The fresh conversation(s) we need to have to make our democracies strong again

The British comedian and podcaster of Russian origin, Konstantin Kisin, has been arguing for years that Western democracies have become weak and that at some point a competitor at the world stage like Russia or China will take advantage of our weakness. With the invasion of Ukraine his prediction might have come true.

Kisin says: "While here in the West we talk endlessly about equality, diversity and social justice, in the rest of the world, things are much simpler. People respect strength and despise weakness."

Putin himself has made fun of Western wokeness in recent times. He probably invaded Ukraine once he had concluded that Western culture had become weak enough for him to advance his interests (and imperial fantasies) without too much resistance from the West. Whether he miscalculated Western reactions and what this means about the war in Ukraine is a whole different question.

We do not yet know what will happen. And this is not the place to discuss what Western democracies should have done to avoid war, or whether it was ever within our control. Nor is it the place to discuss what can be done to bring peace, how to avoid sleepwalking into (a nuclear) World War III, and how to reduce human suffering in Ukraine and beyond. Others discuss these important questions at length.

But regardless of what happens in Ukraine, we in the West need to have some serious conversations about ourselves. Kisin is addressing a sore point. The discourse in Western democracies has become highly dysfunctional. Our societies have become increasingly polarised in recent years. Many Western citizens have lost confidence in the democratic system itself. We all seem to have lost confidence in our own values. Our culture has indeed become weak.

It is truly remarkable that few people seem to see the irony in the fact that mainstream discourse in Western democracies did not exactly cherish the very idea of individual freedom during the two years of the Covid 19 pandemic, and now, after the invasion of Ukraine, we have all of a sudden rediscovered our core value of freedom, which we are supposed to defend against our enemies. Former German President Joachim Gauck has even said that we should "freeze for freedom", meaning that we should heat our homes a little less in order to use less Russian oil and gas, which in turn will supposedly help defend our freedom.

During the pandemic, there was a consensus among Western elites that we should sacrifice many of our civil liberties for the greater good, which in this case was to keep infection rates down and save lives. While these goals seemed perfectly noble and even reasonable at first, as the pandemic progressed it became clear that masks, lockdowns, vaccines and vaccine passports had become dogmas that had to be defended at all costs, regardless of what they actually achieved and how much they conflicted with other values, including our civil liberties and freedoms.

When we now remind ourselves that we must defend our freedom against Putin, we seem to be paying lip service to values that were once at the core of our culture, but which have increasingly eroded in recent years.

Just a few weeks ago, for the first time in the country's history, Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau invoked the Emergencies Act to end the large but almost entirely peaceful protest by the Canadian truckers who were protesting against Covid vaccine mandates. Trudeau justified this by saying that the truckers held "unacceptable views". Invoking a War on Terror law the Canadian government froze the protesters' bank accounts and blocked their credit cards. Thousands of donors who had tried to support the truckers financially through a donation website now face financial retaliation from the Canadian authorities.

These incidents, which are more reminiscent of authoritarian regimes, and the fact that they did not generate much media coverage in the Western world, let alone outrage, are only the latest and most striking evidence that something fundamental has changed in Western democracies.

Western governments are increasingly resorting to instruments similar to those used by China to control their citizens. After the remarkably smooth adoption of vaccine passports by many Western societies in recent months (and the exclusion from large part of public life of those who decided not to get vaccinated) several Western governments are now discussing the launch of digital programmable currencies that would allow governments to decide how citizens spend their money. Such vision is not dissimilar to China's social credit system.

While Western governments are now becoming increasingly authoritarian, Western culture has been displaying totalitarian traits for some time. Our institutions now increasingly follow a narrow ideological agenda that leads to conversations only among conformists with approved viewpoints.

Since social media mobs started to police speech, more and more people have been self-censuring what they say in the public sphere. Through a strange interaction between the traditional media and the dynamics of social media, a consensus on a moral narrative now seems to develop very quickly on any new topic. Once established, everyone must follow the consensus if they do not want to be castigated by the guardians of morality. People who dare to cross the multiple red lines are seeing their careers crashed and reputations destroyed.

During the pandemic, the media rarely carried opinions that fundamentally went against masking, lockdown or vaccination rules, even if the impression of scientific consensus was false. Scientists, officials and journalists who disagreed with the mainstream narrative mostly remained silent for fear of ruining their reputations or losing their jobs. Now, with the invasion of Ukraine, the same dynamic is unfolding. It quickly became clear that no one is allowed to present views or facts that are not 100% consistent with the simple Ukrainians good / Russians evil narrative.  

