Pure Democracy: Online Government

[cal]

So we don't have Pure Democracy in America, we have an electoral college and a separated group of individuals (less than 1% of 1% of 1% of our total population) that we throw into a room in hopes that they will vote on laws and make decisions in favor of how we'd vote and make them. This isn't Democracy, this is more like a Representative Republic.

 

So what's a "Pure Democracy"? Pure Democracy Example on Wikipedia

It's a system in which the people being governed have direct control over what the government does. In an absolutely pure democracy, there would be no elected officials within the government, the system would sustain itself, and any decisions that needed to be made would be collaborated on by any and all people within the system, all having an equal say in it (as far as voting goes). To stop a large flow of poorly-written or deeply flawed bills being presented, there would be a system of registration put in place where in order to be a law-writer you would have to pass a legality test, and a scientific literacy test. The laws then made would go through an initial phase of being up-voted or down-voted to be presented in the next major voting phase in which everyone in the nation has a choice of deciding whether or not the bill is passed. In my dreams, I also imagine that the voters have to take literacy tests as well, but this won't happen for the reasons below...

 

Why isn't a Pure Democracy in place?

Power - It requires people to step down from their already prescribed positions of rule.

Intelligence - It requires people to take the time designing a system governed by the whole of the people, not an isolated group of them.

Motivation - It requires people to keep up with what their country is doing on a regular basis, and to be actively involved in it.

Congregation - It would normally require everyone to meet up at the ol' Greek forum to discuss the month's topics, which is hard to do with 300 million people.

 

Why it can be done now, and should be.

The only non-ego aspect of the reasons these systems of Pure Democracy aren't in place in major governments is the congregation aspect. Not everyone in the country can fly over to D.C. every month for a meet-and-greet over the war politics. And up until the last couple decades, there wasn't really a system in which large volumes of people could communicate simultaneously with each other. But you're reading this now, and you're reading this from a system that would allow a Pure Democracy to take place.

 

After discussing this with a few friends, the most common objection to the idea, the only one really, is that voting over the internet can be hacked and rigged. This is true, but voting via paper is more easily rigged than any of the major voting engines on the web that I've seen. Not to mention that the voting machines in America were designed to allow for third party option placement after the ballots have been counted. There was a trial held about this in which one of the programmers describes how ****ing shady our government is -

Plus, if it came down to it, we could design a system rather fortified, I mean there are ways to stop hacking cold in it's tracks, granted it's hard to do now, but it's not impossible.

 

The rest of my list are just human flaws stopping us from advancing socially, so I guess they'll just be a human-hump to get over in terms of implementing a Purely Democratic system. So aside from those, why don't we try to start implementing a more democratic system like this?

 

My proposal - Is anyone down to write software and a constitution to help setup a mock version of this type of government? Really I'm just doing this for my own amusement, I don't think we'll ever get out of our corruption as a nation. So if anyone wants to mess around with this maybe as an internet, or global government, that would be cool.

 

Is anyone principally opposed to this form of government or find any intrinsic flaws I skipped over?

[belovelife]

http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

[phillip1882]

hmm, i tend to prefer the idea of anarchy, but definitely a step forward. my primary peeve is that would it be majority rule for every law? if so, this seems rather unfair. laws in my opinion should be hard to pass. maybe 2/3's is fairer, or 3/4? dunno. there are definitely many obstacles you would need to overcome.

[cal]

laws in my opinion should be hard to pass. maybe 2/3's is fairer, or 3/4? dunno. there are definitely many obstacles you would need to overcome.

If the constitution is written up or if a law is passed saying it needs to have 2/3's of the vote to pass, then yea it could be that way. I mean none of this is set in stone, it's just an idea.

 

http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

My doctor recommends that instead of suicide, I try this as an alternative - DMT

Thanks for the suggestion though, I'm glad everyone will see how strongly based on factual schema your opinions are and how well thought out your judgment of me is. Your counter-views on my characterization of north Alaskan sea bass are also being strongly considered.

