we can locate "four political inventions" that laid the foundation for the later ideological conception of politics. These include: (1) ideological propaganda, rooted in preaching; (2) political self-censorship, which grew out of the confessional; (3) the modern prototype of the “masses,” which grew out of the spiritual institutionalization of religion (the invention of the "masses" predates the modern invention of the "individual"); and (4) the modern political concept of the “spiritual enemy,” which grew out of the religious struggle with the infidels.
 
At the beginning of the modern era, "publicracy" was only a latent problem, not yet a fatal one. However, the contemporary world has developed the technical conditions to efficiently implement the "publicracy," and the global systemic power (hereinafter referred to as GSP) synthesized by global financial capital, the Internet, cellphones, artificial intelligence, big data, and all new media systems has become the "publicracy."  This is a new, contemporary, type of political power, where political power is disguised as commerce, which transcends the traditional concept of politics and therefore cannot be analyzed according to the political concept of modernity, and which actually escapes the control of modern political power to a large extent.
 
GSP is a comprehensive force that integrates the power of financial capital, values, big data, traditional markets, and Internet platforms. It has become a systemic power that  brings together the biggest capital, the latest technology, and the largest communication platforms, and runs on a global system. Therefore, it has surpassed the constraints of traditional political forces (state and religion) to obtain an enormous freedom that cannot be controlled, and has given colonialism a new form and new method to occupy every corner of the globe.  In this sense, GSP has been transformed from its initial form as economic power, becoming a new type of political power.
 
The means by which this new power controls the world does not appear to be invasive, because it claims merely to be providing a "seamless service," yet it is this total service, which people cannot refuse, that has led to the a universal dependence on this systemic power. Not only in an economic sense, but also in a psychological and sociological sense, the comprehensive services it provides have become an essential part of everyone's life. People willingly accept the attentive service of systemic power, while at the same time being manipulated and controlled by it, even accepting the ready-made opinions the system has cooked up for us instead of thinking things through on our own.
 
One might say that the GSP achieves its goal of domination through a total service that collectively makes people stupid and deprives them of their free will and independence of behavior. If in the early days of civilization, military force and knowledge were the primary tools of power, and in the current era, service has become the new tool of global systemic power to gain an advantage in efforts to achieve domination. This is very likely to lead to a new authoritarianism, which is paradoxically based on and facilitated by anti-authoritarian free markets and democracy.
 
The world is witnessing the birth of a new authoritarianism, which is destroying democracy by means of a "publicracy" that originates in democracy and shares its genes. Modern democracy has always thought that the sole enemy of democracy was the traditional model of tyranny, not realizing that the more dangerous enemy of democracy comes from the "publicracy" hidden within. Marx found that capitalism had created its own grave-diggers. By the same token, the threat to democracy comes from within.
 
However, this does not mean the end of democracy. People today take pleasure in exaggerated predictions of the ends of things, like Francis Fukuyama's (b. 1952) overly eager proclamation of the end of history, as an advance notice of failure. It is an unprovable but often true fact that no system, idea, or methodology that has existed or reappeared over the course of history disappears forever.  Instead, they keep reappearing as the DNA of civilization or persisting in reality through mutation. The reason for this interesting phenomenon may be that those ancient institutions, ideas, or methodologies serve as vehicles for the practical wisdom that human beings use to cope with the basic problems of life, and wisdom is always useful.
 
This means that multiple institutional genes, found in both democracy and autocracy, are unlikely to disappear completely. Contrary to the idea of the end of history, the truth is that nothing that creates history ever ends.

The problem here is that the future of democracy depends on whether we can establish a new concept of democracy in which "opinion-based democracy" is transformed into "knowledge-based democracy," which will hopefully restore democratic rationality.  The knowledge-based democracy I am imagining here will attempt to institutionalize rational wisdom as part of the institutional apparatus of democracy, so that the democratic system can operate in an intelligent way "automatically," which is equivalent of having a democracy with intelligence “pre-installed 自带.”

Democracy Cannot Define the Good

To build a new concept of democracy one cannot avoid the basic problems. Let’s start with a reminder. In recent decades, left-leaning liberalism has sought to see democracy itself as a value. A value-based definition of democracy seems at first to be a positive affirmation of democracy, but it is actually a devaluation of democracy. Values are subjective, and making democracy a value also makes it subjective, and if democracy is merely a subjective value, it is not an objectively existing thing, but simply a political preference without a common denominator. In fact, democracy is an institution whose main components are the methods or techniques used to make public choices. Only through a fact-based understanding of democracy as a technical institution can the gains and losses of democracy be analyzed objectively or on the basis of shared standards.
 
The results of democratic choices, however, do contain values, such as those that are more favorable to equality, or emphasize fairness, or protect freedom, and so on. What is important to emphasize here is that democracy is not a value in itself, but a function of a given set of conditions and rules related to the expression of public choice, i.e., an operational function. Only by understanding democracy as a function or a tool can it be technically improved, whereas if democracy is seen as a value, it obscures the technical aspects of democracy and does nothing to improve it, and instead blocks the potential for its improvement. The contemporary ideology that sanctifies democracy has backfired to become a major form of anti-democracy.

The fundamental dilemma of democracy is that while it can produce public choices, it cannot guarantee that public choices will be good, or even that they will be for the common good or the public good. "Good" is a generalized concept that includes all good things, and is therefore a vague concept; views differ, and vary over time. For example, in ancient Greece, the good to be achieved by democracy was freedom—not the "negative" freedom of modern times, but the "positive" freedom to have a voice and participate in public affairs.
 
The good to be achieved in modern democracy (prior to World War II) has been a procedurally legitimate public choice based on the rule of law and the right of the individual to universal suffrage.  The good to be pursued in post-modern democracy (after 1968, roughly speaking) emphasizes equality, and continues to expand the concept of equality from equal rights to equal opportunities, and subsequently to gender equality, racial equality, equality of sexual orientation, and equality of outcomes. The concept has even expanded to include the idea that all individuals are of equal value and deserve equal recognition, which in value terms virtually abolishes the difference between the worthy and the ignorant, differences of ability, natural differences, physiological differences, differences in knowledge levels, in abilities to work, etc. 
 
In other words, all differences in fact are regarded instead as value discriminations. It is clear that the path followed by contemporary democracy has evolved from seeking to protect the equality of everyone, i.e., a "negative equality," to a stance where everyone is aggressively seeking their own individual equality, i.e.,  a "positive equality. The concepts of "negative equality" and "positive equality" here refer to Isaiah Berlin's (1909-1997) criteria of negative and positive freedom. The point of negative equality is to be protected, i.e., to resist the inequality imposed on individuals by governments or any form of collective power; the point of positive equality is to be aggressive, i.e., to force government or society to recognize the equality that each individual desires. It would be nice if everyone got what they wanted, but the problem is that this is not within humanity’s capacity, and people have different and conflicting understandings of what good things are.

