The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Pathological Democracy with Aydin Paladin

00:00:00.000 Hello and welcome to Brokonomics.

00:00:28.880 Now, as you are of course aware, democracy is the very best thing that humanity has ever invented.

00:00:35.260 And if you doubt that, just watch any sci-fi programme for the last 30 years and you'll discover that the only reason you go to the trouble of conquering the immense difficulties of figuring out how to travel transgalactic spaces

00:00:46.940 is that you can stand there wagging your finger at some tentacled mass explaining why they need to adopt democracy so they can have all their decision-making powers abrogated to San Francisco 0.70

00:00:56.420 and they can have gay rights pushed down their throat by an Andorian president. 0.75

00:01:00.360 However, I have found an academic who has some words to say to the country on this stuff. 0.79

00:01:06.860 So let's get to the root of this heresy.

00:01:09.380 I welcome Aidan Paladin.

00:01:12.440 Hello.

00:01:13.140 Thanks.

00:01:13.760 Nice to be here.

00:01:14.620 Thank you for having me.

00:01:15.480 No, thank you very much for coming on.

00:01:16.600 Now, you are, I can tell, a proper academic.

00:01:19.820 And I know that because I've read your latest substack.

00:01:22.780 And it's got things like confidence indicators or intervals.

00:01:25.860 And it's got it's got it's got the stuff and it's got regressions and all the sort of stuff that I'd like to be able to pretend that I understand, but really don't.

00:01:33.620 So I'm not going to try. But you clearly are a proper academic.

00:01:37.480 But are you are you one of the sort of the new age ones who doesn't do it in academia?

00:01:41.620 You do it on YouTube instead.

00:01:44.260 Well, I was in academia. I was a Ph.D. student up until about, I guess, nine years ago now.

00:01:50.540 And I took a sabbatical from doctoral school because I was so burnt out from it.

00:01:55.220 and but i couldn't not work at the same time and so my dad said well you're always talking to me

00:02:00.900 about politics so why don't you go yell into the void of the internet about it instead and that's

00:02:05.520 what i've been doing is basically talking about politics and and more particularly uh the

00:02:10.120 intersection between politics and social science which is what my background is in uh specifically

00:02:14.480 group psychology behavioral psychology and mass communication and that all lends quite well to

00:02:21.240 politics yes i didn't intend to it for it to i was i my phd was going to be in a game studies

00:02:28.020 of studying video games and how people interact with video games it's a very different sort of

00:02:31.980 direction there even that got political exactly yeah yes and around that time is is when it

00:02:39.380 started to get political so you know 2016 u.s election was a big change for everything in u.s

00:02:46.980 politics and um the most recent article i've written talks a lot about that shift in part

00:02:51.860 in at least the american political system but of course the americanization of britain is also

00:02:56.500 a yankification has been occurring for some time as well of british politics well one of the things

00:03:02.280 i kind of got from your your latest substack and actually i better get you to explain it in a

00:03:06.400 minute is that um the system selects for a certain type of behavior so whether it's the

00:03:11.800 amerification of politics or whether it's just that america is a slightly more mass democracy

00:03:15.980 and therefore gets there slightly earlier, I suppose, is an interesting question.

00:03:18.840 But why don't you take us through what you're working on at the moment?

00:03:22.940 Because that was what really caught my eye and made me think we need to have you on.

00:03:26.820 So basically, what I've proposed here is that democracy as a system of government

00:03:32.440 inherently leads to polarisation and to partisanship.

00:03:36.980 What we've found, I went through data that goes all the way back to the 1940s,

00:03:40.400 up until the modern day, and basically, from the time that you cast your very first vote,

00:03:44.360 you are selecting for partisanship. And once partisanship becomes selected, every subsequent

00:03:49.140 vote increases partisanship every single act of voting. In the long run, what you end up with is

00:03:54.800 people who are heavily partisan, no matter what their personal beliefs may be and how cool of a

00:04:00.060 person they are otherwise. When it comes to engaging with democracy as a system, they only

00:04:06.000 become more entrenched over time and very rarely do they shift sides. In addition to that, the other

00:04:11.400 that increases along with partisanship is polarization on issues. And as issues become

00:04:15.760 polarized, people start to see the world in completely divergent ways. You can give them

00:04:20.500 the same article with the same information, for example, that Bush's statements on WMDs in Iraq,

00:04:26.220 and then give them the Duflin report that says there were no WMDs in Iraq. And people who are

00:04:31.100 partisan to the right read that article and were more convinced than before they had read it that

00:04:36.100 there were WMDs in Iraq. And the same thing with Bush banning stem cell research for Democrats.

