From wiki:
It argues that following the global economic crises of the 1970s, governments, financiers and technological utopians gave up on trying to shape the complex "real world" and instead established a simpler "fake world" for the benefit of multi-national corporations that is kept stable by neoliberal governments
So I don't think it'a new thing, but maybe it's getting worse
The century of the self must be recommended also.
How else will they make easy money from illegal and unsafe constructions.
There is always the "it was the will of god" excuse.
This will continue till we wisen up and elect the right people, select the right people.
This is part of the problem:
The problem is not necessarily democracy, but rather the insight the lack of bandwidth in voting ballots. A few bits every 4 years or whatever? Contrast this with the rate of modification in the law of a jurisdiction. Define the "democratic grade" as the ratio of binding democratic input in bits/per year to the changes in the binding law in bits/per year.
The problems aren't the concepts of democracy, but that humanity was sold a muzzle with a nameplate stating "democracy".
One may argue that it was necessary in the era where most democracies were initiated, until large enough fractions of the population become educated, but justified or not, its hard to defend today.
Every time you spread the message that we just need to "vote right" you too are in a novel way a part of the problem.
Low probability but high impact hazards, those are the toughest to deal with at society scale.
We just need to be better. All anyone can do is be a bit better everyday. It's a monumental, hard task that we all just need to do.
This is how society gets better. We have come a long way. We have a long way to go. We can't "design" our way out of simply being better people.
My hunch is there are honest and reasonably competent people but who don't desire such positions.
Perhaps it is time to try sortition at scale.
I was just a while ago writing elsewhere (sorry, not totally on topic):
"But now almost everyone has figured out what the signs of the corruption are so we can spot the ones getting ill from the power and remove them.
I was joking that we (Finland) could sacrifice a island f Åland to be a Matrix for the power corrupted elite. We can simulate plenty of virtual sycophants fro them to be perfectly happy narcissists while isolated from doing us harm.
And I'm happy to volunteer to train as a therapist, should someone want to get better!
The golden rule and its formulations is pretty damn good litmus test for checking the level of corruption. If you're deep enough this will create a rage reaction. Think of Trump when someone talks about empathy or standard deviation. He will get hostile as he doesn't understand what the aliens around him are talking about.
I referred to the moral development with the lollipop and the levels are:
Pre-conventional (narcissist level in childhood or later in life regression by trauma, addiction or ...) Conventional (the sheep level that understands moral based on what others do around - google banality of evil if you don't know this) Post-conventional is the level where we do the golden rule thinking.
Most of us are in the conventional in action, BUT can understand the golden rule and that's enough. Have the decision makers reflect on some, even mundane, issues on the basis of "what if all 8 billion of us did this" and you'll get a short sircuit or division by zero, if the capability has regressed or never developed. These are no evil people by no means, but in most cases ones that have not had a healthy people around them. Either as a child or later on. We just know where we're going to end up should we not remove them from the power. Whether the society is powered by communism, or capitalism, or whateverism the outcome is the same if we don't figure out a way for this.
We cannot allow replacement via "good great leaders" as the power itself also creates the regression, just like addiction or trauma. So if I'm seemingly moral now and you'll select me as the great spagetti leader that dictates over the world and other puny religions, eventually I will corrupt by the admiration. And so will you.
The predicament of the human race is IMO decided by the fact that do we dare to start talking about this human trait honestly :D Sorry a long rant, now I'll shut up!"
So thanks for a question I had an answer almost available!
"Take all your overgrown infants away somewhere And build them a home, a little place of their own The Fletcher Memorial Home For Incurable Tyrants and Kings" ... "They can polish their medals and sharpen their smiles, And abuse themselves playing games for a while Boom boom, bang bang, lie down you're dead"
-- "The Fletcher Memorial Home" by Pink Floyd
My disagreements are about how he treated the band.
The other issue is that the machinery is not 1 person but 10s or 100s of 1000s of people who are actually doing the work you want to do. There is a difference between "£10M will sort out that hospital easily" and going through the machine ends up making that cost more like £100M not just "corruption" although there will be some but also massive inefficiency, lack of agency for people to make things happen without having 100 meetings to agree it and then having the government change their mind and throw the whole thing in the trash.
Devolving decisions to local government helps to a point but some things have to be managed centrally, which is where the bureaucracy is at its worst.
https://deming.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/inconvienent-t...
On the other hand, there's also a market for generating outrage and panic, sometimes justified, sometimes not.
So not the best metric for what majority of people want.
Also the wants are manufactured in many parts.
Aleksey Yurchak coined a term Hupernormalisation and it works here too.
We know the reality, yet leaders keep telling us via TV, social media... that everything is fine.
We know that they know that we know.
Fake world? Matrix? Escape from the freedom?