Obviously, democracy cannot get around the basic fact that resources are limited. Since only certain goals can be achieved, democracy can only adopt the principle of majority rule. Should democracy attempt to deliver the “good” that every individual imagines they want will paradoxically lead democracy to a dead end, or in other words, democracy will be destroyed democratically.  If one looks at the problem realistically, one must admit that democracy can neither define the good nor realize conflicting goods. In other words, democracy cannot transcend problems of resources, financial problems, or mathematical problems.
 
Therefore, the goal of democracy must be limited to seeking to minimize harm and maximize compatibility within society. This requires wisdom, not just opinions, which only produce insoluble problems. However, no existing democracy can guarantee that its public choices will be rational and wise, beneficial to all, or at least causing harm to none. This means that democracy cannot even achieve "Pareto improvement," which is the minimum requirement for a good society. 
 
A "Pareto improvement" occurs when the interests of at least one person in a society are improved, and no one's interests are harmed as a result. It is easy to see that in fact most people will not be satisfied with "Pareto improvement." There are theoretically better indicators than "Pareto improvement," such as the "Confucian improvement" I have argued for (see below), but this is not possible with current democracy, and requires the establishment of a new kind of democracy. At present, the best functioning democracies are successful only at aggregating the opinions of the people. This is a public choice system based on statistics, and its statistical nature limits democracy to the function of reflecting public opinion.  It cannot resolve conflicts of opinion, to say nothing of making intelligent choices, particularly in the cases in which a manipulated or corrupted democracy has turned into a power game or even dissolved into social unrest.

The effectiveness of democracy presupposes community consensus, or rather, the effectiveness of democracy overlaps with the degree of community consensus. If a community lacks basic consensus, democracy is ineffective. There is no standard definition of what we call “basic consensus,” which is usually linked to the common destiny of the community and mainly includes common security, common interests, common crises, and common values. If a basic consensus exists, the conditions leading to social division are removed, so that the problems that democracy has to deal with are limited to strategic or technical disputes over how to achieve common goals, and disagreements over strategic or technical solutions will not lead to serious conflicts and divisions in the community. This is because these disagreements are only differences of opinion about how to achieve a common goal, not a fundamental struggle over which life, which system, or which beliefs to choose. That is why a democracy working within the boundaries of consensus is almost always effective, while a democracy without consensus is almost always ineffective.

Consensus is supposed to evolve naturally out of community life. But since the advent of modernity, consensus has become less and less natural. In contemporary society, a weak consensus still survives, though it tends to decline. The fundamental reason for this change is that in modern times, each individual has become the sole arbiter in matters of interests and values, and once supra-individual goals and values have disappeared, consensus is predestined to disappear as well, which leads democracy to undergo a qualitative change from a system that makes public choices between different strategies based on a shared consensus, to a system that makes public choices between conflicting interests or opposing values. This means that consensus changes from being a prerequisite for democracy to being a choice that democracy can make.
 
This qualitative change signals trouble for democracy, and indeed democracy is already in trouble. Democracy becomes a struggle once the "right and wrong" becomes a matter of choice instead of a mutually agreed on premise. The problem is that since democracy cannot define truth, goodness, or justice, it is impossible to form a values consensus through democracy.

There are few universal truths in the humanities or social sciences that are valid in the way that mathematical or scientific truths are. This suggests that in the humanities and social sciences, both bias and consensus lack the quality of universal validity. Given proposition P (people need air, water, and food to survive), which is a scientific truth, then based on P, it may follow that Q (a society should guarantee a basic amount of air, water, and food to everyone without discrimination), or it may follow that R (a society can only prioritize guaranteeing better quality air, water, and food to some people), and so on.
 
But P cannot justify Q or R (as in Hume's principle), that is, a necessary P can only lead to a possible Q or a possible R, i.e., □p→◇q∨◇r. Thus, to justify propositions such as Q or R, one must introduce additional values that include "ought", such as, for example, that "everyone should receive equal benefits regardless of differences in ability," or "those who have greater ability should receive more benefits." Differences in values are widespread, and there is no truth to turn to, so we have to turn to consensus. But consensus is not truth, but rather a substitute for truth. In ancient times, consensus was always used as a substitute for truth, so their debates were about distinguishing between “righteousness and profit," and not over "different kinds of righteousness." In contemporary times, however, serious divisions over values has led to a consensus-free society, and modern democracy is incapable of building consensus, so it is not only trapped in a post-truth state, but also in a post-consensus state, without even a substitute for truth.

For a long time, it has been assumed that democracy "validates" the legitimacy of an institution or a public choice. In the absence of consensus, however, democracy is unable to validate itself, to say nothing about the legitimacy of a particular thing. Thus, validation becomes something to be proven, leading to the problem of "validating the validation."  If the exercise of validation is rejected, then an arbitrary “validation” automatically validates its own authoritarianism. Only the unique solution of a mathematical problem is qualified to claim "Q.E.D."   There is no unique solution to a value problem, and hence no justification that merits the use of Q.E.D., otherwise it is anti-liberal authoritarianism. As long as you recognize that other people think as well as you do, then any value proposition is always “in search of validation,” but is never “validated.”  Precisely because there are differences of opinion, democracy can only choose among the various opinions on the basis of the majority principle, which consists of winning, but not "validating.”
 
Since there is a lack of truth in the field of values, the closest thing to legitimacy is unanimity, or maximum consensus. However, unanimity is extremely rare. Consider the case of constitutions, which in theory should be based on unanimity, but the fact is that there is no constitution in the world that is based on unanimity of all citizens. This means that even the legitimacy of constitutions has never been fully validated, to say nothing of other texts and practices. I am afraid that "unanimity" will come about only in politically fortunate moments, when the whole society has a common interest or faces a common crisis, at which point democracy can reach its maximum legitimacy. Otherwise, democracy muddles through or is even ineffective under adverse conditions, such as (1) lack of rule of law, (2) zero-sum game of interests, (3) lack of consensus, and (4) clash of civilizations.

In philosophy, even a unanimous consensus is not sufficient to define the good or truth. It is not impossible for everyone to think incorrectly. Maximum consensus is also maximum legitimacy. This illustrates that maximum validation is not a proof of goodness or truth either. Therefore, it must not be forgotten that consensus becomes the highest standard only when truth and goodness are absent, and only when consensus ceases to exist do personal preferences become decisive reasons, and at this point there are no standards at all. Democracy leaves the question of "what is good?" or "what is true?" to be decided by the sum of uncertain and inconsistent preferences, which is both a political and a civilizational risk. In today's world, the question of how to bring wisdom back to politics is therefore a critical one.
 