00:04:41.400 after they read the article, they were a little bit more cautious on it, but they stuck to their

00:04:45.740 original perceptions rather than coming to update it with the reality of the information. People,

00:04:51.160 and they do this to avoid cognitive dissonance, which is a sense of psychological discomfort

00:04:55.660 that's actually activated in some of the same areas of the brain as physiological pain.

00:05:00.860 So of course, as animals, we want to avoid pain. And so to avoid pain, we avoid political reality.

00:05:06.860 and that's how people end up perceiving things so disparately and by voting it just gets

00:05:12.460 encouraged again and again to not update your perception of reality and instead to live in a

00:05:17.700 parallel one so i'm as i'm as likely to avoid slamming my fingers in the drawer as i am having

00:05:24.920 to accept a political reality that does not concur with my priors because it causes psychological

00:05:31.600 pain which which my which my brain basically perceives as the same thing and therefore avoid it

00:05:36.860 Yeah. I mean, it's, again, having to admit that you're wrong sucks. No one likes to do that. And to particularly something that they've invested effort, time, money into in particular, the more you've invested into something, the more difficult it is to accept that you were wrong in the past. 0.85

00:05:51.920 You either have to be wrong in the past or you're wrong now if the two things are dissonant.

00:05:55.520 So your options there are to say, well, the present is false or the present is different than how it appears or to convince yourself that you really never felt that way in the first place.

00:06:05.220 and particularly in the age of social media where people have all these statements that they've made

00:06:10.340 for years and years supporting a candidate or supporting a party online and readily available

00:06:15.200 I think it's even more difficult now to remove yourself and update your previous beliefs when

00:06:21.560 it's all right in front of your own face and you're constantly reminded of things that you

00:06:24.680 supported or believed in the past if they're just concordant with current beliefs. Okay so this

00:06:29.660 polarization is very much a feature, not a bug of politics. Yes. I mean, you pretty much find this

00:06:36.100 inherently with polarization. People have opinions towards politicians. And by polarization,

00:06:42.080 it's often measured by things like, the president makes me angry. That's what's meant by polarization.

00:06:47.580 So these emotional reactions to politics. And what specifically we find is that partisanship

00:06:53.120 alone in and of itself is not enough to cause this reality warping. It requires both partisanship

00:06:59.080 and polarization for people to start to read things in the antithetical way to what they've

00:07:04.200 just read or been informed about. And it's why I'm sure everybody has this experience where you've

00:07:08.740 talked to someone on the left, for example, and they have a completely different version of events

00:07:14.720 that they are absolutely sure is the real way that things are, and that you're actually the

00:07:18.460 lunatic and you're the one living in a parallel reality. And that's the inherent result of voting

00:07:24.680 and participating in the democratic process well i don't know if i remember well i mean there are

00:07:29.780 of course examples of that on left and right but the way that i got that the strongest was over

00:07:33.200 the covid era where i remember speaking to people and um i i went to visit some some people that i

00:07:39.580 knew who were sort of terrified of this and i had brought with me because i was in crusader mode at

00:07:45.380 the time i'd brought with me with the government's own stats on how many people were actually dying

00:07:50.740 of this thing and it's just saying look your your perception is wildly different to the government's

00:07:56.320 own numbers and they were accusing and these were good and these are people i know well known for a

00:07:59.820 long time and and and they were accusing me of of bringing them propaganda it's no it's literally

00:08:05.100 the government's it's because and i could kind of see that the more effective my argument was

00:08:12.680 they were recoiling as if i had hurt them yes yes because it's causing psychological pain

00:08:18.680 psychological discomfort um to have to because you have to do something about it you have to

00:08:23.800 alleviate the pain um that's our again our inherent desire is well i'm in pain i need to

00:08:27.920 make this pain go away so you have a couple of options you can admit to or you can kind of erase

00:08:33.380 the past and say you know maybe i was misled in the past but i'm right now or you were you're wrong

00:08:38.820 now but right in the past that one's very unusual uh the most common way of dealing with it is to

00:08:45.540 do none of those and just ignore the present information. It's wrong or it doesn't exist.

