Democracy or Domestication?

Have We Become Citizens… Or Merely Subjects of a System That Allows Us to Believe We Are Free?

An examination of modern democracy, institutional power, manufactured consent and the increasingly uncomfortable question of who actually gets to decide how we live.

I have occasionally wondered whether we have misunderstood the nature of modern democracy, and I suspect that living in a cave in rural Spain gives a man rather more time than is strictly healthy to wonder about such things. We talk about freedom, representation, individual rights and the power of the electorate as though they were permanent fixtures of our society, rather like the electricity supply or the annual appearance of Christmas decorations in November. Out here, the electricity supply is something I generate, ration and occasionally swear at, but most people are entitled to assume it simply arrives, and we treat our freedoms in much the same way. We assume they are there because we have always been told they are there. We vote every few years, watch politicians argue on television, listen to promises about a brighter tomorrow and then return to our ordinary lives, generally no better off and occasionally wondering why we bothered getting out of bed.

But perhaps we should ask ourselves a rather more uncomfortable question. What if the democratic freedoms we believe we enjoy are becoming increasingly ceremonial? What if the machinery of democracy remains intact, the elections continue, the politicians change seats and the language of liberty remains reassuringly familiar, but the actual ability of ordinary citizens to influence the direction of their own lives is steadily diminishing? It is the kind of question that tends to get you labelled a crank at dinner parties, which is usually a fairly reliable sign that it is worth asking.

I am not suggesting that we have suddenly woken up in some Orwellian dictatorship, complete with jackboots, loudspeakers and a gentleman from the Ministry of Truth checking whether we have been thinking correctly. Although, given the direction of some modern institutional thinking, I wouldn’t entirely rule out the appointment of a departmental committee to investigate the matter. What I am suggesting is rather more subtle, and perhaps considerably more concerning. We may be witnessing the gradual transformation of democratic societies into systems of managed populations, where citizens are increasingly treated not as the people who ultimately hold power, but as people whose behaviour must be monitored, influenced, encouraged, discouraged and, when necessary, corrected. That distinction matters enormously, and it runs like a thread through everything that follows.

The illusion of participation

Democracy, at its simplest, rests upon an idea that should be remarkably straightforward. Governments derive their authority from the consent of the governed. Citizens elect representatives, those representatives are accountable to the electorate, and if they fail to deliver, the electorate has the opportunity to replace them. It is not a perfect arrangement, but it is a reasonably sensible way of organising a society without resorting to throwing people into rivers whenever they disagree with the local leadership. Yet somewhere along the way, we seem to have become rather too comfortable with the idea that voting is the beginning and end of democratic participation, as though our civic duty can be discharged in the time it takes to queue in a draughty church hall and mark a cross with a pencil on a string.

We are encouraged to believe that our influence is exercised through a ballot paper, while the enormous machinery of government, corporate lobbying, international institutions, financial interests, regulatory bodies and policy networks continues operating largely beyond the reach of ordinary democratic scrutiny. Governments come and go, but many of the underlying structures remain remarkably resilient. Different politicians occupy the same offices, make different speeches and frequently discover that the range of decisions available to them is considerably narrower than their election manifestos suggested. A government may be elected on a promise to change direction, only to discover that economic commitments, international agreements, institutional dependencies, commercial interests and established policy frameworks place significant limits on what it can actually do.

Some of those constraints are legitimate. A modern country cannot simply disregard its legal obligations, economic realities or international relationships because a newly elected administration fancies a fresh start. But that does not remove the democratic question. At what point do legitimate constraints become a convenient explanation for why the electorate’s wishes are rarely translated into meaningful change? If citizens can choose the government but have increasingly limited influence over the policies that government is able or willing to pursue, what exactly are they choosing? A different collection of faces delivering broadly similar outcomes, perhaps, with a fresh coat of paint on the podium. It is worth considering, even if the answer is not one we particularly enjoy.

From governing people to managing behaviour

There is an important distinction between governing a population and managing one. Good government establishes laws, protects rights, provides essential services, maintains public infrastructure and creates conditions in which people can live their lives with a reasonable degree of security and independence. It recognises that citizens are adults, capable of making decisions, accepting responsibility and occasionally getting things spectacularly wrong without requiring an intervention from the Department of Approved Behaviour.

