Democracy, overcome?

The invisible hand, according to Adam Smith: “Each person uses their capital to satisfy their immediate needs, but an invisible hand leads them to promote an objective that is not in their intentions, promoting efficient markets in a complex aggregate that no one can fully understand [...]”. The supremacy of the market. Hayek described this invisible hand as an imperceptible and unfathomable, but solid and determining, pattern. Market dynamics make it possible for people to act on their own, in ignorance of the whole, without anyone having to tell them what to do.Conventional capitalism, until the 21st century, was sustained by a reciprocal relationship between business and society, between economy and democracy. When in 1965 General Motors had a value of approximately 25,000 million dollars (about 225,000 million dollars today), it employed 735,000 workers; today, Alphabet (Google's parent company) has a value of approximately 2 trillion dollars and about 190,000 workers, and Meta (Facebook's parent company), more than 1 trillion dollars in valuation and 79,000 employees. Reciprocity has been lost, even more so due to the capacity companies have to condition demand: they do not need the market, they create it. The alignment between business, economic, political, and social interests has weakened. Some maintain, with good reason, that past reciprocities were at the origin of the amicable relationship between market and democracy. They needed each other. That balance has been lost. The market dominates democracy. Hence the growing relevance of stark economic profit. The right does not hide its interests at all...

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, in

Why Nations Fail, explain “that the positive feedback loop” between industries and political institutions led to the structural reforms that brought democracy to the United Kingdom before the continent. Curbing popular demands by force would have reduced business profits and employment: it was not in anyone's interest, neither the bourgeoisie nor the proletariat. There was understanding and therefore reform, and the beginning of modern democracy.On the other hand, we currently suffer from a “rradical indifference” that consists of equating the importance of all facts, minimizing the importance of falsehoods, and in an environment where lying has no consequences. It has turned the social area of information and news that relativize the importance of veracity and hinder verification into a quagmire. fake news are distorted signals that cause personal and social costs because they make it difficult to distinguish what is true from what is not. In the period prior to the US presidential elections, Americans were subjected to a sea of information, 760 million news items, many false, to boost the republican candidacy... Something similar happened in the United Kingdom before the Brexit referendum. The large amount of information makes falsehood more effective.

The balance between democracy and the market has weakened due to the excesses of capitalism and the shortcomings of democracy, which have been emphasized to steer public opinion towards the idea that democracy is weak. This represents a significant change between the 20th and 21st centuries. Today, companies are freer to maximize profit at the expense of any other objective. It is evident that the theoretical reason cited by social networks for not controlling the content they disseminate – the most "absolute freedom" – is related to their ability to attract users. The primary interest is to have users, nothing more.The excess of power of capital over democracy is so explicit that it is not absurd to think that it will be precisely capital that will change public opinion if there is no revolt against social slumber. And the only hope, in this regard, is Europe; the USA, at least in the short term, will not react. It already happened in the era of McCarthyism in the 50s, which, although it did not have anything like the current strength of authoritarianism, did last more than a decade, with consequences in two.

The focus of technological progress to control nature, steam, electricity, the telegraph, aviation has been a constant. But it's over: today the main interest of technological advancement is to dominate human nature, opinion, ideas. Hence the danger of digitization and AI, which will make us more capable, but also more dependent.Some try to make it seem that regulation and laws reduce freedom. They come to say that left-wing ideology is a domain that the world, which wants to be free, must eliminate as outdated. Here is the ideological shield that allows everything and that, supposedly, "demonstrates" that it is in the current environment that we are truly free... when in reality this environment is a jungle and an absolute deregulation. Whoever preaches it knows the limitations of the statement. But no one will confront him because fashions are now as important as before, and opposing them is not convenient, neither for profit nor for aesthetics.