Everything Wrong With Democracy - Jason Brennan
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0:00 What is democracy?
2:56 Why would anybody want democracy?
13:15 Is voting a right of equal citizens?
20:00 Is voting required for protecting against tyranny?
25:57 People don’t vote for their values
31:03 How democracy may be immoral
37:41 What is the alternative to universal suffrage?
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The best argument against democracy is a conversation with the average voter. The best argument for democracy is an in depth look at how people live in undemocratic countries…
"look at how people live in undemocratic countries…"
That is an ASSERTION, not an argument.
@@SpiritualPsychotherapyServices an assertion can also be an argument...?
@@SpiritualPsychotherapyServices technically speaking telling someone to look is a command/request, not an assertion…
@@SpiritualPsychotherapyServicesUnless you have no knowledge on the topic you are trying to discuss , that is an argument
@@adulterer5385
THE MONARCHY:
THE MONARCHY DEFINED:
A KING (“kṣatriyaḥ”, in Sanskrit) is a man who has a divine mandate, via his counsellor (i.e. his spiritual preceptor), to govern an area of land (and sea) and the population within its borders. He should be the head of the military, and if necessary, courageously lead his army into battle (as opposed to cowardly scampering into a bomb shelter under the Pentagon building, as Presidents of the United States of America are apt to do). A king should be a natural leader among men, and be willing to sacrifice his life to protect his subjects. A good monarch will take heed of astute advice from his spiritual guide (ideally, the wisest prophet in his kingdom), as well as his lay ministers, in order to build a just society.
THE ROLE OF THE MONARCHY:
Since a (genuine) monarch has effectual ownership and control over his country, he alone is authorized to divide his territory among the chiefs of each clan, known as “LANDLORDS” (or simply “lords”, for short) who will, in return, pay taxes to their king. These (land)lords will, in turn, apportion the land under their jurisdiction, to the peasant class of society (otherwise known as “proletarians” or “workers/working-class” men), in exchange for rent (traditionally in the form of agricultural produce, but nowadays usually in money/cash). In this way, a harmonious system of cohabitation will be established, based on the natural hierarchy of human society. See also Chapter 19 regarding this hierarchical structure.
A LEGITIMATE monarch will endorse holy and righteous edicts, such as absolute freedom of speech*, homeschooling of children, free markets, and private ownership of all goods and services (even such infrastructure as roads, water and sewerage systems, health care, and education). An authentic king will enforce taxation on the profits of businessmen and landlords alone, provide material support to members of the Holy Priesthood if necessary, establish a monetary system using (or at least backed by) precious metals, and avoid interfering with the private matters of his citizens (unlike evil governments, who meddle in such things as sex, marriage, and discipline within workplaces and families).
*Read the entry “freedom of speech” in the Glossary to understand this provision according to dharma/law. See too, the term “legitimate”.
OBJECTIONS TO MONARCHY:
There are but two kinds of persons who would POSSIBLY object to the institution of a genuine, legitimate monarchy:
By far the greatest number of objectors are those who have very little idea of what constitutes a LAWFUL monarchy, as defined above. The usual arguments are either “I don’t want to be ruled by a tyrannical, despotic dictator”, or “I don’t believe monarchy should be hereditary”. Obviously, neither of these arguments is applicable when the institution of monarchy is properly understood. Any man can call himself “King”, but if he lacks saintly (or at least noble) qualities and doesn’t have the best interests of his people at heart, he is naught but a fascistic dictator.
Just as a priest is, by definition, a holy man, so too should a king be a righteous and wise monarch (“rāja-ṛṣi”, in Sanskrit). Perhaps two of the most important Western philosophers, Socrates and Plato, referred to such a sagacious ruler as a “philosopher-king”. After all, a king’s primary duty is the protection of his nation (“saṃrakṣa”, in Sanskrit), so how could a person fulfil his duty of care if he was evil and heartless? Just as a family must be protected by its head (the father), every nation requires a good patriarch. Unless a man has the natural proclivities to do so, he ought NOT follow his father’s occupation. Therefore, a prince isn’t necessarily qualified to assume his father’s role upon the demise of his sire. In fact, an actual (genuine) king will disapprove of his firstborn son seizing rulership, unless the prince was the most qualified person available.
The only “valid” objection to monarchy could possibly be from those miscreants who wish to destroy society via an ILLEGITIMATE system of government (see Chapter 22) or those who are simply too dim-witted to understand how monarchy is the most beneficial form of governance.
Any form of governance OTHER than monarchy, by the process of simple deduction, must be controlled by either workers, businessmen, or priests (or even women!), and therefore, is intrinsically evil, since those persons are unqualified to rule a nation. If there is no aspiring monarch extant within a nation, then the best alternative is a priest (a prophet, to be more precise), but only until a sovereign arises and retakes power.
BHĀRATĪYA MISCONCEPTIONS OF MONARCHY:
One of the greatest misunderstandings regarding the RULING class (that is, the monarchy), at least within Indian society, is the misconception that a king is any man who happens to work as a soldier. To put it in more precise terms, in Bhārata, those who are recipients of the Vedic tradition, often consider any man who serves in the military to be a member of the kṣatriyaḥ class, although they invariably use the incorrect term “caste”, which is an adulteration of the class and life-stage system (“varnāśrama”, in Sanskrit) mentioned in Chapter 19 of this “Final Instruction Sheet for Humanity”. The word “caste” suggests a hereditary social system, which is actually a contravention of authentic dharma.
It is not only absurd, it is downright laughable for any soldier to claim that he/she is a member of the ruling class, simply for being a warrior, or in some cases, due to the fact that one of his/her distant ancestors may have been a village chief or even a great king (“mahārāja”, in Sanskrit).
The Sanskrit terms, “rājanya” and “kṣatriyaḥ”, refer exclusively to those very rare males whose vocation is to serve their nations as kings, and not simply to any man who serves in an army or navy as a warrior. All military staff, apart from the supreme commander (the sovereign) are members of the working class of society, since they are EMPLOYED by the king as soldiers. The word “kṣatriyaḥ” comes from the root noun “kṣatra”, meaning “dominion”, “power”, or “supremacy”, implying that one who belongs to this class of society has “supreme” dominion over all others. To presume that a soldier/warrior belongs to the ruling class, simply due to the fact that both soldiers and kings sometimes partake in battle is, as mentioned above, truly hilarious! Therefore, if you are one of those Indians who mistakenly consider yourself to be a kṣatriyaḥ, simply because you joined one of the branches of the military, or even more preposterously, due to the fact that one of your ancestors may have been the monarch of some part of ancient Bhārata, kindly stop your self-delusion - you are nothing more than a silly, foolish worker!
STUBBORN OBJECTORS:
One of the most baffling rebuttals I receive to any of my precepts, is in relation to my assertion that monarchy is the only LEGITIMATE form of governance. I have seen a huge number of comments in social media platforms, in which the authors criticize various extant governments for their multifarious wrongdoings. I often respond to such comments with the whole of Chapter 22 (and sometimes with this chapter), which proves, beyond any doubt whatsoever, the above assertion (that monarchy is the ideal form of governance). Those commenters invariably are unconvinced of the obvious wisdom of “F.I.S.H”, and attack my position with truly inane retorts, particularly with the claim that democracy is inherently the best form of governance, for they are unable to see the blatant fact, that the cause of the aforementioned wrongdoings, is precisely the democratic (sometimes, socialistic/communistic) system that they endorse! It is akin to saying: “I know that slashing my wrists is causing my body to lose blood, but if I don’t stop slashing my wrists, I will no longer bleed, so I had better keep slashing my own wrists!” The stupidity is truly astounding! Even more astonishing, is the number of persons who (supposedly) have read, or have listened to this chapter, in which the two most common arguments against monarchy have been annihilated, yet proceed to proffer one or both of those two arguments!
Democracy is like the Internet: the best, and worst, thing about both is that everybody has a voice.
Imagine how worse it'd be if only the elites had a voice? Remember feudalism, serfdom, slavery, sex slavery, punitive rape, indentured servitude, religious authoritarianism?
Besides, we're living in democracies right now. How much of the British, American, European public really support Israel over Palestine? If we had a choice, we'd have spent it on ourselves, not shipping weapons to sponsor a genocide.
So the best joke in town right now is democracy. If the bipartisan elites want to get their way, they'll get it in spite of the electorate.
Wow this comment was hard to read, i get what you mean though
Everybody has a voice?
This is like spitting in my face, my entire life I've been seeing backwardness in society, and my entire life I've spoken against it.
Not once has my voice been heard or made a dent in the lunacy.
@@WhoThisMonkey that's becase there are 8 billion people in the world, we're not gonna silence everyone else for you, you're not that special
@@WhoThisMonkeyyou have a voice, but other people don't have to listen.
Alex, for me this was a great example of how philosophy can be used practically and applied to improving social systems. I really like how you weave so many historical philosopher references and citations into your arguments. It helps me remember how complex and multifaceted we all are. Thanks for sharing all the work you do !
🐟 22. ILLEGITIMATE GOVERNANCES:
SOCIALISM (and its more extreme form, communism) is intrinsically evil, because it is based on the ideology of social and economic egalitarianism, which is both a theoretical and a practical impossibility. Equality exists solely in abstract concepts such as mathematics and arguably in the sub-atomic realm. Many proponents of socialism argue that it is purely an economic system and therefore independent of any particular form of governance. However, it is inconceivable that socialism/communism could be implemented on a nationwide scale without any form of government intervention. If a relatively small number of persons wish to unite in order to form a commune or worker-cooperative, that is their prerogative, but it could never work in a country with a large population, because there will always exist entrepreneurs desirous of engaging in wealth-building enterprises. Even a musician who composes a hit tune wants his song to succeed and earn him inordinate wealth.
Socialism reduces individual citizens to utilities, who, in practice, are used to support the ruling elite, who are invariably despotic scoundrels, and very far from ideal leaders (i.e. compassionate and righteous monarchs). Those citizens who display talent in business or the arts are either oppressed, or their gifts are coercively utilized by the corrupt state. Despite purporting to be a fair and equitable system of wealth distribution, those in leadership positions seem to live a far more luxurious lifestyle than the mass of menial workers. Wealth is effectively stolen from the rich. Most destructively, virtuous and holy teachings (“dharma”, in Sanskrit) are repressed by the irreligious and ILLEGITIMATE “government”.
