Democracy as Convergent Dominant Value for Evolution of Cultures
Interpreting Sen's Democracy as a Universal Value from perspective of evolutionary psychology and behavioral economics.

First, political and social participation has intrinsic value to people. However, we propose that to someone who has never had this privilege, participation and thus democracy is of little value. Once people experience the state of flow that comes from their engaged social participation, then they begin to dearly value the new privilege and experience deprivation on its loss. Thus the proposed civil debate gives people a taste sample of social participation and this experience will increases the value people will place on participatory process and thus on democracy.

Second, democracy has instrumental value in enhancing the hearing people get in expressing and supporting their claim. However, people facing life-long deprivation often learn to be helpless and voiceless. Giving them freedom to speak does not relieve them of the shackles that limit their minds. The on-going civic debate will provide batting practice for people to voice and support their claims to fair share of the aid. This debate process hones confidence to stand up to voice a claim and refines the skills of delivering arguments in an impassioned and yet logical manner with clearly stated reasons. Thus, when people acquire the confidence and skill to be heard, this increases the instrumental value of democracy. Accordingly, to speed up this process, training on skills of discourse/debating need to be integral part of civic mobilization and leadership training.

Third, democracy has constructive value that enables people to learn from each other, and helps society form its values and priorities. The process of sharing ideas allows evolution of emerged consensus trade off between cultural traditions, religious values, human rights, current needs, future aspiration for children and economic constraints. The skills of discourse increases speed of knowledge interchange and discovery from the wealth of knowledge and wisdom of the people.

We argue that there is a feedback loop here. Social dialogue has a constructive role in expanding collective knowledge, increasing capabilities that drive updating social values to reflect new social potentials. The materialization of the higher social potential forms the basis for higher cultural valuation for constructive role of democracy. This insight comes from fact that internal preferences are not absolute, they are constructed in a narrative about ones future self, and evolve through narration. The narrative-self evaluates outcomes based on narratives of future consequences outcome, and its consistency with current self. However, if a future possible consequence of immediate action is not brought to attention, it is not taken into account in the decision, and there can be sub-optimal decisions.

People start with positions short-term self-interest and the concession and compromises made allows people to take ownership of the social values and then it become part of their self-image and cultural identity. This extends Thomas Jefferson's argument for a "Living Constitution" as a social contract that each generation debates based on the knowledge of the times and then internalizes into their identity. For most part the Self strives to keep consistency and thus core values can only change slowly over time, otherwise the people intense disrupted psyche. With falling barriers of information the social change flooding through Pakistani society is the same order of magnitude the West absorbed over entire century. This rapid social change is causing intense anxiety for erosion of traditions value, as people not discard only the outdated values, but also the good elements of the culture in embracing Western values. This experience of erosion of cultural identity is one of the core reason certain members of society to regress to religious fundamentalism to seek secure emotional ground. A number of leading thinkers have suggested protectionist solutions by trying to slow down effects of globalization, but these measures are unsuccessfully. The process of the social dialogue has potential to bring a more organic change in culture, that openly celebrates the wisdom of the core value of the culture that are unchanging. These social core values anchor the social identity that dampen anxiety amid rapid change.

Some cultural values display a stubborn resistance to change even though majority of individuals no longer find them useful, but collectively they are bound by them as part of their acceptance of their culture identity, or they individually risk punishment and alienation from the society for rejection of traditions. For example, Tostan International (Tostan.org) facilitates elimination of Female Genital Cutting and Early Femal Marriage using broad community discussion starting from universal human rights and providing information about negative future health and life-risk consequences of certain choices, and probing questions for communities to reevaluate their deeply ingrained traditional and religious values to become in-line with their future aspirations. The force of traditions can be so strong that not even a single village can unanimously decide such actions, because villages often intermarry and are dependent on others. To be successful such bold steps have to be taken by cluster of closely inter-linked villages collectively decide to abandon specific traditional practices that violate.