Comment on Half-a-million members sign up to new left-wing party founded in Britain
JasSmith@sh.itjust.works 2 days agoI’m not so sure. Humans are incredibly diverse by nature. We have evolved to inhabit every ecological niche in existence, and then we invented many more. We can’t get a population to agree that the sky is blue or that water is wet or the Earth is round or that vaccines are safe. There is always at least 10% who disagree on any subject. When you map each 10% group as a Venn diagram, it covers everyone in the population on some issue, big or small. In terms of governance, this means that any direction chosen will be opposed by a relatively large minority. There are only two options here and it is absolutely binary: majority rule, or minority rule. History has taught us that minority rule is horrific. It tends to create massive inequality, death, suffering, and eventually revolution. Democracy is the solution presented for majority rule, and I am intimately aware of the phrase “tyranny by the majority.” In fact I would categorise democracy as exactly that. Despite that, it is better than the alternatives.
So I think we are evolutionary bound to a best case scenario in which the majority chooses a generally agreed upon direction, while a loud minority gets really angry. Democracy ensures that that loud minority doesn’t get violent because they’re given a seat at the table and a voice, even if they don’t get their way this time.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 2 days ago
Democracy is fine. We don’t have it.
Representative Democracy (where you just pick somebody who belongs to a party you more or less align with, although invariably not on everything) is bad. It’s barely democracy at all.
Direct democracy is better. That way we could be pro-Ukraine, pro-Palestine, pro-NHS, pro-privacy and pro-nuclear. We wouldn’t have to pick which one to sacrifice.
JasSmith@sh.itjust.works 1 day ago
I like it in theory but there have been no real world examples of it actually working. There are only supplementary implementations which exist next to representative democracy. One of the most cited reasons that it could not work is the mental and decision load expected of an average elected representative. They make many decisions each day, big and small. When agreeing on a Bill, they might read tens of thousands of words, negotiate with hundreds of other representatives, and make dozens of various deals to achieve their preferred outcome. In a direct democracy system, either those bills would be split into 10,000 constituent parts, and each would be voted on by the public; or there would be 10,000 ombibus bills proposed by citizens, each with subtle variations, and the public would be expected to vote on them. Or both of those scenarios, at the same time.
The outcome seems painfully clear to me: in both of those scenarios, 98% of the public would check out. That’s far too many words to read, far too many meetings to hold, far too much information to process and on which to provide reasonable judgement. The legislature would be controlled by a hyper connected and independently wealthy 2% who would lobby for their preferred bill using their fortunes and connections.