The Unfinished Contract —Our Democracies Must Learn or Die (Part One)

Welcome to this experiment: a book written section by section in public. Last time, I described what this endeavour is about (Opens in a new window):

a book-length project written online, in public - a new and scary experience for me, and I hope an exhilarating experience for you - the reader.

This is a new and focused project called: Cognitive Republic: Building Societies That Experiment, Learn, and Evolve.

We will examine how we can reinvent democracies as learning, adaptive, systems. You can read the introduction here (Opens in a new window), and the first intended section titles in this footnote.¹

The Unfinished Contract — Our Democracies Must Learn or Die (Part One)

Over the past decades democratic states have been battered by crises outpacing their ability to adapt. A crisis shortlist would minimally include: a once-in-a-century financial meltdown, a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic, a once-in-a-summer climate catastrophe, and in the background the social pressure cooker effects of a slow-building but widespread crisis in housing provision.

And there’s so much more – you can add to this list yourself (both public corruption and wars should also feature).

Public trust in democratic government and democratic institutions is falling fast, but our politics seems trapped in the same old, stale, recurring, arguments and debates. Across the world, surveys record plummeting public trust in parliaments, governments, and other democratic institutions: the share of citizens saying (Opens in a new window) they are unhappy with “the way democracy works” jumped from under 40% in 2005 to nearly 58% by 2019. Similarly, in a 2024 multi-nation survey (Opens in a new window), just 36% of people in twelve advanced economies expressed satisfaction with their democracy, down from almost half just a few years earlier. In 2023 just 39% of people across OECD countries (Opens in a new window) expressed trust in their national government. Younger generations are especially disillusioned (Opens in a new window): by their mid-30s, 55% of global millennials say they are dissatisfied with democracy, compared to under half of Generation X at the same age (and a majority of baby boomers are satisfied).

Democracy rests on an explicit and implicit social contract between citizens and the state. The public expects democratic institutions to govern effectively, fairly, and transparently. Democratic governance relies on a reservoir of trust – we trust that election outcomes are legitimate, that authorities will act in the public’s interest, and that social divisions will be managed peacefully through our institutions. When this reservoir of trust dries up, the very core functioning of democracy itself is threatened, and citizens may withdraw from civic engagement or turn to anti-system alternatives.

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Across richer and poorer countries alike, the same symptoms recur: we have elections placing politicians in office, but not it seems into effective power; we have parties and leaders effective at mobilising anger but when in office cannot or are unable to govern effectively; and we have citizens who feel unseen by their representatives, and who withdraw into private life or even some form of polarised or hardened identity. Loss is the master variable: people feel dispossessed of control, time, and recognition, and angry at governments that do not deliver. The 20th-century promise of linear progress has broken down; governments legislating for a predictable, linear, slow Newtonian world look brittle and unstable.

And new species of authoritarian populists have quickly evolved in this new political environment, promising simple solutions for our complex problems, as well as offering retribution and punishment to be handed out to an ill-specified enemies (judges, immigrants, cosmopolitans, liberals, outsiders, professors, experts) - any and all of whom are blamed for what ails you.

Rising distrust has coincided with the growth of these authoritarian-populist movements openly challenging liberal-democratic norms. From the United States and the United Kingdom and India to Hungary, Brazil, and the Philippines, populist leaders have gained support by presenting themselves as the voice of ‘the real people’ against corrupt or unresponsive elites (even if these leaders are elite billionaires themselves). They promise quick fixes and strong leadership, appealing to voters frustrated with the status quo.

And this vicious cycle continues: eroding trust in democracy fuels populist victories, and in power, such leaders often further undermine checks and balances – accelerating further democratic backsliding.

The populist surge might be better interpreted as more a symptom (Opens in a new window) than a cause of democratic malaise: only after mainstream institutions have lost trust and credibility could these outsider candidates successfully denounce the system as rigged or call for sweeping illiberal changes. This is a cause for hope: people are seeking a new way to solve our problems.

What to do?

It’s a dismal situation. How will our democracies renew the social contract, and restore trust in government, and tame the apparent allure of the authoritarian alternative? Reversing this cycle is among the central governance challenges of our time.

Many policymakers and scholars argue that democracies must renew their social contract (Opens in a new window) for the twenty-first century. Traditional remedies (such as technocratic fixes or public-relations campaigns imploring citizens to trust institutions) just aren’t enough. Traditional fixes – a bit of advertising to a few key groups, a bit of imploring, a bit of hectoring, some dog-whistles, a new website, a few tik-toks, a free mindfulness course or two for the stressed and dispossessed, a tax break or tax cut, a vote every couple of years: these are not going to work, especially as we know we are facing dangerous, unpredictable and uncertain future challenges, where policies frozen by ideology shatter, unable to cope with new circumstances or changing realities – as we have seen with many recent policy failures right across the world.

It’s easy to despair: our infrastructure still lags, our public services fray, and the general macro-mood sours further. This is a policy, capability, and capacity gap.

