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Comment by stevendhansen | Hacker News Reader

"...until you can come to a consensus that's acceptable to everyone."

In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, democracy rarely seeems to come to any consensus that is acceptable to everyone, but rather serves as little more than a moral battering ram that the 51% can use to impose their will on the 49%. Perhaps one day people will realize that democracy, given its cultish appeals (e.g. "but don't you know other systems are worse!?") is simply barbaric.

Maybe technology will render nation-states obsolete within my lifetime. I can only hope.

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The Athenians would say that we do not have a democracy but an oligarchy. The only way that they saw to actually make the government the will of the people was to select representation by sortition, i.e. drawing by lot, like jury selections.

I don't think that they were wrong in this regard. If we look at the demographics of the house of representatives, they do not come close to making a parallel of the demographics of the country. If representatives were selected at random, we'd have 51% women in the house, we'd have people from all economic backgrounds according to the current wealth disparity instead of only the wealthy. We'd need to actually focus our resources on education if we agreed that really anybody can be selected for representation. If the pool of representatives was large enough (larger than we have now, which is a limitation put in place to make party control easier), then random selection should always result in a representative body that is actually representative.

> In my (admittedly anecdotal) experience, democracy rarely seeems to come to any consensus that is acceptable to everyone...

To be fair to American democracy as originally described, supermajorities were required to make big decisions (Constitutional amendments). And power was decentralized between branches of government and layers of government (state and local governments had more authority than the federal government on some matters). This design was amended and eroded over the years. One of the consequences of the movement toward a simple-majority democracy is the 'battering ram' effect you're (justifiably) complaining about.

I'm actually beginning to think that we should require a 2/3 majority for simple legislation and a 3/4 majority for amendments. Maybe it'd help nip a lot of problems in the bud.

Or just create new ones …

In my experience the more common result is some kind of compromise that fails to solve the actual problem and leaves everyone dissatisfied.

You hope that nation-states will be obsolete within your lifetime? Seems to me that's a strange wish given the overwhelming evidence that we would then be faced with a global corporate feudalism from which there would be no retreat. Nowhere to run, no place to hide where people can live as they wish in a way they find congenial. The latter might be unlikely given that local laws could be easily rendered pointless if a powerful central authority elsewhere deemed them unacceptable. Only my view but I'd call that a dystopia.

You say 'democracy, given its cultish appeals (e.g. "but don't you know other systems are worse!?") is simply barbaric'. Does your "quote" rebut itself as you seem to suggest? What is your non-barbaric alternative to democracy?

its solvable by using consensus democracy rather than majority democracy.

The literal consent of the governed is necessary for government to be legitimate.

According to a definition of legitimacy concocted specifically to apply to a few selected forms of government.

I've participated in such structures before. Honestly, very few people have the time to go to 5-hour-long meetings on a weekly basis.

sounds like you were in the majority.

i have been in it also, and it works just fine. i certainly do not like to be in a minority where the majority gets what it wants and the minority is steamrolled.

A significant role of government is to manage conflicts. Conflicts, by definition, lack consensus.

Imagine Hal doesn't want Bill to build a fence (to make it fun, let's say Hal isn't even going to be impacted by the fence, he just doesn't like Bill).

How does consensus handle this?

Our current system tells Hal to sit down and shut up about what Bill does on his property. If consensus is the norm, Hal has a veto on Bill's fence.

An answer about requiring people to be reasonable in a consensus government is not very satisfying, people aren't reasonable.

consensus works by give and take. Hal and Bill don't just have to deal only with the fence. They have many more items they need to negotiate if they are to live as neighbors.

our current system does NOT allow Bill to do whatever he wants on his property.

our current system does NOT allow Bill to do whatever he wants on his property.

Of course not. My point was that it doesn't give Hal a veto over anything Bill might want to do.

Any ideas on how technology would render nation states obsolete?

nation states fight over borders to increase tax revenues. wars are governments jockeying to get bigger pieces of the pie.

the solution is to make the pie arbitrarily large.

http://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm

Continue to broaden the scope of what can be transmitted securely and anonymously over the internet until jurisdiction over specific pieces of land approaches irrelevancy.