The argument that some form of government WELFARE programme is essential to aid those who are unable to financially-support themselves for reasons beyond their control, is fallacious. A righteous ruler (i.e. a saintly monarch) will ensure the welfare of each and every citizen by encouraging private welfare. There is no need for a king to extort money from his subjects in order to feed and clothe the impoverished. Of course, in the highly-unlikely event that civilians are unwilling to help a person in dire straits, the king would step-in to assist that person, as one would expect from a patriarch (father of his people). The head of any nation ought to be the penultimate patriarch, not a selfish buffoon.
DEMOCRACY is almost as evil, because, just as the rabble favoured the murderous Barabbas over the good King Jesus, the ignorant masses will overwhelmingly vote for the candidate which promises to fulfil their inane desires, rather than one which will enforce the law, and promote a wholesome and just society. Read Chapter 12 for the most authoritative and concise exegesis of law, morality, and ethics, currently available.
Even in the miraculous scenario where the vast majority of the population are holy and righteous citizens, it is still immoral for them to vote for a seemingly-righteous leader. This is because that leader will not be, by definition, a king. As clearly and logically explicated in the previous chapter of this Holy Scripture, MONARCHY is the only lawful form of governance. If an elected ruler is truly righteous, he will not be able to condone the fact that the citizens are paying him to perform a job (which is a working-class role), and that an inordinate amount of time, money and resources are being wasted on political campaigning. Furthermore, an actual ruler does not wimpishly pander to voters - he takes power by (divinely-mandated) force, as one would expect from the penultimate alpha-male in society (the ultimate alpha-male being a priest).
The thought of children voting for who will be their parents or teachers, would seem utterly RIDICULOUS to the average person, yet most believe that they are qualified to choose their own ruler - they are most assuredly not. Just as a typical child fails to understand that a piece of sweet, juicy, healthy, delicious fruit is more beneficial for them than a cone of pus-infested, fattening, diabetes-inducing ice-cream, so too can the uneducated proletariat not understand that they are unqualified to choose their own leader, even after it is logically explained to them (as it is in this chapter, as well as in the previous chapter). And by “uneducated”, it is simply meant that they are misguided in the realities of life and in righteous living (“dharma”, in Sanskrit), not in facts and figures or in technical training. Intelligence doesn't necessarily correlate to wisdom. No socialist or democratic government will educate its citizens sufficiently well that the citizens have the knowledge of how to usurp their rule.
To put it frankly, democracy is rule by the “lowest common denominator”.
It should be obvious that ANARCHY can never ever succeed, because even the smallest possible social unit (the nuclear family) requires a dominator. Any family will fall-apart without a strict male household head. In fact, without the husband/father, there is no family, by definition. The English noun “husband” comes from the Old Norse word “hûsbôndi”, meaning “master of the house”.
The same paradigm applies to the extended family, which depends on a strong patriarchal figure (customarily, the eldest or most senior male). Likewise with clans, tribes, villages, towns, cities, and nations or countries.
Unfortunately, there are many otherwise-intelligent persons who honestly believe that an ENTIRE country can smoothly run without a leader in place. Any sane person can easily understand that even a nuclear family is unable to function properly without a head of the house, what to speak of a populous nation. The reason for anarchists' distrust of any kind of government is due to the corrupt nature of democratic governments, and the adulteration of the monarchy in recent centuries. However, if anarchists were to understand that most all so-called “kings/queens” in recent centuries were not even close to being true monarchs, they may change their stance on that inane “system”.
Most of the problems in human society are directly or indirectly attributable to this relatively modern phenomenon (non-monarchies), since it is the government’s role and sacred DUTY to enforce the law (see Chapter 12), and non-monarchical governments are themselves unlawful.
One of the many sinister characteristics of democracy, socialism, and other evil forms of governance, is the desire for their so-called “leaders” to control, or at least influence, the private lives of every single citizen (hence the term “Nanny State”). For example, in the wicked, decadent nations in which this holy scripture was composed, The Philippine Islands and The Southland (or “Australia”, as it is known in the Latin tongue), the DEMONIC governments try, and largely succeed, in controlling the rights of parents to properly raise, discipline and punish their children according to their own morals, compulsory vaccination of infants, enforcing feminist ideology, limiting legitimate powers an employer has over his servants, subsidizing animal agriculture, persecuting religious leaders (even to imprisonment and death, believe it or not. Personally, I have been jailed thrice for executing God’s perfect and pure will), and even trying to negatively influence what people eat and wear.
Not that a government shouldn’t control what its citizens wear in public, but it should ensure that they are MODESTLY dressed, according to the guidelines outlined in Chapter 28, which is hardly the case in Australia, the Philippines, and similar nations. At least ninety-nine per cent of Filipinas, for instance, are transvestinal, despite Philippines pretending to be a religious nation.
Cont...
@@SpiritualPsychotherapyServices And?
@@SpiritualPsychotherapyServices are you retarded?
@@isaiahmayle4706You sir, are getting the like xD
Simply because you are not spreading bs
@SpiritualPsychotherapyServices What is now happening to Marx’s theory has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the theories of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes fighting for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their theories with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to hallow their names to a certain extent for the “consolation” of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. Today, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the labor movement concur in this doctoring of Marxism. They omit, obscure, or distort the revolutionary side of this theory, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now “Marxists” (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently German bourgeois scholars, only yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the “national-German” Marx, who, they claim, educated the labor unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of waging a predatory war!
In these circumstances, in view of the unprecedently wide-spread distortion of Marxism, our prime task is to re-establish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state. This will necessitate a number of long quotations from the works of Marx and Engels themselves. Of course, long quotations will render the text cumbersome and not help at all to make it popular reading, but we cannot possibly dispense with them. All, or at any rate all the most essential passages in the works of Marx and Engels on the subject of the state must by all means be quoted as fully as possible so that the reader may form an independent opinion of the totality of the views of the founders of scientific socialism, and of the evolution of those views, and so that their distortion by the “Kautskyism” now prevailing may be documentarily proved and clearly demonstrated.
Let us begin with the most popular of Engels’ works, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, the sixth edition of which was published in Stuttgart as far back as 1894. We have to translate the quotations from the German originals, as the Russian translations, while very numerous, are for the most part either incomplete or very unsatisfactory.
Summing up his historical analysis, Engels says:
“The state is, therefore, by no means a power forced on society from without; just as little is it ’the reality of the ethical idea’, ’the image and reality of reason’, as Hegel maintains. Rather, it is a product of society at a certain stage of development; it is the admission that this society has become entangled in an insoluble contradiction with itself, that it has split into irreconcilable antagonisms which it is powerless to dispel. But in order that these antagonisms, these classes with conflicting economic interests, might not consume themselves and society in fruitless struggle, it became necessary to have a power, seemingly standing above society, that would alleviate the conflict and keep it within the bounds of ’order’; and this power, arisen out of society but placing itself above it, and alienating itself more and more from it, is the state.” (Pp.177-78, sixth edition)[1]
This expresses with perfect clarity the basic idea of Marxism with regard to the historical role and the meaning of the state. The state is a product and a manifestation of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms. The state arises where, when and insofar as class antagonism objectively cannot be reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.
It is on this most important and fundamental point that the distortion of Marxism, proceeding along two main lines, begins.
On the one hand, the bourgeois, and particularly the petty-bourgeois, ideologists, compelled under the weight of indisputable historical facts to admit that the state only exists where there are class antagonisms and a class struggle, “correct” Marx in such a way as to make it appear that the state is an organ for the reconciliation of classes. According to Marx, the state could neither have arisen nor maintained itself had it been possible to reconcile classes. From what the petty-bourgeois and philistine professors and publicists say, with quite frequent and benevolent references to Marx, it appears that the state does reconcile classes. According to Marx, the state is an organ of class rule, an organ for the oppression of one class by another; it is the creation of “order”, which legalizes and perpetuates this oppression by moderating the conflict between classes. In the opinion of the petty-bourgeois politicians, however, order means the reconciliation of classes, and not the oppression of one class by another; to alleviate the conflict means reconciling classes and not depriving the oppressed classes of definite means and methods of struggle to overthrow the oppressors.
For instance, when, in the revolution of 1917, the question of the significance and role of the state arose in all its magnitude as a practical question demanding immediate action, and, moreover, action on a mass scale, all the Social-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks descended at once to the petty-bourgeois theory that the “state” “reconciles” classes. Innumerable resolutions and articles by politicians of both these parties are thoroughly saturated with this petty-bourgeois and philistine “reconciliation” theory. That the state is an organ of the rule of a definite class which cannot be reconciled with its antipode (the class opposite to it) is something the petty-bourgeois democrats will never be able to understand. Their attitude to the state is one of the most striking manifestations of the fact that our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks are not socialists at all (a point that we Bolsheviks have always maintained), but petty-bourgeois democrats using near-socialist phraseology.
On the other hand, the “Kautskyite” distortion of Marxism is far more subtle. “Theoretically”, it is not denied that the state is an organ of class rule, or that class antagonisms are irreconcilable. But what is overlooked or glossed over is this: if the state is the product of the irreconcilability of class antagonisms, if it is a power standing above society and “alienating itself more and more from it”, it is clear that the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible not only without a violent revolution, but also without the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class and which is the embodiment of this “alienation”. As we shall see later, Marx very explicitly drew this theoretically self-evident conclusion on the strength of a concrete historical analysis of the tasks of the revolution. And - as we shall show in detail further on - it is this conclusion which Kautsky has “forgotten” and distorted.
I think a good way to summarize this conversation is that there are problems with sanctifying democracy because it blinds us to the very real problems that are inherent within it. He's not actually making an argument against democracy, only that we shouldn't stop ourselves from looking at better ways of accomplishing better government because democracy is sacrosanct.
@@Anothertakeonthisif everyone had the same power, it would make polticial decisions take longer and longer to make
@@Anothertakeonthis yeah I agree
This also feels like half the conversation. Describe what happens in places with less complete democracy, Guam, Puerto Rico, tell us what is inherently bad about dictatorships. The alternatives we've discussed were medieval kings, and complicated voting, why not hit us with numbers?
There are no problems with liberal democracy - it is the solution to social and economic problems.
@@fallingphoenix2341 Guam and PR, etc., don't count. That's a different breed of human being. There are studies that show that a collective with a collective-average IQ of 90 or lower can't engage successfully in democracy. IQ has been shown to be 80% genetic. So POC in 3rd world countries are not going to be able to demonstrate what white people can do in 1st world countries. You can call that 'racism', but that's just denial of reality for the sake of the cult of political correctness, which is driving the modern world to ruin.