In fact, the idea of integrating wisdom and politics is an ancient dream that began with Plato. In the contemporary context, of course, there is no longer any need for a "philosopher king," but the question of how to combine wisdom and politics has never been resolved. In the case of democracy, the problem is that it has not been smart enough so far, so it is reasonable to try to imagine a smart democracy, i.e., a democracy that has intelligence preinstalled.

One Person, Two Votes

The key to the technical design of democracy is the voting system. The voting paradoxes as discussed by Condorcet (1743-1794) and Kenneth Arrow (1921-2017) can be ignored here. Although voting paradoxes constitute strict proof that democracy can be neither perfect nor completely just and fair, perfection is something that is exists only in logic, mathematics, or pure concepts, is never is found in reality, and therefore can be ignored. Which is not to say that the idea of perfection is meaningless, of course. Ideals are not meant to be realized, but instead are the standards used to measure reality. That is the meaning of perfection. If the ideal of democracy is the full expression of the true will of the people and the maximization of the common good for all, then we can conceive of  voting principles that are as close to optimal democracy as possible.

The proposal discussed here is an improvement in the voting rules, with the goal of making the voting system more adequate in expressing the true public sentiment and reducing the possible harm that voting might inflict on that public sentiment. As discussed earlier, the effectiveness of democracy lies in the trust of the people, and the loss of trust leads to the loss of democracy, so it is necessary to introduce the two a priori principles of minimum harm and maximum compatibility. There is no logical reason to oppose these two principles, and in fact to oppose them would be to try to use democracy to the detriment of a certain number of people, which is obviously to oppose democracy itself. Therefore, these two principles can pass the a priori argument—the strictest kind of philosophical argument— and become a priori principles whose a priori nature lies in the fact that any objection must logically defeat itself.

What I am envisioning is a two-vote rule, i.e., a "one person, two votes" rule instead of the usual "one person, one vote" rule. My reasoning is as follows: suppose two candidates run for election, where candidate A benefits everyone and everyone gains N, while candidate B gives 51% of the people a benefit of N+1 and reduces 49% of the people's gain to N-1. In a "one person, one vote" system, candidate B, who is aiming to favor a particular group, is very likely (in fact, there is almost without question) to defeat candidate A, who favors no one. 
 
Human beings are selfish by nature; only a minority will be selfless, while the majority will inevitably choose personal interest over principle. I believe that the one person, two vote system could help reduce the harm to minorities. In this system, everyone would be given two votes—one positive and one negative—rather than the usual one affirmative vote, and every voter could, when voting, cast one positive and one negative vote, or on their own initiative, cast only one vote (no matter if it is positive or negative) , or not vote at all. 

The rationale for the two-vote rule is that everyone has something they like and something they don’t, with both affirmative and negative preferences. The necessary functions of consciousness are involved here. Affirmation and negation are the two basic dimensions of consciousness and the minimum conditions for thinking and acting to be possible. If we employ only one of these dimensions of consciousness, consciousness is functionally incomplete and we cannot think adequately, or even think at all.
 
Specifically, if thinking has only an affirmative function, it is perhaps only equivalent to the level of lower animals; if it has only a negative function, thinking is able to function normally but at a minimal level, which shows that the negative function is the key function of thinking. This can be proven logically: affirmation is the naturally given existential property of any being, when there is P, it is equivalent to P being true, and all other logical relations, including negation, conjunction, disjunction, implication, and mutual implication, are all epistemological properties prescribed by humans. Except for negation, other logical relations can be mutually interpreted and therefore mutually reducible to other logical relations, which means that only negation is an absolutely irreducible logical relation, and once the negation function is omitted, thinking cannot proceed.
 
It is clear that thinking is functionally inadequate if only affirmation is available, and that negation is the fundamental function of thinking required to make any choice.  Positive affirmation can even be explained by negation, i.e. p = ¬ ¬ p.[2] This means that even if the "one person, one vote" rule must be adhered to, the vote should express a negative preference and not a positive preference. The affirmative is only a cultural tradition, while the negative is a logical imperative; moreover, there is proof from the operation of computers that affirmation and negation are the basis of computer operations, and if the function of negation is removed, the computer will not work. When a computer with only "one vote" cannot function, how can we trust the “one vote” of a human brain? For these reasons, democratic voting requires a yes vote and a no vote to express the two basic functions of the mind in order to fully express people's conscious preferences.

Furthermore, there are other existential reasons for the one person, two vote rule: what people dislike often touches on more frightening issues than what they desire; what people dislike is often about threats to security and freedom, while what they desire is closer to the pursuit of profit maximization, so that desire leads to more conflict and division than cooperation, while what is disliked is often shared, which makes it easier to achieve unanimity. People are united by common crises and divided by competing interests. It is true that a society usually has fewer common interests than common threats, so that the basis for social consensus comes more from common security, common threats, or common crises. The existential rationale for this is that common crises are about survival, and questions of survival are more profound than questions of interests. In short, for both thinking and living, the negative function or the negative vote is crucial and cannot be omitted.

The two-vote rule can be imagined as follows: (1) Net approval rule. The algorithm is: net approval rate = approval rate - disapproval rate. Suppose a program or candidate A gets 51% approval and 31% disapproval, then its net approval rate is 51% - 31% = 20%; if program or candidate B gets 41% approval and 11% disapproval, then its net approval rate is 41% - 11% = 30%, resulting in a win for B. This result is clearly different from the result produced by the one-person, one-vote rule. (2) The conditional majority principle. The algorithm is that if two proposals have the same net approval rate, then the proposal with the higher approval rate wins.

It is easy to see how, in some cases, a two-vote process can produce a completely different result than a single-vote process.  In comparison, the two-vote process is a more accurate expression of popular mood and a more accurate expression of what people really want and do not want. The intended positive effect of a two-vote system is that it can in some manner limit or reduce the harm to the interests of the loser vis-à-vis the winner, or can enhance the ability of the disadvantaged to defend themselves. Rationally speaking, the two-vote system should force candidates to try to set more reasonable and less eccentric, neutral goals, which is equivalent to trying to be as close to the middle way as possible, and especially trying to think in terms of the common or general interest of the community, and thus avoid losing by not generating a large number of negative votes.

​Under the two-vote system, the stronger party will still win, but it will probably need to limit its excessive demands in order to remain strong, or it might compromise its strength by losing too much popular support. Thus, in terms of theoretical possibilities, the two-vote system is expected to better maintain political stability and cooperation in a society, while avoiding the risks of political and economic extremism.
 
