Is mass democracy making society less human?

As politics becomes increasingly shaped by social media, mass messaging, and distant institutions, BlazeTV host Auron MacIntyre is questioning whether modern societies have simply grown too large to be human.

And author of “The Master and His Emissary” Dr. Iain McGilchrist has an answer for him.

“More and more, our politics is this disembodied understanding. It is the thing fed to us through social media feeds and communicated through advertisements and headlines and these things. People feel like they know more about the world than they’ve ever known,” MacIntyre says.

“In reality, they know not even their neighbor or the issues that they face politically. And so these things have become completely disconnected. To my mind, the way that this is evolving is that we are basically becoming less human in all of our political interactions, making it very difficult for us to then understand the other as human, to understand the society and the world around us,” he continues.

MacIntyre believes this will precede a “collapse in our political systems” that will bring us back “to more of a city-state model.”

“Do you think that we can continue to see these large, you know, super-states expand and continue to lean on this idea that they have some kind of meaningful input from the individuals involved in their citizens, or do you think that ultimately we will have to contract and once again deal with each other at a much more local level when it comes to political organization?” MacIntyre asks McGilchrist.

“I do think we will need to do that very definitely if we’re to survive,” McGilchrist answers.

“We will have to rediscover the virtues of intermediate size,” he continues, pointing out that it may resemble the “downfall of a civilization.”

“But it might actually enable the regeneration of a much better way of life in which we lived with more modest demands on the earth, closer to the earth, cultivating the earth in common with our own community, sharing our lives with them, helping and supporting one another,” he explains.

“That would be a very different one from the one in which we are alien from one another,” he adds.

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