I am interested in politics. That is not to say that I have any significant education, knowledge or experience in that field. I admit my interest in politics is very general. I am interested in the way that people exist, how we exist together and the mechanisms that allow us build the societies we build. It is a broad interpretation, that includes philosophy, psychology, sociology.
I am not politically active. As a Canadian citizen, I am extremely frustrated by my native land's current system of constitutional monarchy and the parliamentary democracy that comes with that. I am proud to be Canadian, and appreciate that this nation is a great place to live but it can get better. We can get better. I feel very strongly about veterans, and the costs that our freedom demands; a lot of people have selflessly fought for Canada but I really don't think that any of them intended to fight for our right to choose who chooses for us. The flaws, issues, and conflicts that I perceive, have led me to stop exercising my right to vote. I have voted exactly once and found the experience tremendously disappointing. I am an opinionated individual and I sincerely value and cherish the ideals of democracy. I want to be an active participant in the affairs of my community, on the local, national and global scale, but I don't see how passing my right to an opinion to a stranger with a nice chin could even be rationalized.
The first grievance isn't with the corruption, the exclusion, the inefficiencies or the ineffective. The first grievance is with my fellow subjects of this flawed state that insist that "if you didn't vote you don't get to complain." I don't know how many times I've heard variations of this line, and every single time, I am absolutely levelled by it. If you relish choice and say in the operation of your government, then representative democracy should offend your every sensibility. Substituting the simplest model of representative democracy into any social problem is comical. The analogies aren't perfect, but if there was a discussion at the dinner table about what to have: would you ever have a poll to pick which neighbour will tell you what to eat?
This illusion of choice has got to be the best grift going. It's the ultimate diversion and there's hardly any accountability to the people, other than voting someone out by voting another, possible worse candidate in. I don't mean that it's a malevolent conspiracy or anything. In fact, I'm pretty sure the fathers of confederation did their best to create a fair and balanced system, given the insane logistics of governing a nation prior to the invention of the telephone, but in today's connected world; it's just a joke. The government is quite happy to trust on-line banking when it comes time to take my taxes or pay a fine but somehow it isn't secure enough to handle my opinions?
Essentially, by voting, you give tacit approval to someone else to make your choices for you. You likely have never met this person and may not have even voted for this individual. In most cases, the person who "wins" doesn't even get the majority of the votes, meaning most of the voters would have actually preferred someone else; they just couldn't agree on who.
No wonder voters think they deserve exclusive rights to gripe.
I couldn't agree more with your point about the idiocy of "if you didn't vote, you can't complain". To the contrary even, one could say "if you did vote, you can't complain cause you furthered the system", not that I think any action takes away your right to complain, but just saying.
ReplyDeleteHowever I am not sure if I understood you correctly, but I don't personally see the advantage of a direct democracy either, I find the direct oppression by a majority, just as undesirable as the indirect one through representatives.
Further, most people being stupid, it may even be advantageous to have representatives as they at least tend to be smarter than the average Joe (or worse the below average Joe) or they would not have gotten a seizable number of people to vote for them. On the other hand I guess it may not be better to get corrupt smart people over benevolent idiots.
An additional problem with direct democracy is of course the logistics of doing so, perhaps we could do it technically now, but who exactly would be in charge of making it run, who would phrase the questions the people have to decide?
You being a friend of inimalist (he referred me here, I assume you may know him under another name) you are probably not advocating direct democracy. Maybe you favour an Anarchist system? In which case I'd be on your side, however of course that has problems of itself (referring again to the "most people being stupid" thing).
Anyways, I enjoyed reading what you had to say, and am looking forward to more articles.
Bardock42- Thanks for checking this out and commenting, I hope to see more of your insights on future posts.
ReplyDeleteI'm not really advocating anything. i do think that the strongest feature of our government is the constitution charter itself and the judicial branch that protects it. Small motivated groups are far more prone to radicalism and I think that we are actually protected by the majority most of the time; when we are not the charter gives us a way of ensuring minorities don't get trampled. I've even thought that there should be a time threshold on new legislature, to avoid ill conceived fads and reactionary policy.
I'm sure that there would still be terrible legislature passed, and there would still need to be some form of leadership and oversight system, if there were no longer a legislative branch as it currently exists; but I think it is necessary to make the system less exclusionary and divisive.
As for generating the questions and possible solutions, I think that people will naturally form groups and lobby for that sort of thing. The issues will make themselves clear. Perhaps we could take another cue from the judicial branch and institute some sort of jury duty, with random groups being selected to oversee/moderate stuff.
We live in one of the most connected nations in the world. I'm sure even if there were a website where you could submit ideas and do pre-polls it would be fairly simple to prioritize the issues and narrow down what the prevailing support for the various resolutions might be.
I'm not an anarchist, although I am read in Bakunin. In my opinion we are going to form some hierarchies and social institutions no matter what, so we might as well make them as rational and functional as possible. I guess my preference would be for a strong federal infrastructure (consisting of a limited executive cabinet and possibly and expanded judicial branch) and no or limited provincial governments, with those powers being handed to the local and regional levels.
imho, the problem comes more from partisanism than really from anything else. Whether representitive or direct, so long as people are basing political decisions on a priori decisions based on party lines, it really wont matter.
ReplyDeleteAs institutions, the parties themselves become corrupt, playing a political "game" to ensure they are re-elected, posturing for power rather than any general well being of the nation itself, and people almost can't help but succumb to it. I could link studies that show more political knoweldge being correlated to stronger partisanism, essentially, people only learn politics from a particular point of view.
Though, I tend to disagree with both of you on computer voting. I mean, in theory, and if we used some kind of quantum cryptography-mumbo-jumbo-whatever, maybe it is possible, but there have been lots of reports of the voting machines that exist now being entirely faulty and suceptable to hacking. I don't know if technology, in terms of network security, is at a point where that type of direct system wouldn't be comprimised