Hi Lata,
No, you are not a mad, as far as I can see.
At a first sight, I like your Citizen Mundi initiative
very much. I realize, it is an excellent endeavour
to rise people's participation from bottom-up, thus
consistent with the (Direct) Democracy we look at.
IMHO, it looks like the very opposite of the top-down
"truths" with which some crazy scientists and other
aspirant leaders of Democracy (?) keep on inundating
so insistently the Yes-Men herd they want to head.
Cheers,
antonio - psychiatrist
Lata Gouveia ha scritto:
Thank you Antonio,
So I'm not crazy? Great!
I always suspected that was the case but for the last 8 weeks I've been
running Citizen Mundi and the data I've ben collecting confirms that is
the case even among relative intellectual elites. If you have a minute,
come and visit us at:
https://citizenmundi.wordpress.com/
Thanks again,
Lata
From:
Antonio Rossin <rossin(at)tin.it>
To:
wddm@world-wide-democracy.net
Sent: Friday, 9
October, 2009 8:35:56
Subject: Re: [WDDM]
Weighted voting
Lata,
I totally agree with you: (the utmost democratic
majority of) people are not fit to govern themselves.
Very simply, average people do not want to take any
political responsibility upon themselves, so they manage
to depend on others (i.e., Representatives) for this basic
requirement of Democracy.
Now the problem becomes, analyzing why when and how
such a dependent trait has been embedded into people's
relational brain.
I mean, once this imprinting mechanism had been exposed,
its reversal could be all what today's Democracy needs of.
Regards,
antonio
Lata Gouveia ha scritto:
Thank you Joseph,
I've just read your response.
Whilst I agree with most of it, I am not so confident that the "one
person/one vote" mantra is necessarily fair or sensible.
Moreover, from the point of view of a long term strategy to push for
more direct types of democracy, it is the biggest thorn on our side.
Equal opportunity, yes, but whilst demanding individual responsibility.
Let me put it this way. If you talk to any politician, any business
leader, any political analyst, anyone in positions of responsibility
about Direct Democracy, a very high percentage of those people will
laugh in your face. "It would never work!!" they would say. Why?
"Because people are too dumb to govern themselves and you must be
incredibly naive to think otherwise"
The main reason for the preservation of Guardianship and representative
systems is, above all others, the notion that people are not fit to
govern themselves.
Let me give you an example. Ireland has just approved the Lisbon
Treaty. Many people believe the Irish people were blackmailed,
intimidated or brainwashed. Others say that they were informed, as
opposed to a year ago, when they rejected the Treaty.
Let me ask you this, would it really be so unfair to ask people to fill
in the following questionnaire and shouldn't people have a
responsibility to do certain basic research before demanding that the
powers that be step down and hand everything over?
1)
The treaty of Lisbon is:
- A) document that concerns the Republic of Ireland exclusively.
- B) A document that primarily concerns the European Union.
- C) A document that primarily concerns the trade relationship between
Ireland and Portugal.
2)
The two main decision-making institutions within the EU are:
- A) The Council and the Commission
- B) The Parliament and the Commission
- C) The Parliament and the Council.
etc.
Can anyone tell me with a straight face that a person who does not know
these basic things is just as fit as someone who does to make a binding
and irreversible decision for their country and for the future of the
entire premise of geopolitics?
I guess this is my dilemma. I am a supporter of democracy, I criticise
democratic deficits wherever I see them and I believe that the next
evolutionary step for Mankind is, somehow, related to the improvement
of democracy. However, if I had to make a choice between giving the
British people a referendum on, say, the Euro, or giving a handful of
people at the top the decision, I would have to go with the second
option... simply because I don't trust the British people to know
anything that's not been fed to them by Rupert Murdock.
Bring in the multiple choice test and the weighted vote and I would
totally support the referendum instead.
Simple.
Lata
From:
Joseph Hammer <parrhesiajoe(at)gmail.com>
To: wddm@world-wide-democracy.net
Sent: Thursday, 8
October, 2009 10:26:37
Subject: Re: [WDDM]
Weighted voting
I would tend to agree with Hamid and Jim.
The American Medical Association is a great case study for
this
issue. They have more knowledge about the medical industry than the
average individual, but that is not necessarily a good thing. It would
be good if the motivation of the actors was the unbiased betterment of
mankind. This is folly. No person can recognize the extent of his or
her own bias. History tends to exonerate the idea that any group who
possesses superior knowledge will use the information asymmetry to
enrich themselves rather than society in general.
I strongly believe in the "one person, one vote" principal. If
forced to compare the relative effects of ignorance and power
consolodation, it might be a toss up. However, we will have ignorance
through bias in any category of man. What is in our power to prevent is
the consolodation of power. Wise kings start wars... uneducated
peasants seldom think it worth the cost in blood.
In most decisions of governance, it is ethical principals
rather
than specific knowledge that should drive our legislation.
Plus, most people with "education" in a field will claim the
ability to make better decisions. This education is market driven, and
not motivated by truth unless the market rewards accurate, unbiased
information.
Take economics, for example. The biggest employer of
economists
is the Federal Reserve. Like the alchemists of old, these rascally
intellectuals buy into a completely fictitious notion... that you can
create money from thin air... or out of lead, as the alchemists
believed. In the heyday of alchemy, many scholarly types insisted that
the layman, who doubted the wisdom of the alchemists, was unrefined and
uneducated. A college cannot attract many students to a class that
says, "Alchemy is bullshit" or "The best monetary policy is
non-intervention by the state" or "None of these sophisticated economic
models that we teach you have ever actually worked". All of these
notions would kill the entire fields of curriculum.
Plus, over a three-year period ending in October 1994, the Fed
awarded 305 contracts to 209 professors worth a total of $3 million.
Wow... that's about 15k per professor.
Plus, to get tenure, you must publish. One critical way the
Fed
exerts control on academic economists is through its relationships with
the field's gatekeepers. For instance, at the Journal of Monetary
Economics, a must-publish venue for rising economists, more than half
of the editorial board members are currently on the Fed payroll -- and
the rest have been in the past.
"Knowledge" is easily perverted by self interest. The
assumption
that individual scholar can make better decisions is wholly dependent
on the subject of inquiry and the incentives to mislead.
If the subject of inquiry is highly technical, then I agree
with
Hamid. It is in the best interest of society to hire one or more
researchers to investigate the topic. There are many ways to make this
work well, but there are far more ways to screw it up... like letting
representatives choose the investigators (unless we structure
incentives to reward politicians for effective, honest choices... a far
cry from the current situation).
We need the knowledge, but we need to guard against interested
dogma, and letting intellectuals have more say is, like Jim said,
manipulable.
Parrhesia
- Vanity is hemlock to those who seek truth. Be careful what
you
consume.
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