National borders will never be irrelevant. The meat and bones will always require a physical domicile.

That's why real democracies have more than 2 [real/major] parties. Governments are a lot more interesting and concensusy when they're made up of 23%, 27%, 24%, and 26% for example. Suddenly there's no single majority to ram its will down everyone else's throat.

Except that cases are hardly rare where a small minority party becomes crucial for forming a government and winds up wielding power far beyond its numerical support among the population. And its not rare for countries to be unable to form a government for months or even years.

That's probably because their system is flawed.

In Denmark, we never have to wait for long. Whenever those in power want to pass something big or important in parliament, they seek a broad support - otherwise, it'll just get repealed whenever they lose power.

Everything certainly isn't perfect here (yes, it can be darn annoying when center parties hold too much power - but then again, it is a stabilizing factor), but healthy mechanics can get you a long way with democracy.

I feel a lot of people in this thread point out cases where democracy doesn't work. That's easy. But maybe it would be better to look for cases where it does work and learn from it.

It's much easier to agree on which cases are failures than which ones are successful.

Part of the problem with the US is that it is just so damned big and so diverse. I' not sure democracy scales well.

To take your example of Denmark; Denmark has less population, and half again as much area as Massachusetts. Comparisons between the US as a whole, and individual European countries don't always make the most sense; the more appropriate comparison would be to the EU, to have the same kind of multitudes of disparate people under a common banner.

God forbid society should invest in the interests of small minorities occasionally to win their support for the majority interest?

Imagine party A has 23%, party B has 28%, and party C has 49%. Party A and B join forces; they decide per consensus on how they would vote in parliament. Since they have together 51% and vote as one, they don't need to consult party C, even though it's the party with the most votes.

We have again a situation where 51% crushes the 49%.

That's only true if party A and party B agree on every decision, in which case you simply have two parties, "AB" and C.

Also, in some countries, there are way more than 3 factions (over a dozen in Belgium and the Netherlands), making it less likely that the same subset of parties will find itself in agreement every time.

The effect of having that many factions is that the majority part of parliament will always take the minority opinion into account because they know that, in the next vote, they may be part of that minority.

Of course, that is not a guarantee; I think it is part of a nation's culture. Other countries may value the short-term "let's win this vote" way above the longer term "we have to live in this country together".

That certainly seems the case in the USA, where "in four years time, we might end up with the shorter straw." doesn't seem to play a big role in politics (?anymore?)

"WAIT GUYS! Half A has 1 more vote than Half B. Looks like we don't need to do any science, let's just assume the people from Half A were right".

Democracy and religion share beds, occasionally, I might even say they were married on upon a time. Barbarism indeed.

Why do you assume all questions are answerable by science? Science says that if you assemble materials in a particular way you will get a solar panel, and if you assemble other materials in a different way then you get a toaster; it can't say which you should do.

Science says that a human being is a collection of genes which are formed at conception; it can't say anything about abortion, murder, capital punishment or self-defense. Those aren't topics on which it is competent: all it can do is inform discussions thereon, by affirming, 'yes, we are talking about a human being in this case, but in this other we are not.'

You simply can't address every issue with an appeal to science.

I never actually assumed that. The scientific method applies to systems which have a set of observables. Social science is not a second class citizen to natural science, as both society and nature are systems which can be observed. Therefore, it seems more prudent to ask "why" (i.e. applying the scientific method, or some more general inquisitive process) Half A and Half B disagree rather than simply assuming one half is correct and moving on. In the latter case, there is no learning.

> Social science is not a second class citizen to natural science, as both society and nature are systems which can be observed.

I honestly think social science is only slightly more scientific than astrology.

But even were it not, science is not capable of answering questions like what one ought to do. Sure, A & B disagree; it's interesting why they do; maybe they're both wrong; maybe they're both partially-correct; but what should be done about it? Science can only say what is, not what ought to be.

You have to make some philosophical assumptions (e.g. utilitarianism) in order to even think that science can provide direction, and even then you will get bogged down in questions like, 'what is the greatest good for the greatest number?'

As an aside to the downvoters: don't downvote if you think I'm wrong; please share how you think science can answer a question like 'ought we execute murderers.'

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