Every person carries within them a private constellation of desires, fears, values, instincts, and tradeoffs. As discussed in the chapter on General Will, Jean-Jacques Rousseau described this internal landscape as the Individual Will: the full shape of what a person would choose if they could express their preferences clearly, without distortion, pressure, or strategic calculation.
At first glance, it seems simple to ask what someone wants. In reality, human preference is rarely simple. It is conditional, contextual, and often opaque even to the individual.
The Individual Will is not a stable ranking of choices. It is a mosaic of long-term commitments, short-term impulses, moral convictions, emotional reactions, and strategic concerns. People want comfort and challenge, security and freedom, continuity and change—often simultaneously. Preferences vary by circumstance and shift with new information.
They are also multidimensional. A voter may prioritize environmental protection while also caring deeply about housing affordability, economic vitality, and personal convenience. Within any single issue, people carry internal conditionals: I want X unless it costs Y, or I would accept A if B were addressed. Often, people only discover what they value most after experiencing the consequences of a decision.
This fluidity places severe constraints on any system that claims to represent the will of the people faithfully.
All of these Wills change over time. Your own will has changed throughout your life—what you wanted in school is not the same as what you need now. Your group's wants and interests will also shift. If there is a hurricane or typhoon, the housing association's needs change from determining the correct color palette for your garage to making sure that debris is cleared and houses are restored. And what you believe is right for the country, the common good, also changes. The advent of new technology, from cars to rockets, to AI, radically changes what is best for the country.
This is one level of complexity. Another level is our world views, which may differ radically. Is it better to build a highway or keep an area natural? What system of health care is best for our common good?
Individual Will is a complicated beast. There are many competing reasons that humans like or dislike things, and it can be difficult to reconcile them all. Preferences are a complicated landcape of pros and cons, but it is possible to manipulate people to a conclusion by defining a narrow scope. This is a trick parents quickly learn. When little Timmy does not want to go to school, the parent deflects by asking him if school would be better if he wore the blue or green shirt. The fact that Timmy likes the green shirt has somehow become the reason why he must go to school.
Thus, humans may have a preference between A or B, even though they dislike A and B. US elections take full advantage of this.
Any attempt to aggregate Individual Will inevitably loses nuance. Preferences discovered today become outdated tomorrow. Rankings collapse conditional reasoning. And any attempt to infer Individual Will by someone other than the individual is ultimately guesswork.
Political systems therefore rely on stated preferences—what people say they want. But stated preferences frequently diverge from true preferences. This gap, known as preference revelation failure, is central to why modern elections systematically misrepresent the electorate.
People intuitively understand that wishes alone do not determine outcomes. As a result, they tailor what they express toward what they believe is achievable. This happens everywhere—from social interactions to consumer behavior—but it is especially destructive in elections.
Traditional electoral systems reward strategic expression. Voters are encouraged to ask not, “Who do I want?” but “Who can win?” The familiar advice to “hold your nose and vote for X” is proof that voters understand the system is hostile to honest expression.
A popular argument holds that Democrats and Republicans must reflect people’s Individual Will because they keep winning elections. If a better alternative existed, it would emerge. But elections artifically narrow the scope of consideration, so are not unbiased measurements of public opinion.
US elections are simultaneously asking voters two conflicting expressions of their Individual will in a single question. The two questions are:
These are very different questions. The first is a genuine interrogation of Individual Will. The second is a strategic calculation attempting to weigh internal and external factors. I may like candidate X, but when (1) means candidate X will have no political power, his good intentions will do nothing to advance my concerns. Thus I am offered to choose between like-minded and effective representation.
This forced choice happens because US elections are not about aggregating individual will, it’s about selecting the factional will in power. Thus, the winner of a US election did not win because their platform was liked. They won because the people believed he and his platform would do the most good, or at least less harm than the likely second place finisher.
While the overarching problems created by strategic decisionmaking by voters are described here, the system dynamics that creates the motivation for making those strategic decisions is elsewhere. As for how the electoral system makes a candidate a superior strategic choice is described in Direct Representation. Meanwhile, some candidates are the better strategic choice because the post-election system makes them more effective representatives, and this is explained in the chapter on Compromise.
This is a significant barrier for third parties because the systemic bias built into the system always favors the duopoly. To break through, they must possess a great deal of momentum early in the campaign and then maintain at least near-parity polling despite the attacks from the establishment. This usually requires some sort of synchronized shift in public expectations that the newcomer can leverage before the major parties adapt to it. This is why few candidates outside the two major parties win anything beyond small local races.
Thus, if we want a government system that works to identify the General Will, elections need to only be concerned with mapping voter’s Individual Will to candidates or factions.
To summarize, an election whose goal is to capture Individual Will must:
If it is a requirement that no representative can lose, the solution is simple: every candidate is sent to Congress. Each votes with a weight proportional to the support they receive.
Elections no longer determine who governs, but how much influence each voice carries.
Every citizen’s vote is represented. New voices can become representatives by registering as one and they are viable immediately—even if they represent only a single individual.
The Individual Will is too rich, too layered, and too dynamic to be captured by traditional electoral ballots. Binary or limited-choice elections force misrepresentation, suppress innovation, and entrench factions.
A system designed around true preference revelation must maximize expressiveness, minimize distortion, remove barriers to new ideas, and allow voters to continually refine their representation.
Direct Representation offers a concrete institutional blueprint for approximating Individual Will. It transforms elections from contests into continuous acts of expression, allowing society to see individuals not as binary selectors, but as full, multidimensional participants in collective self-government.
A common worry of opening up the field of candidates to anyone is that too large a slate will lead to choice paralysis. This is a concern, but research suggests that paralysis is strongest when:
Elections, by contrast, involve deep values and long-term consequences. Voters generally enter the process with strong priors about what they want and clear heuristics for navigating complexity.
However, the risk of overload can be offset by adding some soft requirements to the list. Specifically:
Even in cases where the voter is overwhelmed and makes an uninformed decision, it is better than the elections we have today. The voter is slicing the landscape according to their own priorities rather than selecting from a constrained menu.
And even in the worst case where a voter is unable to vote at all, it can not change the overall outcome of the election as with first-past-the-post or any election contest. The only person affected is that voter.
All of these quality-of-life improvements are comparable with Direct Representation.
Such an election would not resemble an event so much as an ongoing process.
This is the closest a political system can get to approximating the full complexity of Individual Will. It reveals not just what people choose under constraints, but what they would choose if the system itself did not distort their expression.