However, it is also a profound and general cognitive failure within our democracies: our systems no longer perceive change clearly, remember honestly, reason under uncertainty, correct error without humiliation, or tell shared stories people can recognise as theirs.

Twenty-first-century volatility is not just economic or cultural; it is cognitive at its core. Information moves faster than institutions can currently process it; policies ossify before their ink dries, and democratic feedback loops are too slow and too late, and democracies are not designed to learn from their mistakes.

An inability to learn is the democratic system disease

Democracies are bad at (a) allocating and sustaining attention, (b) remembering what worked, (c) rehearsing and learning from failure, (d) correcting without humiliation, (e) telling the truth about trade-offs. These gaps are where our contemporary demagogues live.

We need a new way of thinking, new ideas, even a new language, to discuss what ails us, and how to fix it. We need something more than equal to the challenges we are facing; we need something that will have public confidence, and which repays public trust.

A more fundamental rethinking of democratically responsive design is needed.

I argue here the alternative is governing by experiment, turning democracy itself into a complex adaptive system: a system capable of adapting by learning faster than the challenges it faces arise. If democracy is to endure, it must be able to learn in public. That is the starting position of the Cognitive Republic. It offers what populism cannot—a way to govern loss, uncertainty, and disagreement without lying about them—and how that is made tangible, measurable, and hard to game.

We need a radically new democratic philosophy – one appropriate to the complex and uncertain times we find ourselves in, and which, upfront, admits that many of the difficulties and problems we face do not admit of obvious and easy solutions, but solve them we must. Redesigning our democracies as learning systems – capable of testing, adapting, evolving, learning, and delivering, can renew the faith and trust of the public, and surmount the complex challenges we will inevitably face.

This model rests on certain key ideas:

• experimentation over dogma – power is only granted on condition that it be curious. Ministries frame proposals as hypotheses, specify success metrics, and accept rollback if the evidence disappoints;

• variation plus selection equals adaptation – just as ecosystems thrive on biodiversity, democracies grow wiser when cities, cooperatives, and regional councils test different solutions in parallel. Comparative results reveal what works, for whom, and at what cost;

• ethical foresight and inclusivity – rapid testing does not excuse recklessness. Each pilot passes through an ethics screen, accessible to the communities it may affect, while ensuring vulnerable groups are protected even as the system learns.

Over time, the republic becomes a network of continuous experimentation: problems surface, prototypes launch, feedback flows, and laws evolve.

Bottom line: Populism metabolises loss and failure into blame and retribution, offering anger instead of solutions, whereas the Cognitive Republic metabolises loss into learning with dignity, replacing the broken promise of perpetual improvement with a credible promise of visible corrigibility (the quality or state of being capable of correction) (Opens in a new window).

In the Cognitive Republic, government behaves less like a command-and-control centre and more like a Civic Experimentation Lab—a publicly accountable arena where every policy begins life as a prototype. Instead of debating abstractions until gridlock sets in, leaders launch small, time bound pilots. Citizen juries watch the trials, independent evaluators track outcomes, and open dashboards publish the data in real time. Failed ideas are not scandals; they are datapoints that feed the next iteration. Controlled pilots and rapid rollbacks let lawmaking out‑pace crises instead of chasing them. Embedding continuous learning cycles into government is the best real defence against a slide toward brittle authoritarian rule.

This approach builds upon findings in psychology, neuroscience, and evolutionary biology. When our brains encounter surprising or unexpected inputs, they update their models of the world, learn, and adapt; when societies face unexpected crises, they too must learn, unlearn, and relearn.

I call this approach the ‘Cognitive Republic, (Opens in a new window)’ where we all, together, build an experimenting, learning, evolving society. Cognitive Republic offers a radical reframing of democracy for the twenty‑first century as a thinking and learning system—an ecosystem of experiments, heuristics, and feedback loops, not just a system of checks and balances.

Now all of this is easy to say - of course democracies should learn and be responsive! But it is much harder to think through this challenge in detail, and even harder to implement. And it is important to avoid utopian longings and yearnings. Above, a new democratic philosophy must be practical and legible, or it is useless. These are the challenges I will address over the coming weeks and months.

Next time (paywalled): liberal democracies must reinvent themselves as learning systems

1. Here are the initial sections - and there’s many more to come.

   Introduction: The ‘Cognitive Republic’ and the Global Collapse of Democratic Faith (Opens in a new window)

   1 — The Unfinished Contract: Why Democracies Must Learn or Die

   2 — The Cognitive Republic: A Manifesto for a Learning Democracy

   3 — A General Theory from First Principles

   4 — The Compounding KPI: Learning Rate

   5 — A New Civic Humanism: Philosophy & Values

   6 — Identity Engines: How Brains Make “Us”

   7 — Institutions That Think: Enhancing the Civic Brain

   8 — The Hybrid Agora: Where Pixels Meet the Public Square

   9 — Preference Rich Democracy: Beyond Binary Choices

   10 — Markets That See ↩