Hacker News Reader

Comment by engineer_22 | Hacker News Reader

This is a problem as old as thought itself. One of the worlds first philosophers, Plato, wrote a book about it. He agreed, the best form of government is one where the terms are longer.

He showed us what a democracy gets you - it's government by the least common denominator. It devolves to sensualism, that is, the highest aim of the people is to satisfy their desires, and they capture the government for that purpose.

My unsolicited opinion: a government reflects its people. If the people are corrupt, so too the government. I think the framers of the US Constitution understood it, and knowing their peers corruptible, set up precedent and procedure to ensure stable government.

We've had some rocky patches, and we're encountering another bumpy stretch of trail, but with history as our guide, we'll pull together when the moment's need arises.

View on HN

> He agreed, the best form of government is one where the terms are longer.

That wasn't the only restriction. He also recognized that the longer someone is power, the more likely they are to be corrupted. Plato does not believe that democracy is the best form of government. According to him, equality brings power-seeking individuals who are motivated by personal gain.

In the US, there is a mix but there is a telling wrinkle. The Supreme Court is a lifelong post, but the decisions are carefully documented and deconstructed. The President (and most legislators) have a much lower level of scrutiny because of intentional obfuscation (like National Security reasoning) and closed sessions without formal reasoning for their actions. Transparency is not valued highly at the most immediate levels, which is why corruption is inevitable under the current practices.

What use does the Supreme Court distinction have? It’s a political position. The lifetime appt likely means your side will defend you at most or all costs.

Even if I am able to verify one side or the other of the Court is being hypocritical with their argument for lifting Roe v Wade (abortion legality) soon via the careful examining of the results, will this mean anything more than catching any politician BSing?

> What use does the Supreme Court distinction have? It’s a political position

I think you mean political appointment.

The discussion is centered around the philosophy of political positions and their utility over time. Regardless, the SCOTUS is also a political position that has a specific process and set of requirements (explicit and implicit).

> will this mean anything more than catching any politician BSing?

I think you're missing the point. The fact that the SCOTUS decisions are considered so important (despite being equally impactful to an individual as any local political decision) is a cognitive dissonance that is baked into modern US politics. One term is the longest that can be assessed and all others are relatively short term.

That's worth trying to explain, rather than arguing over the merits of short-vs-long cycle political postings, as if there exists one-true-way.

It is often said that the USA Supreme Court is politicized because it is chosen by elected officials, whereas in Britain the recommendations for the high court are made by legalists, and therefore the British high court is less political.

As an outsider, it's really weird to see the intense debates over the supreme court couched in terms of political points of view. I mean, that's what elections should be about... it really comes across as if Americans have given up hope of a functioning democracy and have retreated to battling for political appointments to the SC for long-term policy.

We did a long comparison of the constitutional crisis in Hungary and the USA here:

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/thesis-1-there-is-one-corre...

> we'll pull together when the moment's need arises.

Unless the need are manifesting slow enough (e.g. climate change).

Yours is a great point, because it brings to light the follow-on question; what system, or improvements to an existing one, would help people work towards longer-term goals? I think it's a difficult ask, because even a responsible, civic-minded person, will honestly, almost always, choose to satisfy an immediate, personal, need over a concrete, community, ~500 year goal. (I'm not just speaking to climate, change here. I'm honestly interested in how groups might genuinely work toward such goals).

I can only believe that organized Religion has that much staying power. Nothing else could last through 20 generations.

I think religions are valuable because they give their adherents a common foundation on which to base their decisions. So if they live in a community with a fellow believer, they can be reasonably sure how they will behave over time - which has advantages to them.

It's noteworthy that the thinking around climate change has some similarities with religion.

I think the only thing missing from the climate change/religion similarity is that climate change has no savior or ultimate authority

This is an interesting answer. There are some actual real-world examples to support it. I think someplace like Cologne Cathedral was planned and the plan executed to completion in ~600 years.

I think it would also be fair to say, that there were other organizing factors in addition to religion, certainly civic, and economic.

The academy has also done exceptionally well. Individual institutions like the University of Oxford have unbroken chains of governance going back centuries, and so do scholarly societies. And of course, the institution of (say) science as a whole could also be regarded as a common endeavour lasting centuries where the highest-status individuals routinely make decisions with the far future in mind (although you would usually say that they're doing it for their legacy).