Population management operates from a rather different starting point. It regards human behaviour as something to be shaped towards predetermined objectives. People become data points, demographic categories, risk profiles and behavioural patterns. Their choices are analysed, their habits measured and their decisions increasingly influenced through systems designed to produce particular outcomes. We already see elements of this in everyday life. Governments use behavioural science to encourage particular choices, from pension enrolment to energy consumption. Financial institutions monitor transactions and apply automated risk assessments. Digital platforms collect extraordinary quantities of personal information to predict what we might purchase, read, watch or believe. Employers increasingly rely on performance metrics and monitoring systems to assess productivity, insurance companies use data to calculate risk, and public services employ automated systems to determine eligibility, prioritise applications and identify potential problems.

None of these developments is automatically sinister, and I should be honest about where I am standing when I say that. I spent years in the RAF Police and later in senior security management, so I am hardly naive about the value of monitoring. Risk assessments, access controls, audit trails… I have written enough of them to fill a small hangar. Some of this technology is genuinely useful, and it has made certain services quicker, more accessible and considerably less dependent upon the sort of paperwork that once required the patience of a Benedictine monk. But that career also taught me that every system of control needs a clear answer to one stubborn question. Who decides what constitutes desirable behaviour, and who holds those decision-makers accountable? In the military, that answer was at least written down somewhere. In a great deal of modern life, it rarely is.

A behavioural nudge can be perfectly reasonable when it helps someone make an informed choice. It becomes considerably more problematic when the individual has little understanding of how the influence operates, cannot easily challenge the outcome, or finds that what was once a voluntary choice has quietly become the only practical option. The language is usually reassuring… efficiency, public interest, safety, sustainability, inclusion, protection. All perfectly respectable words, and all capable of describing perfectly respectable intentions. But good intentions do not automatically guarantee good outcomes, and the use of benevolent language should never exempt public policy from examination.

The road to an unnecessarily intrusive administrative system is unlikely to be advertised as such. It will probably arrive as a series of individually reasonable measures, each introduced to address a particular concern, each accompanied by assurances that the public need not worry. Before long, we may find ourselves wondering when the ability to make an ordinary decision became something that required institutional permission, and nobody will be quite able to point to the moment it happened.

The surveillance society… and our remarkable willingness to participate

Perhaps the most extraordinary aspect of this transformation is how much of it we have willingly embraced. We carry devices in our pockets that can reveal our location, habits, interests, communications, movements and purchasing behaviour. We use applications that request access to information they have absolutely no obvious need to possess. We accept cookies, agree to terms and conditions we haven’t read, and surrender personal information in exchange for a slightly more convenient shopping experience.

I suspect most of us have clicked ‘Accept All’ without reading a single word, and I certainly understand the temptation. Life is short, and nobody wants to spend an afternoon studying seventeen pages of legal language merely to discover the opening hours of a garden centre. I also have a confession to make on this front. In my civilian security days I earned the nickname Mr Memo, because I issued memos that people had to sign to confirm they had read them. Those signatures later proved remarkably useful to the Directors as evidence, but I never once mistook a signature for genuine agreement. A signature proves you received something. It says nothing about whether you understood it, liked it or had any real choice in the matter. ‘Accept All’ works on precisely the same principle, only with better graphic design.

Yet the cumulative effect is significant. Our digital lives have become an extraordinarily valuable source of information, and the commercial appetite for that information is immense. Technology companies have built business models around collecting, processing and monetising personal data, while governments have increasingly recognised the value of digital information for security, administration, law enforcement and public policy. The relationship between convenience and surveillance has become so tangled that it is difficult to tell where one ends and the other begins.

We have normalised the idea that almost everything we do online should be recorded, analysed and retained somewhere. We have become accustomed to being tracked by devices, platforms and services, often without having a particularly clear understanding of what happens to the information afterwards. And because the process is largely invisible, we rarely give it much thought. This is where the distinction between consent and acquiescence becomes important. Agreeing to something because it is the only practical way to access a service is not necessarily the same as freely choosing it. If refusing permission means being excluded from ordinary participation in modern life, the freedom to refuse starts looking rather theoretical.

