The human mind is something which has fascinated me for a very long time for its seemingly infinite intricacies. To get a vague idea about its enormous complexity, we just need to look at the vast research that has gone into developing the theories in artificial intelligence. After decades of research, today's most advanced agents can't hope to accomplish in a million years what a human baby can do even before its born. There are many things that I want to cover on this topic and will coming back to it, however for now, here is one theory that I would like to propose that I think describes this machine well: The human mind functions the best and at its full potential when working independently. While this fundamentally remains true at all levels for the ultimate decision, for the penultimate decisions for highly complex activities, there may be an optimal number, two or three team members at best, where people collaborate, taking the collective IQ of the group higher than the sum total of IQs of individual members. Anything larger, and degeneration kicks in.
To explain, the more people there are in a team, the more inefficient is the decision making and thinking process, as a group can only take decisions which comply with the lowest common denominator of the group. We can thus say that larger the group is, lower is the IQ of the entity. No wonder start ups end up accomplishing so much and democracy is usually a kingdom of morons. Applying this theory in a larger context, I would like to think that the American model of democracy may be better than the British model. In the American model, at the end of the day, one person, the president, has to take the final call on all things significant, who knows he is answerable for his decisions. In Britain, where a group of ministers choose the prime minister, who knows he will be back in power only if his party wins next time, and as long as they do, he will remain the leader, has very little incentive to be a true leader and think about consequences. While electoral politics is complex and this may sound like an oversimplification of the democratic process, I would like to think that this is true for the make or break moments.
Clearly, the British model of democracy is not something the British invented. They merely adopted it. When democracy came into being, it was certainly a remarkable thought which allowed masses to break free from centuries of monarchies and allowed them to participate in and influence the state's decision making, which eventually gave birth to the most important concept of modern times - capitalism. Over time though, democracy has got boxed into becoming a collective decision making body with only the most popular decisions being taken which win votes. Look at the concept of welfare states for example, a disaster of gargantuan proportions. The proliferation of the current greek-roman-british democracy model, in the earlier years of modern civilization, made the world a better place but in recent decades has successfully manged to make it a far worse place than it ideally should have been. The model, with its heart in the right place, unfortunately didn't evolve and at the center of it was the group think and its below par decision making capability. Unfortunately, influenced by the British, many former colonies of the Empire will have to continue suffering from this for decades to come. On the other side, leader and true decision makers, who exert individual thinking as opposed to groupthink, can create so much value when the moment of truth comes. That's how you get Jobs, Gates, Singapore and China. What was that song - "Go alone, you..."