00:08:49.760 And that's what you find most commonly. And I think everybody can probably relate to that in

00:08:55.480 some personal experience they've had where just ignore, it doesn't exist, go back to whatever you

00:09:00.060 were doing beforehand. And everyone is susceptible to this. It's not one political side or the other.

00:09:04.880 yes um i i wonder if as an investor i'm somewhat insulated from that because if that is the human

00:09:16.040 tendency but if you stick to it as an investor you lose all your money quite quickly if you can't

00:09:20.640 update on the basis of new new information you kind of have to train yourself regularly to be

00:09:24.740 able to throw out your priors but i mean presumably there are a proportion of people who can do this

00:09:29.700 do do this. But I mean, you're talking about the mass of the voter base.

00:09:36.320 Yes. So there's two mitigating factors. One is political knowledge. So people who are political

00:09:41.980 junkies, they tend to be less likely to be misled by and believe falsities because they have a

00:09:46.940 general kind of baseline, people who pay a lot of attention to politics. Now, I should say that

00:09:51.560 there is people who are eligible to vote are actually less politically knowledgeable than

00:09:56.420 those who are ineligible, at least in the United States, that's been found. So people who make

00:10:01.560 voting decisions based on very little political knowledge, people, I guess, who are outside of

00:10:06.560 the system. I mean, in this case, it was measured by people who were under the age of 18. So 17

00:10:12.360 year olds had more political knowledge than did 19 year olds, for example, in the US. And that

00:10:18.160 was over a long period of time to not just like one election cycle over decades. So political

00:10:23.720 knowledge is a mitigating factor. People with a lot of political knowledge who are political

00:10:27.240 junkies, they tend to not be misled as easily, although there are, you know, examples of that

00:10:32.160 as well. And that's probably because of the other factor, which is need for cognition.

00:10:36.220 Need for cognition is the desire or need to think deeply about things. And it's heavily

00:10:40.360 correlated with intelligence, multiple forms of intelligence, in fact. So people who are

00:10:45.320 low need for cognition, at least in some instances, are more likely to believe falsities because 1.00

00:10:51.440 they're dumb i mean that's it's honestly like there's no other way around it they're a bit dumb 0.97

00:10:54.980 people who are hiding for cognition on the other hand are able to discern these things 1.00

00:11:00.620 but there are plenty of very intelligent people who just get locked into a worldview and never

00:11:05.440 change it yeah so like i said it's both it's it can't it's not just intelligence alone

00:11:10.620 intelligence and uh being highly politically knowledgeable um however if you're extremely

00:11:16.420 partisan and the situation is very polarizing, even the most intelligent and politically informed

00:11:21.920 person can fall victim to these tendencies to avoid psychological pain. Yes. Do we think that

00:11:29.980 this is a failure mode of democracy or is it a mechanism that actually helps stabilize it?

00:11:35.540 Because what you're describing is basically sort of creating two ballasts on either side of the

00:11:40.880 ship that are very difficult to update and very difficult to move, which means that you don't get

00:11:46.400 any sort of rapid change? Yeah, well, you won't get rapid change with this because these tendencies

00:11:52.780 last for a lifetime. So like I said, once you've cast your first vote, for the most part,

00:11:58.020 whatever direction that has been in, and even in a multi-party system, whatever direction that has

00:12:02.120 been in will be the direction that you will stay on pretty much for the rest of your life, with

00:12:06.500 rare exceptions, for the rest of your interaction with the political system. As a result, yes,

00:12:12.640 even in multi-party systems, there's a tendency towards bipolarity. It's just one or two parties

00:12:18.740 usually end up being at the head of that ship. And it creates, like I said, this two parallel

00:12:23.380 worlds. If there was more than that, I think it'd be more complicated. But like I said, even in

00:12:26.960 multi-party systems, people tend to diverge one or the other for the most part. And yeah,

00:12:32.940 it perpetuates the democratic process in that there's always another fight to happen. We've

00:12:37.940 always got to go face face the enemy at the ballot box again and again in perpetuity you know at

00:12:44.420 infinitum so if most people and i agree with you most people are low information or low salience

00:12:51.560 whatever you want to call them voters what actually legitimizes democracy other than the

00:12:57.000 fact that it's got all this psychological buy-in the thing that people mostly vote on is not policy

00:13:02.680 because they tend to be very unfamiliar with policy, and not just policy, but basic positions.

