Comment by Epa095
8 hours ago
> I do not believe that a majority of humans can be made to meaningfully engage with democracy.
Why not? Is it just that you have not experienced it, or is there a more principled argument?
My personal experience is that democracy feels to work much better in smaller (sub 10 million people) than larger, but it could also just be correlation not causation.
Size is important (heh). Democracy in ancient Athens had a "demos" only two or three orders of magnitude larger than Dunbar's number.
Let's ignore the "massification" of democracy (by which I mean entrenched power gaining leverage over the "demos" by targeting propaganda at the low-agency portion of the population, but this may be controversial?). Population scale has changed but Dunbar's number hasn't, and if the 0.1% of the population that is deeply invested in a topic manages to organize, there's a high likelihood that they can get critical reach. However, population scale has changed and Dunbar's number hasn't, so the first step of actually organizing 0.1% of the total population becomes a lot more difficult with scale.
Arguably, my distrust of modern democracy doesn't help, but I have no idea how anyone could manage to find and fish out 20k specific individuals from a pool of 20M people. And that's what needs to be done, IMO, not signing petitions (and in Canada, there's already a little bit of debanking-based chilling effect re: out-of-band political organization).