The Road to Democracy—Paved with Aggression and Resentment?

Democratic nation-building can only be successful if the social and psychological causes of a dictatorial regime are understood and the multiple steps required to achieve democracy anticipated.

Democratic practices and institutions depend on collaborative relationships, trust, and reflective processes. When a socially and culturally cohesive nation -- where individuals have some degree of trust in each other -- with a history of democratic-type institutions is liberated from a dictatorial regime, its people can readily come together to support democratic reforms, as was observed in post-communist Poland.

However, a country with a long history of warring factions, where each faction distrusts the other, actually often depends on a dictatorship to contain hostilities. What happens when this type of nation is freed from a dictatorial regime? To answer this question we first must look at why a group would embrace or tolerate such a regime in the first place.

Social groups have a number of basic needs, including safety, cohesion, implicit survival-based communication, shared symbols, and a relatively shared sense of reality and humanity. Different groups, however, vary in how they come together to meet these basic needs. Chaotic, fragmented social groups, and social groups that are invested in polarized beliefs, meet their basic needs in different ways than social groups that are relatively integrated and share a sense of reality and humanity.

For example, fragmented and/or polarized organizations often can only cohere around a powerful feared leader or set of polarized beliefs or images, because the group feels that no other structure could contain the imminent danger from the different factions. Paradoxically, fear of hostility is used to contain hostility and provide security for the group.

The dictatorial regime may also provide a familiar social structure. Dictatorial regimes tend to operate at a level of group functioning dominated by “all-or-nothing” thinking, concrete rules, extreme punishments, and little tolerance for flexible reflective thinking that would challenge an authority structure. Warring factions also tend to operate with “all-or-nothing” thinking (i.e., “the other factions are all bad.”) and rule by severe authority figures. Therefore, the polarized thinking that characterizes a dictatorial regime feels familiar.

In contrast, reflective thinking -- embodied in representative forms of government -- and concepts such as justice, equality, debate, and compromise feel alien.

What is likely to occur when a nation of fragmented or polarized warring factions is all of a sudden freed from the tyranny of a dictator? Will they be appreciative, and feel a sense of security from a potential governing process that feels alien to them? Or will they feel a collective anxiety and uncertainty because the proposed new governing structure, while supporting individual freedoms, does not provide a familiar social organization or an immediate sense of protection against factional hostilities? Unsurprisingly in such a circumstance, we can expect a number of reactions: frank hostility by those with very different objectives, along with anxiety, fear, and resentment by those for whom a new structure does not provide the security and cohesion of the prior one, and lack of appreciation by those who do not intuitively embrace the liberating power as representing goals that are familiar and attainable.

The road toward democracy, therefore, often involves a considerable period of time and a number of steps. The nation’s different groups have to meet the challenge of working together and resolving hostilities. They have to learn to trust each other enough to experience a somewhat shared sense of reality and humanity and invest in some type of representative governing structure. The groups have to develop the psychological and social capacities to embrace reflective, integrated compromises rather than polarized solutions. Achieving the psychological level where differences are evaluated and debated is a long and difficult road.

What policies can promote these processes? Some are familiar. These include being prepared for the long haul, trying to establish safety, security, and basic necessities, investing in schools and health care, and working with moderates toward self-governance. In addition, however, it is crucial to anticipate hostile reactions, and to realize that, to cope with the anxiety of losing the relative security of a dictatorial regime, the liberated group will require a greater sense of safety than might be anticipated. Without this first step of “safety”, there will be an enormous temptation to return to autocratic practices.
Embracing abstract democratic principles requires high levels of personal and group functioning. As the United States was forming, Thomas Jefferson indicated that democratic processes can only be as strong as the capacity of the governed to invest their trust in these processes. Therefore, the support for human capital, including family and educational programs to enhance the capacities of future generations for reflective thinking, collaboration, and empathy, will have to be far greater than is usually planned.

Based on: Greenspan, S. I. & Shanker, S. The First Idea: How Symbols, Language and Intelligence Evolved from Our Primate Ancestors to Modern Humans. Boston, MA: Perseus Books