00:13:08.680 One of the more interesting facts that came out of this was that in 1992, basically, in total,

00:13:16.880 35% of Americans did not know that Bill Clinton was to the left of George Bush. They didn't

00:13:24.640 understand that the Republican Party was a right-leaning party. 35% either learned it or

00:13:30.220 forgot or never learned it at all during that election cycle. You would think the most basic

00:13:35.280 bit of information that voters would be aware of, they couldn't grasp or hold on to. So instead,

00:13:42.120 because people don't understand policy either, generally speaking, something between 10 to 20

00:13:48.340 to 30 percent of voters on any given policy issue either never learn it or will learn it and then

00:13:53.580 forget it in any kind of election cycle. There was about nine different times that that was,

00:13:59.480 10 different times that was tested in every single case um it occurred the same time people

00:14:03.500 didn't understand what or they learned it and then forgot so it sort of it sort of sounds like

00:14:08.780 that what you're implying is that is that public opinion is it's more that it's produced by the

00:14:15.580 system rather than expressing it um yes it is it's a product of democracy itself so because people

00:14:22.600 don't pay attention to policy where are they getting their cues from it turns out that the

00:14:26.620 predominant and only real cue that voters base their opinions on is what I can best describe

00:14:31.160 as vibes. So, for example, in the election between Al Gore and Bush, it was widely promoted

00:14:39.240 that Al Gore was distrustworthy. He wasn't honest. He was insincere. And that was largely based on

00:14:44.400 he ran, he did an interview or a speech where he talked about how his grandmother took the same

00:14:49.560 arthritis medicine as his dog. That was not true, personally. It was not a real anecdote from his

00:14:56.060 life it came from a house democrat study so it was like accurate information that the same medicine

00:15:00.860 cost three times as much and was being prescribed to people and dogs however because he had lied

00:15:05.880 about that it gave the um it gave his opponents the ability to just frame al gore as a dishonest

00:15:12.580 liar and as a result that shifted massively favorable opinions towards bush and it not but

00:15:19.160 they didn't believe that al gore was less credible they didn't believe that he was less intelligent

00:15:22.880 They didn't believe he was less knowledgeable. They believed he was less honest. And that is what shifted opinions towards whether or not he'd be a good president. It's vibes and not policy. The vibe stuff is what gets votes.

00:15:35.120 so i'm kind of thinking here that what what you're suggesting is that you know early donald trump

00:15:42.140 in particular when he's in campaigning mode was actually a genius politician because he didn't

00:15:46.940 try and do all the clever stuff he just came up with a nickname for people that was a bit cutting

00:15:51.740 and a bit negative and actually that was not just a byproduct of his style that was actually doing

00:15:58.100 the work oh yeah yeah you know sleepy joe or yeah all the other names he's got everybody

00:16:03.780 Lil Marco. All those little names that can reduce a person down into a single descriptor,

00:16:11.180 which is always negative. Yeah. I mean, that makes it much easier for the voting public to

00:16:17.140 comprehend. They need soundbites because they can't, they don't have the time or energy to be

00:16:22.160 able to, I mean, it is, this is a full-time job. Obviously you and I both do this as a job

00:16:26.320 and most people do not have the time, energy, ability, whatever it is, what, or a combination

00:16:31.480 of all of them to dedicate to doing this as a full-time job as a result they need soundbites

00:16:36.720 they need little tidbits of information um and then it's a little bit absurd that we take people

00:16:42.060 who we know are in a large portion incapable of learning these things for any number of reasons

00:16:47.920 or forgetting them and then expect them to go out and make informed decisions that determine the

