Democracy's Ultimate Challenge

Below is a diagram of the Problematique, showing eight of the most impactful problems and their relationships. Despite countless solution efforts, all are unsolved. Most are growing worse.

The complexity of the diagram reflects the ultra-high complexity of the problem. This complexity causes the problem to behave much like the mythical Gordian knot which no one until Alexander the Great could untie.

Solving the Problematique is democracy’s ultimate challenge. The report examines the problem, its causal structure, its long history of failed solutions, and how that may be changed. Root cause analysis and simulation modeling are used. A controlled experiment was used to test the presence of the main root cause and the potential for resolving it with practical solution. Results were positive. The report thus offers a rational path forward for solving the Problematique.

In 1970 a short report titled The Predicament of Mankind stunned the world by identifying and naming “the global Problematique.” Ever since then, one major project after another has attempted to solve it.

This began with The Limits to Growth 1972 simulation model and book, with many subsequent iterations and related studies. The modern environmental movement appeared, failed to make progress, and was severely reprimanded in 2004 with Shellenberger and Nordhaus’ The Death of Environmentalism. Citing a long pattern of evidence, the report reached this widely quoted conclusion:

We have become convinced that modern environmentalism, with all of its unexamined assumptions, outdated concepts and exhausted strategies, must die so that something new can live.

Projects continued and culminated in the United Nations’ massive Sustainable Development Goals Framework, initiated in 2015, which provides 112 targets and over 10,000 actions for 17 problem areas). Similar efforts have attempted to solve the non-sustainability problems, generally by focusing on one problem at a time, such as the Council of Europe’s 2017 Information Disorder: Toward an interdisciplinary framework for research and policy making. This targeted democratic backsliding.

But alas, nothing has worked. WHY is this?

That is the question confronting humanity and is the question the report explores. The report runs 78 pages and is available here.