 

Also, you're ugly and your mother dresses you funny.

Edited November 3, 2012 by Matthew Garon

[CraigD]

So we don't have Pure Democracy in America, we have an electoral college and a separated group of individuals (less than 1% of 1% of 1% of our total population) that we throw into a room in hopes that they will vote on laws and make decisions in favor of how we'd vote and make them. This isn't Democracy, this is more like a Representative Republic.

The US government is not merely like a representative republic, it is one. You’re correct, Matt, that It’s not a direct democracy. However, representative republics such as the US’s are a form of representative democracy, also called “indirect democracy”, so it is a democracy.

 

I recall from school 3 main objections to a direct democracy – that is, all public matters being decided by a vote of all the People:

1. The practical problem of time spent governing – There are many of public matters to be discussed and decided – public matters ranging from grave decisions like war, to small but significant ones such as product labeling, to minutia such as public trash collection schedules – so if a DD is really “pure” in the sense that everybody decides everything, nobody would have time to do much of anything else. To be practical, a DD mustn’t take a Person more than a few hours each day, requiring filtering the public matters to only a small subset of the total. How is this filtering done, and by whom? How can this filtering be itself a public matter decided by all the People, without taking as much time and effort as it saves?
   
2. The problem of the tyranny of the majority – Consider this example: 51% of the American People (or 67% or some other ratio if your DD requires supermajorities of some kind), conclude that an identifiable minority of people – say ethnic, cultural, or religious Jews, who are less than 2% of People, or the self-described non-religious, who are about 16% – feel that members of this minority are simply bad, and should be exterminated. Even if such a thing is prohibited by law, such as a Constitution, a true DD can change these laws, and as a legitimate exercise in government, exterminate, or less extremely, oppress or disenfranchise this minority.
   
3. The problem of demagoguery (dependent on the tyranny of the majority)– A demagogue is an individual or small coalition that is adept at persuading a majority of the People to agree with and support them. In a DD, effective demagogues could take of the government. A defense against demagoguery is for majority of the People to be able to recognize and oppose its practice, but historically, no system of education or enculturation appears to have been effective at doing this.
   

I believe that improved communication has and can continue to improve governments such as the US’s Representative-based, 3-branched Constitutional Republic, making them more “frictionless” indirect democracies. However, I believe the checks-and-balances written into such governments are critical to their success. These checks and balances depend on barriers to the immediate popularity of proposed additions and changes to law as measured by a vote of all the People, primarily by delaying the People’s opportunity to vote for or against representatives and laws, in most cases for 2 to 4 years, though in the case of SCOTUS Justices, we must wait in many cases for tens of years for them to die or retire, allowing the President to appoint and Congress confirm their replacement.

 

All these objections stated, I’m favor a ground-up redesign of governments on all scales. I think Matt’s idea:

My proposal - Is anyone down to write software and a constitution to help setup a mock version of this type of government? Really I'm just doing this for my own amusement, I don't think we'll ever get out of our corruption as a nation. So if anyone wants to mess around with this maybe as an internet, or global government, that would be cool.

is an excellent one, and would love to write, part-time and unpaid, some government and People simulating software like this. Matt, how about you starting a thread for this :QuestionM

 

My expectation is that such a sim, which I strongly suspect has been done many times before, would on its first run using a simple “ideal Athenian direct democracy” model (where everybody, not just non-slave men, vote on everything), show one, more, or all of the learned-in-school failures I listed above, requiring the model to be adjusted ‘til it approached something resembling a modern representational democracy. It’d be great fun finding out, or just trying to find out. :thumbs_up

[Guest MacPhee]

Could Science be governed on similar lines.

 

Eg - suppose a new scientific theory is put forward. Every "registered Scientist" studies it, then goes online and votes on it.

 

If the majority of votes are in favour of the theory, it gets accepted as scientifically true. Otherwise it gets chucked out.

[lawcat]

Referendum democracy. It's communism, that's why it has not been established.