People often equate democracy with representative democracy, which is only one specific type of democracy. And then they criticize democracy based on that specific instance. However, democratic theory is much broader and includes direct, participatory, deliberative and other forms of democracy
There's also multiple different methods of voting, where it's not exactly one person one vote. Democracy is extremely fluid and adaptable. The issue is that most "democracies" are really capitalist oligarchies pretending to be democratic. They were invented by the monarchist nobles who begrudgingly gave a small amount of power to the lower classes to satisfy them during the revolutionary periods of the times. Democracy hasn't even been allowed to blossom and experience all aspects of itself.
@@andrewgodly5739 agree
Liberal democracy be definition is representative democracy... The difference is Jeffersonian democracy which the USA uses - essentially giving the High Ups veto over parliament
Yeah. But the root of the problem is that people are dumb.
But you aren't@@LumaSloth and you can vote too
As someone who has been fairly passionately involved in politics in NZ for a few years now, I largely agree in the sense that our democracy is generally just people voting blindly for either the party in power, or if they've been annoyed at the government recently, voting for the other big party. I've talked to many people about specific issues and they align much more to other parties yet continually vote for one of the members of the duopoly. This is clearly not voting by their values
Are you talking about the party vote or the electorate vote? Because the electorate vote in NZ still uses First Past the Post, which suffers heavily from the spoiler effect and "wasted" votes, encouraging voters to only vote for the two largest parties. The behavior of NZ voters might be partially explained by the voting system in place. Please correct me if I'm wrong -- I'm not too familiar with NZ. This is just based on some quick searches I did online.
@@Odima16 Well the party vote is the most relevant, generally. Don't get me wrong, the electorate vote almost always goes to the exact same parties but for me the party vote is the one people actually care about and is where you can truly support those who support your values. Electorates often don't have all parties represented meaning I had to vote for a party I largely disagree with for my electorate vote. But with the party vote, people time and time again are making the same choice and that is essentially restricted to red or blue. I havw talked to many people about who they vote for and it is incredibly common for someone to say "National because I haven't enjoyed the last couple of years of Labour" (this was the last election, the inverse always happens when National has been in government) and this is while they could vote for another party that actually represents their values.
I'm likely particularly passionate on this topic as the party I find aligns with my values best, is consistently shown to align with many people yet have never made it into government
@@rorybessell8280 Thank you for the information. Do you think that some voters are still treating the party vote like it uses FPTP? Because I could easily see people being confused about how Mixed Member Proportional (MMP) works, or they don't realize that the party vote uses MMP, or they're still just used to the pre-1994 voting system where FPTP was used for both. Part of why I'm asking is because I'm very passionate about changing voting systems to move away from FPTP, and I want to know more about the real-world implementations of other voting systems.
@@Odima16 I'd say that some attitudes remain from the FPTP days. I wouldn't say that people necessarily actively think that way and I'd be surprised if there were many voters who didn't know it is MMP (we do have a lot of silly, old people complaining it's not FPTP though). I'd say there's just a general lack of effort from the majority really. If you can vote based off a leader or simply by putting in the other "main party" or keeping the status quo it requires a lot less thought, time and energy. I think a lot of people have a dim view of politicians so think it's not worth their time to put more effort into it
@@Anothertakeonthis I don't disagree, I just think it's done poorly and altering the way democracy works would in my opinion, allow for even better diversity of ideology
Jason Brennan energy made me listen to the whole thing in one sitting.
same and I don't usually do that
Yeah i got serious nazi vibes. I had to listen to it all to make sure.
@@autisticberserker1807Nazis were populists who came to power democratically.
Brennan's philosophy is the opposite of that.
lol it’s 60 minutes
@@autisticberserker1807 advocating against democracy seems trendy these days.
My view is that democracy serves the purpose of preventing a populace from ever being too abused. Even if they vote poorly and choose a bad candidate, they can always get rid of that candidate if it causes them too much suffering.
This assumes a system whereby a government cannot dismantle the right to a democrat vote.
Quite a good, if depressing, description
The price of that safety to choose another government is that those in power are guided by the next election, rather than long term considerations.
Although that's discussed in the video and it's argued that this protection stands as long as there is representation from all classes of society
For taking the example discussed here
Suppose that a government wants to get rid of the votes of gay people and just takes away their rights
That is protected as long as gay people have a representative in the government that can counteract the action of other groups against themselves, so you get around this problem by allowing gay people to vote in general but only if they have proper education, but the consequence of this system is that there is a huge piece of the population that doesn't have representation, uneducated people, so your government will get as good as the education can go, and to give representation to uneducated people as well to avoid exploitation you have a complete democracy again
So the actual difference to me seems to be the quality of the education rather than anything else, also cause you don't need to be so smart to do everything byt smart enough to trust and elect competent people instead of presidents that makes the best sport methaphor
o.o
I’m pro democracy, but I am much more pessimistic than this about our system. I don’t think we can always just get rid of a candidate. A lot of the time, bad candidates are in power because they have deals with media conglomerates and have public relations consultants and trick the uneducated voter by getting them angry or scared. It’s always not so easy to just get rid of them
In order to be electable one must be popular to the majority of citizens. Popularity doesn’t imply competency.
The Iraq War says it all. But there's more to it. Like the two-party system of the United States.
Also, we are talking ideologies. One may support war because it's profitable. Another one may oppose war despite the promise of profit. Who's the least competent? We now have a widespread idea that governments should be run as businesses. That's an insane idea, but also the direction the West is heading. It has already happened in part. The United States was once the land of opportunities. It now ranks 27 in social mobility. One only have to look at Hollywood. Nepotism.
Sadly that is only correct under a Direct Democracy system. Under the current common Representative system, there is a discrepancy of voting power due to unfair districting and proportionality.
In other words, voters are DUMB!
A sad consequence of destroying education(not that we were educating all that well at any point)
One of my most popular comments 😀
So after 1 hour of discussion we are right back to the quote we all know and love: "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"
Yeah, unfortunately, but that doesn't mean a better system doesn't exist. We just haven't invented it yet.
Edited because people kept taking what I said out of context. I hope this is clearer for everyone now.
I was thinking about Churchill throughout the whole convo.
@@Deleteyourself83 ... If we haven't found it yet, it doesn't exist, yet. It's not like the system is out there in nature waiting to be discovered. We need to invent it.
I was implying "invent" when I said "found". I really didn't expect that needed explaining in the context i was using it in but here we are.@@adb012
@@Deleteyourself83”democracy” is so broad. We haven’t come close to exploring its full area. Maybe there are alternative forms of democracy that do better. I wish we used citizens assemblies more often, for example. Or that non-politicians were pulled up for “committee service” from time to time.
The red scarf argument is really close to smoking. Smokers used to smoke to look cool to others, then we discovered smoke causes cancer and now it also signifies a damaging addiction, and its no longer seen as that cool.
Its still seen as cool sadly, just not as much.
The health argument against smoking was always limited in the sense that its efficiency depends on the premise/assumption that people value their own well being. Depressed people can also choose to smoke precisely because it's a form of self-harm.
Which is interestingly also something compromising the case for democracy: it assumes that the electorate has an instinct for self-preservation, but it doesn't account for those with utter disregard for themselves and the world. Religions have even helped shed a light on this undeniable side of human nature, which causes certain people to actually long for the world to end in a puff of smoke, and for everyone to die together.
And their vote counts as much as yours and mine. They can even run for the elections and end up in power if they're charismatic enough. This trait, as we often see with psychopaths and sociopaths, is not mutually exclusive with one's intelligence, education and/or social skills. I wonder how Mr Brennan's model would deal with this.
yeah, theres also the concern that people would attach existential meaning to the scarf. i would absolutely agree that progressive forces would push for a change in red scarf wearing, however a rather large contingent of people would almost certainly find meaning in the suffering and make a claim similar to "life is suffering and everyone before me did, it is simply the cost of being valuable." I think Jason brushes off that force too rapidly.
@@CosmicTeapot Brennan's proposed system would not weed out those people. The point of his system is to lower the political impact of people who are *mistaken* about what they want and what policies accomplish it. If someone is quite politically knowledgeable and quite accurate when it comes to that, then their vote would have high impact. Even if what they want is the death of civilization.
But that's true for democracy aswell. If anything, the one tool that contemporary democracies have to safeguard against that kind of voter is the rigidity of constitutions, an arguably anti-democratic tool.
@@CosmicTeapot Well-being is not only health. Smoking affords people other things as well
Cigars are cool. Those pathetic little white things definitely are not cool.
Some concerns about his ideas:
There is research that suggests that people with a high social status are more selfish than those with a lower status (Dacher Keltner for example conducted experiments and found that even when you manipulate someone into thinking of himself as “high status”, the person is likely to become more selfish).
Additionally, I assume that people with higher education will perform better on the test. The problem here is that although there is social mobility, the socioeconomic background is still a deciding factor in the education level of people.
This would create a scenario where “elites” will have more voting power, which will also make politicians more focused on their issues as they want to get elected.
I also doubt the trustworthiness of the research that he mentioned of economists on rich people “naturally opposing free trade because it harms them”: Globalization and free trade lead to greater inequality and outsourcing, therefore benefiting the companies that could outsource work for example (in the last decade rich people have had a much higher increase in wealth than middle class or poor people).
Also, I don’t see political decisions as entirely depending on competency or empirical knowledge (like knowledge about employment, minimum wage …) because the differences between the parties are a lot about priorities and not so much differences of competency
Jason Brennan himself is literally evidence of everything you say here. Of course someone who is a PhD at a prestigious university in one of the richest countries in the history of humanity doesn't want the bottom half of the population to control anything lol, it basically goes without saying.
Counterpoint: Such a system could also give incentive to politicians to educate more of the polulation in order to gain them as voters. Also, what is considered a priority or not can also highly depend on competence.