I once asked the French economist Jean-Paul Tchang (b. 1949) if Macron would have still won the 2017 French presidential race if the two-vote rule has been adopted. He guessed that Macron would probably still have won by a small margin, but more likely in a rather awkward situation where each presidential candidate would have had a negative net approval rating. I also asked the American philosopher Roger T. Ames (b. 1947) whether Trump would have won the 2016 U.S. election if the two-vote rule had been applied. He replied that Trump would mostly likely have lost, but that unfortunately the other candidate would also have had negative net approval ratings. He asked me in return: Is winning with a negative net approval rating considered a win?

This is a serious question that goes deep into the foundations of democracy and touches on the crux of today's democratic crisis, namely that consensus in democratic societies can disappear and is in fact disappearing. Ames’s question hits the nail on the head: Is winning with a negative net approval rating a win? Of course, a negative net approval rating only occurs when social divisions reach a significant level, which is not necessarily a frequent event. But the point is that it can happen, and that's a serious problem for democracy. If every candidate has a negative net approval rating, this is a sure sign that a society is seriously lacking in consensus and is divided in terms of values, interests, and ideas, and democracy is inefficient in such a situation. In any event, winning with a negative net approval rating certainly defeats the very purpose of democracy, which is that the winner must represent at least a majority of public opinion.
 
Clearly, the two-vote system is a "litmus test" or touchstone for democracy, and it can clearly reveal the hidden crisis of a democracy. The single-vote system merely shows the approval rate but not the disapproval rate, so its voting results cannot fully express people's true preferences and cannot reflect social conflicts, but only show that each has its own preferences, which is the equivalent of telling good news but not the bad. Taking the 2020 U.S. election as an example, in terms of single-vote support, both Trump and Biden received "record high" support, but in terms of the intensity of mutual resentment between supporters of the two sides, if calculated by the two-vote rule, I am afraid that their net approval rates fall well below 50% and are not sufficient to prove they have the trust of the people. It would even not be surprising to see both sides receive negative net approval ratings.

As demonstrated by Condorcet or Arrow's theorem, any electoral system has its limitations, so it is impossible to hope to perfect democracy, and all we can do is improve it. The two-vote system is an improvement on democratic voting, but it is still not capable of defining what is good, nor of illustrating what choice is in the interests of all of the people. This means that the double-vote system is still not enough to make democracy itself institutionally smart, but is only a "mitigation" strategy that helps minimize harm and maximize compatibility. That is, the two-vote rule is well-intentioned, but not smart enough, so it is only the first step toward a smart democracy.
 
The Complexity of the Popular Mind

The fundamental nature of the electoral system lies in the aggregation of the independent preferences of all members of the community. Even assuming that everyone is immune to the influence of ideological propaganda, commercial advertisements, or social fads (an unrealistic assumption, of course, since the fully autonomous self is a metaphysical assumption of modern philosophy), democracy faces a fundamental dilemma: the aggregation of individual rationalities does not guarantee a collectively rational outcome. In fact, collectively irrational outcomes occur from time to time. If voting tends to produce negative outcomes that are detrimental to the common good or detrimental to each individual, this is a major problem, a serious one that has not gone unnoticed.
 
However, reflections on democracy, from Edmund Burke (1729-1797) to Gustave Le Bon (1841-1931), have been marginalized by modern mainstream ideology and often labelled as conservative or harmful. It does no good to avoid theoretical problems; serious problems always emerge resolutely in practice. If democracy elects a dangerous person, or a referendum decides to renege on an international debt, or democratically decides to wage a war of aggression, or the majority votes to pass discriminatory bills against minorities, or, conversely, a minority generates social pressure by creating a sensation to force people to vote to pass bills against other minorities—the democratic dilemma has long been not limited to the tyranny of the majority, but can also be the tyranny of certain minorities over other minorities, or even the use of "politically correct" discourse by minorities to force people to vote against the majority.
 
This is a new phenomenon today, where the discourse of "political correctness" is used to create discursive violence against individuals with such precision that no one dares to oppose "political correctness," and in the end, the few win out over the many.  These incorrect outcomes can hardly be considered “just” because they are democratically decided. Is it possible, then, to find a way out of the dilemma of collective irrationality and invent a new kind of democracy, one in which reason prevails and tends to produce the general and common good, thus transcending the simple sum of individual preferences?

Many theorists, such as Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) and Jürgen Habermas (b. 1929), tend to believe in deliberative democracy, and to reconstruct a public sphere that operates as a deliberative democracy in line with of the ancient Greek tradition. This assumes that communicative rationality is an effective way to reach collective consensus. This is a constructive way of thinking, but it leaves untouched a key problem:  an agreement of the minds cannot guarantee that it will put an end to a disagreement of the hearts. Even if one accepts the "ideal speech conditions" recommended by Habermas to guarantee effective rational dialogue, and believes that rational minds can always be persuaded by "better arguments," there is still no guarantee that the conflict between the parties will be extinguished by rational consensus, because being persuaded by rational argument is not the same as making actual concessions (which is known as “pretending to be convinced 口服心不服”).
 
The heart and the mind are not the same thing. Thought matters involve logic, language, and knowledge, while matters of the heart involve interests, emotions, and values.  These are not interchangeable, just as truth is not interchangeable with values. More people see religion, values, political ideology, cultural identity, or national identity as more important than truth—this has always been true and is even more so today—and may therefore make irrational choices, even knowingly. This is an exception to Socrates' principle that "no one makes mistakes voluntarily." Because an intellectual consensus is not the same as an emotional consensus, a mutual meeting of the minds cannot guarantee a mutual acceptance of the heart. If reason could solve all problems, then social and civilizational conflicts would have disappeared or been put to rest, but the opposite is true, so it is necessary to admit the truth: reason does not always solve problems of the heart. No matter how much reason there is in an argument, as soon as the relationship between the heart and the mind breaks down, consensus disappears and democracy fails.

The preconditions for the functioning of democracy are social trust and social consensus, but a fundamental contemporary dilemma is the degradation of consensus and trust. Therefore, if we hope to revive democracy, we have to renew the idea of democracy rather than wait for social consensus to suddenly pop out of the magician’s hat like a rabbit. Rebuilding popular intellectual and emotional consensus is beyond the capacity of democracy; we cannot change the existing social conditions of modern times, and changing society is an extremely complex and unpredictable process. Instead of indulging in nostalgia for the social consensus of yesteryear, we should create new institutions that accord with today’s reality, and the least costly way to do this is to improve the system. In other words, democracy needs a reboot.

