Democracy, Governance, and the Drift from Merit
Instead of voting, how about a conversation with an ASI?
Contemporary democracy in much of the English-speaking world is not collapsing. It is not tyrannical. But some are losing confidence. With polarisation and mis-information, it is far from its best.
It is drifting into a recognizable pattern. Elections remain. Institutions function. Courts operate. Yet something deeper has shifted in how decisions are made and justified.
Political life has become highly polarized and identity-driven. Most voters do not evaluate policies on their merits; they inherit positions from the tribe to which they feel they belong. Voting becomes an act of loyalty rather than discernment. Political parties function less as deliberative coalitions and more as identity markers. Once identity hardens, argument becomes secondary.
This is a scar on the beautiful face of citizenship, that right to have a say in how society should best operate.
At the same time, bureaucracy has thickened. Regulations accumulate far more easily than they are retired. Approval processes multiply. Veto points proliferate. It becomes easier to stop a project than to build one. It can take years to approve infrastructure that is plainly necessary. In Australia, something as straightforward as extracting copper from the ground — a material essential for electrification, renewables, and modern infrastructure — can be delayed not by engineering constraints but by procedural layering.
As Ezra Klein points out in “Abundance”, the proliferation of well-meaning bureaucratic and stakeholder impositions makes the building of high-speed rail and affordable housing nigh-on impossible in California.
This is not a moral condemnation of civil servants. It is a systems problem. When layers of review expand without coordinated pruning, friction rises and accountability diffuses. No one actor is responsible for failure; everyone can point to compliance with process.
Regulatory capture follows naturally. Those with concentrated interests — large corporations, unions, industry lobbies — learn to navigate and shape complex systems. They influence rule-making to their advantage. Meanwhile, dispersed citizens bear costs they struggle to identify. Markets distort. Entry barriers rise. Innovation slows.
Process is mistaken for progress.
Political announcements of consultation-based decisions then become theatrical. Reports, policies and symbolic gestures substitute for measurable outcomes. Trade-offs are hidden rather than confronted. Time is treated as if it were free. Delay is invisible in political rhetoric, though it carries enormous economic and human costs.
This drift is often accompanied by something that deserves to be named carefully: anti-science. Not hostility to laboratories or to research funding, but a subtler departure from disciplined scientific reasoning.
Anti-science in this sense includes denial of human nature. The “blank slate” has been rebutted in psychology and evolutionary biology. Yet policy still frequently assumes that incentives do not matter, that status does not motivate, or that evolved differences can be erased by decree. When policies ignore predictable human responses to incentives, unintended consequences follow.
Anti-science in this case includes denial of basic economics. Price signals are not ideological inventions; they are information mechanisms. Incentives shape behavior. Productivity constrains what can sustainably be distributed. Any increase in wages or salaries without a corresponding increase in productivity only debases the currency, it is not a real pay-rise.
Policies that stimulate housing demand while suppressing supply cannot solve affordability; they simply inflate prices. Yet electoral cycles reward visible transfers over structural reform.
Anit-science includes fear-campaign governance toward transformative technologies. Vaccines, nuclear power, artificial intelligence, genetically modified foods — each has at times been framed in apocalyptic terms detached from proportional risk assessment. Risks are magnified rhetorically when politically useful and minimized when inconvenient. Precaution becomes paralysis. Meanwhile, the costs of inaction — energy poverty, delayed medical advances, unproductive farmland, vitamin deficiencies, slower infrastructure rollout — are rarely counted.
Anti-science includes the sin of “party spirit”, which is denounced widely in Scripture. In the epistemic sense, positions are adopted because they signal party loyalty. Arguments are evaluated by who speaks them rather than by whether they are true. In such an environment, politics becomes the management of issues on other than their merits.
It is a sin to allow other people’s opinions to influence your own, because of the faction they belong to rather than the merit of the arguments. I wish all Christians and all people of good will would repent and renounce such behaviour.
There are other, quieter failures as well. Equality of dignity is conflated with equality of outcome, leading to policies that suppress excellence rather than raise the floor. Second-order effects are ignored when the best candidates do not get the best academic support or the most appropriate opportunity.
Institutional entropy — the tendency of systems to become more complex over time without proportionate gains in performance — is underestimated. The status quo is romanticized, even when it is itself the product of past risk-taking and innovation, and is long-past time for renewal.
Perhaps most fundamentally, there is a creeping denial that human flourishing is dynamic. Flourishing is not mere comfort. It is challenge, responsibility, risk, creativity, and growth. Civilizations advance when individuals are free to push boundaries, take risks, and build. Yet political rhetoric increasingly treats stability as the highest good and change as inherently suspect.