@@chaosmonkey1595 sure some priorities depend on competence but there is no “general truth” that can be established (academic experts for example often argue against each others claims and both have at least some degree of competency in the area, also most of the times only predictions regarding the effects of new policies can be made but there is never a 100% degree of certainty) and concepts and priorities differ not only because of competence but also because of interests, upbringing …
In regard to politicians educating the masses, in someway that is already the goal and also practiced: Politicans emphasize problems and polices with data, scientific research … in order to gain support. But I would say that this is also accompanies a certain framing and interpretation of facts and information. If that wouldn’t be the case, politicians couldn’t form a political identity and might succeed as educators but not in a political realm. An effect that i could imagine is that some people will have more motivation to educate themselves in order to participate politically, but I don’t think this effect could hold up to the abuse of this system by elites, who have a lot of resources that they can invest to profit from this system. I would also figure that the questions of the test would ask for more or less superficial “education” (for example how high the employment rate is) rather than more complex ones, as those are difficult to rate as “correct” or “false”: if you have to describe what led to the financial crisis in 2008, there are a lot of factors and some varying explanations depending on how detailed the answers should be. Also, i think to some extent you can compare this proposed system to the past ones with “property qualification”, because in the past education and wealth were even more correlated. This meant that when only people with financial wealth could vote in the past, those were also the more educated people but nowadays we probably would agree that policies in those time periods weren’t superior to polices in areas where everyone had a vote.
@@chaosmonkey1595depends what you mean by education. For example, look at the extreme red states in the US. They are changing what they teach children about history in order to fit a political and ideological narrative that is compatible with the right wing, and incompatible with progressive perspectives. That being said I guess this is a problem really with all political systems.
@@chaosmonkey1595 it's literally happening as we speak and has been happening for centuries
after watching the whole thing, the impression i'm getting is that it seems like the biggest problem with democracy is that we haven't figured out how to do it properly yet
The problem is an uneducated electorate. High school dropouts have as much power as those with a Master's degree.
Well there’s your problem. You’re not supposed to watch the whole thing and comment your thoughts. You’re supposed to just read the title and post a self-flattering slogan.
i disagree but ill let u know my full thoughts after watching the full podcast
Easy solution: amendment that changes citizenship…
🔹 1) as of 01 Jan 2030, nobody will be born a citizen. Going forward, one is born “national.” In order to vote, you must pass the citizenship exam. If you pass the citizenship exam, you can vote (even if you are 5 years old). To retain citizenship, you must take the citizenship exam every 10 years (just like renewing a drivers license). All nationals and citizens receive a free passport at birth and every 10 years. If the passport is lost/stolen, you must replace it at your own expense. This passport is your new national ID to be used for voting and indicates if you are a citizen or a national. Nationals retain the same protections under law as a citizen, only difference is the ability to vote.
🔹 2) Also, all federal elections will now be (ranked choice, star, or STV). A candidate can only win if they receive 50%+1vote of all citizens in their district. If not enough votes for an absolute majority, the office remains vacant until it is important enough for the citizens to vote as a majority. Example: if 75% of citizens vote, a winner would need 67% to win. Details: A district has 100 citizens. The winner needs 51 votes for an absolute majority. If 75 citizens vote, the candidate would need 67% of the vote to earn the 51 votes.
@@KGTiberius Read a single book about American history and you'll quickly find that testing people for the right to vote is a terrible idea.
I've had similar lines of thinking about participation in government, but now I have a new term to describe one of these potential systems! The whole conversation was great and raises plenty of questions, but learning the term "epistocracy" I think will be especially useful. Great episode!
“A man is no less a slave because he is allowed to choose a new master once in a term of years.” - Lysander Spooner
and real slave:
The oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament.
Bourgeois democracy, the main "problem" with democracy that literally everyone in this comment section and the podcast itself is ignoring, how the capitalists and their managers have an insanely disproportionate representation in our systems
@@sierra1513based take
You can become a politican and stopp being a ”slave
Personal opinion: People who argue that only certain people should be allowed to vote are elitists. And I think probably the worst voters.
The people who believe that only certain people should vote always want to base the criteria for who should be allowed to vote off of what they personally are strong, or good, at. They aren't interested in what would be the best criteria to determine who should be able to vote; they only care about themselves meeting criteria and other people being excluded. So they always want a say in who can and can't vote, not for the sake of determining what is valuable in voting, but for the sake of deciding who CAN'T be allowed to vote. They treat the conversation as a way to play petty, preferential games. Most of them will tell you that only people who think exactly like them should be allowed to vote. It's treated as an opportunity to silence those who disagree with them.
An uninformed electorate isn't the issue. Rather the issue is an electorate which does not see their role as a duty but rather a means of getting what they want.
Technocrats or rule by the academia has its own problems in that the technocrats are entirely disconnected from the needs and perils of the general public.
This feels vaguely anti-vaxx.
I super disagree with this criticism as a real academic would not be ignorant to the plights of many, which is being uneducated
@@princeale1206 No true scotsman. Most academics are incredibly disconnected. Always have been.
The first part is super super important and I fully agree
What stops the technocrats from abusing the voting system to benefit themselves rather than somebody else? They could vote for their interests first and for the interests of the publics second (just enough not to get "overthrown")
Ultimately, the issue with democracy, like with any other political structure, is the human input.
And the scientificaly proved fact that it is evil psychopats who unavoidably come to power.
This statement doesn't provide any information about democracy...
This was an awesome conversation! Thanks to both of you for your thoughts.
What we really need - and what his proposed system still doesn't have - is a self-correcting mechanism. Alex pointed out one possible biasing issue, and he proposed that random selection would correct that. But the biases that really cause problems are the ones that we can't predict. So by the time we notice it things have advanced to the point where (like with first past voting) the ones in power would rather use it than fix it, then it's too late. But if there's an automatic mechanism that kicks in once enough people start complaining about something like that, then it fixes itself.
I think that's why the American system is so resistant to change.
People give us flack for never getting things done, but I think the point is that it corrects for temporarily insane publics
I think that's the beauty with his philosophy of valuing empiricism over ontological democracy. You test it out in the lab and try to find out how people will exploit the system, then you plug the holes, until the expected time for finding workarounds is long enough that you can shake up the system every so often that nobody can get too comfortable.
Revolutions and peasant uprisings may have this kind of function.
@@allisthemoist2244 I disagree I think America has been resilient despite its system not because of it, because of good human beings.
Given these two opposite views, how do we prove it though?
@@cyberneticbutterfly8506 you read what the founders originally said about it
There was a party here in Australia that wanted to try direct democracy with the constituency voting on every single amendment via app. One of the ways they tried to address the lack of knowledge in the constituency was to give people the ability to pass their vote to an expert, which I thought was in interesting concept. A lot of people might opine on topics in public they aren't really equipped to have an opinion on, but in private, they KNOW there are people more qualified in any given area and might be happy to pass their vote on a particular issue to such an expert. Of course, it depends on who gets chosen to be an expert and how good the constituency is at identifying one, but if it's always working academics and scientists, that's going to be far superior than just leaving it with a party of politicians (who often have no more experience than being a rich kid and a lawyer).
I think that the biggest weakness in both democracy and activism is that people think it’s their responsibility to apply themselves even when they know very little about the issue at hand and are not personally invested enough to research and problem solve for it. The mentality of “If you’re not part of the solution then you’re part of the problem” doesn’t result in people investing themselves into the issue. It just makes those people, who are no less ignorant of the subject than before, more susceptible to manipulation as they fall prey to mob mentality.
Why should I trust the judgment of the academic ? They may or may not be an expert but their chosen action may still harm me
@@JohnM-sw4sc Why should you trust them to know more about their field than someone who has never studied it? Isn't that obvious? Do you not understand how expertise works? If you don't want policy decided by objective evidence, then what you are saying you prefer is policy decided by emotion and whim. Which do you think will be more likely to result in harm, or negative outcomes?
@@PinataOblongata blind adherence to the authority is the midwits favorite cry
Expertise and credibility are determined by small bodies of humans capable of their own biases and political aims.
The only insurance against this is to get a very large sampling of the expertise and even then you must still consult reason and common sense.
But the amount of single study backed claims and clearly biased experts involved in our political processes is concerning.
Not to mention I said an academic, not all experts. My concern is mostly aimed at those who never leave academia and venture in the field. Those whose minds exist purely in the theoretical and hypothetical. The economist who tells us 2008 can’t happen because “the experts don’t predict it” - it is no wiser to trust someone who never leaves the ivory tower than it is to consult an oracle.
@@JohnM-sw4sc That’s valid but it sounds like you get to choose who you give it to. Sounds a lot like the American system of choosing representatives but better.
Democracy basically means...
For the people...
Of the people...
By the people...
... But the people are r...
Your channel is growing fast, you have gotten very close to 700k, keep it up.
706k now
I like his proposal at the end of getting ordinary people decide what it's important to know to be an informed voter. It's basically a form of meta-cognition, but for a population.
The first mistake was not recognizing we are an oligarchy disguised as a democratic republic
Winston Churchill, House of Commons, 11 November 1947:
"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.…"
He was right. What the guy is trying to argue here is that we shouldn't ascribe some sacredness to democracy based on it being the least terrible form of government *that has been attempted*. Maybe there's something more optimal we haven't tried but we would never know unless we stopped this near-religious adherence to democracy.
@@jovazquez6102 try living in Russia, China, North Korea, Iran, for a while, then make up your mind.
Epistocracy != autocracy. Try engaging with the ideas, not with your straw men.@@ManuelCampagna
Yea. Manuel that's a straw man
@@enyichi nyaa nyaa nyaa
What a great episode, Jason was an excellent guest. Definitely tracking down more of his thoughts.
I think the "red scarf" analogy falls short. The reason voting is imbued with that symbolic meaing is kind of inherent to what voting is. Getting a scarf doesnt actually do anything for you, getting the right to vote actually gives you power, especially when we're talking about marginalised groups suddenly recieving a right they never used to have.
Getting the right to vote gives you basically no power. A single vote is meaningless. As you said voting *blocs* have power, but why not give them more power by doing statistical tests to find out how they would have voted if they were informed on basic things like "which political candidate favors gun control: Donald Trump or Joe Biden?"
@@jovazquez6102 No a single vote is not meaningless. Questions are easily manipulated to favour certain politics over others
Starship troopers says this well:
"When you vote, you are exercising political authority, you're using force. And force my friends is violence. The supreme authority from which all other authorities are derived."
Wow! Jason Brennan is a really great communicator. This was a great introduction into the ideas and arguments regarding democratic studies. Gave me a lot to think about.
Awesome you got Jason Brennan on!
This discussion was good for introductory purposes as clearly the variables in how government works or performs are too many to fully discuss them in a single quick rundown. A great example of a topic where trying to debate or be antagonistic on the topic would hurt clarify and meaning, unfortunately we are used to see ideas that are strange to us being challenged more harshly as we identify with them in a tribalistic level. I'd love to see you delve deeped into these topics in the future
This was a great conversation. Lots of back and forth, and the guest seems to know his material.