 

The question is, how far is someone--a citizen, a banker, an industrialist, a political broker, a general--willing to trust the referendum for safety and well being of himself, his family, and the country. We of course are willing to do a few things by referendum, but not all things.

 

People would vote for all kinds of things, and I have my doubts that reason would often prevail. Before something like that can be implemented, a culture of educated, responsible self governance must develop, and no society is there yet. That is why communism is a utopia, unfortunately of course.

Edited November 10, 2012 by lawcat

[belovelife]

If the constitution is written up or if a law is passed saying it needs to have 2/3's of the vote to pass, then yea it could be that way. I mean none of this is set in stone, it's just an idea.

 

 

My doctor recommends that instead of suicide, I try this as an alternative - DMT

Thanks for the suggestion though, I'm glad everyone will see how strongly based on factual schema your opinions are and how well thought out your judgment of me is. Your counter-views on my characterization of north Alaskan sea bass are also being strongly considered.

 

Also, you're ugly and your mother dresses you funny.

 

 

all i'm saying, is sometimes people don't know whats best for them, they are convinced otherwise by those who can potentially influence them , while anyone with basic chemistry would know this is water, someone with a good enough argument, can make it seem bad, in the future when we are much better informed, like we are beginning now with the internet, a utopia may be possible,

imho, this may take some time

[cal]

The US government is not merely like a representative republic, it is one. You’re correct, Matt, that It’s not a direct democracy. However, representative republics such as the US’s are a form of representative democracy, also called “indirect democracy”, so it is a democracy.

My bad dude, I meant to write, "This isn't *Pure* Democracy, this is more like a Representative Republic." I didn't mean to say that we don't have democracy at all, haha.

 

I recall from school 3 main objections to a direct democracy – that is, all public matters being decided by a vote of all the People:

1. The practical problem of time spent governing – There are many of public matters to be discussed and decided – public matters ranging from grave decisions like war, to small but significant ones such as product labeling, to minutia such as public trash collection schedules – so if a DD is really “pure” in the sense that everybody decides everything, nobody would have time to do much of anything else. To be practical, a DD mustn’t take a Person more than a few hours each day, requiring filtering the public matters to only a small subset of the total. How is this filtering done, and by whom? How can this filtering be itself a public matter decided by all the People, without taking as much time and effort as it saves?

This is the exact objection my friend gave the other day, that it would be time consuming, which is why he argued that we have people who's job it is to consume that time. But here's my solution- granted it isn't easy to pull off, but we could work all the major things like war into the self-actuating system that is the constitution of this government. Whether or not we go to war can be mathematically based on economic costs, and life cost (among other things factored in), rendering the decision of war left to the equation hard-coded into the system. This decision can be over-ruled by a majority vote from the people, but only in one direction (bad reference, I don't even like them, please don't judge me lol); the majority can decide not to go to war, but not to go to war. So the nation can never instigate war without constitutional consent, if that makes sense.

 

The small but significant matters such as product labeling would be raised and decided on by the people like a normal purely democratic society would do. The minutia such as trash collection would also be a special case like war. If there are issues that only regard a certain demographic ("demographic" being limited to all persons within a geographic region, not a specific race, gender, etc.), then only that demographic would be allowed to vote on that issue. For example, me, from California, would not be able to vote on trash collection laws in New York, unless that is, it is some national trash law that effects both California and New York, but that would be the exception to the rule.

 

2. The problem of the tyranny of the majority – Consider this example: 51% of the American People (or 67% or some other ratio if your DD requires supermajorities of some kind), conclude that an identifiable minority of people – say ethnic, cultural, or religious Jews, who are less than 2% of People, or the self-described non-religious, who are about 16% – feel that members of this minority are simply bad, and should be exterminated. Even if such a thing is prohibited by law, such as a Constitution, a true DD can change these laws, and as a legitimate exercise in government, exterminate, or less extremely, oppress or disenfranchise this minority.

