Comment by TFYS
1 day ago
There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should not have it comes to have it. This is what every system so far has succumbed to. We need a truly equal system where all concentration of power is avoided unless absolutely necessary for the functioning of society to avoid an eventual collapse of the system.
The basic mechanism you’re describing is essentially accurate, however:
> As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship.
This doesn’t logically follow. The existence of a power differential doesn’t necessitate the differential being exploited to increase the differential. If we assume individuals are maximally selfish, this might hold, but that isn’t the case; people do altruistic things all the time, and there’s good reason to think most people are hardwired for it. The problem of liberal democracy is how you design a system to address those who are hardwired towards malicious selfishness; it isn’t clear that you truly can.
I would say that over a long enough period of time it's unavoidable that a selfish person will use the power to gain more. Selfish people are more likely to seek positions of power, so even if most people are altruistic, the people that seek power are more likely to be selfish.
I’ve come to basically the same conclusion. Attempts to engineer perfect political systems that are immune to this sort of infiltration is like trying to build a structure that will never need to be repaired—you can expend a lot of resources and effort on it upfront, but on a long enough timeline there will be failure modes you didn’t foresee.
In other words, cancer always spreads.
Not necessarily the first cancer, but eventually one will.
Cancer is when a component of a system acts to replicate or enrich itself instead of acting to perpetuate the system.
1 reply →
What if a true democracy is not a worthy goal? What if some people should have more or less say in something.
Should someone unrelated and likely non-impacted by a thing have as strong a voice in that thing?
Should someone non-knowledgeable have an equal say to someone experienced? Is that fair?
If A knows 2+2=4 and B says it is five, we don't average votes and call it 4.5. And if a large debate happens and B convinces enough people that for very large values of 2, the answer is five, democracy says the answer is 5. How do you protect against this outcome in a pure democracy?
Education would probably be the answer. In a true democracy we would need to make sure everyone is well educated. Of course there are a lot of decisions that require very specialized knowledge that can't be taught to everyone, and in such cases it might be necessary to have limited participation or some kind of weighted voting.
Unfortunately that seems to be highly subjective and different people have a very different understanding of what "well educated" means.
> What if some people should have more or less say in something.
Yes, I certainly agree.
The problem (which IMHO outweighs all the benefits by quite a bit) is that when you allow drawing these artificial lines the ones in charge of them will inevitably design the system in such a way that benefits them (maybe even without ill intentions).
It's similar to geographical gerrymandering just openly based on social/education/etc. class.
Also... balancing interests of diverse social and economic groups is not exactly straightforward, its certainly not basic math.
You instill civic virtue from a young age.
That's how totalitarian regimes maintain their grip on power as well. At the end of the day someone needs to define what "civic virtue" is, if its done top down well that might not necessarily work out that well (of course it might be the opposite but it seems like a very dangerous method).
2 replies →
Nothing has been as effective at dispersing and diffusing power than Liberal democracy.
Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal". In a democracy, the people have the power to decide and anyone has the power to elect, be elected and to voice his opinion freely.
> Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal".
His point is that democratic systems are subverted if absolute equality is not enforced. It’s a crude argument but basically correct. The only way you prevent usurpation is by making sure one individual doesn’t have any obvious means of scaling his influence to the point that he can challenge the democratic militia.
What you call influence is simply trust that others impart to an individual. There is very little a single individual can physically do by themselves. So if there is someone with the influence to challenge a militia then it's better to say a proportionate number of people are also challenging the militia with the person as their proxy.
1 reply →
If things are not equal, then the voice of some people is louder than the voice of others, and that is no longer a true democracy.
This is nonsense. Most/all democracies have laws that only certified doctors can practice medicine. This makes doctors unequal from other people. Is this incompatible with democracy?
Democracy is about equality of rights, not equality. People are not equal in every aspect, but they should be equal in front of the law, for example.
Freedom is not absolute because your freedom stops where somebodys freedom beginns.
Hence, if you practice medicine without qualifications there is a high chance you will hurt somebody. It is not undemocratic to protect against hurting others. Hurting others is not a right.
Interesting thought exercise though.
> Is this incompatible with democracy?
Yes. This is why every society of note limited the franchise prior to the 1900s. You can only have debates among equals among people who are equal. The sort of equality communists imagine requires that you either radically re-engineer the human pysche or implement Harrison-Bergeron-style handicaps on exceptional people.
Depends on what the doctor can do with that inequality. If it means the doctor gets paid 20 times more than others then yes that is incompatible with democracy, as over time that wealth difference will be used to increase the inequality. But if the power is limited to only decisions about health, which is necessary for healthcare to function, then it should be acceptable. You'd still have to make sure that even that level of power is not used to gain more power, though.
One can argue whether 20 times more is too much or too little but I would say that it is correct that a doctor gets paid quite a bit more than unskilled labor. Some people who become doctors might still go through with it if it were not but most (sane) people would not go through the lengthy and very demanding path that is medical school and residency if it was not a better paid than a job that very many people could do. I can tell you here and now that I don't think I personally would have had the stamina to become a medical doctor.
1 reply →
>There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible.
Only if by that you mean equal opportunities for everyone.
But if you mean equal outcomes, then you're guaranteed to get USSR/Cuba/Venezuela poverty, famines and shortages, and even there that didn't fix the issue of the elites being super wealthy, it just made everyone else equally poor.
People will never end up equal no matter how many thumbs the government puts on the scale, that actually makes it so much worse.
Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes. Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.
All the countries you mention had a lot of power centralization, which I'm arguing is the reason all systems fail. If we avoid centralized power, we avoid the corruption and theft that inevitably comes with it.
Can you go into detail how your ideal system would work?
3 replies →