Hacker News Reader

Comment by danmaz74 | Hacker News Reader

Democracy isn't about selecting the "best leaders" - democracy is about self-determination and freedom.

Democracy isn't really about freedom at all. When the majority can overrule and extinguish the rights and freedoms of the minority, that is not freedom. It's more about mob-determination than self-determination.

How is democracy not about selecting leaders?

Democracy means "rule of the people (demos)", and it was opposed to traditional Aristocracy, the "rule of the best (aristos)". Even if modern democracies are mostly representative, and not direct like the original Athenian democracy, they are still based not on the idea that we should elect "the best" leaders to make "the right" choices (as if there was an objective metric for any of the two), but on the idea that each citizen has the right of self determination even in collective matters - and that democracy (one head, one vote) is the best approximation of that.

So, my point is that measuring democracy ("power to the people") against the purposes of aristocracy ("power to the best ones") is pretty misguided...

My point is simply that whatever the intentions, democracy has devolved to selecting leaders, and for the most part they aren't even representative.

I'd say measuring the ideal instead of the reality isn't all that useful.

Democracy is significantly about an expression of preference, rather than identification of quality.

Think about it as voting for the dinner choices. It is not about finding the best chef, it is about getting Spaghetti Bolognese, because that is what you feel like tonight.

I'm not saying that with our vote we don't select our leaders - I'm saying that the reason why we have democracies isn't to ensure the selection of the best leaders (as the article was implying) but to freely express our self determination in legislative and governmental matters by way of choosing our leaders, using whatever criterium, reason, justification we please, just as we do with our personal matters.

That's fair enough but it doesn't render the whole issue void.

For example, a vast majority of the people might share the wish to select a leader best equipped to improve the countries economic prospects.

If that is what the overwhelming majority wants, but the system doesn't enable that outcome, then I think you can argue that self-determination hasn't been expressed.

If that was the case, would it mean that self-determination hasn't been expressed, or that its expression didn't reach the intended goal of those who expressed it?

I'd say that the article is criticizing the ability of democracy to deliver the latter, and that in a representative system the two can't be neatly separated.

If the system in aggregate produces candidates who can't execute what the people want, but yet each individual determines their own choice of vote amongst the poor choices, can this really be said to be self-determination?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com