[TLDR (too long didn’t read): If you are reading this, chances are you care about HR. This Reader is about the sorry state of many a democracy in our ailing world and where that puts us in our struggle for HR. For a quick overview, just read the bolded text]. Traducir/traduire los/les Readers; usar/utiliser deepl.com
–…and it is failing; it is run by compulsion and by vested interests, not byrationality and not to protect national interest(s). (Ulrike Guerot)
–What we end up having, is a society in itself and not a society for itself. (Jean Paul Sartre) So, beware: Newly found formal democracies are often no more than oligarchic domination in new clothes.
The ‘rules-based order’ is nothing but the rule of the most powerful
—The rule of law is becoming a joke, most clearly seen in the United States, but also elsewhere, including Europe. The judiciary is losing strength, parliaments have become powerless talking shops. Freedom of the press and freedom of speech are under pressure. (Francine Mestrum)
–The choice(?) before us is: International law or a ‘ruler-based (international) order’. (John Dugard)
1. Take the US today: The US administration has no tolerance for diversity; it is being run by decree –not by accepted rules.* This will ultimately lead to the fall of the empire. (Jan Oberg)
*: As UN Special Rapporteur Francesca Albanese aptly stated: “The international community consists of 193 states, and this is the time to give the US what it has been looking for: isolation”.
2. Internationally, America’s ‘self-declared rules-based order’ is a vacuous expression that envisions the rules as determined by the United States alone. (Jeffrey Sachs) (The US) is the dream (the reverie, the daydream) of a democracy. (Leonardo Padura, Decent People)
How many more poor people have to die before the world learns to distinguish between elections and a democracy? (Far Eastern Economic Review)
3. The word democracy has been demoded to make it mean only the act of voting for elected officials; of course, this is ironic and burlesque. Such a ‘democracy’ often does not guarantee civil, political, economic, social or cultural rights –or not even the right to popular demonstrations. Evidently, therefore, the concept is often maliciously manipulated. (Narda Melendez, Honduras)
4. Elections will still happen, but outcomes will be massaged.
—Democracy is not (just) a spectator sport (Richard Celeste)
5. In order to change the balance of power, people need to learn how to use their basic democratic freedoms (which are a human right, not a privilege!). (Susan George) We can thus not forget that physical capital wears out while social capital does not: the more it is used, the better it gets. (Elinor Ostrom) This leads to the corollary that we need to build popular fronts to lead to popular democracies. (Albino Gomez)
6. True democracy thus requires everyone to take a serious interest in what is going on plus some appreciation of what is possible and what is not, and this, as Oscar Wilde commented, “takes up too many evenings”. Most people just want to get on with their own lives. But unless people at large are well-informed, and give a damn, democracy degenerates into populism, which is not the same thing at all. (Colin Tudge)
7. Either we cooperate closely or we die. Just reacting limits our choices. It is a mistake to imagine that democracy can be imported like CocaCola or a ready-made garment. (Julius Nyerere)
Bottom line
8. The greatest historical presumption of each of us is that we believe our countries to be democratic. In reality, this is a fallacy. Every other ruler has the power to neutralize his opponents (politicians and social leaders…) putting them in jail or sending them into exile. In the name of good business, business peoples’ silence is clearly complicit. (In terms of ‘realpolitik’, practically the entire political spectrum remains silent in the face of imperialism’s attacks on the sovereignty of nations).
9. Democracy today seems to have relative value when politicians look at the world and calculate their own interests –an attitude that has replaced standing by values. For this reason, for example, it is accepted that there are ‘other types’ of democracies, such as dictatorships that are ‘benevolent’ or ‘less bad’. (Juan P. Cardenas)
What we are left with
—The political Right does not know how to resolve conflicts-of-democracy-in-democracy; it wraps itself in a discourse that, in reality, is undemocratic. (Claudio Sepulveda)
10. In every generation, the enemies of democracy change costumes, but their playbook remains eerily familiar. They lie, divide, intimidate and exploit every available tool to consolidate and stay in power. (Giuseppe di Lampedusa, Il Gatopardo)
11. In the West, the powers-that-be rule using their very own conception of what is ‘democratic’ notwithstanding that when power is cruel, the petti-minded and mean celebrate. (L. Padura, op cit) [Any resemblance to what is happening in the world today?].
12. Need an example? If we allow the Far-Right to continue merging political power with AI without guardrails, we will see the rise of a system where freedom is algorithmically rationed. (Thom Hartmann, Common Dreams) Do not forget: Without economic equality, economic freedom is a privilege.
Claudio Schuftan, Ho Chi Minh City
Your comments are welcome at schuftan@gmail.com
Postscript/Marginalia
AI is the most effective tool ever invented for dismantling democracy given its ability to simulate, to deceive, to surveil and to dominate.
–Unless it is rigorously regulated, AI represents a threat to democracy itself.
i) In the 1930s it was radio; in the 2010s it was social media; and now, in 2025, the newest and most dangerous weapon in the authoritarian arsenal is artificial intelligence. AI can now: generate millions of personalized political messages in seconds, each calibrated to manipulate a voter’s specific fears or biases. It can create entire fake news outlets, populate them with AI-generated journalists and flood your social feed with content that looks real, sounds real, and feels familiar, all without a single human behind it.
ii) If the government knows not just where you are, but what you are thinking, organizing, or reading –and it can fabricate evidence to match–freedom of thought becomes a quaint memory. Social media controversies spread rapidly before fact-checkers expose them as fabrications. Dissent will still exist, but only in controlled pockets, easy to monitor and suppress. The ‘news’ will be whatever the regime’s AI decides you should see/read.
iii) So what do we do?: We must treat AI regulation as a democratic survival issue which means:
- Banning the use of deepfakes in political ads.
- Enforcing transparency on algorithmic decision-making.
- Creating unbiased public, open-source alternatives to corporate-controlled models.
- Demanding that social media outlets publish their algorithms so we can see how we are being manipulated.
And we must do all this now, because history teaches us that once authoritarianism takes root, it rarely gives up power voluntarily. The longer we wait, the more embedded, autonomous, and intelligent these systems become. We are not just fighting bad actors anymore: We are fighting machines trained to think like them.
iv) The battle for democracy in the age of AI will not be won with slogans or optimism alone. It will take law, oversight, courage –and above all, vigilance. As said, democracy is not a spectator sport. If we want to preserve the sacred right of self-governance, we must recognize the existential threat in front of us and act with urgency. This time, the fight is not just against the usual suspects. This time, the algorithm is watching. (I lost the reference to this insightful postscript)