If it's that much of a concern, we can just work it into the constitution that genocide is intolerable. We can also disallow the concept of a minority altogether if we really work for this idea we have going here (that idea being whatever we call this form of pure democracy). How we would do that is through a simplicity of the system- no one holds a government office, everyone regardless of race, gender, etc., is allowed to vote on pretty much everything (with a handful of exceptions like initiating war) and has the leisure of when to vote because of almost no time constraint aside from the deadline when voting. Anyone can vote at any time on a law/bill until the voting session for that specific law/bill ends (maybe we allow a month review period and a week-long voting period?). If a law/bill is passed by a majority to disenfranchise a specific minority, then all I can say is that the majority has spoken. I think this freedom to suppress is actually part of what Pure Democracy stands for. Maybe a law passed against Armenians is that they are legally forced to attend an extra year of school. I don't think minority groups would be abused so harshly in a system like this, but I guess the stupidity of the masses is a serious issue. To fix that either we impose literacy and IQ tests, or we write it out of the constitution somehow to disallow minority disenfranchisement, or we do both?

 

3. The problem of demagoguery (dependent on the tyranny of the majority)– A demagogue is an individual or small coalition that is adept at persuading a majority of the People to agree with and support them. In a DD, effective demagogues could take of the government. A defense against demagoguery is for majority of the People to be able to recognize and oppose its practice, but historically, no system of education or enculturation appears to have been effective at doing this.

It would be hard to lobby for the National Rifle Association to a non-existent governor. Demagogue-ing could still exist in this system I suppose, but it would be a very different sort of it. I can't type today haha, but what I mean is that suppose you've written a few bills and have gotten them passed in this system, and people start to recognize you as a successful bill writer, then you have more qualification writing bills at that point than the people that haven't written any bills at all. Why shouldn't you be a source of persuasion if your source tends to be more favored anyways? I don't see anyone taking over a purely democratic government if we disallow anyone to have strong ruling power to begin with. The system I'm writing right now doesn't allow anyone at all to have a government title beyond "Law Making Qualified", which a good portion of the citizens could obtain anyways.

 

I believe that improved communication has and can continue to improve governments such as the US’s Representative-based, 3-branched Constitutional Republic, making them more “frictionless” indirect democracies. However, I believe the checks-and-balances written into such governments are critical to their success. These checks and balances depend on barriers to the immediate popularity of proposed additions and changes to law as measured by a vote of all the People, primarily by delaying the People’s opportunity to vote for or against representatives and laws, in most cases for 2 to 4 years, though in the case of SCOTUS Justices, we must wait in many cases for tens of years for them to die or retire, allowing the President to appoint and Congress confirm their replacement.

This is the only real concern I have for this system only because it's the most difficult to write over, but it's not impossible and if I get a couple of you guys helping out, I'm pretty sure we can tackle this pretty easily. A check-balance is totally necessary, but we don't need a group of a hundred dudes checking and trying to balance every law concerning every subject affecting every person in the country. We can do it in a much more efficient way, for example: if a law is written that regulates the stock market, not only would you need the majority vote for the general populous, but you would need 2/3rd's the vote of the voters that are registered (as an occupation) within the field that the law affects. On top of that, the month long review period for a bill/law would also help regulate what laws are even presented to be voted on to begin with (another thing I am having a difficult time writing up haha). But there are a couple other checks we could do and the 51%, 67% numbers are just thrown out there for examples, we can get more specific as we go along with this. I think you get my point though, that it's not impossible to effectively and efficiently remedy.

 

All these objections stated, I’m favor a ground-up redesign of governments on all scales. I think Matt’s idea:

My proposal - Is anyone down to write software and a constitution to help setup a mock version of this type of government? Really I'm just doing this for my own amusement, I don't think we'll ever get out of our corruption as a nation. So if anyone wants to mess around with this maybe as an internet, or global government, that would be cool.

is an excellent one, and would love to write, part-time and unpaid, some government and People simulating software like this. Matt, how about you starting a thread for this :QuestionM

Dude, that's ****in awesome, let's do this. I'm down if you are haha, and I'm already writing up a lot of the concepts since I've gotten some good feedback to this idea. So yea, I'll contact you in a bit after I've posted this response and we'll see about hitting up some other hypographers and starting a new thread for its facilitation if you want.