Despite the history, it is clear that the academy is also failing in the current error. I was in academia (science) for a very long time and watched the collapse of the cultural norms that made it successful. I had mentors and friends that are a generation older than me who confirmed my observations of accelerating decline. The reproducibility crises in multiple fields are just the tip of the iceberg.

I don't think the academy is failing any more than is the historical norm. The collapsing cultural norms are not centuries old, they are a product of the academic boom of the latter half of the twentieth century, where the first world (and certainly America) was more or less peaceful, the population was sharply rising, and access to and demand for higher education was exploding. The academic norms of the 1980s would be unrecognisable to an academic of the 1920s, yet I claim that both academics are part of a longstanding lineage of people working towards a common endeavour.

And the reproducibility crisis is not an example of decline. It's not like social science used to be reproducible then stopped. It's that for the first time in history, we've realised that things are bad, and now we're (slowly) starting to do good science. The reproducibility crisis is an example of improvement!

I like this answer, but it would be more compelling if a concrete case of planning and execution over a long time frame could be cited. The kind of concrete example I'm talking about is, "We set out to build x or reduce y, over 300 years and it took us 450, but it's done.".

Isn't it more that if corrupt people aren't held accountable, so too the government is corrupt - or something like that?

Regulatory capture/policy capture by for-profit industrial complexes seems never ending, each major industry taking its turn at extracting wealth - which wouldn't be so much of a problem if individuals weren't left behind or extracted enough to suffocate them towards death.

> My unsolicited opinion: a government reflects its people.

A democracy tends to reflect its people a dictatorship tends to reflect the dictator.

You’re right, except that the founder’s experiment clearly failed very early and was foolish to begin with.

If lasting functional government is the goal, it's clearly been successful.

Let's not believe the USA was founded as a utopian project.

I mean there was that whole civil war deal

>It devolves to sensualism, that is, the highest aim of the people is to satisfy their desires, and they capture the government for that purpose.

If Plato's hypothesis is that all democracies will elect 100 mega-Bernies to their senates, I think we can safely say it has been falsified.

Oh, because the US has long terms implemented currently?

Plato's hypothesis was that shorter terms would lead to more democratic (and therefore baser) democracies. Our terms are not that long, although incumbent advantage makes them longer in practice.

Really? Because the top comment to which you replied stated:

>This is a problem as old as thought itself. One of the worlds first philosophers, Plato, wrote a book about it. He agreed, the best form of government is one where the terms are longer.

Ancient philosophers did not necessarily think democracy was good. Some were even so direct as to say that noble blood deserved to rule. Plato believed longer terms were less influenced by democracy than shorter terms, and therefore they were a better form of government.

I think someone is going to have to come up with some actual scholarly citations, because you and the top commenter to which I am referring are explicitly disagreeing and up until this point all anyone has done is make baseless assertions

We are not disagreeing.

Apologies, I misunderstood your original comment

I’m looking at both comments. They are both saying Plato pushed for longer terms.

Plato was among the first to stand liberalism in contrast to democracy:

----------------

Hayek said "If I have to chose between a democratic society and a liberal society, then I must choose a liberal society." That idea has been at the heart of Western political theory since Plato, who also suggested that it was better to live in a liberal society than a democratic society, but Plato was reacting, specifically, to the democratic murder of Socrates. Socrates had advocated for a style of probing philosophy that would wake people up by forcing them to "Question everything" and this made the people of Athens uncomfortable, so they accused him of "corrupting the youth of Athens" and they sentenced him to death. And Plato's analysis of the democratic murder of Socrates set up the conflict between democracy and liberalism that the West has spent the last 2,500 years discussing. The criticism of the "tyranny of the majority" usually starts with a discussion of the democratic murder of Socrates.

https://demodexio.substack.com/p/is-it-true-that-entrepreneu...

Pardon my simple question: What is Liberalism?

Nothing to pardon! Liberalism is the philosophy in which individual equality before the law and inalienable liberties are the top priority.

This can fit in well with democracy (e.g. Bill of Rights), but can also be absent in democracies (e.g. the majority being able to vote to kill you). Similarly, liberalism can influence governments of all types, codifying individual rights and laws which can limit the power (or at least the rights) of the government.

Well put, thank you :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com