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Comment by TFYS | Hacker News Reader

There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible. As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship. Once you have extreme concentration of power, it's only a matter of time until someone that should not have it comes to have it. This is what every system so far has succumbed to. We need a truly equal system where all concentration of power is avoided unless absolutely necessary for the functioning of society to avoid an eventual collapse of the system.

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The basic mechanism you’re describing is essentially accurate, however:

> As soon as you allow any level of inequality to exist, the power differentials caused by it will be used to increase the power differential and inequality even more, and over a long period of time you'll end up with a dictatorship.

This doesn’t logically follow. The existence of a power differential doesn’t necessitate the differential being exploited to increase the differential. If we assume individuals are maximally selfish, this might hold, but that isn’t the case; people do altruistic things all the time, and there’s good reason to think most people are hardwired for it. The problem of liberal democracy is how you design a system to address those who are hardwired towards malicious selfishness; it isn’t clear that you truly can.

I would say that over a long enough period of time it's unavoidable that a selfish person will use the power to gain more. Selfish people are more likely to seek positions of power, so even if most people are altruistic, the people that seek power are more likely to be selfish.

I’ve come to basically the same conclusion. Attempts to engineer perfect political systems that are immune to this sort of infiltration is like trying to build a structure that will never need to be repaired—you can expend a lot of resources and effort on it upfront, but on a long enough timeline there will be failure modes you didn’t foresee.

Then how do you explain that all attempts at communism ended in dictatorships, except (perhaps) Israel, whereas the list of capitalist republics that ended in dictatorship is pretty short?

Oh and how do you intend to solve that most "communists" leaders were fake and intended to become dictators from the very start. There's many cases of various dictators, from anarchist, to just self-interested people, fascists, religious lunatics, ... pretending to be communists to grab power. In many cases, communists supported these awful people with extremely bad results. Examples: Russia, Afghanistan, Iran, Poland, Venezuela, ... all are cases of communists supporting would-be dictators that had ZERO intention of ever making those societies equal or tolerant or democratic.

In fact there's plenty of people who got support by pretending to be communists, even going so far as committing terrorist attacks on behalf of communism, to turn around and become capitalist "leaders", like ... well, most of the members of the EU commission for example. Jose Manuel Barosso, for example, was part of communist protests that lynched people. He was also the EU commission president that pushed Greece into debt servitude.

In other words, cancer always spreads.

Not necessarily the first cancer, but eventually one will.

Cancer is when a component of a system acts to replicate or enrich itself instead of acting to perpetuate the system.

Cancer can be also said to be fault of a system living longer than it needs to. In the end, what matters less is the specific instance of the system than ensuring the continuity of development is passed on.

But for states, they still feverishly cling to the idea of unity even as it brings increasing fragility and stagnation.

What if a true democracy is not a worthy goal? What if some people should have more or less say in something.

Should someone unrelated and likely non-impacted by a thing have as strong a voice in that thing?

Should someone non-knowledgeable have an equal say to someone experienced? Is that fair?

If A knows 2+2=4 and B says it is five, we don't average votes and call it 4.5. And if a large debate happens and B convinces enough people that for very large values of 2, the answer is five, democracy says the answer is 5. How do you protect against this outcome in a pure democracy?

You instill civic virtue from a young age.

That's how totalitarian regimes maintain their grip on power as well. At the end of the day someone needs to define what "civic virtue" is, if its done top down well that might not necessarily work out that well (of course it might be the opposite but it seems like a very dangerous method).

I don't know what you're talking about. What kind of civic participation do you see in North Korea?

I don't, you don't either, quite a few people in North Korea might view it differently.

My point is what methods do you use to "instil civic virtue"? How do you define it? And most importantly how do you prevent people from diverging from them?

Historically totalitarian societies were often quite good at instilling any kind of "virtue" you wanted. Free and democratic societies generally tend to struggle with the "instilling" part. (Of course to be fair there a few success stories (to an extent) like France)

Education, and the fostering of independent civil society, which is something you don't see in authoritarian societies. The virtues you want to instill in a democratic society, contrasted with authoritarian ones, are truth vs. propaganda, accountability vs. loyalty, and courage vs. obedience.

