America’s Real Crisis: The Collapse Of The Citizen

Authored by Kay Rubacek via The Epoch Times,

Across the free world, people are exhausted, institutions appear unresponsive, and leaders feel distant. Politics remains an endless quarrel. In this climate, a new idea is taking hold, that perhaps the machines can do better.

Billionaire technologist and former Google CEO Eric Schmidt has publicly cautioned against this temptation while acknowledging why it is on the rise. When democracies fail to deliver, he notes, people naturally look for something—anything—that promises competence.

Surveys from 2025 even show that many citizens now trust artificial intelligence (AI) systems to make decisions on their behalf more than their elected representatives. It’s a striking shift, but it reveals something more troubling than the technology itself.

The real crisis facing America and the West is not technological; it is moral. Democracies do not weaken because their tools become outdated; they weaken when the people who sustain them lose confidence, clarity, and inner direction.

Even if we built the most advanced AI-driven civic platforms—and even if we used algorithms to scale up deliberation or streamline participation—we would still fail unless we first addressed the deeper problem: a free government cannot survive a morally disoriented public. No algorithm, no matter how sophisticated, can supply virtue where none exists.

Yet the idea of “algocracy” (government by algorithm) continues to seduce a society increasingly overwhelmed by disorder. Algorithms promise what human institutions struggle to offer: speed, consistency, neutrality, freedom from corruption, and relief from the churn of political conflict.

In an era of distrust and institutional decay, those promises feel like rescue. But they are built on a misunderstanding of both human nature and machine logic. An algorithm can optimize efficiency, but efficiency is not wisdom. Optimization is not judgment. And judgment—moral, historical, human judgment—is the core function of democratic life.

When citizens lose their sense of agency or become exhausted by polarization, they begin to look for something outside themselves that can restore order. In previous eras, that “something” was a strongman. Today, it is a statistical system. The impulse is the same: to outsource responsibility to a seemingly neutral power.

But once people get accustomed to the idea that “the algorithm knows best,” they slowly lose the habits that make self-governance possible. The muscle of civic responsibility weakens, the instinct to weigh competing truths dulls, and the capacity for moral discernment erodes. A society that surrenders judgment cannot sustain democracy, no matter how refined its tools become.

The Founding Fathers, though they lived centuries before machine learning, understood this dynamic better than any of today’s technocrats. John Adams’s observation that the Constitution was made for a moral and religious people was never a theological demand; it was a sociological fact. A free republic requires citizens who can restrain themselves, tolerate disagreement, act with integrity, and recognize right from wrong. Without that, laws become hollow and institutions brittle.

George Washington warned in his Farewell Address that liberty cannot last without shared moral principles. He feared the loss of a common ethic long before he feared foreign empires.

Their foresight came from a sober understanding of human nature, not an idealistic faith in it. They knew that a population lacking virtue would either spiral into chaos or beg for a ruler to save them from themselves. Today’s twist of fate is that the “ruler” many are turning toward isn’t even human.

This points to the central flaw in the hope that AI can help build a “better democracy.” AI does not fix a society; it reflects it. And whatever it reflects, it magnifies. If a culture is confused about justice, its AI systems will deepen that confusion. If people are divided about truth, their models will intensify the division. If citizens avoid their responsibilities, AI will gladly step in. Tools inherit the morality of the hands that wield them, and if the people guiding those choices lack moral clarity, the machine will simply scale their disorientation.

This is why the drift toward algocracy is so dangerous. The real threat is not that AI systems will dominate us but that we may no longer produce citizens capable of resisting domination. A morally confused society can be controlled by almost anything, including a technological black-box that no one fully understands.

This doesn’t mean AI has no role in democratic life, but there is a line it cannot cross. AI cannot determine the value of a human being, define justice, or cultivate moral citizens. It cannot replace the wisdom encoded in history. It cannot supply the inner discipline that enables a free people to remain free. The health of a democracy cannot depend on the elegance of its code or the capacity of its machines. It must depend upon the character of its citizens.

The path forward will not be found in a new algorithm. It begins where this enduring republic began: with the formation of the citizen. A society must restore historical orientation as guidance, not nostalgia. It must rebuild moral clarity through shared human values and virtues such as courage, honesty, duty, and dignity. It must reanchor its institutions around human principles that transcend political fashion, such as transparency, fairness, limits on power, and equal treatment under the law. And it must treat AI as a tool for strengthening the civic participation of human beings, and never as a substitute for civic responsibility.

At the center of all of this stands the human person. Any political system—algorithmic or not—that weakens the dignity of the individual can never sustain freedom.

Democracy can survive new technologies. It has already survived industrial revolutions, global wars, economic upheavals, and dramatic shifts in the information ecosystem, but it cannot survive the collapse of the citizen. If we want democracy to endure, the solution is not to outsource judgment but to reclaim it. The machine can assist deliberation, but only the people can determine what is good. The machine can scale decisions, but only the people can form judgment. The machine can organize data, but only the people can cultivate virtue.

The question of our time is not whether AI will govern us. The question is whether we will remember how to govern ourselves.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.