Are people too flawed, ignorant, and tribal for open societies?

Did you mean a partial judiciary?

If someone had the power and popular and/or oligarchic support necessary to overturn the entire current system of government and transition to being some kind of emperor, couldn’t they just stage a military coup right now?

Why would they wait for an election to take place? And given that no coup has been executed, what is everyone so worried about? Why would that person even bother campaigning?

If they don’t have the necessary military support, then any coup attempt would just be put down by the military. Simply declaring oneself emperor does not make it so.

I feel like people have watched too many movies.

This is the thing that so many on HN don't get (as evidenced in the replies so far): neither party is your friend. Neither party actually wants solutions because both parties thrive when government is perpetually bad.

The Republicans can't actually accomplish their stated goal of completely dismantling government at the federal level because if they did then there would be no federal bogeyman to rally their base against. They can't actually close the border because then there would be no more immigrants to hate.

Likewise, the Democrats don't actually want Trump's popularity on the right to fade because then they'd lose the most effective rallying cry they've had in years. The policies they've chosen to focus on are unpopular outside of the far left and have cost them a lot of support from the moderate voters, so their only chance of success is to persuade the moderates that this will be the last fair election if Biden doesn't win.

Everyone in Washington knows that the supposed threat to democracy is nonsense. If they believed otherwise they'd have booted Biden out of the race for an electable candidate a year ago. But it's part of the game that they play to get your vote and stay in power.

So, to your point: I agree wholeheartedly. The two existing parties are corrupt to the core and there's nothing left to salvage. We need to dismantle the two-party system, and for that we need to fix the voting system. First past the post has to go.

Look at the mess in Israel at the moment. That's a coalition government in failure mode. Italy has coalition governments, but in recent years they seem to have coalesced into two main factions.

With Amazon Prime’s new Roman series I’ve just been rereading Tacitus, who sees the collapse as equally inevitable:

That old passion for power which has been ever innate in man increased and broke out as the Empire grew in greatness. In a state of moderate dimensions equality was easily preserved; but when the world had been subdued, when all rival kings and cities had been destroyed, and men had leisure to covet wealth which they might enjoy in security, the early conflicts between the patricians and the people were kindled into flame. At one time the tribunes were factious, at another the consuls had unconstitutional power; it was in the capital and the forum that we first essayed civil wars. Then rose C. Marius, sprung from the very dregs of the populace, and L. Sulla, the most ruthless of the patricians, who perverted into absolute dominion the liberty which had yielded to their arms. After them came Cn. Pompeius, with a character more disguised but no way better. Henceforth men's sole object was supreme power. Legions formed of Roman citizens did not lay down their arms at Pharsalia and Philippi, much less were the armies of Otho and Vitellius likely of their own accord to abandon their strife. They were driven into civil war by the same wrath from heaven, the same madness among men, the same incentives to crime. That these wars were terminated by what we may call single blows, was owing to want of energy in the chiefs.

Could you be more explicit about Rome please? From what I know, the transition from Roman kings to the Republic doesn't match the pattern you describe. Neither does the fall of the Western Empire. In neither case is there a transition from kings to aristocratic rule to democracy.

if we excessively simplify the problem is people acting in their own interest rather than that of the system. If you want to build something you do have to put building it first or else you are just dishonest.

imho if you want results you have to exclude people who are unwilling or unable to constructive contribute. The system must be such that those who expect others to organize everything don't become victims. perhaps just ask them if the thing is working with some kind of punishment and rollback logic.

How, for example, could it even explain the middle ages in Europe?

Well, given my personal ignorance since the moment I more or less understood (the) "complexity, invisibility, incentives, and politically motivated cognition", I can safely speak for millions of smarter and more capable people (apologies, nevertheless) that this degeneration and succeeding repetition is the failure of the smart crowd.

They, the smart and intelligent crowd, and we, people with capable but less trained & thus less powerful brains, fail to keep the echo and hall going. We'd rather balance work/life, and hustle up side projects than pick up the fight against the aristocracy and politicians, who are, with everything that is (and always has been) going on, mocking and provoking the smart crowd and quite literally defecating all over the place, which is, kind of, sorry for the sentimentality, our home & garden, too ...

It's not a programmed cycle, not an infinite loop, there are plenty of distinguished and graceful ways to handle all the errors, warnings, negative effects and shitty outcomes, that, for the sake of completeness, create just as much or even more (and more meaningful) work. ... and a great many people to handle the foundational work.

neighborhood kids self organizing play, multigenerational households and family run businesses, boarding houses where personal spaces are shared with strangers, participation in civic clubs and churches (which was as much about business networking and social prestige as anything but still organized collective effort to worthy causes), self organized physical markets (like the grove in LA in the 30s), chambers of commerce, local business (cartels) parceling up their markets, barn raising, “culture scenes” like the west village in the 60s…

perhaps most saliently to me personally, the end of faculty led university management.

Percentages aren't of course the whole story; maybe secondary education in these countries is of such higher quality that fewer people need to study further to participate intelligently in political discourse. Perhaps the implications of free degree education on graduates' personal finances gives northern Europeans more free time to use that knowledge and participate in politics.

I like the idea of free education, but I am not confident that this is to blame for the USA's issues - mostly because of the situation in my country, the United Kingdom. Despite having had no tuition fees until 1998, this has not done anything to prevent an almost completely two-party system from prevailing for the last hundred years. For me, the non-proportional electoral system has become both the probable symptom and the probable cause of voting tribalism in both countries.

