Comment on Half-a-million members sign up to new left-wing party founded in Britain
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 month agoIt’s almost as if representative democracy is a shit idea, designed to empower populists and demagogues.
Comment on Half-a-million members sign up to new left-wing party founded in Britain
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 month agoIt’s almost as if representative democracy is a shit idea, designed to empower populists and demagogues.
JasSmith@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
It’s far from perfect but it’s better than everything else humanity has attempted.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 1 month ago
We can do better.
JasSmith@sh.itjust.works 1 month ago
I’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 1 month 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.