Democracy has Hamlet’s Problem: The Search for Relevance in a Complex World

To cope with the complexity of the world, cognitively limited agents must employ framing to identify what is relevant and stabilise meaning. Yet democracy rests on the Popperian fallibilist imperative to break existing frames. Hence Hamlet's problem: while fallibilism yields great epistemic benefits and grounds egalitarian ethos, the frame-breaking it invites leads to paralysis and distrust. Technocracy and populism can be then read as political responses to an essentially cognitive problem. A political environment capable of containing Hamlet's problem must be self-organising and self-complexifying, to process dispersed knowledge inclusively, reconcile citizens to the tensions democracies generate, and secure public justification.