This increased dogmatism and the shutdown of pluralistic conversation in Western democracies stifles the very creativity that was at the heart of the success of our free societies. The more conformists we become, the more we will be losing out against other cultures and political systems, especially the Chinese. And what is worse, our societies do face many important challenges that we must tackle over the coming years – climate change is probably the most prominent of them. If we can't openly discuss these issues and are capable of seeing them from multiple perspectives, we will fail to find any stable solutions.

The way social media business models and algorithms work sets us against each other. Moreover, Russia and China have been actively driving the political division of Western democracies for years by manipulating public discourse on social media. If we fail to fundamentally change this dynamic, our democracies will not survive.

At the same time, the Chinese Communist Party is using the tight authoritarian control it has over its population to reduce the social harm the internet can inflict on the functioning of society. For example, China limits the use of a popular social media app for children to 40 minutes per day in order to "eliminate the social pressure for kids to participate in social media conversations that run deep into the night".

It looks like we are now in a situation in our Western democracies where we experience the worst of both worlds. We are adopting more of China's authoritarianism, but unlike in China, many of these policy decisions are driven by social media and mob outrage rather than careful considerations of how to strengthen our societies. Western societies are becoming polarised, less free and more fearful.

The fresh conversations we need to have

If we want to have a chance for a prosperous, peaceful and self-determined future in our Western democracies, we need to talk. Urgently. We need to start having real and honest conversations about the root causes of our problems. We need to stop believing that those we disagree with are evil and we are morally superior. We need to learn how to truly listen to each other's perspectives.

We need to create spaces and develop social processes that are geared towards having the difficult conversations about how we want to and can live together, now and in the future.

We need to talk about:

How to fix our broken information ecology

First of all, we need become fully aware of how dangerous the current situation is for the survival of our democracies. Currently, neither our culture nor our institutions enable the type of good faith communication that is required to improve our mutual understanding of essential realities.

The principle of free speech and the possibility to voice views and ideas that deviate from the mainstream consensus without suffering negative consequences is fundamental to the success of our democracies. To advance our shared understanding of the world and find workable solutions to our social problems, we need creative processes that are inevitably messy and that involve exploring heresies and making mistakes.

We need to explore ideas on how to transform our institutions to make them fit for the digital age. Above all, we need to learn how digital communication technologies can open up opportunities for learning and coordinated action and enable new forms of democracy instead of leading us down the spiral of polarisation and tribalism.

How to stop the new class war

The main social conflict taking place in Western societies is not a classic left-right divide, but at its core a new class war between the elites who dominate institutions and political discourse and the working classes who have shown their discontent in recent years when they voted for Brexit and Trump and most recently with the Canadian truckers' protests.

The last 40 years of deindustrialisation have created a great cultural divide between the working classes and an academic class – the elites – who live geographically removed in large metropolises and whose lives are increasingly determined by post-modern values. The elites are convinced that they are morally superior, with their narratives of inclusion, anti-racism and feminism. They believe they are fighting against an evil racist, misogynistic and even Nazi ideology. In reality, however, they are often confused about the real values of ordinary people who have been on the losing side of many political developments in recent years, including the economic impact on them of globalisation, high levels of immigration and Covid-19 lockdowns.

We must discuss how we can stop this fight against our own people. It is tearing our societies apart and destroying our democracies. The open society can only exist if everybody is capable of being tolerant – this must include tolerance towards those who hold traditional values. Can our progressive-minded elites reduce some of their moral certainty and cultivate generosity of spirit?

How we can live together in our multi-ethnic societies

Our increasingly multi-ethnic societies have inevitably brought new social tensions and questions about how much diversity is beneficial and how much assimilation is necessary for a society to function well.

However, the discourse in Western societies in recent years has moved away from the question of how we, old and new members of our societies, can best live together. Instead, the increasingly dysfunctional discourse has focused almost exclusively on a supposedly pervasive systemic racism in Western culture. A new expanded interpretation of racism, exported from the American context and indiscriminately adopted in European societies, was now blamed for all inequalities between different ethnic groups. This also led to accusations such as that it was racist for a white person to want less immigration - a previously normal conservative position.

This discourse, led by Western elites, has had virtually no positive impact on the lives of working class ethnic minorities, but has created a new culture of victimhood among members of the white working class who now often feel wrongly accused of having white privilege and being inherently racist because of the colour of their skin.

Critical race theory, the academic discipline behind all this, is deeply flawed and destructive. Instead of continuing this divisive discourse, we must come together and have honest and earnest conversations about how we can create the conditions for all social groups in our societies to thrive and live happy lives. This, of course, includes an honest analysis of actual discrimination and how the oppression of the past, including slavery, still disadvantages the descendants of oppressed groups.