Personally I am in the camp that not "everyone" should vote because I do think that only the informed should vote. But as you discussed in this conversation, what kind of competancy test should be required to be a voter and who gets to write that test? I felt like the jury analogy was really good, and I never thought about it that way before.
As he said, just take random people from all walks of life and ask them to put questions on the test. Some people will put some wacky questions like 'What's the recipe for pumpkin pie', but if we believe in the 'Adults are responsible' theory, then they will put questions they THINK an informed voter would know.
If his main argument is that only select people are competent enough to make large governmental decisions, then let us facilitate the mass development of competence among the common people.
it wasn't just competency, it was competency and good faith. the second is quite important as well.
@@garrett6076 And thus we must perpetuate the mass adoption of good faith as well. He wants the best qualified to rule, and so we should focus on making everyone the best qualified. An oligarchy of philosophers isn’t nearly as cool as a democracy of philosophers.
Why would those in power voluntarily increase competition for positions of power?
@@SickegalAlien There are many many people who value fair distribution of power. And many political persons who represent that value. Their publicity is minimal, and we are accountable for that. We must replace the power hungry with the many advocates of democracy.
That's ridiculous. As DeMaistre pointed out in the wake of the French Revolution. That's not only romantic and purely theoretical utopianism, but the total state power needed to enforce the mass development of competence and good faith amongst the common people is going to cost more than the state has a budget for.
really enjoyed this conversation as usual, this guy has some interesting insights
What about THESE insights?:
🐟 22. ILLEGITIMATE GOVERNANCES:
SOCIALISM (and its more extreme form, communism) is intrinsically evil, because it is based on the ideology of social and economic egalitarianism, which is both a theoretical and a practical impossibility. Equality exists solely in abstract concepts such as mathematics and arguably in the sub-atomic realm. Many proponents of socialism argue that it is purely an economic system and therefore independent of any particular form of governance. However, it is inconceivable that socialism/communism could be implemented on a nationwide scale without any form of government intervention. If a relatively small number of persons wish to unite in order to form a commune or worker-cooperative, that is their prerogative, but it could never work in a country with a large population, because there will always exist entrepreneurs desirous of engaging in wealth-building enterprises. Even a musician who composes a hit tune wants his song to succeed and earn him inordinate wealth.
Socialism reduces individual citizens to utilities, who, in practice, are used to support the ruling elite, who are invariably despotic scoundrels, and very far from ideal leaders (i.e. compassionate and righteous monarchs). Those citizens who display talent in business or the arts are either oppressed, or their gifts are coercively utilized by the corrupt state. Despite purporting to be a fair and equitable system of wealth distribution, those in leadership positions seem to live a far more luxurious lifestyle than the mass of menial workers. Wealth is effectively stolen from the rich. Most destructively, virtuous and holy teachings (“dharma”, in Sanskrit) are repressed by the irreligious and ILLEGITIMATE “government”.
The argument that some form of government WELFARE programme is essential to aid those who are unable to financially-support themselves for reasons beyond their control, is fallacious. A righteous ruler (i.e. a saintly monarch) will ensure the welfare of each and every citizen by encouraging private welfare. There is no need for a king to extort money from his subjects in order to feed and clothe the impoverished. Of course, in the highly-unlikely event that civilians are unwilling to help a person in dire straits, the king would step-in to assist that person, as one would expect from a patriarch (father of his people). The head of any nation ought to be the penultimate patriarch, not a selfish buffoon.
DEMOCRACY is almost as evil, because, just as the rabble favoured the murderous Barabbas over the good King Jesus, the ignorant masses will overwhelmingly vote for the candidate which promises to fulfil their inane desires, rather than one which will enforce the law, and promote a wholesome and just society. Read Chapter 12 for the most authoritative and concise exegesis of law, morality, and ethics, currently available.
Even in the miraculous scenario where the vast majority of the population are holy and righteous citizens, it is still immoral for them to vote for a seemingly-righteous leader. This is because that leader will not be, by definition, a king. As clearly and logically explicated in the previous chapter of this Holy Scripture, MONARCHY is the only lawful form of governance. If an elected ruler is truly righteous, he will not be able to condone the fact that the citizens are paying him to perform a job (which is a working-class role), and that an inordinate amount of time, money and resources are being wasted on political campaigning. Furthermore, an actual ruler does not wimpishly pander to voters - he takes power by (divinely-mandated) force, as one would expect from the penultimate alpha-male in society (the ultimate alpha-male being a priest).
The thought of children voting for who will be their parents or teachers, would seem utterly RIDICULOUS to the average person, yet most believe that they are qualified to choose their own ruler - they are most assuredly not. Just as a typical child fails to understand that a piece of sweet, juicy, healthy, delicious fruit is more beneficial for them than a cone of pus-infested, fattening, diabetes-inducing ice-cream, so too can the uneducated proletariat not understand that they are unqualified to choose their own leader, even after it is logically explained to them (as it is in this chapter, as well as in the previous chapter). And by “uneducated”, it is simply meant that they are misguided in the realities of life and in righteous living (“dharma”, in Sanskrit), not in facts and figures or in technical training. Intelligence doesn't necessarily correlate to wisdom. No socialist or democratic government will educate its citizens sufficiently well that the citizens have the knowledge of how to usurp their rule.
To put it frankly, democracy is rule by the “lowest common denominator”.
It should be obvious that ANARCHY can never ever succeed, because even the smallest possible social unit (the nuclear family) requires a dominator. Any family will fall-apart without a strict male household head. In fact, without the husband/father, there is no family, by definition. The English noun “husband” comes from the Old Norse word “hûsbôndi”, meaning “master of the house”.
The same paradigm applies to the extended family, which depends on a strong patriarchal figure (customarily, the eldest or most senior male). Likewise with clans, tribes, villages, towns, cities, and nations or countries.
Unfortunately, there are many otherwise-intelligent persons who honestly believe that an ENTIRE country can smoothly run without a leader in place. Any sane person can easily understand that even a nuclear family is unable to function properly without a head of the house, what to speak of a populous nation. The reason for anarchists' distrust of any kind of government is due to the corrupt nature of democratic governments, and the adulteration of the monarchy in recent centuries. However, if anarchists were to understand that most all so-called “kings/queens” in recent centuries were not even close to being true monarchs, they may change their stance on that inane “system”.
Most of the problems in human society are directly or indirectly attributable to this relatively modern phenomenon (non-monarchies), since it is the government’s role and sacred DUTY to enforce the law (see Chapter 12), and non-monarchical governments are themselves unlawful.
One of the many sinister characteristics of democracy, socialism, and other evil forms of governance, is the desire for their so-called “leaders” to control, or at least influence, the private lives of every single citizen (hence the term “Nanny State”). For example, in the wicked, decadent nations in which this holy scripture was composed, The Philippine Islands and The Southland (or “Australia”, as it is known in the Latin tongue), the DEMONIC governments try, and largely succeed, in controlling the rights of parents to properly raise, discipline and punish their children according to their own morals, compulsory vaccination of infants, enforcing feminist ideology, limiting legitimate powers an employer has over his servants, subsidizing animal agriculture, persecuting religious leaders (even to imprisonment and death, believe it or not. Personally, I have been jailed thrice for executing God’s perfect and pure will), and even trying to negatively influence what people eat and wear.
Not that a government shouldn’t control what its citizens wear in public, but it should ensure that they are MODESTLY dressed, according to the guidelines outlined in Chapter 28, which is hardly the case in Australia, the Philippines, and similar nations. At least ninety-nine per cent of Filipinas, for instance, are transvestinal, despite Philippines pretending to be a religious nation.
Cont...
Brilliant conversation.
There is a possibility to consider that the way people vote - stupidly and tribally - is not necessary an inseparable feature of the human condition in and of itself, but also conditioned by the "democratic" system in question. The truth is, there is very little individual agency and few ways for a person to feel their vote matters or their voice is heard in most democratic systems. When this happens, people act pragmatically - not rationally, but pragmatically - and turn to things that actually matter in their daily life and which they can actually appreciate - their tribe and social belonging. It's not that they don't have ideological values, it's that realistically, cementing themselves in a tribe gives them more benefit (at least in the short term) than considering values that the political system will likely ignore anyways.
In theory, the thing that protects against this is voter anonymity - since there is absolutely no way for anyone to find out who you voted for, you should theoretically be both unable to milk it for social benefits or be attacked on its basis.
I feel like this very fundamental, and useful tool of democracy, has been forgotten about in contemporary discourse, even though it survives legally speaking.
There is no evidence that non-whites can be convinced to vote non-tribally. There were attempts to do it and they had a failure rate close to 100%
Freedom to choose is necessarily freedom to choose poorly. It seems unlikely that any alternative to democracy can be guaranteed to produce a good outcome for me. If a good outcome is not guaranteed, I would rather have some agency in how things unfold. If I am to have a bad outcome, I would rather have chosen it than have it chosen for me.
That's all well and good, but there is a very real question about whether choosing policies is the same thing as choosing outcomes.
If, for example, what Bob primarily cares about is increasing the financial prosperity of the country, and he falsely believe that protectionism does that, and votes for protectionism, does it *increase* Bob's autonomy if his vote gets counted highly, or does it reduce it? I think an argument could be made that giving Bob precisely what he wants is malicious compliance rather than actual representation.
@@tudornaconecinii3609 The last line of my comment is poorly worded. I did not mean to suggest that choosing polices and choosing outcomes are the same thing. Rather, I meant that if I'm experiencing a poor outcome, due to a policy decision, I would rather have had a say in choosing the policy that led to the outcome, than have had no agency at all.
@@t3tsuyaguy1 That is definitely a choice. I don't think it's the only one and I don't think it's undisputably the one that maximizes for autonomy, however.
The way I see it, though, the reason why I usually go vote is to steer society in a direction according to my values. It isn't to get a *specific* policy passed. (there may be times in which I DO one-issue-vote, but in those Brennan's system wouldn't actually weigh my vote down, because my policy IS my end, definitionally). So I would actually want my vote to be ignored if it leads to bad outcomes, yes - remember, Brenann's system doesn't downgrade your vote based on an arbitrary set of values of what makes an outcome bad, but based on what YOUR values are.