Unanimity of thought lies in universal necessity, and the clear criterion of universal necessity is logic or mathematics, which is the unquestionable criterion. However, for the spirit (or the heart), there is no similar criterion of universal necessity, and the closest criterion to universality, relatively speaking, is unanimity based on sharedness. Historically, there are two conditions that unify the hearts of a community: (1) a shared spiritual world, i.e., an interpretive system or belief system concerning facts and values, including mainly religion, mythology, historical narratives, and philosophy; (2) a shared relationship of interests, i.e., the security and basic interests of each individual become simultaneously the common security and common interests of all of the people, thus creating the effect of sharing honor and disgrace and working together in difficult times.  
 
If one of these two conditions is satisfied, this will achieve a passable level of unanimity, and if both conditions are satisfied, this will achieve the full effect of unanimity. By way of contrast, if a community cannot guarantee common security and common interests, and a very small number of people have exclusive claims to important material interests, or if a community cannot build a spiritual world where everyone shares the glory, and a very small number of people capture all the glory, it is impossible to achieve unanimity.

Popular sentiment is not the same as public opinion.  Public opinion is likely to be led astray by social fads, fake news, and propaganda, as well as manipulated by capital and power; therefore, opinions conveyed by ballots or social surveys may not be a true reflection of either the mind or the heart. The only fully effective precondition for the functioning of democracy is a popular sentiment rooted in a shared security, shared interests, and a common spiritual world. Considering the highly fragmented spiritual world and the tribalization of values in contemporary society, it is difficult for any such society to meet the conditions for constructing a unanimous popular sentiment, which is a problem that cannot be avoided in contemporary democracy.

​This means that it is difficult for democracy to satisfy multiple inconsistent demands impartially or justly, and the rational goal of democracy can only be to take as its a priori obligation the minimization of harm and the maximization of compatibility. According to its a priori obligations, democracy must favor strategies that maximize mutual benefit, aiming, to the extent possible, to transform the game of universal competition into a game of universal cooperation.

One can imagine a strategy that maximizes mutual benefits: given any participants X and Y in a game, there exists an institutional arrangement in which a reciprocal equilibrium of benefit sharing can be reached between X and Y, where X profits when and only when Y profits, and X loses when and only when Y loses, so that promoting the interests of Y becomes the preferred strategy for X to achieve its own interests, and vice versa. Of course, this is an idealized goal, and reality only seeks to approximate but not fully achieve this goal. The original inspiration for this idea comes from Confucius' principle of "he who wishes to be established himself, seeks also to establish others 己欲立而立人，己欲达而达人," so we will call it "Confucian improvement" or "Confucian optimization.” 
 
Confucian improvement is obviously superior to Pareto improvement, because Confucian improvement is equivalent to everyone’s achieving Pareto improvement at the same time, or, to put it another way, when anyone receives a benefit, everyone must receive it at the same time. Even if the Confucian improvement is only partially realized, it will still be possible to build a near unanimous public opinion or social consensus, and therefore democracy will be able to obtain an effective foundation. If we reject Confucian improvement, I fear there is no hope of building a social consensus.

Democracy with Pre-Installed Intelligence

We already know that democracy has two major problems: (1) the aggregation of individual rationality is not guaranteed to produce collective rationality, and instead often even results in collective irrationality; and (2) it is difficult for democracy to do away with the manipulation of capital and power groups. Therefore, there is reason to design a smart democracy in which the system comes with a pre-installed “IQ,” so that democracy can function rationally without unfair preferences and can produce the most rational public choices possible.

Some political scholars have taken the unusual step of suggesting the ancient rule of drawing lots as an alternative to voting in elections, and one of the most creative and comprehensive accounts comes from the Chinese political scientist Wang Shaoguang 王绍光 (b. 1954). The lottery option has far-reaching roots; one of the main principles of ancient Greek democracy was the drawing of lots, along with public debate and voting, all three of which are useful in their own right. Roughly speaking, the lottery was used to select the leaders of the city-state, public debate (the origin of deliberative democracy) was used for public resolutions of the city-state, and voting was used in case of disagreement and disaccord.
 
Some say that drawing lots is the fairest measure and truly treats all people equally. As Wang Shaoguang has argued, drawing lots means "making a rational choice to de-rationalize the selection process."  Drawing lots excludes the possibility of using power, influence, intrigue, and mass incitement; it relies solely on the will of heaven, thus making it truly neutral and fair. Although providence is irrational, allowing heaven to choose is itself a rational choice, hence the idea that it is a de-rationalization of a rational and deliberate selection. Wang Shaoguang believes that the lottery as employed by Greek democracy is superior to modern democracy in terms of fairness, because the procedural fairness of modern democracy cannot guarantee true fairness, and whoever holds the most social resources in fact wins. Here he adopts an argument by historian Thomas Trollope (1810-1892) to the effect that people are so full of prejudices that it is better to believe in probabilities than in people.

The lottery is indeed a kind of equality without discrimination. But the problem is that even if equality for all is a good thing, there is certainly no reason why equality in everything should be a good thing. The drawing of lots to select leaders is very problematic, because according to probabilities, it is obvious that the drawing of lots cannot guarantee that the chosen leaders will be good, honest, and wise.  Instead, there is a high probability that mediocre people will be chosen, and an even higher probability that selfish and incompetent people will be chosen. Just and selfless people represent a minority, and you can spend your life looking for someone who is both wise and selfless.   The Book of Documents talks about "securing uniformity despite irregularity 惟齐非齐."
 
This is a genuine insight into the issue of equality, that treating different things differently in a way that is compatible with their nature is what produces equality and justice, while insisting on treating different things with “compatibility” is what produces inequality or injustice. It is clear that for democracy, lotteries cannot be the best option. The expected goal of democracy is to produce reasonably wise public choices, and the probability that a lottery will happen to yield a reasonable outcome is too low. In fact, Greek democracy did not rely entirely on the lottery. The consuls were elected by drawing lots, but the real power of the city-state was in the hands of the Senate, which set the agenda, and public events were not decided by the consuls or even the Senate, but by citizens' deliberations (deliberative democracy) and, if they could not be decided, by referendum (plebiscite).
 
It is evident that Greek democracy was a comprehensive formula that included lottery, public deliberation, and voting. It should not be overlooked that the professionalized high officials of the city-state, such as generals and treasurers, were not democratically elected, but chosen instead on the basis on professional competence and prestige. Within such a separation of powers, drawing lots lot had no fundamental impact on the politics of Greek democracy, and it was feasible precisely because it had no fundamental impact. It is perhaps also important to mention that Athenian democracy was not a successful system, and in fact was one reason for Athens' decline and even defeat. In short, I am afraid that democracy by lottery is not a superior democracy. If lotteries were an optimal system, then the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s Mark Six would be the quickest shortcut to wealth.

