Representation Does Our Understanding for Us, and Keeps the Change

Most citizens of a free country have never had to hold a real opinion about abortion. Or about whom their country sells weapons to. Or about how many people it is acceptable to kill on the roads in exchange for getting to work ten minutes faster. They have attitudes about these things, and they will state them if asked. But an attitude is not an opinion. An opinion is what you have after you have looked at the facts because you were going to have to decide. Almost nobody in a representative system ever has to decide, so almost nobody ever looks.

That is not an accident of laziness. It is what the system is for.

Understanding as a Service

Representation is usually described as a delegation of decision. I want to describe it as a delegation of understanding, because that is the part with the larger consequences.

When you hand a question to a representative, you hand over the work of finding out what the question involves. Someone else reads the reports, hears the experts, weighs the trade-offs. You receive the result as a law, and you receive with it the comfortable feeling that the matter has been handled by people who understood it.

For a while this looks like an excellent arrangement. Nobody has time to understand everything. Division of labour works for bread and shoes; why not for public questions?

The Two Prices

Because the price is different, and there are two of them.

The first price is the obvious one. Whenever a question involves a powerful minority interest, the understanding will be done in that interest's favour. The arms trade is the clean example. Almost no public, asked directly whether its country should sell weapons to a regime that will use them on its own people, would say yes. Every representative government does it. The understanding was delegated, and the people it was delegated to understood the exporters' problem better than the public's, because the exporters were in the room and the public was not. The same shape appears wherever a concentrated interest meets a diffuse one, which is most of the time.

The second price is subtler and I think larger. A public that never has to decide never learns. It does not develop the habit of asking what a policy actually does, because the answer will not change anything it has to do. It never discovers that road safety and health spending draw on the same purse, that a border decision is an economic decision, that its moral certainties on one question contradict its moral certainties on another. It stays, on public matters, at the level of attitude, and it stays there for life.

Ignorance as a Function

I used to think the second price was a side effect. I now think it is closer to a function.

Knowledge is power in the plainest sense: a public that understood the questions would be harder to govern on behalf of, because it would notice the distance between what it wanted and what it got. Every increase in the public's understanding is a decrease in the representatives' latitude. So the system has no reason to invest in that understanding and every reason to keep the questions at a distance, abstract, technical, somebody else's job.

Again, nobody needs to intend this. The old conflict between the governing minority and the governed majority simply reappears in a new domain. It used to be fought over land and taxes. It is now also fought over facts and education, and the side that controls the agenda is winning it without a shot.

What Facing Reality Would Look Like

Under direct democracy the arrangement inverts. The question comes to you, you will have to answer it, and so for the first time you look.

Some of what you find will be unpleasant. You will discover that your country's exports include things you would not sell to your neighbour. You will find that the trade-off between the speed limit and the death toll is real and that you have been on one side of it without knowing. You will find that abortion, argued as a slogan for fifty years, is a set of specific cases with specific facts and that your attitude survives some of them and not others.

That unpleasantness is what understanding feels like from the inside, and a society that has never felt it has never understood its own affairs. I have argued elsewhere that people do not much want the truth where being wrong costs nothing. Representation is the arrangement that guarantees being wrong costs nothing. Give people the decision and the cost arrives, and with it, slowly and unwillingly, the looking.

The current system handles our understanding for us and keeps most of the change. Taking the decision back is how you get the change back too.