Christian Transhumanism does not reject democracy. It rejects drift.
Toward Merit-Centered Governance
The central problem is not voting. It is how we vote.
Modern democracies primarily ask citizens to vote for parties. A party is a bundle: policies on taxation, immigration, energy, health, education, culture, and more, wrapped into a single brand. Citizens must accept or reject the bundle. Nuance collapses. Trade-offs disappear behind slogans.
Christian Transhumanism favors individual sovereignty and rights as foundational. Human beings are not merely members of voting blocs; they are responsible moral agents. A healthier democratic architecture would move away from voting for bundled identities and toward voting on issues — specific proposals evaluated on their merits.
In an age of advanced artificial systems, this becomes technically feasible in ways it never was before.
Imagine governance assisted by transparent, auditable artificial superintelligence. Instead of merely counting votes, such systems could interrogate — not coercively, but dialogically — the reasoning behind individual positions. Citizens could be asked not only “What do you support?” but “Why?” They could be presented with modeled consequences, trade-offs, and long-term projections. They could revise their views in light of evidence.
Voting would become less tribal and more deliberative. Artificial systems could map patterns of reasoning, detect inconsistencies, surface overlooked consequences, and expose capture. They could model infrastructure proposals, land-use changes, industrial projects, and emerging technologies with far greater accuracy than human bureaucracies alone.
You could agree with people on the other side of politics on some issues and disagree on others. You could vote on single issues, explaining why, and have your logic tested and amplified by ASI instead of just tallied as a vote.
We must take care here that ASI would not become Plato’s philosopher-king-despot. The role of ASI would not be to rule. It would be to clarify. To make trade-offs explicit. To expose second-order effects. To shorten feedback loops. To reduce corruption by increasing transparency.
Human rights remain non-negotiable. Artificial systems must operate within constitutional constraints that protect dignity, liberty, and due process. But rights are accompanied by responsibilities. Humanity carries a sacred charge: to steward creation, to build, to innovate, to carry the light of consciousness and intelligence forward.
Governance must support that vocation, not suffocate it.
Inequality, Technology, and Ambition
In a previous blog on the CTA website, I wrote of how new technologies tend to increase inequality in their early stages. The wealthy are early adopters. They can afford experimentation. They can hire expertise. They capture early gains. This pattern is not mysterious; it is structural.
Yet the existence of early inequality does not make innovation immoral. Without differential reward, ambition stagnates. Without the possibility of disproportionate gain, risk-taking diminishes.
The moral task is not to eliminate inequality of outcome. It is to preserve equality of dignity and to maintain a hard floor beneath which no one falls. Not just a Universal Basic Income but a universal dignity of life and
Christian Transhumanism affirms that human beings are unequal in talent, drive, and reward. It rejects the idea that excellence must be capped to achieve justice. But it equally rejects the idea that basic life standard, dignity or opportunity can be stratified.
A dynamic society requires both ambition and compassion. It requires markets that reward productivity and institutions that prevent destitution. It requires freedom to build and safeguards against abuse.
The Next Three Decades
Over the coming three decades, governance will change. Artificial intelligence will model complex systems, forecast outcomes, detect corruption, and optimize technology and infrastructure roll-out at scales beyond unaided human capacity.
It will do so in a manner better than humans, and in a manner some humans may not fully understand.
The question is not whether artificial systems will shape governance. The question is whether they will be harnessed to restore merit, transparency, and accountability — or captured by the same factional dynamics that distort current institutions.
Christian Transhumanism calls for decentralised power, strong rule of law, limited but effective central government, and transparent, auditable ASI-assisted decision-making.
Government should do what the private sector cannot or will not do: enforce contracts, protect rights, the rule of law, maintain a safety net, and coordinate genuine public good projects that are beyond private industry. It should not micromanage innovation or entrench incompetence.
Democracy, because it reflects the sovereignty, value and sacredness of every individual not be abandoned. But given the current failings and opportunities to improve, a plan to enhance it is vital.
Technology amplifies agency. Without moral formation and disciplined reasoning, amplification destabilizes. With them, it can renew.
So in the future, instead of reading the newspaper and voting, you can have a conversation with an ASI who will listen to your views, challenge them, and take account of your preferences on multiple issues, not just a party.
Let’s be honest – we all vote for the lesser of two evils. Maybe you could pick and choose your best positions from each side. Wouldn’t it be great to mature beyond polarisation?
The task is not to end democracy. It is to recover its capacity to decide the best paths forward for society on merit — and to equip it with tools worthy of the complexity of the age.