The problem is not technology itself. Technology can be liberating, empowering and genuinely beneficial. The problem is allowing technological capability to become an automatic justification for technological intrusion. Just because something can be monitored does not mean it should be monitored, just because information can be collected does not mean it should be collected, and just because an algorithm can make a decision does not mean we should surrender the right to question it. There is a rather old-fashioned concept involved here called privacy. Apparently, it has become something of an inconvenience.

The manufacture of acceptable opinion

Perhaps an even more sensitive issue is the relationship between democracy, information and the boundaries of acceptable public discussion. A functioning democracy requires disagreement. Not polite agreement dressed up as consultation, but genuine disagreement, including arguments that make people uncomfortable. It requires citizens to question authority, challenge established assumptions and examine competing interpretations of events. Without that freedom, democracy becomes little more than a performance, staged for an audience that has been quietly asked not to heckle.

Yet we increasingly find ourselves in a culture where the manner in which an opinion is expressed, the person expressing it and the perceived consequences of allowing it to circulate can become more important than examining whether the argument itself has merit. There are, of course, legitimate reasons to restrict certain forms of expression. Direct threats, harassment, incitement to violence and other unlawful conduct are not magically protected simply because somebody describes them as free speech, and a democratic society has a responsibility to protect people from genuine harm. But there is a substantial difference between protecting individuals from unlawful abuse and protecting institutions from uncomfortable criticism. The difficulty arises when the definition of harmful expression becomes so broad, or so politically convenient, that legitimate questioning begins to be treated as a problem in itself.

Social media platforms now occupy an extraordinary position in public life. They influence what information people encounter, which conversations gain visibility and which subjects receive limited exposure. Their moderation policies, recommendation systems and commercial incentives have consequences for public debate, even though their decision-making structures are not democratic institutions. Governments also have legitimate interests in tackling misinformation, particularly where it presents demonstrable risks to public safety. But who decides what constitutes misinformation? How transparent is that decision? And what happens when an official interpretation turns out to be incomplete, mistaken or influenced by political considerations?

We should be particularly careful about assuming that institutional authority and factual accuracy are interchangeable. History offers plenty of examples of accepted wisdom being overturned by people who were initially dismissed, ridiculed or marginalised, and scientific progress itself depends upon the possibility that established explanations may be challenged by new evidence. If questioning the accepted position becomes socially or professionally dangerous, we risk creating a culture in which people learn to remain silent rather than think independently. And a society in which people are afraid to ask questions is not necessarily a better-informed society. It may simply be a quieter one.

The politics of permanent emergency

One of the most powerful ways in which governments acquire additional authority is through the declaration of an emergency. Wars, terrorist threats, financial crises, pandemics, environmental challenges and national security concerns can all require exceptional responses. There are circumstances in which governments must act quickly, and there are occasions when temporary restrictions are justified by genuine necessity. But emergencies create a particular political problem, because they can change the relationship between citizens and the state at extraordinary speed.

I grew up in a service family during the Cold War, with postings in Germany and Norway, and I spent much of my childhood in the long shadow of an emergency that never quite arrived. It taught me early that a threat does not have to materialise to reshape the way people live, think and accept instruction. When people are frightened, uncertain or worried about their families, they naturally look towards institutions for reassurance and protection. They are often willing to accept restrictions that they might otherwise question, particularly when those restrictions are presented as temporary and necessary. That is entirely understandable. Nobody wants to discover that the government has been sitting on its hands while a genuine crisis unfolds.

The difficulty comes afterwards. Do temporary powers actually disappear? Are exceptional measures properly reviewed? Are mistakes acknowledged, and are the institutions responsible for implementing them held accountable? Or do some of the powers, procedures and precedents quietly become part of the administrative landscape, like scaffolding that nobody ever gets round to taking down?

This is not an argument that every emergency measure is an attempt to undermine democracy. It is an argument that extraordinary powers should always attract extraordinary scrutiny. The burden of proof should rest with those seeking to exercise them, and the public should never be expected to accept that questioning a policy is somehow equivalent to opposing the public good. There is a rather dangerous assumption that people who ask difficult questions during an emergency must necessarily be acting irresponsibly. Sometimes they are. Sometimes they are simply trying to establish whether the people making the decisions have got things right, and that distinction ought to matter a great deal more than it often does.