00:16:52.340 fate of the country it kind of suggests that actually what we're doing is is it's much better

00:16:58.940 off that you're not in academia that you're on youtube and i mean to relate a conversation i was

00:17:03.660 having with carl the other day we were talking about running for parliament and and but it we

00:17:08.240 what we came to is by god what if we actually win because we we'd be trading a quite a powerful

00:17:13.780 position as an influencer for a position of no power whatsoever which is being sort of lobby

00:17:20.280 fodder because it sort of suggests that actually the ability to express ideas clearly and simply

00:17:25.460 and serve them up on a format which is low effort for people to get hold of

00:17:29.980 is actually far more powerful than marching around in Westminster

00:17:35.000 and waving order papers and all that sort of stuff.

00:17:37.780 Well, it's always a huge problem of being able,

00:17:40.240 particularly for people in politics directly,

00:17:43.040 to be able to communicate information to the voters

00:17:45.340 because they have this tendency to stick with whatever they originally thought

00:17:49.300 or to learn it and then forget it.

00:17:52.000 I mean, this was a huge problem, actually, which election cycle was. Was it 1992 as well? One second. Oh, yes. What was the actual 1997? So the 1997 general election, because Labour and the Tories had switched sides in terms of their position on, you know, whether they should integrate with the European community, what would the precursor to the European Union, there was the British public was moving away from favorability towards integration.

00:18:20.580 And so because the conservatives had also moved away from being favorable towards integration at the time, the whole John Major's whole campaign there was to try and inform the public that, look, the conservatives are against integration.

00:18:34.840 It didn't work, though. People maintained at the time in 1997, there was a significant portion of the public that continued to believe that labor was against integration rather than the other way around.

00:18:46.940 So you find this in all kinds of different political environments and contexts, not just in the U.S., but in the U.K., in the Netherlands.

00:18:55.020 And in my article, I talk about a lot of it, but it's so consistent.

00:18:58.760 People can't learn new information either very well.

00:19:02.420 In fact, it's been a problem with when newspapers make updates to articles, people will remember whatever they read first.

00:19:09.100 And people will continue to do whatever they did first.

00:19:12.040 Very common example, it's often people will say, my whole family votes this way.

00:19:15.880 so I vote this way and that's whatever you've always done is what you will continue to do

00:19:20.640 very hard to break out of that yes and I know you went back to 19 whatever it is you went back to

00:19:26.260 but is is it is this a fundamental truth of human nature or is it perhaps the case that with

00:19:32.980 social media which is much less friction involved in getting hold of it I mean you you can consume

00:19:39.860 your news in whatever format you want when you're sat on a bus you can pull up your phone if you

00:19:44.340 want to watch a half hour lotus eater segment or a 90 minute brokonomic segment or a 30 second

00:19:49.920 tiktok you can be served up in a relatively low friction way is that is that helping to dissolve

00:19:54.400 any of this do you think i'm not really sure because you the people who are going to be

00:19:58.900 interested in consuming that content in the first place are the politically involved people who are

00:20:04.120 interested in political knowledge and that is a certain subsection of the population there's

00:20:08.900 some stuff that, sure, has very broad appeal. People are obviously interested in the daily

00:20:14.640 news cycle to a certain extent, just wanting to know what's going on in the world. But the people

00:20:21.420 who are interested in politics to the degree that they will sit down and watch even a 30-minute

00:20:25.240 segment, let alone an hour and a half, are typically the people who are already high

00:20:29.100 political information and therefore less likely to be susceptible to this stuff. And also probably

00:20:34.500 a little higher iq a little bit more at least need for cognition i need to want to think about

00:20:39.400 things yes so unfortunately it's our audience echo chambery there yes indeed but it that isn't

00:20:45.620 it becomes a bit of a maybe not echo chamber filter bubble people who select for it are already the

00:20:50.280 people to be who are less likely to be susceptible to this stuff so is this why political systems

00:20:55.500 in the west keep on evolving into uh basically technocracies and there's this kind of layer of

00:21:01.740 administrative governments because if you if if the signal if there's more noise as a signal going

00:21:07.500 on in the electoral base as a whole you can't really do it through the political system you