It’s my informed opinion that this was a very interesting interview. It gets my upvote ✅
I like the point that I think Jason was getting at: if we're pro-democracy not because we believe all people deserve to have a say in politics, but rather because we believe that democracy is the best political system for achieving society's collective interests, then perhaps we should move on from democracy if we someday develop a political system that does a better job than democracy at achieving that collective good.
Whether that's possible is a totally separate question, of course.
the competency 'test' is investing and caring more for public education. put experts in charge of education, not politicians. an educated electorate is healthy for democracy and society.
Democracy means you can get them out of power without violent revolution. Seems pretty key to me.
When he's referring to democracy here he means, a system where everyone gets one equally weighted vote. You could easily have systems that don't apply that rule where you don't need violent revolution to get people out of power.
@@thomaspickin9376this exploits at the very least the half of the population that doesn't pass the patent of vote, making them vulnerable to exploitation from the rest who do pass the patent of vote
My opinion is that every system can works given certain variables and cannot works in others, if there is a technical emergency democracy is totally useless, you don't vote for who pilots the airplane, you shouldn't vote for who decides for ecological policies, but you need to vote to elect the representative that can protect yourself from exploitation, the solution seems to me to create a more fragmented system in which certain agencies can only act upon a certain domain and not others, anf our system is already like that, i think we just need to add more agencies to achieve that
@@thomaspickin9376you could easily end up with a system where a small number of elites entrench a deeply unpopular political class in power - who are resented by the masses
Definitely getting his book. A viewpoint I've never really delves into
Congrats on 700k subs!
I think the argument that 'democracy gets rid of bad policies, bad individuals, or bad governments' was dismissed far too lightly. Accountability is an advantage of democracy that cannot be easily reproduced by other systems of government. Peaceful transition of government was not mentioned. The mandate of an elected government is not mentioned. Too much of this video seemed to be covering the wrong arguments.
Democracy encourages "bad policies, bad individuals, or bad governments" as much as it discourages it. Most dictators came onto the scene as representatives of democracy.
As far as accountability goes, representatives are only held accountable for going against partisanship at this point. They're held accountable by a relatively small constituency with narrow special interests and only judged based on how well they conform to those interests. Peaceful transition only works when a country lacks serious political fragmentation.
I enjoyed this episode.
The guest provided all necessary context and explained his ideas well.
With regards go democracy, I believe that Jason is correct in his analysis. However, I do not believe any real modifications for who can vote could be actionable for the acknowledged reason that democracy is so ingrained as "good" in the social psyche.
Rather than changing who votes, I believe we could change who gets to run for office.
I'm 29 minutes in and this is an AMAZING video. Definitely worth anyone's time!!!
A great discussion on how to improve our current form of democracy. The level of average voters' understanding of economy, science, governance, and state craft is frightening. Any of Jason's ideas sound better than the system we have today. But I also not hopeful that any of them would be implemented or even debated in our lifetime.
I like randomly selecting representatives which corrects for many structural weaknesses cumulating over time.
I like the idea where the representatives are kinda like delegates thus having varied voting power among themselves. I think this gives more clear meaning for all votes over the whole term.
And I like having optionally a negative vote because sometimes you know better who isn't fit to rule than who is best. Maybe more people would like to vote against the bad people than for the not so awful people.
o.o
if we elected random people as representatives we probably wouldnt get anything done because people have different beliefs
I vote against everyone who aren't my favored candidates.
We’ve been in an oligarchy for a long time. What makes it worse is that it is also a kakistocracy now: rule by the least competent.
(Yet another -ocracy I just learned about 🙄)
When wasn't there an oligarchy in your view? Is this like a make America Great again thing where we imagine a world without problems at some vague point in time in the past? 'Rule by least competent' goes in the long list of assertions based on vague examples and feelings as well. Vibin your way through your ideologically like the video mentioned, it seems to me.
@@willjapheth23789 Never implied there wasn’t in one form or other. Nor did I insinuate it was only in one or another political party. It’s also true in State and local governments.
Thou presumeth too much methinks.
@@paulwicht6294 just seems like your standards for what makes oligarchy is all vibes and zero substance. Likewise with your standard for competence. Anyone can whine about their system with loaded language and zero description or alternative. Hence why you feel I presumed because you said nothing of substance. Same crap I've seen a 1000 times over. Even you reply had zero substance.
@@willjapheth23789 Where did I set my own standard for what is an oligarchy? There’s a simple definition for it that I did not create. Same with kakistocracy.
I only used these terms descriptively based on my observations on current affairs that I think are accurate.
Nor was it my intention to insinuate solutions but you seem to insist that I have a hidden agenda.
If I intended to state my political opinions I would have made that clear. I don’t listen to Alex for political debate or opinion but for his interesting conversations with knowledgeable people.
I’m sure I would disagree on some things in a friendly chat with him, but he’s not banging his desk with his conceptions demanding that listeners agree with him.
A very rare quality I would like to see more of. I am grateful for having bumped into him recently.
@@paulwicht6294 I see people through around these words without any justification in the same way people say Biden or Obama are socialist. So I find it equally annoying. There is no reason to imagine the US as an oligarchy that does basically call all other modern systems oligarchies as well. It's basically just a way to complain without having to explain the alternative, like when people call literally every government program socialist, therefore bad. People need to have a higher rhetorical standard than to just throw around words that have serious implications like they are memes and expect it to mean anything. I guess it's a pet peeve of mine.
Something I've been considering with starting with businesses and small municipalities, is to have advanced AI continually run the organization - Not only would it run the current policies better, but it could constantly receive surveys and data - and based off a series of heuristics, like reducing suffering, increasing wellbeing and increasing understanding - could operate major portions of the work, and then we could have a series of seperate AIs, running on different models, to validate whether the AI is running according to the best interest of the people and its values.
You want Skynet? Because that's how you get Skynet.
@@BuddhaMonkey7 stfu bro. No one is giving ai the nuke code
Fascinating arguments, I'm amazed people don't talk about with "some people get to vote" systems, who decides who gets to vote, if only some people get to vote? Are we going to base it on a literacy test that naturally excludes people who grew up speaking different dialects of the national language? How about we base it on a math test that discriminates against rural voters? People who follow a particular religion?
It sounds like a great way for private interest groups to consolidate power. Not that they can't do that with the current system, I'm just saying it doesn't fix everything.
It's always interesting (to say the least) how people from rich countries love to talk about "democracy" and never talk about the inherent problem of super rich people and people starving. Like, Jason in the beginning mentions the problem of a group of people having power over another, but doesn't economical dominance strike him as such? Strange how they bounce around the topic but never actually touch it.
Absolutely right
the group of people having power over another is one of the main reasons people can be rich and starving
The conversation is really about political democracy, economic democracy is socialism.
Bourgeois democracy, the main "problem" with democracy that literally everyone in this comment section and the podcast itself is ignoring, how the capitalists and their managers have an insanely disproportionate representation in our systems
@@Drkon6economic democracy is inseperable from political democracy, after all the entire point of the state is to organize the productive forces
It’s an intriguing concept (I’ve always been fairly sceptical of democracy), however my gut reaction is it seems very convoluted and far more open to abuse and I’m not convinced the gains would outweigh the effort/risk. Currently my thoughts are many democracy’s have evolved slowly over time and have various checks and balances in them, many of which may not be entirely obvious but are nonetheless important. Still it was a very interesting, so thank you.
Fascinating. I have had my critiques of democracy for a while, this gave me more to think about. Especially, the _people vote for social and not for political reasons_ part.
Trying out new forms of government is important. I think there are better forms than democracy.
Great discussion. Thank you.
Including a discussion of the Electoral College in the US would have been interesting.
17:31 _"And in that world having the right to vote is treated like being a medical doctor yeah some people can do it some people don't it's not a big deal we license it the way we license plumbers and medical doctors"_
In a sense, this is the world we live in, indeed, not everyone get to vote in the congress/parliament/senate/... Some people can do it (MPs, representants), but it's not a license, it's a vote.
Love this guy and nice episode!
Fascinating!
For me, the primary choice is one of ethics and morality. I'm in favor the radical non-paternalism, and from that standpoint, we must be allowed to vote against our own best interests. I'd rather be the one to mess up my own life, than to have those mistakes imposed upon me.
The ridiculous easy counter to that is you don't live in a one man society. The state has a vested interest in not having a large portion of society fail. Like east Germany vs west Germany issues.
@@willjapheth23789define fail?
@Dan16673 damage the overall prosperity of the country. If a bunch of people start dying or crippling themselves on drugs or unsafe practices, a society will almost always find a way to reduce the prevalence of the practice for its own sake. It doesn't even have to be a real threat sometimes like with religious conformity. Unless the society literally does want you to suffer as with minority discrimination. Typically these conformity instincts are enforced on the local level, but given modern governments have national programs that depend of the predictable productivity and welfare of the society, they have a strong incentive to stop even small national health threats or even crap like birthrates as with Poland.
@@willjapheth23789 Who gets to decide that though? If you are saying that the "state" is separate from the "people", then you are describing some sort of tyrannical situation (in the blandest sort, just any autocratic top-down form of rule). If the people get to choose who controls the state, then you have not actually solved the above issue, as the people get to vote in those who control the state.
No system is without flaws, and thus this is why I choose morality and ethics to inform my decision.
@garretnarjes782 well institutions like people typically want to survive so you can predict the actions of an institution by it's interests which ideally align with the well being of the people as democracy is an attempt ensure. Institutions that don't protect their interests tend to not exist for very long. I say institutions because companies and unions and organizations also tend to be self preserving too. It doesn't explain all decisions same with people, but does a good job of explaining why a leader might worry about demographic issues, like obesity. You can break the decision making down to the individual people but it gets too complicated to be useful to predict anything with limited information.
I seem to remember an Epistocracy being tried in the Simpsons: Dr Hibbert, Comic Book Store guy, the geeky scientist and Lisa were a self-annoited intellectual class who would rule benevolently in a rational and enlightened fashion. Needless to say, it didn't prove to be any of those things.
That's also a cartoon tho
@@DarthVaderfr And also satire
Also the thing in the Simpsons was not an epistocracy, it was a dictatorial technocracy. The entire point of an epistocracy is that everyone still gets to vote, but the voting power of each person scales with their intelligence/competence. It's not for 3 people to be philosopher kings. In fact, one of the arguments *for* epistocracy is that it's more robust than democracy to voting a dictator in power.