That change in countenance reveals all the hidden social connections on which that person necessarily relies for their mental, physical, and emotional well-being.

My treatment would be to first try to address the root cause of polarization, which is in large part social media. Somehow eliminate the foreign troll farms that have been caught running far-right and far-left Facebook groups for example. Mandatory proof of humanness.

Then try less extreme civic measures like more Federalism and a weakening of the executive.

What happens to the Texans who don't ascribe to whatever the government decides are "Texan values?" Forced march to the California border? Re-education camps?

I don't think adding a level to it would help, a new class of voter-politicians would soon emerge anyway, and they'd probably merge with "proper" political parties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy

We all live in top-down structures. Even Switzerland is a representational democracy (or a bunch of representational democracies in a trenchcoat) at its core. States are extremely allergic against relinquishing power so they usually only allow for federations in constrained, often bureaucratic forms: clubs, corporations, interest groups, etc, all of which often end up being top-down structures themselves, either through mimicry (gotta have your by-laws) or legal compliance (someone has to foot the bill).

The assumption seems to be that "scale" must be vertical. The various idle rich humming John Lennon's tune are completely oblivious to its message. We know that human brains are evolved to deal with "small" groups of people (think families or housing blocks) and that this breaks down once you get into the dozens let alone hundreds. We also know that close-knit groups of humans are very stable and often engage in acts of altruism, even within groups beyond this scale (think neighborhoods, villages) as long as they follow a web of trust they can intuitively comprehend.

Humans are really good at scaling horizontally. We even invented diplomacy and currency to settle disputes with groups outside our web of trust without having to engage in violence and war. This is the brotherhood of man. The only problem with this kind of scaling is that it doesn't allow for the concentration of power and wealth in individuals because it is ultimately a network of peers rather than a hierarchy of domination.

I think Democratic Confederalism is an interesting approach to a horizontal model that satisfies our modern need for a certain level of formality and structure while still building on our evolutionary strengths.

Remember: our evolutionary advantage isn't our individual intellect, it's other people. Our intellect may allow us to defeat any natural predator but we come into this world naked, defenseless and entirely dependent on the kindness of others. Helping other humans is literally in our DNA, not just when it comes to child-rearing.

Alongside software-managed person[udge]s impersonating people.

> noosphere doesnt have good autonomic defense systems

Or threat models, e.g. funding unlocked by 2012 Smith-Mundt Act for industrial-scale weaponization of online speech.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noosphere

I guess the use of the term instead of a more common descriptor like "society" implies a religious or at least spiritualist world view, but the way you're using it implies the attacks stemming from an unspecified "other", which doesn't quite fit at least from a cursory look at the philosophy behind it.

My criticism would be that much like Thatcher said though in a very different sense: there is no such thing as society, there are just individuals. Or more specifically: there's no such thing as a unified whole of society or humanity across history, there are actors with different interests and different levels of influence and each actor may consist of more than one person and each person may be part of more than one actor. The assumption that debate between political opposites on shared interests must bring them closer presupposes that both sides want to be closer and that the purpose of the debate is to find truth rather than to loop in the audience to join your side.

Of all the species that have existed on Earth at some point over the past 3.5 billion years, over 95% have gone extinct. That's part of the natural process of evolution.

(Stat from https://www.theworldcounts.com)

Can you expand on that? It seems potentially but not necessarily consistent with "democratic institutions" but the "control" must be limited to preserve the various freedoms required for openness.

> shared morals

But the degree to which two people's moral views need to overlap is minimal. Yes, I shouldn't invade your home, but I also don't need to approve of what charities you donate to, what happens in your bedroom, how you worship, etc, all of which some people will perceive as part of their morality.

The article also throws the term "democracy" around without ever defining it. "Freedom of association" implies a direct democracy, possibly allowing for delegates, but "democratic institutions" and "politicians" implies a representative democracy at which point the distinction between democracy and technocracy becomes less clear.

Lastly, the article is very much begging the question by idealizing the "disinterest truth seekers". This implies there is an underlying truth that is orthogonal to ideology and social norms. Even in the natural sciences this is hardly a given. Mathematics famously is the only science that can claim absolute correctness but such "truths" are only relevant within their respective systems, e.g. the obvious statement "1 + 1 = 2" is only true if we agree to submit ourselves to the underlying assumptions, many of which are ultimately arbitrary. Physics is probably a close second but the consensus on what might currently be the closest approximation of a model perfectly describing empirical reality is so complex that most applications instead use models that are known to be wrong but are simpler and ultimately good enough for the given purpose.

At this point in science it is functionally impossible for a single person to have a holistic understanding of any given field, let alone the renaissance man ideal of a holistic understanding of a broad range of fields. So all views of "truth" are ultimately filtered through biases (e.g. discarding information as "irrelevant" or "unrelated") and often layers of abstractions. Imagining that this alone can result in a functioning society is the ultimate folly of liberalism: the total blindness to its own ideology.

Ideology is not a flaw. Ideology is a lens through which we can understand society and a value system which informs us in how we want to progress as a society. If you don't take the time to build out a coherent ideology or at least a coherent value system - and understand it as such - you'll just be left chasing an inconsistent and often contradictory assortment of "virtues" and ad hoc preferences like those 85% of people who are not "politically engaged" (and arguably being politically engaged is neither necessary nor sufficient to having a coherent value system or else we wouldn't have the widespread problem of very vocal Lions Eating People's Faces Party voters).

the earth is but one country and mankind its citizens.