>there’s understanding that one cannot participate in a complex web of interdependencies that is advanced human society without giving up complete freedom
The problem is, that web is not just a neutral thing that arises organically, it's a bloated mess of faceless coercion that is disproportionally manipulated by a minority.
It used to be that a tribe agreed not to kill or cheat each other and defend against common threats, that's something very basic that I have trouble imagining anybody not wanting. There were manipulators and status seekers, always, but they were forced to divide their attention between the thousands and thousands of tribes and sub-tribes, if I percieve my tribe to be controlled by a trump or a biden or a putin, I can always take my family and go elsewhere, at no more cost than the price of the trip and the risk I'm accepting by leaving the tribe.
Fast forward through 10K years of agriculture, and we're sheep. Lovecraftian faceless horrors called states divide up the entire earth into 200 divisions or so, the vast majority of which are irrelevant (except in deploying violence against you :)), about 10 or 15 control pretty much 99% of what you do. The size acts as a force multiplier for manipualtors and status seekers: Now only the best trumps and bidens and putins compete to govern you, and the winner, as they say, takes all. They can do whatever the F U C K they can, let me tell you, quite honestly and coming from a guy who appreciates democracy and misses it in his country, that democracy is a laugable excuse of a government scheme. You can tell your bullies you hate them? Great, but I'm betting they already know. You can whine and threaten to get them out of the office ? that's it ? you spend a whole 2 or 4 or 6 years raging at a bunch of people and getting other people to rage with you and other people to rage against you, so that, finally, the bullies can "only" bully you as much as they already have, and not more ? and this the best case scenario that you can only get if you're good at convincing people your cause is worthy ? Is this your local optima ?
There is no feedback, the massive inertia of millions and millions of obedient drones serve to condition and dampen any single insurrection. The contradictory feedback of the huge and impotent masses all cancel each other in an orgy of destructive interference, and what remains is the will of the rulers. The coordination overhead asymmetrically influnces those trying to live in freedom, and favors those trying to crush it.
Words alone can't express how I despise and loath hierarchical societies. Words alone can't express how I loath complex huge things that are out of my control and harm me. I don't think that feelings can be serialized into strings, but if they can, it would take me a very large one to express all the myriad and subtle ways that I hate nation states.
>I don’t understand why not assume other people—whom one without immense hubris would assume to be equally smart
I don't think intelligence play into it, at least not the kind of intelligence I respect. Smart people are bullied all the time. Smart people had 10K years to fix the massive clusterfuck that is hierarchical societies or toss them into the dirstiest toilet, and they couldn't. It would be the height of hubris to assume you can succeed where billions failed.
>Is this a failure of democracy?
No, it's a failure of people being dumb enough to think that the social protocls and algorithms that fared well in networks of N=100, struggled in networks of N=1000 and absoultely tore themselves apart in networks of N=10000, can scale well to networks of N=10000000 and above. Anything that doesn't respect the underlying reality is doomed to repeatedly live in fear and failure and die in confusion, and the reality is that distributed systems are hard. It's even harder when the processors were never built to operate like this. You're trying to reinvent ants and bees with primates, and failing so hard that the result is not recognisably any of them.
"Democracy" is a bandaid, a flawed ideal that can never work, and makes things worse by making you think you're doing something.
>I just don’t think this can be solved technically
Correct, it's solved by not being large clusterfuck of coercion and control, by being small and simple and beautiful, by recognizing the fundamental limits to cooperation that being flesh and blood enforces on you, and respecting them.
>work on people not being jerks
You can't. Being a jerk is encoded in your DNA. Life competes. Life meta-competes: competes at the level of the rules of competition itself, to bend and distort it in their favor, the meta-game. Life at its very core is the aspiration of a single celled asshole to convert the entire universe into more versions of itself, it began so, and it remains so.
The only way to emulate altruism, to hack it onto a system after the fact, is to make selfish assholery more expensive than selfless altruism, always. Sometimes that would make sense, like within the boundaries of your gene pool, few people, I love to imagine, think about deceiving and coercing their flesh and blood, and fewer still actually go along all the way.
But that natural familiar affection declines exponentially as the genetic diff grows, and you have to resort to complement it with artifical measures. The problem with artifical measures, though, is that they are second-class citizens, they are never as convincing and natural as natural inlicnations. It's an uphill fight. Invent laws and rules and regulations and constitutions and religions and mainfestos Till The Cows Come Home, you can't put them in the DNA, and DNA is what life is, and what a thing is what a thing does. So it is an arms race: I invent a God today to tell people to be nice to each other, and tomorrow a smooth-talking smooth-brained asshole manages to convince people God Ackshually wants us to do his bidding instead, I invent democracy the day after tomorrow to convince people that everybody matters, and by the weekend that same breed of smooth-talking smooth-brained assholes find the exploit.
Unless, and until, every single nerve signal going in or out of a brain is subject to your rules (by dystopia, by utopian merging of all human minds into one, by anything), you don't have rules, you have suggestions, protocols, paradigm. "Would you please agree not to fuck with me ?", maybe I will, who knows, I'm not my best self all the time, and there are worse. Why put yourself with a bunch of strange assholes and bet your wellbeing on them obeying a buggy protocol they are never truly compelled to follow ?