The most compelling argument for democracy is the number of people risking their lives to escape authoritarian countries and trying to get into democracies. I think it was Churchill who said that democracy is the worst form of government except for every other form of government ever invented.
I would love to see you have a discussion on this sort of topic with Rory Stewart!
The definition of "perform" and "work" should be more precise. Every political system that exists today works... For some groups of people.
Good discussion; thanks!
Polyarchy was the American system of political hierarchy during my early years (before Reagan.) The problem with polyarchy is finding and elevating "responsible men" to high office. In America's capitalist system, post-Citizens United, money, not ideas, is the primary political currency. There is no meaningful correlation between wealth and good leadership let alone citizenship.
Agreed. Major problem crippling our democracy.
Maybe if we could fix it…
Money only effects issues people don't care about, that is true regardless of pre or post citizens united. It's a ridiculously US centric view to see political influence as purely monetary especially when you start trying to pin a particular date on it as if entrenched power hasn't always been a hurdle. And it's just offensive to suggest any such hurdle is effectively insurmountable.
😢
@@willjapheth23789 It is US-centric because the commenter was talking about the US. Additionally, there is US-based research about correlations between public support for policy, and actual policy - and it is clear that public support is _not_ what drives political decisions in the US; unless you are wealthy, then there seems to be much more of a correlation.
@@lVideoWatcherl sure, thing. And how many of those policies have a huge activist group or lack their of? Say prolife? And happened to the supreme court again? Trump? How exactly did he win in 2016? People obviously have an influence and no amount of money is going to change some people's minds. Candidates with all the money lose all the time. Money is one factor, a motivated political movement is another, especially if they have a clear policy goal, like prolife and unlike blm. Money ≠ effectively spent, money ≠ convincing. Money does grease the wheels though, especially for issues no one is fighting over.
Congratulations Alex for 700k subs
The saddest part of this conversation in the first place is that you can't assign different weight to voters because no one in power could effectively do such a thing or be inclined to do such a thing. What criteria would be involved? IQ? Capital? Education? All of them should factor in but there will be a strong bias from those in power to tilt the balance.
Good point. You could also find that some Ethnicities end up being over represented as they already are in education, salary etc. Could lead to riots, or could lead to things like affirmative action and DEI in the voting and election process. Either way it aounds much worse than the admittedly very imperfect system we already have.
Just read through all these comments and it is abundantly clear why we have to retain our right to vote. ALL of us. Roughly 1475 comments at the time of this writing and almost everyone of them is operating from the assumption that they would be in the elite that is allowed to vote. A solid percentage of them then lament that we can't remove human power completely and put computers in charge so we can just never think again. They firmly believe that AI could never be biased. This is exactly with we have to retain democracy. So far there isn't anyone in this comments section that represents my views. I am disgusted by the majority of these takes because they all want to give away all of our autonomy. I will continue to think for myself, because I would like to be able to continue to think.
a wise man once said that the best argument against democracy is a conversation with the average voter
America's founding fathers were right not everyone should be able to vote
I dont know if I'd call Churchill wise. More stubborn than anything else.
Wouldn't want to praise Churchill lol, plus if weren't for democracy, you wouldn't be talking right now
@@user-iv1bv6kv6xChurchill was paraphrasing Plato. Plato criticized democracy in his work "The Republic." One main argument was that he believed democracy could lead to the rule of the unqualified and the ignorant, as it allowed citizens to make decisions regardless of their expertise.
@@Deleteyourself83 ah my apologies
Polarization is the biggest problem right now, and the solution is just better voting methods.
@@Anothertakeonthis Do you think people are just psychologically prone to polarization or something?
@@Anothertakeonthis I agree. Some tribalism is inevitable. The US's problem is systemic polarization which disqualifies third parties. Having four parties instead would be a huge victory. It's noteworthy that the "best" election systems which were recently developed have not been applied in any country yet.
@@vu4y3fo846y With voting, especially of the 2 party kind, one party wins and the other loses so it lends itself to polarisation. You can lessen this effect if the power of the government is limited. If the government is very powerful then losing can be catastrophic and so losers consent gets withdrawn.
Democracy is an idea and as such a good one. In practice not entirely so. The problem is there isn't any better alternative. So, we will continue talking about it as if it worked.
What a please t surprise to see Brennan here.
Any chance you could get Hoppe on your show? That would be marvelous indeed.
less than 4 minutes in and im already in love with it.. brains, bah they are lost, no more so on my self. Hence my drinking.. But i love it. keep it it up folks. We all need it
Love, in the theological sense, is not a feeling or a sentiment, though it is often accompanied by those psychological states. In its essence, love is an act of the will, the willing of the good of the other as other. To love is really to want what is good for the other. To love is really to want what is good for someone else and then to act on that desire. Many of us are kind, generous, or just, but only so that someone else might return the favor and be kind, generous, or just to us. This is indirect egotism rather than love. Real love is an ecstatic act, a leaping outside of the narrow confines of my needs and desires and an embrace of the other's good for the other's sake. It is an escape from the black hole of the ego, which tends to draw everything around it into itself. In light of this understanding, we can now see that God's creation of the world is a supernatural act of love. God, it is true, has no need of anything outside of himself, therefore, the very existence of the universe is proof that it has been loved into being, that is to say, desired utterly for its own sake.(Barron)
This episode was a great change from the frequent videos on religion. More varied topics are very much welcomed!
One problem with the questionnaire is that some questions, while they may technically have an objective answer, are very difficult for even informed people to evaluate, while also having different answers predicting wildly different political viewpoint. If, for example, one question was "Is there a genocide in the middle east right now?", then no matter what answer is objectively correct, the criterion of what counts as "informed" will be very biased in one political direction
In such a hypothetical scenario where the answer to a question is lopsided, no matter what the question is, but the population feels that the question is important enough to be considered on the ballot,
Then all that scenario shows is that there's a serious disconnect between the government and the governed on this one issue.
All the more reason to include it.
Alternatively, if there was no disconnect about such a lopsided issue, then the electorate wouldn't think to bring it up.
In the USA we require people to take a civics test in order to obtain citizenship, but sadly a lot of Americans wouldn't pass even this simple test when they are granted birthright citizenship. I think it's fair to ask people to take a civics test each election cycle (every 4 years) in order to register to vote, that the test should be passable by people who score one standard deviation below the average, that the test doesn't need to be monitored and therefore a person could literally cheat to get the answers if they didn't know them, and that the test should include knowledge of every government position that they are eligible to vote for. A simple test would be a substantial deterrent for a lot of people to vote and therefore it would be argued that it is equivalent to voter suppression, however it seems unreasonable to believe that a person lacking so lacking in motivation to vote that they would find it too much to ask to understand the functions of the government positions that they are voting for is really casting a meaningful vote, or that they are truly being disenfranchised by such a test when it seems that it's more in the interest of elected officials to increase the volume of mindless voters than it is in the interests of the public or individual voters.
It was already made illegal because it was tried the south for bad faith reasons and there is zero reason to trust any new test would be issued in good faith.
These civics tests could be made into dogmatic purity tests. If the questions go from something like, "Who are the twelve justices of the supreme court?" to something like, "Is free trade good or bad?" then we have a religious test with the test being based on economic philosophy rather than spirituality.
@@anthonysabatino4317 I think that these slippery slope arguments get a lot of traction in the USA to stop a lot of reasonable actions from taking place because there isn't actually a slippery slope so long as there are clear limitations. For example, if self defense is legal, does that make all homicide legal? No, because self-defense is clearly defined. I have a hunch you'd bend over backwards in the opposite direction to justify some sort of qualifier for the 2nd Amendment, even though that's arguably a much more real slippery slope than requiring that you certify basic understanding of what you are voting for before you get to exercise the right to vote.
@@erinmagner What are the limitations you would propose to stop the civics test from becoming a purity test? How many questions do you think it should have? Also, you assume quite wrongly about my stance on the Second Amendment. I counter your accusation of slippery slope fallacy with the guilt by association fallacy.
@@anthonysabatino4317 It was just a guess about the 2nd Amendment that it would be something meaningful to you personally; that doesn't mean that the point about the slippery slope changes. With gun control, the term "safety" is pretty vague even if we can find a general agreement on what people need to know about gun safety and how to evaluate their understanding of it. With civics it's much more black and white because everything is quite literally written down and defined by law; it's not subjective at all even if laws are subject to interpretation because the actual text is an object. I proposed the limitations in the original comment so I'm not sure what you didn't understand about them. As far as test length it should resemble a driver license test, or an appropriate length shorter than that to assess the information relevant to the government positions that are up for a vote over the next four years.
Wow! What a brilliant idea for the test at 47:16
It's hard to watch something that I fundamentally disagree with so strongly, but I find it is usually better to power through these things and try to understand where they are coming from. Great job from Alex by mentioning some of the better arguments as well.
Love Jason Brennan. You should talk to Mike Huemer as well!
Democracy has become a dogma that perhaps should be questioned. I broadly agree with Brennan in that Democracy works so differently from how it's supposed to on paper. So different that it's almost difficult to call it democracy.
I wonder if different implementations of democracy should be tried more readily to truly test which is best
@@theowainwright7406 Try them first at-home
That's because Western democracies are liberal democracies, notice how the word "liberal" comes first. The democracy part isn't actually important at all, what's important is the liberalism.
Oh boy, that´s just old elitism ashamed to say its name
Maybe elitism has value if it works and has proper checks and balances. You should come up with a better argument for democracy than using pejoratives
@@jovazquez6102 you don´t meet the requirements to have a vote here, so no
@@ernestogiusti5802 If you don't want to engage in good faith then why are you here?
@@jovazquez6102Being antidemocratic is almost necessarily bad-faith as far as I'm concerned
@@raskolnikov3799 You're being dogmatic
In defence of democracy, complex social systems are exceedingly rarely one-way causal. Jason put aside the arguments about democracy being good in itself, and said that "once you get to that point where you're instrumental about government; then the government can be flawed, it just need to better than the alternatives" - but this seems unlikely. When people are asked to take responsibility for something it affects them. Asked what they think also affects them.
Here's a real-world example: Sweden, as you may know, took a somewhat different approach to deal with the Covid epidemic. Individuals, venues, care homes, schools and so on were asked to follow the guidelines, but no punishments or police actions were on the table. The guidelines presented were those previously prepared in case of a pandemic.
In Sweden, the experts in the relevant authorities are less beholden to whatever government happens to be in power. They are expected to due their duty and they enjoy substantial freedom to do so. Herein Sweden rely on professionalism rather than elections. The politicians never ran the C-19 show.