The idea of smart democracy can also draw on other intellectual resources. Although there is no tradition of democratic practice in China, there is the kernel of an idea hidden in the Great Plan 洪范chapter of the Book of Documents. Of course, this is a retrospective reconstruction of the origin of a theory; in fact, the ancients were not talking about democracy, but rather the institutional design for resolving doubts in affairs of state, but the germ of the idea of smart democracy is embedded in the theory. According to legend, the ideas found in the Great Plan come from Jizi 箕子 (a legendary figure from the 11th century BCE).  The text, however, was not written in the Western Zhou period (1045-771 BCE), but more likely put together during the Spring and Autumn (771-476 BCE) and Warring States (476-221 BCE) periods by people who added material as well as organizing the original text; some of the language in the text closer to the style of the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods. 
 
Still, the main ideas are quite ancient, and perhaps truly originated in the thought of Jizi. Jizi was the uncle of the Shang Dynasty king, one of the three sages at the time. When King Wu of the Zhou Dynasty destroyed the Shang Dynasty, he heard that Jizi was a great sage and asked him to serve in his court, but Jizi politely refused.  Nonetheless, for the sake of the world, Jizi offered King Wu a document discussing "nine categories 九畴" (i.e., nine strategies for ruling the country), including politics, economics, and ethics. Looking at Zhou dynastic practice, it would seem that King Wu accepted most of these suggestions, for example, the fifth category, "the establishment and use of royal perfection 皇极", deals with the principles of justice needed to rule the world.
 
The most unique and innovative of the nine spheres is the seventh, "the intelligent use of the examination of doubts 稽疑", which deals with the resolution of doubts in state affairs, and whose institutional design can be regarded as the kernel of smart democracy. Jizi’s suggestion is that when there is a difficult issue of national or public importance, the choice should be decided through a combination of the expression of  human and heavenly opinions. This kind of democratic institutional design was not in harmony with the monarchy of the time, so it makes sense that the Zhou dynasty never adopted it.[3]

Jizi’s smart democracy was designed as a five-vote system. Of the five, three were human votes, one being that of the monarch, the second that of the collective opinion of the ministers, and the third that of collective opinion of the people. Thus it would seem that the ministers and the people first had to engage in deliberation in order to reach a collective opinion. On the base of historical conditions of the period, we assume that grassroots officials did not have the right to participate, which means that the collective opinion of the ministers was probably limited to 20 to 30 important ministers; in addition, given the social structure at the time, there probably was no popular assembly, and the collective opinion of the people would have been expressed by respected representatives of the people.
 
In any event, the idea of the three votes is democratic and excludes the monarch's dictatorial power. What was more important were the two "weighted votes" representing heaven. It was impossible for heaven to vote in person, so divination was used to know heaven’s opinion, and there were two such divination votes. It is interesting to note that Jizi thought that two divinations were sufficient to understand heavenly opinion, and I cannot help but wonder why he chose two rather than one or three.  From  a common sense perspective, one divination is very random, little different from gambling, and even the will of heaven needs to be verified to avoid unpredictability.  “Three” was a frequent symbol employed at the time, and three divinations would have been the best symbol of the repeated confirmation of the will of heaven, and even two out of three would have been authoritative enough, but Jizi chose two divinations. 

​Perhaps he thought this was the simplest way to confirm the initial divination. When Confucius was asked if he wanted to "think three times," he also replied that twice was enough.[4]  There may be another reason: during the Three Dynasties, study of the Yijing was much in fashion, the interpretation of everything was based on the theory of yin and yang; Jizi’s two divinations may have been one yin and one yang.
 
It is important to note here that in the early days of civilization, divination was not viewed as superstition, as it is today, but was regarded as credible knowledge, with a status similar to that of today’s science. Before the empirical knowledge of science became authoritative, divination was a compelling form of expertise. Like empirical knowledge, divination also required skillful deployment, and although it was mystical in nature, its random results also required "professional" interpretation to produce meaning, and the shaman’s interpretation implied the experience and acumen of long experience in the affairs of world and men. 
 
Shamans who were qualified to interpret divination at the time were all wise and prestigious "experts," all of which meant that divination was not a blind guess, but something better. As early civilizations matured, shamans were replaced by historians (the scholars Chen Mengjia 陈梦家 (1911-1966), K. C. Chang 张光直 (1931-2001), and Li Zehou 李泽厚 (1930-2021)) all offer extensive discussions of this), In other words, people placed their trust in historical experience rather than in divination, the reason being that people gradually found that historical experience had more reference value than divination, thus establishing the authoritative status of history. Chinese civilization eventually chose historical knowledge as its main reference point and became a history-based civilization, although this is not relevant to the present text.
 
We might understand things this way:  Jizi’s creativity did not lie in the use of divination per se, but in imagining a unique "knowledge-weighted democracy" that assigned a decisive place to expertise in political decision-making. As for divination, it was an acknowledged expertise at the time, and in the contemporary context, the weighted vote of divination should become the weighted vote of modern scientific knowledge, so as to reconstruct a contemporary version of Jizi’s smart democracy.

According to the text of the Great Plan, Jizi’s rules of concerning smart democracy can be summarized in modern language as follows.

The three human votes are marked as K (king), M (minister), and P (people), and the two divination are marked as D1 and D2, which gives us:
 
Rule 1: If K, M, P, D1 and D2 all agree on a solution, forming a unanimous consensus, then this is the optimal public choice.
 
Rule 2: If K, D1 and D2 form a consensus, but M and P oppose it; or if M, D1 and D2 form a consensus, but K and P oppose it; or again if P, D1 and D2 form a consensus, but K and M oppose it, then none of the cases is an optimal solution, but may be used with caution when no other options are available.
 
Rule 3: If one of the divinations, either D1 or D2, does not support the proposal, the proposal thus looks highly suspect. If the proposal concerns a domestic operation, it might be used in a pinch; if it is an external operation, then the risk is too high.
 
Rule 4: If neither divination D1 nor D2 supports the option, then it is not feasible even if human support is unanimous. The veto rendered by the professional “knowledge” of heaven’s will is definitive.
  
It is easy to see that Rule 3 and Rule 4 give greater weight to the heavenly votes, which means that Jizi considered the what was learned about heaven’s will through divination had more credibility than human opinion. Rule 4, in particular, makes clear that the unanimous rejection of the divination votes outweighs the unanimous agreement of all human votes. This may be an indication that the all-knowing and unbiased spirit of heaven transcends human biases and limitations.
 
The design of Jizi’s system can be analyzed structurally as follows: human opinion expresses what man wants to do, heavenly opinion explains what can be done, and what man wants must be subordinated to what heaven allows. Explained in modern language, the goal of the knowledge-weighted democracy designed by Jizi is to guide democracy through knowledge and to let democracy prevail through knowledge, thus helping people to make rational decisions. Of course, Jizi’s vision is only a prototype of a smart democracy; it is far from mature and in need of improvement. Without delving into its shortcomings or the limitations of the era, what is important here is that the idea of knowledge-led democracy suggested by Jizi reveals a new concept of democracy.