The institutions that no longer seem to listen

Perhaps the greatest danger to democracy is not an obvious assault upon it, but the gradual erosion of public confidence. People can tolerate disagreement. They can accept that governments make mistakes, that economic conditions are difficult and that not every political promise can be fulfilled. What they struggle to accept indefinitely is the feeling that their concerns are being ignored.

When citizens repeatedly raise issues about housing, public services, immigration, taxation, employment, education or the cost of living, and receive responses that appear disconnected from their everyday experiences, something begins to change. They become cynical. They stop believing that the people in charge understand their lives, and they begin to suspect that public consultation is an exercise in public relations rather than a genuine invitation to influence policy. They notice that certain questions seem to receive immediate attention while others disappear into the administrative wilderness, never to be seen again. And eventually, quite rationally, they disengage.

This is often described as declining trust in institutions, as though public confidence were a natural resource that simply needs replenishing from time to time, like topping up the oil in an old car. Perhaps we should consider whether the institutions themselves have contributed to the problem. Trust is not something that can be demanded through official statements, public information campaigns or carefully worded assurances. It is earned through honesty, accountability, competence and a willingness to admit when something has gone wrong.

A government that expects unquestioning public confidence is asking for something rather different from democratic consent. And a public that is expected to accept decisions without meaningful explanation is not being treated as a collection of sovereign citizens. It is being treated as an administrative audience, permitted to watch the performance but not, under any circumstances, to wander onto the stage.

The quiet surrender of personal independence

There is another aspect of managed populations that receives rather less attention, perhaps because it is less dramatic than political censorship or government surveillance, and that is the gradual erosion of personal independence. Consider how much of modern life depends upon systems over which we have very little control. Banking, utilities, communications, healthcare, transport, digital identification, online services and even basic administrative procedures are increasingly dependent upon interconnected platforms and centralised infrastructure.

These systems can make life remarkably convenient when they work. When they fail, however, the consequences can be rather less entertaining. An account is suspended, a payment is blocked, an identity cannot be verified, an automated system rejects an application, or a digital service becomes unavailable. Suddenly, an individual who has done nothing wrong may find themselves unable to access something essential, with very little opportunity to speak to an actual human being who has the authority to resolve the problem. We are becoming increasingly dependent upon systems that we cannot easily understand, challenge or replace, and the more centralised our lives become, the more vulnerable we may be to decisions made somewhere well beyond our immediate control.

This is one reason why resilience and self-reliance matter. I should declare an interest here, since I live off-grid in a cave with a small group of friends, a vegetable patch and what some might describe as an unhealthy interest in solar panels, so you may wish to weigh my objectivity accordingly. But the ability to think independently, maintain practical skills, question information and retain a degree of personal autonomy is not some eccentric hobby for people like me. It is an important part of being free.

Independence does not mean rejecting society, technology or modern conveniences. It means retaining the ability to function when those things are unavailable, and maintaining enough personal agency to make meaningful choices rather than simply accepting whatever options happen to be offered. A society of entirely dependent citizens is a society in which power becomes increasingly concentrated in the hands of those who control the systems upon which everyone else relies. That should concern us, regardless of our political preferences.

So, who actually holds the power?

This is perhaps the most difficult question of all, because modern power is rarely concentrated in one obvious place. It is distributed across governments, international organisations, financial markets, multinational corporations, technology platforms, regulatory bodies and institutional networks. These organisations have different responsibilities, different incentives and different levels of public accountability. Some are democratically elected. Some are commercially motivated. Some operate under international agreements, while others exercise enormous influence without ever appearing on a ballot paper.

It would be simplistic to suggest that they all operate according to one coordinated plan. They do not need to. Powerful institutions can arrive at similar outcomes through shared incentives, overlapping interests and a mutual preference for stability and predictability. Governments want manageable economies, predictable populations and functioning public services. Corporations want profitable markets, reliable customers and access to data. Technology companies want engagement, growth and control over their platforms. Regulatory institutions want compliance and consistency.

None of these objectives is necessarily unreasonable in isolation. But where does the individual fit into this arrangement? Are citizens being treated as people with rights, aspirations and the freedom to make their own decisions, or increasingly as variables within a system that has its own priorities? It is a question worth asking, particularly when institutional convenience and individual freedom come into conflict. Democracy should not simply be about choosing who manages the machinery. It should be about ensuring that the machinery exists to serve the people in the first place.