00:21:11.760 have to extract it away to the courts and the compliance and you know bank of england makes a

00:21:16.740 whole bunch of decisions and you basically just push it out of the political arena i mean i think

00:21:21.500 it has to sort of logically because people don't know anything for the most part i mean these are

00:21:26.620 what i'm talking about the statistics here these are broad national level statistics and surveys

00:21:30.420 on in aggregate people can't if if in 1992 the american public 33 percent of them 32 percent of

00:21:38.480 them excuse me did not know that george bush was to the right of bill clinton then um there's

00:21:46.280 again like a third of the populace how can you expect them to have any sort of opinion that is

00:21:51.460 informed in any way on details and specifics on on bureaucracy and administration and it's just

00:21:57.600 impossible. That's why it has to be someone's job. And unfortunately, once it becomes embroiled in

00:22:01.440 bureaucracy and administration, it also becomes opaque and very difficult to then, for those who

00:22:08.040 are interested and do want to know, find out what's going on or have any say in it. So what

00:22:13.980 are you saying? Are you saying that the system, the democracy is broken? Or are you saying that

00:22:18.480 democracy is simply optimizing for different function, which appears to be stability over

00:22:23.800 time without having to make much change you know it wants to be the crocodile it wants to go

00:22:27.420 300 million years without ever needing to evolve

00:22:30.220 I mean I don't advocate for democracy personally I'm a monarchist so which I think is a more stable

00:22:37.600 system yeah but uh in terms of democracy there is a stability to it however in that you know

00:22:43.740 these things stay stable over time you stick with your vote you stick with your your party and your

00:22:47.360 guy however because of the inherent polarization and partisanship that democracy produces this

00:22:52.980 means that the populace is perpetually at war with each other, which is not stable. And particularly

00:22:59.240 in recent years, I think in part because of the advent of social media has exacerbated this

00:23:04.420 because it's in everyone's faces all the time in a way that it used to maybe only be during

00:23:08.440 election cycles, is that people feel that they are at war. I mean, for years and years, people

00:23:14.080 like Tim Pool have been saying there's going to be an American civil war. I've heard people say

00:23:17.360 there's going to be a British civil war for a while now as well. And a lot of that tension is

00:23:23.580 built up because of democracy as a system, because people form marching lines, and they're very

00:23:29.520 unlikely to change them. Yes, I suppose there is a way of looking at democracy, which is to say

00:23:34.820 it's a proxy for a civil war. We used to actually have the civil war. And largely, it was the biggest

00:23:41.420 side one. But if you have a democracy, you can do away with all the bullets and stuff, and you can

00:23:45.800 just cast ballots and this and the biggest side still wins and but you didn't you didn't have to

00:23:49.820 go to the bother of getting shot so it's a kind of version of that but what I wanted to ask is

00:23:54.600 I certainly agree with all of this when it comes to a mass democracy the only thing I'm wondering

00:23:59.360 is we what is the problem is the problem the mass bit or the democracy bit so as a thought experiment

00:24:05.640 let's say the democracy didn't work where we all voted straight up to the national level

00:24:10.400 what if the way democracy worked is we voted for our local councillors on local things that we

00:24:16.860 could actually have you know even low information voters can understand if their if their streets are

00:24:21.500 clean or not and if there's potholes and if the bins get collected and then the local councillors

00:24:26.180 vote for the county councillors and the county councillors vote for the you know whatever the

00:24:30.420 MPs and the MPs vote for you know whatever you you tear it up so that oh that as you go up the

00:24:36.720 layers you're moving up the um information level or the iq level whatever it is of the people could

00:24:42.680 that work i think that's a more that's probably more likely to get positive change to society

00:24:50.340 in particular however though people are low information voters even at the local level

00:24:55.360 and protect maybe actually i think far currently they're far more likely to be unknowledgeable at

00:25:01.640 the local level if you enjoyed that content and of course you did because you are a smart person

00:25:06.880 why don't you go over to lotus eaters.com where you can watch the whole episode for a little as

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The Podcast of the Lotus Eaters - April 28, 2026

PREVIEW： Brokenomics ｜ Pathological Democracy with Aydin Paladin

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