Human nature is selfish, and there is no point in complaining about that, because selfishness is what makes life possible. But short-sightedness is a problem, and collective short-sightedness becomes a major problem. The vast majority of people today are only concerned with their individual short-term interests, and the short-sightedness of this mode of thinking is related to changes in our sense of time.  As the historian Francois Hartog (b. 1946) has pointed out, our contemporary experience of time is "presentist," in which the measure of time is instantaneous and confined to the present moment. As a result, people's understanding and value judgments are not only personalized but also based solely on the momentary awareness of the present, which defines things in terms of our immediate, one-time consumption, and dissolves all spiritual values.
 
The validity of any spiritual value, whether moral or religious or philosophical, lies in its permanence and constancy. When the scale of temporal perspective is reduced to the present instant (so-called living in the moment), spiritual values lose the conditions necessary for their existence, and only personal interests and private feelings of the moment remain in consciousness, which means that consensus cannot exist.

The presentist state of consciousness not only diminishes spirituality but also affects individual rationality, in the sense that when the temporal perspective becomes an important variable in thinking, the shorter the unit of time used to measure benefits, the less likely it is that rational thinking will reach an outcome that is beneficial to the individual in the long run, to say nothing of the well-being of the collective common good. In other words, when the temporal perspective is grounded in the present, even if individual rationality is used correctly, it is impossible to choose long-term effective or collectively shared benefits.   A presentist rationality is inevitably short-sighted.
 
Game theory also proves that in a one-off game, the winning strategy selected by individual rationality cannot be the optimal strategy. Instead, individual rationality always creates collective dilemmas. Typical models of the include the prisoner’s dilemma, free-riding, the tragedy of the commons and the tragedy of the anticommons, etc. Just as it is almost impossible for individual rationalities to come together to make up collective rationality, it is also impossible for individual opinions to add up to a reasonable common choice. Under such unfavorable contemporary conditions, the democracy of the aggregation of opinions must fail. Only universal knowledge can approach universal rationality, and therefore only a knowledge-based democracy can be rational and reasonable.

A society or community is able to function more or less correctly because there are enough multiple rounds of “play” in the community to constitute a long game. This is not a product of luck, but of wisdom. Human beings invented institutions, laws, and ethics to ensure multiple rounds of games with stable rules. In a multi-round game, people must consider the long-term to be able to secure their own interests, and therefore rationally tend toward cooperation. The fact that consensus is disappearing in contemporary society suggests that the systems currently in operation are gradually becoming ineffective, or at least inadequate, and therefore institutional improvement is becoming a matter of life or death for society.
 
A valid condition for the formation of sustainable long-term games or stable cooperative institutions is credibility, which is a way to guarantee the certainty of rules, the stability of practices, and some degree of a predictable future. The Legalist politician Shang Yang (390-338 BCE) was the first to discover that credibility is a condition for the validity of all institutions and values. However, stable and credible rules of the game are still not enough to ensure people's support and loyalty to a system, a problem that the Legalists failed to realize. Another institutional condition that is just as important as credibility is that a system must conform to what people want, otherwise it will lack the attractiveness necessary to be sustainable.  In other words, the rules of the game of any system must be fundamentally consistent with the general, shared, and common interests of the community.
 
Furthermore, the acceptability and sustainability of a system lies not only in the fact that it promises the common, shared, and general interests of the community, but also that the system must have the capacity to deliver on its "institutional promise," i.e., the capacity to deliver the merchandise. The fundamental problem with institutions, therefore, is that they must have the capacity to resolve often contradictory demands, i.e., the contradiction between unlimited desires and limited feasible rational goals. Institutions are like people, who face the same contradiction. The difference is that the individual is responsible for the individual’s own affairs, while the system is responsible for the collective. Here is the common weakness of all systems: the system itself lacks the capacity for rational intelligence, or rather, it lacks sufficient IQ compared to the difficulties it needs to contend with.

Assuming that a person has rational intelligence, they must be able to rationally choose a relatively optimal goal between infinite desires and finite capabilities, in other words, a reachable goal despite existing limitations. In the most simplified model, this is equivalent to solving for the maximum value of the desirable items in a binary coordinate with a feasible value domain constraint, or to put it another way, solving for the maximum value of feasibility in the domain of desirable values, which is equivalent to solving for the focal point of desirability and feasibility (cf. Thomas Schelling's definition), or the intersection of desire and rational intelligence, which is the optimal rational solution (and not the only rational solution. Conservatives may choose other rational solutions that are slightly lower than the optimal solution).
 
This focal point can be mapped onto the system while the problem remains unchanged, i.e., an acceptable and trustworthy system must be rationally intelligent enough to solve for the maximum desirable option under the feasible value domain constraint, or the maximum of the feasible options in the desirable value domain, both of which are consistent with the focal point.

For a system to have a pre-installed IQ, we can imagine a contemporary version of a knowledge-weighted democracy on the basis of Jizi’s inspiration. The basic idea is a knowledge-weighted democracy with "two rounds of decentralization," in which public choice is separated into two rounds of voting under deliberative conditions to determine two separate goals: the first round of voting is a collective choice by all to determine a desirable value domain, i.e., the items desired by public opinion; the second round of voting is carried out by knowledge committees to determine what is feasible within the range desired by public opinion. This is the final choice.
 
The contemporary version of smart democracy must be very different from Jizi’s democracy.  First of all, there is no monarchy, so the votes of monarchs and ministers are not needed, but only the votes of the people.  Therefore, the first round of voting expresses the majority opinion of all people, and the winner is based on the net support rate under the two-vote rule described above; the second round of voting is a knowledge-weighted vote, and the "Science Committee" and "Humanities Committee" take the final vote.  This imitates Jizi’s two types of knowledge-weighted votes. In fact, organizing two knowledge committees may be no better than one such committee, and there is no necessary reason for it, and I am simply respecting Jizi’s insight. The point is that, just as Jizi’s divination was not a vote expressing humanity’s desires, but a human voting in heaven’s stead, so the vote of knowledge committee is not essentially expressing what people want—even if it is people who are voting—but rather humanity who is voting on behalf of knowledge, and the "knowledge vote" and the knowledge committee are merely proxies for knowledge itself.

