Some Comments on Democracy and Manipulating Consent in Western Post-Democratic Societies

In the history of western democracies, now degenerating into post-democracies, it is possible to identify a first phase during which aspirant leadership has been attempting to influence and involve people, by forcing masses to do something, to believe something, rather than by getting consent. The second phase relates to democracies where aspirant leadership must get consent thorough formal elections. The mass dimension is not related anymore to involvement, but to getting formal consent. Manipulating social techniques, based on sophisticated research in cognitive science and applied by using the mass-media, have been and are used for marketing exploiting knowledge of complex human behavior in order to turn individuals into customers. Similar technologies are used for to influence people to buy a political offer and leadership. The mass dimension is not anymore a warranty of democracy, but rather the basis for applying marketing techniques that make consent buyable. Democratic societies became degenerated post-democratic societies. The most significant aspect of such manipulating techniques is the manipulation and control of language used by applying approaches based on cognitive science. Some of those approaches are introduced. The purpose of this contribution is to focus on how the systems community may make people aware of the manipulating processes and able to recognize them, with special reference to language. The possibility to make consent buyable may be the end of the classic idea of democracy and this must be taken in count when dealing with so-called emergent social systems, often assumed to be non-democratic by western societies.