How women and men can thrive

The dysfunctional discourse on men and women is analogous to that on ethnic minorities: Femininity is good, masculinity is toxic. The underrepresentation of women in positions of power and in typically male spheres – so the apparent consensus – is exclusively due to systemic discrimination, male privilege and "the patriarchy".

This narrative has been hugely successful: We live in an increasingly feminised world, and women are thriving in formerly traditional male professions and positions. Were it not for the fact that this does not necessarily make life better for women and men.

The reality, for example, is that men throughout the Western world are increasingly failing at school, at work and in life. Fewer and fewer men can support a family and be good husbands and fathers. This is bad for women, men and for our societies. Our culture that successfully "smashes patriarchy" also inadvertently smashes the positive aspects of traditional masculinity, including stoicism, strength and the male instinct to protect his family.

It's also not true that all unequal outcomes in work and academia are due to discrimination against women. This discourse pretends that there are no differences between the sexes, when in fact women and men are different. This includes the fact that they make different career choices.

We need to acknowledge the harm where it exists, but instead of continuing this divisive discourse, we need to have a much more honest discussion about how we can live better together and how men and women can support each other in achieving this goal.

How to deal with complex problems adequately

The dogmatic and one-dimensional way the Western world has dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic laid bare our lack of capacity to deal with complex problems. By focusing almost exclusively on preventing Covid infections and deaths, we ignored the many trade-offs and moral dilemmas that are inherent to complex problems. Even if the lockdown measures prevented some deaths from Covid, which is not even clear, we should have carefully considered whether keeping children out of school for months, leaving the elderly to die alone, destroying thousands of small businesses and further exposing Africa to hunger and poverty was really the price to pay.

We should also ask questions about our deeper worldviews and our fear of death. Should and can we humans control everything? What do we lose if we continue down the path of safety above all and risk reduction at all costs? Or should we rather accept that we are vulnerable and part of a larger web of life? How can we increase the chance that life on earth is worth living and that we do not lose the joy of life and become more like machines?

How to tackle climate change without just #followingthescience

Climate change is arguable a much more complex and bigger problem than the Covid-19 pandemic. Given the cultural moment in our Western democracies, there is a high risk that we will dramatically reduce our welfare through highly authoritarian but inadequate solutions to the climate crisis. It is quite conceivable that, once again, a strategy of fear-mongering by governments combined with a highly moralising Twitter discourse could create a great deal of societal acceptance for highly authoritarian policies without even the slightest debate on alternative strategies.

The hashtag #followthescience was popularised in 2019 by Greta Thunberg and the Fridays for Future movement as a wake-up call to action on climate change. However, during the pandemic the hashtag become synonymous with the idea that we should all follow the officially approved version of "science", which was in essence propaganda for lockdowns, masks and vaccines. It was a call to not question the officially approved opinion on these issues. Clearly, this propaganda about what science is runs counter to the very essence of what makes science such a powerful tool for human progress: Science is always provisional, and it depends on the continuous attempts to falsify the conventional wisdom.

Me need to reclaim the very idea of science as a process rather than of established consensus. But we also need to be honest about the fact that science cannot tell us what to do about climate change. It can provide us with data that can help us make decisions. But above all, we must succeed in conducting a truly democratic and, as far as possible, participatory process that allows for honest and careful consideration of the different solutions and the trade-offs involved.

The Protopia Lab

This is just to give a taste of the kind of issues we need to talk about and the new conversations we need to foster.

To sow the seeds of this new dialogue, we need to bring together open-minded people who are willing to engage in such honest and challenging conversations.

We will need to learn to step out of our ideological frames and develop our own capacity for seeing issues from a much broader range of perspectives than we usually do in order to understand the complexity of the social phenomena that need resolution.

Sadly, the dynamics of Western culture, and the soft totalitarianism we experience, work against the creation of such spaces and processes. For example, incentives seem to discourage donors from funding truly pluralistic initiatives. So far, it is mostly individuals who have the courage to swim against the tide.

Despite all odds, we have created such a space for a new and fresh conversation: the Protopia Lab. Our aim is to facilitate these difficult conversations. We want to plant the seeds for the renewal of trust in our polarised societies and find cooperative solutions to our most pressing social problems.

On this new Substack account, The Protopia Conversations, I will regularly post articles and essays with the aim of moving these conversations forward. We would also love to publish articles and essays from other writers who would like to contribute to these discussions. Please send me your ideas.

Finally, we need your help to make Protopia Lab possible. There is no paywall for this Substack account, but I am grateful for any paid subscription you can afford. You can also support the Protopia Lab through our website if you wish.