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Reposted after: 𝗖𝘂𝗯𝗮 𝗰𝗼𝗻 𝗛 𝗱𝗲 𝗢𝗿𝘁𝗼𝗴𝗿𝗮𝗳𝗶́𝗮 @CubaOrtografia ·(Auto-Translated from Spanish by X) Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
In the hushed classrooms of Stanford University in the early 1950s, a young economist named Kenneth Arrow, freshly minted with his PhD and the shadow of World War II still looming large, grappled with a question that seemed innocuous but proved utterly devastating: Is it possible to aggregate the preferences of free individuals into a "collective will" that is rational, coherent, and just?
What he uncovered wasn't merely a technical hurdle, but a mathematical impossibility as ironclad as the Second Law of Thermodynamics. In his book *Social Choice and Individual Values* (1951), Arrow demonstrated that no voting system or preference aggregation method exists that can simultaneously satisfy these minimal conditions of democratic decency:
- unrestricted domain (any set of individual preferences is possible),
- non-dictatorship (no single individual imposes their will),
- Pareto efficiency (if everyone prefers A to B, society must prefer A to B),
- independence of irrelevant alternatives (the preference between A and B must not depend on the presence of C).
The result is devastating. Any method produces cycles (A beats B, B beats C, C beats A), blatant manipulability, or pure arbitrariness. The "will of the people" isn't just hard to uncover. It's mathematically impossible to construct without violating one of these basic conditions.
"Perfect democracy is an algebraic mirage." This theorem isn't some whim of a liberal economist. It has been confirmed, extended, and reinforced by generations of mathematicians and social scientists. Amartya Sen, Arrow himself, and others refined it. It's one of the few irrefutable truths in social choice theory. And, like any great uncomfortable truth, the left has ignored it with the fervor of a priest denying evolution.
Because if anything reveals Arrow's theorem with crystal clarity, it's the ontological impossibility of "socialist democracy," of "participatory" planning, of "horizontal" assemblies, and all that rhetoric about "the popular will embodied in the rational plan."
The Bolsheviks promised workers' soviets, democratic councils where the people would decide. They ended up with Stalin and the Politburo decreeing by fiat who lived, who died, and how many quintals of wheat each kolkhoz had to produce. Why? Because when you aggregate millions of real preferences (the peasant who wants to plant what brings the most profit, the worker who prefers to work less, the intellectual who wants freedom of expression), cycles emerge, contradictions arise, chaos ensues. Someone has to break it. Always. And that someone is never "the people." It's the party elite, the bureaucrat with a gun, or the activist with a megaphone and an agenda.
The modern left repeats the same tragic theater with less honesty and more posturing. They talk of "horizontal assemblies," "deliberative democracy," "participatory identity politics." In practice, what they achieve are ultra-organized minorities (radical feminists, trans activists, elite ecologists) who capture the process because they're the only ones who show up to the endless meetings. Everyone else—the normal people—works.
The result is endless cycles of purges, cancellations, and "consensuses" no one asked for. The "will of the people" becomes the will of whoever shouts the loudest, whoever best wields guilt, whoever controls the microphone. Exactly what Arrow predicted: either hidden dictatorship or total incoherence.
Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, the "socialism of the 21st century." All promised "popular power." All ended up with a small clique of bureaucrats and soldiers deciding what gets produced, what gets silenced, and who eats. Central planning is nothing more than the futile attempt to impose artificial transitivity on a system whose nature is intransitive. When it fails—and it always fails, as we know—the socialist response isn't to acknowledge the mathematical impossibility, but to ramp up the coercion: more propaganda, more censorship, more political prisoners, more "reeducation." Repression isn't a bug; it's the thermodynamic corrective the system demands to simulate order where there's only contradiction.
The current cultural left, with its obsession over "social justice" and "equity," crashes headlong into the same wall time and again. They want predetermined outcomes (quotas, mandatory diversity, forced redistribution), but individual preferences won't line up. So they invent a soft dictator: the regulatory state, censorious social media, ideologized universities, fabricated "scientific consensus." Someone always imposes the order. Arrow is always right.
