A policy inconvenience

Policymakers around the world gravitate towards making one-size-fits-all policies. Through effective altruism, this approach has also found its way into philanthropy. But it has a fatal flaw. It does not care much about individuality. When you are flying high in the sky, everyone looks like an ant. But that doesn't mean individuality ceases to be a factor. As you shut your eyes to the individuality of your subjects, they do not take kindly to your attempts to treat them like non-player characters or NPCs in a video game.

If policymakers cannot see your individual problems, how do they make policies? Hunches? Projections? Surveys and statistics? Assumptions based on social sciences? A bit of everything, I believe. And therein lies the problem. Human beings are not inanimate objects. Any attempt to assume how they behave may work for an election cycle where choices are well-defined and limited. However, their behaviour in multidimensional daily lives cannot be predicted. Physics will tell you how an atom may behave in a given situation because an atom has no agency, volition, or emotional intensity that varies from person to person. That is why each policy intervention can have adverse effects that nobody saw coming. Add to it the growing dishonesty and opportunism of the legacy media. Media was supposed to be society's mirror. But business interests have effectively neutralised that function.

Want examples? There is no greater media ecosystem than India's. Given that democracy is chaotic and capitalism competitive, you would have thought India's media would be untamable, messy, competitive and brutally honest. But you have seen how easily this ecosystem was manipulated and tamed by a combination of big business, political opportunism and jingoism. Likewise, nothing else can explain why we have a disproportionate number of news channels and very little innovative content in Pakistan. Remember, when the 2022 floods wreaked havoc, all channels were forced to use footage taken from social media because they had no original visual content to display. Western media is also succumbing to corporate pressures, and when an honest content audit is done years later, you will know that most of it is agenda-driven. To think that such a media ecosystem would pay heed to the individual woes of an ordinary citizen is laughable. Media outlets may sometimes milk a case for maximum ratings once it has grabbed public attention or fits their agenda neatly. Still, the disruptions now come from the stoic algorithms of social media. Now, don't think that I am an incurable pessimist but there is enough evidence to suggest that even that ecosystem can be co-opted for agenda setting. Many have accused Elon Musk of manipulating X algorithms to tip the balance and support his favoured narratives.

So, what does a policymaker do? Meet and greet every citizen? Such a task may not be humanly possible. Remember when Raja Pervaiz Ashraf became the prime minister? He threw open the doors of the PM House for the constituents of Gujjar Khan. Little did he know then that so many people would show up in one day that he would have to take refuge on the roof of the palatial building.

Likewise, during the recent Indian elections, when Rahul Gandhi held various town halls, his security detail often faced an impossible situation as teeming masses would rush to the stage to take selfies with their leader.

Don't get me wrong. Gandhi is responsible for some of the most magnificent disruptions in recent political history. His two yatras disrupted the media's monopoly on narratives by effectively using YouTube, Facebook and other video streaming platforms. But by nature, such activities as the two yatras have to be controlled and restrictive affairs. Outreach is good, but you cannot count on it.

Then what do you do? Give up? Not an option. In Donald Trump's 2016 victory and the Brexit shocker, you can see a ruling elite out of touch with the sentiment. When Obama took over shortly after the 2008 crash, he made an admirable effort to save the economy. He managed to succeed in many aspects, too. However, an economy in recession does many weird things, including shifting businesses abroad, replacing the workforce with cheap imported labour, and, when the old workforce is retained, either reducing wages or freezing them for a very long time. Consequently, even those who managed to survive the economic meltdown spent most of his two terms either in distress or with great dissatisfaction. The sentiment was more pronounced in middle America and mainly went undetected. Result? Trump.

Likewise, Brexit in the UK. Then, the media berates decent, hardworking, ordinary voters for making unfavourable choices. If a voter feels he is neither seen nor heard, he can express his dissatisfaction through his vote.

If you want an even more dramatic example, then let's go back to the interwar period when Hitler was a disaffected and deranged ex-soldier. If the Weimar Republic could find a way to identify and appropriately deal with this one madman, the world could be spared of the bloodbath that ensued.

Not everything about individuality poses a challenge. The problem lies with the inability of the state to see and understand its charges. Much talent is lost because the government cannot help individuals attain their full potential. A lot is left to fate and chance. Fate and chance do not make good policy.

What is the solution, then? Simple. Local democracy. The smaller the unit size you are supposed to govern, the easier it is for you to pay attention to each individual. Imagine if your ruler lived in your community, how easy it would be for you to be heard and seen.

Sadly, nation-states around the world have weaponised the post-9/11 realities to centralise powers. That is in addition to how states usually function. For example, India and Pakistan just can't seem to be able to make peace with the decentralised governance models their constitutions propose. In America, the states control the Centre, but these states wield the real power, not local governments. If all countries want to be true to the spirit of democracy, they must make the local governments the most empowered tier of governance.