“Democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.”― Oscar Wilde
“An ideal form of government is democracy tempered with assassination.” — Voltaire
Democracy is just a filler for textbooks! Do you actually believe that public opinion influences the government? --Voltaire
Just voting by itself doesn’t make something right or just; it can just as easily just be another way for one majority to impose their will on a smaller group. Today, democracy is a far cry of what it should be. All we have are popularity contests that provide us mostly with men that lack long-term vision.
If you’re not informed enough to cast a vote on an issue, how can you be informed enough to delegate your vote in a way that represents your interests? Won’t that quickly become a popularity contest? I absolutely want everyone to be represented, but not by popular vote. Let us reason about it unless the quality of a vote can be guaranteed. For some issues it then would be more important to signal disagreement, rather than agreement. At that stage, a vote would block an implementation and restart a reasoning process. Maybe there is a requirement of having at least 5% disagreement to block something, or maybe it should be higher. Maybe disagreement needs to abide by a certain format to provide a start for remediating the objection. Governance through a pure mathematical process will be hard to do efficiently, so we shouldn’t forget that discussion, disagreement all take a part in this and that there may not be a reason to turn a vote into something purely mathematical. How could you, in such a case, preserve the very research focussed approach so far? I suppose my belief in democracy lies in the idea that while voting might not always bring the optimal result the first time around, and the majority can make the ‘wrong’ decision, that it still provides the opportunity to self correct, to learn from our collective mistakes, and make better decisions next time around. Hopefully we can collectively learn from our mistakes quick enough to build a sustainable peaceful society that doesn’t self destruct.
‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’
Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947
Winston S Churchill, 11 November 1947