Jared Diamond's Surviving Societies Had One Thing in Common, and Representative Government Does Not Have It

In Collapse, Jared Diamond works through a list of societies that failed (Easter Island, the Greenland Norse, the Maya, the Anasazi) and a shorter list that faced the same kinds of pressure and survived (Tokugawa Japan, the highlands of New Guinea, Tikopia). He proposes five factors that bear on the outcome: environmental damage, climate change, hostile neighbours, the loss of friendly trading partners, and the society's response to its problems.

Four of these vary from case to case. Some collapsed societies had no hostile neighbours; some had no climate shift. But Diamond is explicit that the fifth is always decisive. Every society that survived identified the danger and reacted swiftly and decisively, even when the reaction meant abandoning long-standing customs. Every society that failed did not.

I want to take that finding seriously and ask what it says about the system of government we live under.

Who Has a Reason to Belittle the Danger

The fatal pattern in Diamond's failures is not ignorance. In several cases the society could see what was coming; the trees were visibly running out, the soil was visibly going. The pattern is that the people with the power to act did not act, and instead talked the danger down, deferred it, or protected the practices that were causing it.

That is not a puzzle once you ask who those people were. In every case the elite's position, wealth and standing were bound up with the old ways. The chief whose prestige depended on erecting statues was not the man who would stop cutting the trees the statues needed. The reaction that would have saved the society was a reaction against the interests of the people entitled to make it.

Now look at a representative government. It is a small group whose position depends on the existing arrangement of the economy, funded by the industries that arrangement favours, and whose horizon is the next election. Confronted with an oncoming danger whose remedy requires changing the arrangement, it has exactly the incentive Diamond's chiefs had: to belittle, to defer, to protect. Not from stupidity or malice, but because that is where its interests sit.

The majority is differently placed. Most people do not profit greatly from the current state of affairs, so they have no special reason to lie to themselves about where it leads. A public deciding directly has a better chance of reaching the point of action than a minority whose standing depends on inaction, and the difference in response time is, in Diamond's account, the difference between a society that collapses and one that does not.

Top Down, Bottom Up, and the Worst of Both

Diamond makes a second observation that I find just as useful. He says big problems of resources and their management have been solved historically in two ways.

Top down: a strong central authority sees the whole picture and can impose a decision. Its strength is decisiveness. Its weakness is that it is far from the ground and often does not understand the actual problem; the decree arrives from a capital that has never seen the field.

Bottom up: the people living with the problem manage it themselves, as small communities have managed forests and fisheries for centuries. Their strength is that they know exactly what is wrong. Their weakness is that they can only act locally; a village cannot regulate a watershed that runs through fifty villages.

Diamond presents these as the two options. But there is a third arrangement, and it is the one most of us live under: the middle-management model. A layer of representatives who are neither on the ground nor in command. They do not know the problem the way the people living with it do, and they cannot act the way a sovereign can, because they are constrained by the next election, by coalition partners, and by the lobbies that fund them. This layer has the disadvantages of both models and the advantages of neither.

Where Direct Democracy Sits

Direct democracy is the one arrangement that is both top down and bottom up at once.

It is bottom up because the people deciding are the people living with the problem; they understand it as no legislator in a capital can. And it is top down because the decision they take is sovereign; it has the force of a dictator's decree, since there is no higher authority to appeal to and no re-election to fear. It can change a long-standing custom in a single vote, which is precisely the move Diamond's surviving societies made and his failing ones could not.

I do not claim a directly governed society will always see the danger, or always react correctly. Publics have their own blind spots. I claim something narrower: it lacks the specific structural reason to look away that the alternatives have, and it can act when it does look. Diamond's history says that combination is what survival has required. We have organised ourselves to have neither half of it.