On Democracy as a Necessary Anarchist Value (2017)
c4ss.org
c4ss.org
> The ultimate in democracy, in the sense of a positive-sum maximization of individual agency and control over their lives to the greatest extent possible short of anyone’s agency infringing on anyone else’s, is universal consent of the governed. And in this sense, a permissionless, stigmergic organization, in which all individual activity is self-chosen, is the ultimate in democracy.
What on earth are the assumptions and conclusions here? What is the mechanism of inference? Maybe this person should spend some time trying to formalize their beliefs.
If an idea is a good one it’s usually possible to describe it in very plain language.
There's a little bit of conflict between the two sentences you quoted, in the sense that the second sentence doesn't explicitly take into account this possibility of one person's agency infringing on another's, but if there's an unstated assumption that imposing activity, as opposed to forbearance from activity, is never necessary to prevent that kind of interference, that would clean it up nicely.
The overarching theme in the passage you've quoted, as in the whole essay, is that there's an inherent tension between democracy and coercion; the employment of coercion endangers (Kevin's definition of) democracy at best, destroys it at worst.
Is that of any help? I'm kind of shooting in the dark here, since I don't understand the root of the difficulty, so it's possible that my explanations are just as opaque to you as the original text. Can you elaborate a little bit on what part you're having a hard time understanding?
This was such an interesting read. The last sentence nails on the head why pure democracy doesn't work. Nothing gets done. Pure democracy is a meeting with more than 12 people in it.
This is incidentally why political parties are emergent phenomena in real-world democracies. It's also why archetypal leaders are either ineffective, or devolve into dictators of one form or another. Real political power in democracies comes from forming coalitions, and gaining agreement. Archetypal leaders, representing any one single ideal, aren't able to do that.
I agree you your comments, btw I think is still an open problem how to deal with political parties in real-world democracies.
For instance, sometimes an election with 13 parties will have open primaries in 5 of them binding the entire population to each candidate who will end up similar to each other, and the next time parties change the rule to avoid this risk and end up with a wide pentagram of mainstream extremes, and some revert back etc.
As long as you have more than a binary split, anyone can join parties militant groups and local officials approve the national election candidates (so you have a soft gatekeeper), you open up to arbitrary mutations that prevent rotting fixtures.
The GOP/Dem eternal fight in the heavens is distracting people from their duty to elect people to solve problems imo. Elections are a duty to manage the country, not a right to choose between two sides of the same coin.
I think we won't need national governments as much anymore, instead we need a global "lightweight" government that does as little as possible, and much more diverse and bespoke local city/community level governance where the governed mostly govern themselves.
Shared resources such as fishing quotas, forests, mineral deposits etc. should be governed by smart contracts where the incentives of the voters are aligned with long-term sustainability. It shouldn't matter which country a person is from or how big their boat is, if they extract X tons of something they need to buy X tons of quota for it on the open market.
I keep reading this but can't square it with what the last sentence seemed to say. I'm pretty sure they were arguing the opposite of what you took that sentence to mean, or am I missing something obvious?
That poses a real difficulty with the topic at hand.
This shouldn’t be particularly surprising. Going back through the twentieth century communists generally fall into two categories; 1) Mass-murdering, totalitarian dictators when in power and 2) terrorists when not-in power.
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States,” noted retired FBI agent Mark Noel. Most of these bombings were committed by terrorist groups such as the Weather Underground. Which is just one in a long list of communist terrorist organizations including FARC, M-19, the Symbionese Liberation Army, the PKK and, let’s be honest, Antifa. In fact, a 2001 Department of Energy study found that,
From an international perspective, of the 13,858 people who died between 1988 and 1998 in attacks committed by the 10 most active terrorist groups in the world, 74 percent were killed by leftist organizations.*