The uncomfortable responsibility of being free

There is something else we should probably acknowledge, and it is rather less flattering to the rest of us. Freedom is not entirely comfortable. It requires personal responsibility, independent judgement and a willingness to accept that other people may make choices we dislike. It means living with disagreement, uncertainty and occasionally the consequences of decisions we would rather somebody else had made.

It is considerably easier to hand responsibility to an institution and expect it to organise things on our behalf. We sometimes complain about bureaucracy while simultaneously demanding that somebody regulate every aspect of life. We criticise government interference but expect government to resolve every difficulty. We complain about surveillance but happily exchange personal information for convenience. We demand freedom of expression while occasionally hoping that somebody will silence the person whose opinions irritate us. We cannot have an entirely passive relationship with freedom and then complain when somebody else takes responsibility for deciding what we are allowed to do.

Democracy requires participation beyond the occasional trip to a polling station. It requires curiosity, scepticism, political literacy and a willingness to examine uncomfortable evidence, including evidence that challenges our own preferred political positions. It also requires a degree of humility. No political party, government, journalist, corporation, campaign group or individual commentator possesses a monopoly on truth, and that most certainly includes the gentleman writing this from a hillside in Spain. The moment we begin treating any institution as beyond question, we have already surrendered something important. And perhaps that is where the real danger lies… not necessarily in some dramatic overnight transformation, but in our gradual acceptance that the ability to question, challenge and disagree is becoming less important than maintaining the smooth operation of the systems around us.

We should probably start asking better questions

I do not believe democracy is dead. Nor do I believe that every government initiative, technological development or institutional decision represents some sinister attempt to control the population. That would be an extraordinarily lazy way of looking at a complicated world, and I have spent far too long around genuine security threats to start seeing conspiracies in every council planning notice.

But I do believe we should be paying rather more attention to the direction in which things are moving. Democratic institutions do not become stronger simply because they continue to exist. Elections do not automatically guarantee meaningful public influence, and the presence of democratic language does not necessarily mean that democratic principles are being properly observed. We should be asking who makes the decisions, who benefits from them, who is accountable when they fail and whether ordinary citizens retain a meaningful ability to challenge them.

We should be questioning the expansion of surveillance, the growing dependence upon automated decision-making, the influence of private corporations over public discourse and the tendency to treat legitimate disagreement as an administrative inconvenience. Most importantly, we should remember that government is supposed to be accountable to the people, not the other way around.

I sometimes think we have become so accustomed to being managed that we have forgotten what it means to govern ourselves. We have become comfortable with being told what is sensible, what is responsible, what is acceptable and what is in our own best interests. We have allowed convenience to replace independence and institutional reassurance to replace personal judgement. Perhaps it is time to reconsider that arrangement.

After all, a citizen is not simply somebody who lives within a country’s borders, pays taxes and follows its regulations. A citizen is somebody who possesses rights, exercises responsibilities and has a legitimate voice in the decisions that shape their society. A subject, on the other hand, is somebody expected to accept the decisions of those in authority. The distinction is not particularly complicated, although I suspect it may be becoming rather inconvenient for certain people.

And perhaps that brings us back to the question in the title. Democracy or domestication? Are we genuinely participating in the direction of our societies, or are we gradually being conditioned to accept a narrower definition of freedom, one in which we retain the appearance of choice while the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, thought and participation are increasingly determined elsewhere?

I don’t pretend to have all the answers, and I am not convinced anybody does. But I do know that democracy was never supposed to be a spectator sport, and that the ability to question authority is not a flaw in the democratic process. It is one of its most important safeguards. Out here, when something breaks, there is no helpline, no committee and no automated system to tell me my call is important. It is inconvenient, occasionally maddening, and it has taught me more about the difference between being looked after and being free than any election night ever did.

We should perhaps be rather more concerned when people stop asking questions than when they start asking awkward ones. Because the moment citizens become too comfortable with being managed, they may eventually discover that they have forgotten how to govern themselves. And by then, the people doing the managing may have become rather too comfortable with the arrangement.

Dominus Owen Markham

An independent perspective on freedom, society, power and the curious business of being human.