The "will of the people" is, then, a comforting fiction to justify the power of a few over the many. Arrow's theorem isn't anti-democratic; it's anti-utopian. It reminds us, with cold mathematical precision, what the 20th century's blood-soaked experience already screamed: that whoever promises to resolve the logical impossibility with more state, more planning, and more "participation" is merely announcing who the next dictator will be. And always, without fail, it ends up being the same type: the one who hates most that people decide for themselves.
2 comments :
It's a shame this never works and it doesn't for all the reasons you listed. One reason you did not list I have surmised is a huge factor in the eventual destruction of Empires. Psychopaths, Narcissist, etc. These people are supremely capable of influencing people because they can lie without any of the ticks that most people have when they lie. They are very good at it. Slowly but surely they move up in power over decades. They lust for power over all things. Over time they and the corrupted people they promote move up in to power. Once there they do whatever it takes to stay there. While they are masters and moving up in power and staying there they are total shit at wielding it for the good of the community. They don't care and actually making things better bores them. War, perversions, power, that's what gets their juices flowing. And over time they also fill all vacancies with people who are similar or are some sort of weird rejects that will do what they ask. Eventually the whole thing comes tumbling down through perverse incentives and neglect.
Stalin is good one but there's a much older one that we have records of . The fall of the Athenian Empire. We see civilizations rise and fall and all this turmoil but why? Civilizations rise up from hard work and the struggle of the many. Once they get to the top they become more powerful and the ruling of them attracts the the most ruthless. Over time the psychopaths move to the top and then, the whole thing crashes to the ground.
I add the US might, just might, work if the US had kept it's rules about voters being competent. Let's say you make the rules such that just over 50% of the voters fit the criteria for voting. I think this could work. Along with getting rid of voting for the US Senate and going back to having them appointed by the State legislatures. Not perfect but likely about the best you could get. Very much the Spartan government or very close which lasted until their Women refused to have children and they were defeated due to population decline.
When Khrushchev ran the USSR he did a lot of things for the population within I think the realms he was allowed to act without being capped himself. I think he tried to do good. Especially in housing. People laugh at what he built but it was a vast improvement over what they had and the way the housing, shops, schools, hospitals were set up was a reasonably good way to do things. The US, spread it out all over way, sucks. The Japanese have much the same with lots of little shops.
One such case that destroyed a whole civilization is Alcibiades of Athens. Alcibiades was almost certainly a psychopath. Some had an intense hatred for him, some great love. It was Alcibiades that pushed the great idea of attacking Syracuse on the Athenians. The failed Syracuse attack was THE downfall of Athens. The failed attack destroyed them completely. The same Alcibiades went from city to city in the ancient world. In Sparta he was more Spartan than the Spartans. Changing his chameleon skin every time he moved somewhere else and betraying everyone he came in contact with. Alcibiades killed Athens with risky schemes to glorify himself.
What did Plutarch have to say about him.
http://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Roman/Texts/Plutarch/Lives/Alcibiades*.html
"...He had, as they say, one power which transcended all others, and proved an implement of his chase for men: that of assimilating and adapting himself to the pursuits and lives of others, thereby assuming more violent changes than the chameleon. That animal, however, as it is said, is utterly unable to assume one colour, namely, white; but Alcibiades could associate with good and bad alike, and found naught that he could not imitate and practice. 5 In Sparta, he was all for bodily training, simplicity of life, and severity of countenance; in Ionia, for p65 luxurious ease and pleasure; in Thrace, for drinking deep; in Thessaly, for riding hard; and when he was thrown with Tissaphernes the satrap, he outdid even Persian magnificence in his pomp and lavishness. It was not that he could so easily pass entirely from one manner of man to another, nor that he actually underwent in every case a change in his real character; but when he saw that his natural manners were likely to be annoying to his associates, he was quick to assume any counterfeit exterior which might in each case be suitable for them..."
http://www.ancient.eu.com/Alcibiades/
One thing not widely known is King Agis of Sparta hated Alcibiades because Alcibiades had a child by the Kings wife.
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