Wether Sweden's policies were the best or not is beside the issue. Thing is, Swedish people bucked the international trend and did NOT lose confidence in the government or authorities, as measured before the pandemic compared to after the whole ordeal was over. They were asked to help, never forced by other means than social pressure and being a decent citizen. In case of a new pandemic, Sweden still holds a strong card that other countries played out and lost: trust.
I'd like to put it to you that something like this may be at play with democracy. Having met people from more or less democratic societies it certainly *feels* like it. I lived in Taiwan a year and people there were very different from mainland China. Could be down to a billion other factors, but I contend participation in all forms counts. Apart from some basic psychological tenants, anecdotes and bro-science is what I have since this stuff is bordeline impossible to research properly.
Democracy is about more than best policy outcomes. It's also about creating the best people.
One issue with ignorance-bias corrected democracy I'd like to see Jason elaborate on is that he stated that most voters don't have strong personal preferences or values and taking this at face value improving the quality of information available to indifferent voters wouldn't change their votes, unless we have evidence to say that voters are indifferent as a consequence of their ignorance.
Why not run the government by jury duty? I think you would always want to keep a central government body with some powers as the ability to make quick reactions in the face of crisis or war is crucial. What if on every bill instead of it being decided by members of government you ran it like a court case with randomly selected members from the public, sequestered for safety, and you had expert witnesses and opposing arguments and the like. Every different bill is treated as a separate case with a new randomly selected jury. I wonder if this would work well? Seems it would accomplish many of the positives that Jason's system has but dodge the problem of making a 'test'.
Why not - but hopefully assisted and advised by specialist AI cyborg technocrats
The issue there is that there'd be no way of holding those decisionmakers accountable. Juries in court cases are hardly known for infallibility
I have always thought that government by jury is a promising theory to try. There would certainly be benefits.
@@supernukey419 Is a professional politician more accountable? or less fallible?
@@supernukey419they arent accountable now
I always get back to the same place with this.
Sure, changes in your system can improve outcomes.
But, what is always going to be more crucial is how your society functions at the level of community. How much cooperation, integration and communication is happening at the ground level?
If the answer is very little or even none, no amount of systems updates are going to improve poor content.
Jonathan Pageau talks about this a lot. When you gut every intermediary, the government kind of has no choice but to take over.
Well said
The system should facilitate for everyone who wants to participate to do so in the BEST WAY, and for anyone who doesn't want to do so, the same.
I thoroughly agree with your push back to the competency test solution for uninformed voters. I would also add that it would be exceedingly difficult to determine that the random selection of those assigned to creating the test is truly random. We would also run into the issue of how to compel those selected to participate. There would need to be a new heap of laws to allow us to pick those that create laws on our behalf...
I tend to agree with Churchill's summarization of democracy but I resist tyranny in any form, including the sugar-coated variety.
It would be interesting to have a system where people vote for issues rather than people. Have the candidates take a test themselves and then match how the candidates deal with issues vs what the voters want. This would remove bias towards people of similar race, gender, and other visual appearances and focus on what the voters want changed. Sadly, I don't see a system like this ever being implemented.
Terrible idea. Candidates can - and sometimes they should - change their minds about an issue while in office. The only way your idea would work is if representatives and executives could somehow be bound and compelled to act the way that they said they would, which must prevent them from changing their minds. Alternatively, they aren’t compelled at all, but then how do you vote out someone who says they’ll address your favorite issues and then they don’t? If you just vote for your issues again, you’ll get the same ineffective official.
@@leithcrowther6086 I don't see how this is any different than the system we are currently in. People's opinion of those in positions of power can change over time. At no point did I say there needs to be a strict adherence to the issues and people would likely exploit this as much as they do the current system. It's an imperfect idea sure but I don't see how it's worse than voting for popularity.
@@leithcrowther6086that’s the point, instead of hoping a candidate will correctly interact with an issue, why not remove that element completely and have direct votes on issues.
People ain’t ready for this convo but that’s what The DPRK and Cuba do and both their political participation and approval crush the wests 🤷♂️
@@DigitalHayds You use two authoritarian regimes as your example, one that is probably the worst place to live on the planet? Nobody in North Korea gets to decide anything that their dear leader doesn't want. Nice tankie apologetics.
Democracy is whoever has the most freedom coupons in the US.
The US is a theocracy, not a democracy.
'one nation under god.'
Separation between church and state my sweet cherry arse.
i think the best argument for democracy is the idea of the wisdom of the crowd, sufficiently large data sets tend to reduce bias and error leading to a generally more informed outcome. This however can be equally detrimental for democracy because people can, and often do, choose things based off of bias rather than information leading to the negative effect of crowds where the choices made are substantially worse. Me personally, being a technocrat, I would say the solution is limiting the ability of people to vote based off of peoples subject literacy and identified subject bias. probably an unpopular opinion but unlimited free franchise that is tainted by ideological inculcation does not exactly facilitate an effective electorate imo.
Good definition of democracy, I cannot find fault with it. This might be another good interview.
Ranked Choice, Star voting, STV… and minimum of 50% + 1 voter of all eligible voters should approve to be legitimate. If unable to get enough people to participate to get 50% total voters, the role isn’t important enough and should be left vacant until enough voters care.
I think the competency test for government positions is paramount.
the makers of the test could mold the test to get people they want in power get in power
Easy solution: amendment that changes citizenship and voting requirements.
🔹 1) as of 01 Jan 2030, nobody will be born a citizen. Going forward, one is born “national.” In order to vote, you must pass the citizenship exam. If you pass the citizenship exam, you can vote (even if you are 5 years old). To retain citizenship, you must take the citizenship exam every 10 years (just like renewing a drivers license). All nationals and citizens receive a free passport at birth and every 10 years. If the passport is lost/stolen, you must replace it at your own expense. This passport is your new national ID to be used for voting and indicates if you are a citizen or a national. Nationals retain the same protections under law as a citizen, only difference is the ability to vote.
🔹 2) Also, all federal elections will now be (ranked choice, star, or STV). A candidate can only win if they receive 50%+1vote of all citizens in their district. If not enough votes for an absolute majority, the office remains vacant until it is important enough for the citizens to vote as a majority. Example: if 75% of citizens vote, a winner would need 67% to win. Details: A district has 100 citizens. The winner needs 51 votes for an absolute majority. If 75 citizens vote, the candidate would need 67% of the vote to earn the 51 votes.
Good idea. I would add to it by making voting mandatory for every citizen who qualifies. (you get a hefty fine if you don't vote)
@@Chakabuka I hear your concern. I have a different idea for the same issue:
IMHO, amendment needed for all federal level elections (President, VP, Congress). Variations on the following proposals, depending on direct vote or electoral college (also modified to rules below).
1) ranked/star/STV-type system.
2) “None of the above” required option. This is different than abstaining
3) ‘winning a seat’ is only valid if over 50% of eligible voters participated (majority).*
4) CONTROVERSIAL: Starting with births after amendment is accepted… Everyone eligible (jus soli, jus sanguinis) is born a national (not a citizen) and must pass the citizenship exam to be eligible to vote (as well as be eligible to run for office). Every national and citizen receives a new passport every 10 years (free) to be used as national identification. This exam must be taken every 10 years to maintain. **
5) CONTROVERSIAL: all candidates must fill out at least 60% of an accountability exam like the website ISideWith. The exam shall not be fewer than 100 questions and not greater than 200, where only 10% of questions may be retired every decade.
* majority: If 49% of eligible voters participate and someone gets 70%, that still is not a majority mandate as fewer than half the people even cared to participate with only 34.3% of the eligible voters wanting that candidate. Strangely, if 50.01% participation and wins by 51% that is only 25.5% the population but at least validates over half the eligible population’s will.
Example: If your district has 1.3M citizens (and 1M are over 18 and eligible to vote), 500,001 people must have participated in that specific line/office (absentee/no-selection doesn’t count towards that office). Even if 658,923 ballots were processed (say just for President) but only 380,000 people filled out for that congressional seat - that office will remain empty until enough people (over half) have given the true popular mandate. If fewer than half participated, it indicates the position/seat is not important enough to the citizens. If “none of the above” is filled in, those votes DO count, indicating they value the position and yet disagree with the candidate choices - participation and choice! If ‘none of the above’ wins, that is cause to have a new election (rather than take a ‘winner’ that was simply the least bad candidate).
** 10 year renewal: Much like renewing a drivers license to keep roads safe, we should be sure the electors are capable of understanding the responsibilities of government to keep the population safe. Also, the exam should be set to about the same as it is today to safeguard the exam from being weaponized by politicians controlling the exam. Furthermore, this exam must be free (no cost) and renewable at every county office (minimum).
Once installed to office in Congress, all Party affiliation is lost/removed.
Singapore might be a contestent for a partly undemocratic yet well working society on some markers
It does seem that the best countries to live in and the countries most people want to move to are democracies. Maybe that is a pure coincidence but I dont think so.
Just because democracy is better than oligarchies and autocracies doesn't mean it's the optimal form of government.
@@jovazquez6102 He didn’t say it was
@@jovazquez6102 Of course it isnt optimal but it is the best we have found so far.
@@martynspooner5822 Sure but we shouldn't let dogma prevent us from finding a better form of government if jt exists
@@jovazquez6102 Yes agree, one can only hope.
More democracy is a value in itself. Democracy as a value doesn’t have to be defended any more than freedom has to be defended. It’s an essential feature of human nature that people should be free, should be able to participate, and should be uncoerced.
I think the lack of meaningful deliberation is what hurts democracy. If regular people could question experts and deliberate with themselves (like a jury does) I think democracy would be far more rational and effective. Right now it is like sports teams.
Elect leaders who pass policies, but ensure that those policies go through jury trials and ensure those jurors have the means to participate in a jury.
Except that regular people *dont* do that and have no interest in doing that, hence the need for a competency test
- P1- We want to be ruled by competent rulers
- P2 - In a democracy, we are ruled by those who vote.
- C1 - We want voters of a democracy to be competent
- P3 - Voters of a democracy are NOT competent
- C2 - We do not get what we want in a democracy.
Well even in just government action there will be winners and losers, so dissatisfaction can also be a result of compromise or gridlock, which can happen even when people are competent and genuine because they still disagree.
P2 is incorrect. You're ruled by those who win votes, if you're lucky.