How many people here believe the majority is always right? Anybody? If not, can you really say you believe in democracy? That democracy is the best of all possible systems? It would be interesting to find out what percentage of the voting population reflects your own views. You probably wont be able to say more than 60%. For myself it might only be 5%.
Very interesting. I have been wrestling with this new idea (at least to me) the last couple weeks. I realized I don't really believe in Democracy through and through. The majority can be wrong, or simply just not want what I want. I took on this idea differently after watching the film "From Freedom to Fascism"...awesome movie.
what do you mean by "best of all possible systems?" gives most people what they want. provides the strongest political position? allows for most economic growth? Democracy is a very hindering system that often comes out with wrong decisions because ignorant people have as much say as the experts. the main selling point of democracy is that you don't get protests like you do in Burma because they don't get given a say, whetjher they would say it or not.
Bricks in the wall Every time I try to engage the question, it becomes more complicated. Right now I'm up to Spice Girls vs. Led Zepplin (Zep, of course) and Backstreet Boys vs. Pearl Jam (PJ, of course). I tried Days of Our Lives vs. Lotus Eaters (Samantha Brady vs. Zoe Kingswood ... I'll go with the f@cked up Kingswood family over the f@cked up Brady family any day). I tried Dean R. Koontz, Stephen King, Abby Frucht, Jack Cady (Frucht and Cady, of course) ... and then it hit me that I was looking at the superficial manifestations, the symptoms. So I tried considering the anthropological utility of music, literature, and drama, and then it hit me that the difference is an even broader concept. Very simply: entertainment in the modern day is about money, not quality. The only measure of quality is not whether or not it's good art, but whether someone else can convince you to buy it. And the same with politics in general. The difference is what these things do. Entertainment, while it performs a vital duty for the human condition, is what we get to do with extraneity. Democracy, on the other hand, is all that's left when we cut away the extraneous parts. Human beings are social creatures; we come together and attempt to operate in groups. Within the group, we are stronger than we would be as individuals. So we make rules to organize the group and preserve that efficacy. Trial and error over the years, as well as much dedicated thought and argument, have brought people to the rather Cartesian conclusion that the narrowly empirical, while being the only real thing, cannot be definitively transferred from one person to another. What this means is that we can never be sure that anything exists, and we can never be right. Rather, there is a mathematical sense of right and correct, but at this fundamental level, it's useless. That two plus two always equals four matters none if nobody's around to count. So in the end, democracy is what is left. We constrain it because experience tells us to do so, precisely because majorities are often, even mostly wrong. But the world isn't so dualistic as we demand, either. It is possible for the opposite of something wrong to also be wrong. Rather than viewing democracy as an end, it should be seen as nothing more than an evolutionary phase, a transition point, a milepost on the road to the end of time. What we learn as a species will allow us to refine the systems we create, but this is an ongoing process that requires the continued good faith of the participants. We should not believe in democracy because it is somehow right. Rather, its value is that it seems to be the strongest we can make with what we have left after accounting for the constraints of reality. The rightness of democracy is not found in any specific fact. Rather, the propriety of democracy arises from what it is not. When we can build something more affirmative, something that is not weakened by the expectation of good faith, we will do so. Where other systems of governance gather the state's coercive power arbitrarily, democracy seeks to distribute that coercive power rationally. This rational outlook (and introspection) is the strength of democracy. That the people taking part don't seem to care is, mostly, their own problem. I mean, they visit their apathy and its consequences on their neighbors and on future generations, but there's no point in appealing to the self-contained egocentric on behalf of other people. After all, all in all, they're just bricks in the wall.
It depends. Let us say that we live in a town which is primarily made up of ducks. Then a fox comes into town and starts some aggitation amongst the ducks. The fox finds a mate and has offspring and they have offspring plus the fox invites his relitives to stay there also. Soon the town has over a third of it with foxes and they are breeding faster than the ducks which makes the ducks very worried for "their" town is now being overun by foxes and they know soon that they will not hold the majority, what will they do? Do ducks laws hinder the foxes, of course it does but with the foxes gaining clout the foxes know it will only be a matter of time when they will be in charge. This is when the problems start.
I know of no democracy anywhere on Earth ...with the possible exception of very small, very cohesive groups of people. With any groups larger than just a few people, democracy simply can't function. A large group of people can't even agree on what to order on the pizza, for god's sake! A representative system, a representative "democracy", with underlying principles, is the only way that a "democracy" can exist. Rule by majority is possible, of course, but without underlying principles for protection of the minority voters, it can't work for long and such a government is usually only possible with the application of force of arms. Baron Max