 

My expectation is that such a sim, which I strongly suspect has been done many times before, would on its first run using a simple “ideal Athenian direct democracy” model (where everybody, not just non-slave men, vote on everything), show one, more, or all of the learned-in-school failures I listed above, requiring the model to be adjusted ‘til it approached something resembling a modern representational democracy. It’d be great fun finding out, or just trying to find out. :thumbs_up

I googled similar gov sims, granted I only looked for five minutes, but in that five minutes, I found that most Pure Democratic sims were done by sociology majors, who tend to not be the brightest, and only done for class research, halfheartedly, and with only a fraction of the intellectual power that the hypography community could allow. So I think we have a really good shot at making a self-sustaining system, not to mention that I don't think we need to start with the Athenian Direct Democratic Model right off the bat, we can work out a lot of the kinks pre-instantiation of the constitution (I think I offered a workable solution to the three flaws you listed?). But yea, I'm expecting a good time to be had out of this either way!

 

 

People would vote for all kinds of things, and I have my doubts that reason would often prevail. Before something like that can be implemented, a culture of educated, responsible self governance must develop, and no society is there yet.

I agree, so much so that I've decided a few literacy tests would be required in order to be registered to vote, but those alone, not an "Adult" title being required. This would solve age limitation issues, like that of highly intelligent fourteen year-olds, being disallowed the right to vote even after they've read and formulated an educated opinion on the topic of which they wish to vote. Even further than literacy tests for general registration to vote, we could require a test per-bill, making it so that the voter had to show he/she understands what the bill is about. The tests shouldn't be too difficult, and we could simplify them to making the voter re-iterate a single sentence thesis that surmises the entire bill. We could even go further to require the bills to have single sentence thesis's and encourage the bill-writers to not deviate from the thesis-goal of the bill they are writing, which would simplify and efficiently facilitate law making and passing even more. All of this is just crude concept at this point though, I haven't gotten to this at all in anything I've written (as of right now at least). But yea, your problem has many doable solutions lawcat. =P

 

 

all i'm saying, is sometimes people don't know whats best for them, they are convinced otherwise by those who can potentially influence them , while anyone with basic chemistry would know this is water, someone with a good enough argument, can make it seem bad, in the future when we are much better informed, like we are beginning now with the internet, a utopia may be possible,

imho, this may take some time

I didn't intend for my response to your link to be taken seriously, primarily, I was just confused as to why you initially posted that link in the first place. It didn't seem very government related, but now I see your point. I think my idea of requiring law-writers to include a single sentence thesis would help clear up any sort of "make it seem bad"-ness that may come out of the law-writers. Maybe it'll make it worse, I'm running on fumes right now so my ideas might be totally delusional, I apologize in advance haha. I guess we'll have to work the kinks out of the constitution when I finalize and collaborate on it with you other hypographers.

 

 

Sorry for the super long wall of text guys, I haven't checked in here for a while and I wanted to get all the bases covered. Also, what should we name our tailored system Pure Democracy? Like when people ask, "What type of government does your society have?" I'd like to be able to say something besides the blanket 'Democracy'. I'd feel special calling it an "Autonomous System of Logical Fellows", but that's just me haha.

Edited November 21, 2012 by Matthew Garon

[Guest MacPhee]

Democracy seems to rely on this principle - that in Politics, all questions should be decided by a majority vote.

 

Why isn't this principle used in Science?

[cal]

Democracy seems to rely on this principle - that in Politics, all questions should be decided by a majority vote.

 

Why isn't this principle used in Science?

Because everyone is qualified and entitled to discussing what their rights are and should be, and how to handle those human rights that apply to them directly and effect their person.

 

Not everyone is qualified or entitled to discuss what theory they prefer over another in science, or what theories are or should be, or how to handle those theories to help prove or disprove them, because they tend to not effect their person directly until the theories become facts.