The knowledge committee will be composed of credible scientists and humanists. The criterion of credibility here does not lie in social popularity, but in narrow expertise, meaning that these scientists and humanists will have reached the summit in terms of the knowledge possessed by human beings, including knowledge currently in hand and the most promising knowledge of the future—in other words, they will be at the forefront in terms of current human knowledge. Although human knowledge can never reach absolute truth, nonetheless, the limits of existing knowledge can be understood as the maximum value of the credibility of human intelligence, which also means a relative minimum value in terms of errors.
 
Credibility also requires that members of knowledge committees not hold important government administrative positions.  In addition, their personal finances must be made public, and any unexplained increase in personal wealth or abnormal income would make them untrustworthy and they could not serve on the knowledge committees, thus severing any possible relationship between the knowledge committees and interest groups. Thus, no matter what choices it makes, the knowledge committee cannot possibly direct wealth toward its own members.  As long as knowledge is the final word and the ultimate power, it will largely be free from the control of the forces of capital, governments, and, political parties, and will be able to produce credible choices that are knowledge-based and intellectually informed.
 
Simply put, the knowledge committee would have the ultimate power to determine public choices, and the government would be the ultimate power to implement those public choices. Such an institutional arrangement has the some potential to achieve, in institutional terms, a smart democracy with preinstalled IQ. 

Thus, according to the two-round voting system of smart democracy, the people first choose a desirable option according to their wishes; and second, the knowledge committee produces its knowledge-weighted votes, approving or rejecting the popular choice and arriving at the final, feasible option. The specific rules are as follows:
 
The first round of voting is conducted in a manner equivalent to the modern practice of universal suffrage, with everyone in the community (society or state) voting (anyone can abstain), using a two-vote rule, with each person having both a positive and a negative vote. This round determines the candidates or the possibilities that are on offer.

The second round of voting is conducted separately in two knowledge committees, the Scientific Committee and the Humanities Committee, again using the two-vote rule. The members of the knowledge committee will examine whether the programs defended by the candidates in the first round of voting are realistic and feasible, based on the highest standards of current knowledge and future trends, with rational discussion and argumentation that satisfies Habermas' criteria.
 
The point of this is the separation of powers: the knowledge committee does not have the power to choose for people what they want, but it does have the power to judge whether what they want is feasible. In other words, smart democracy divides public choice into two value domains: the people decide what is desirable, and in turn, rational knowledge judges whether the desirable goal is feasible.

If one of the knowledge committees does not support a public proposal, then the program in question will be deferred until conditions are right.

If both knowledge committees reject a public proposal, then the public has to come up with another plan.

We should note that knowledge committees may not be able to completely avoid bias, but because they are cut off from considerations of personal material interest, their bias is limited to their professional realm, which is imperfect but clearly better than selfish bias. Moreover, knowledge judgments in future societies will be enhanced by advanced artificial intelligence systems which will improve comprehensive knowledge across disciplines (I imagine a "new encyclopedic" knowledge that is constantly updated in artificial intelligence systems), which will further reduce specialization bias. In any case, knowledge-based choice is closer to rationality than the summation of individual preferences, and smart democracy, with its "institutionalized intelligence and ability," ensures that the preferred public choice of a country or a society, if not optimal, at least does not fall below the average expectations of the people.
 
In short, as long as knowledge is the final word, there is hope that democracy will be transformed into smart democracy with a pre-installed IQ. Finally, it should be noted that the rational mind can never satisfy the desires of the heart. What we call wisdom is simply the identification and realization of the meeting point of the heart and the mind.
 
Notes

[1] 赵汀阳, “一种可能的智慧民主,” published online in 文化纵横 (Beijing Cultural Review) on May 16, 2021. 

[2] Translator’s note:  This equation is meaningless to me.  In fact, the entire passage almost led me to invoke my basic rule of thumb, which is “if you do not know what the author is saying, do not translate the text.”  Ultimately, however, I think I got close enough, but if a reader with a background in philosophy or mathematical notation wants to weigh in, I would welcome comments and corrections.  Here is the passage in Chinese:  双票规则的理由是，每个人对事物都有所赞成并有所反对，有肯定性的偏好也有否定性的偏好。这里涉及意识的必要功能。肯定和否定是意识或心理的两个基本维度，也是思维和行为成为可能的最低限度条件。如果只使用其中一个意识维度，意识在功能上就不完整，无法进行充分的思维，甚至无法思维。具体地说，如果思维只有肯定的功能，恐怕就只相当于低等动物水平；如果只有否定的功能，思维却能够最低限度地正常运行，可见否定的功能是思维的关键功能。这一点可以在逻辑上得到证明：肯定性是任何存在的天然给予的存在论性质，当有p，就等于p是真的，其他逻辑关系，包括否定、合取、析取、蕴含和互相蕴含，都是人规定的知识论性质。除了否定性，其他逻辑关系可以被互相解释因此可以被互相还原为其他逻辑关系，就是说，唯有否定性是绝对不可还原的逻辑关系，一旦省略了否定功能，思维就无法进行了。可见，如果只有肯定性，思维在功能上是不充分的，否定性才是思维做出任何选择的根本功能，甚至肯定性可以被否定性所解释，即 p = ¬ ¬ p.

[3] Translator’s note:  Here is James Legge’s translation of the passage on which Zhao is basing his argument:  “Seventh, of the (means for the) examination of doubts. Officers having been chosen and appointed for divining by the tortoise-shell and the stalks of the Achillea, they are to be charged (on occasion) to execute their duties. (In doing this), they will find (the appearances of) rain, of clearing up, of cloudiness, of want of connection, and of crossing; and the inner and outer diagrams. In all (the indications) are seven;--five given by the shell, and two by the stalks; and (by means) of these any errors (in the mind) may be traced out. These officers having been appointed, when the divination is proceeded with, three men are to interpret the indications, and the (consenting) words of two of them are to be followed. When you have doubts about any great matter, consult with your own mind; consult with your high ministers and officers; consult with the common people; consult the tortoise-shell and divining stalks. If you, the shell, the stalks, the ministers and officers, and the common people, all agree about a course, this is what is called a great concord, and the result will be the welfare of your person and good fortune to your descendants. If you, the shell, and the stalks agree, while the ministers, and officers, and the common people oppose, the result will be fortunate. If the ministers and officers, with the shell and stalks, agree, while you and the common people oppose, the result will be fortunate. If the common people, the shell, and the stalks agree, while you, with the ministers and officers, oppose, the result will be fortunate. If you and the shell agree. while the stalks, with the ministers and officers, and the common people, oppose, internal operations will be fortunate, and external undertakings unlucky. When the shell and stalks are both opposed to the views of men, there will be good fortune in being still, and active operations will be unlucky.”  See the Chinese Text Project.

[4] Translator’s note:  From the Analects:  “Ji Wen thought thrice, and then acted. When the Master was informed of it, he said, ‘Twice may do.’”  See the Chinese Text Project.