I think you are leaning too hard into moral relativism. The differences between free- and authoritarian societies are plain to see.

Don't get me wrong, I'm certainly not equating the values themselves, as you said they are the polar opposite. And to be honest I'm certainly not a fan of moral relativism in the direct sense.

The methods seem more concerning. First you have to give someone the right to define what these virtues mean in practice. Then you need to somehow impose them on the wider population. This is a rather dangerous tool and I think actual examples of such a top down approach working in democratic societies are quite rare.

It works if the consensus already exists in the society. Clearly these days that's not the case in quite a few places.

What do you then? Force children of people who have a radically different understanding of what these civil virtues are to attend schools which teach them against their will? Take them away if the parents refuse? Well that's what totalitarian states do...

> First you have to give someone the right to define what these virtues mean in practice. Then you need to somehow impose them on the wider population. This is a rather dangerous tool and I think actual examples of such a top down approach working in democratic societies are quite rare.

Once you have a democracy, you are not supposed to dictate from the top but distribute political power, and decision-making. The US has seen the executive's usurpation of power from the other branches of government since the turn of the century. Such an unbalanced government is by definition inimical to democracy.

Education would probably be the answer. In a true democracy we would need to make sure everyone is well educated. Of course there are a lot of decisions that require very specialized knowledge that can't be taught to everyone, and in such cases it might be necessary to have limited participation or some kind of weighted voting.

Unfortunately that seems to be highly subjective and different people have a very different understanding of what "well educated" means.

> What if some people should have more or less say in something.

Yes, I certainly agree.

The problem (which IMHO outweighs all the benefits by quite a bit) is that when you allow drawing these artificial lines the ones in charge of them will inevitably design the system in such a way that benefits them (maybe even without ill intentions).

It's similar to geographical gerrymandering just openly based on social/education/etc. class.

Also... balancing interests of diverse social and economic groups is not exactly straightforward, its certainly not basic math.

Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal". In a democracy, the people have the power to decide and anyone has the power to elect, be elected and to voice his opinion freely.

If things are not equal, then the voice of some people is louder than the voice of others, and that is no longer a true democracy.

> Democracy is following people's will, not "making things equal".

His point is that democratic systems are subverted if absolute equality is not enforced. It’s a crude argument but basically correct. The only way you prevent usurpation is by making sure one individual doesn’t have any obvious means of scaling his influence to the point that he can challenge the democratic militia.

What you call influence is simply trust that others impart to an individual. There is very little a single individual can physically do by themselves. So if there is someone with the influence to challenge a militia then it's better to say a proportionate number of people are also challenging the militia with the person as their proxy.

This is the argument populists make regarding Caesar, and there might be some truth to it, but it falls apart when you look at a Venezuela or North Korea; it’s easy to say that a nation gets the government it deserves when you aren’t the one having your life threatened.

Then again, outsized influence is a problem in democracies as well; this is what creates the conditions for a Caesar figure to emerge in the first place.

Nothing has been as effective at dispersing and diffusing power than Liberal democracy.

>There's no other way to have a true democracy than to make things as equal as possible.

Only if by that you mean equal opportunities for everyone.

But if you mean equal outcomes, then you're guaranteed to get USSR/Cuba/Venezuela poverty, famines and shortages, and even there that didn't fix the issue of the elites being super wealthy, it just made everyone else equally poor.

People will never end up equal no matter how many thumbs the government puts on the scale, that actually makes it so much worse.

Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes. Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.

All the countries you mention had a lot of power centralization, which I'm arguing is the reason all systems fail. If we avoid centralized power, we avoid the corruption and theft that inevitably comes with it.

Can you go into detail how your ideal system would work?

I don't have details. It'd need to be based on direct democracy, but for now we don't have any way to make good decisions efficiently with it. I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.

>I don't have details.

No way. I'm shocked.

>Equal opportunities can't be achieved without equal outcomes.

And how is 'equal outcomes for everyone' as the end goal, different than communism?

Even if you think it's not communism, the results will still be the same: poverty and famine for everyone but the elites since, news flash for you, people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures just like our ape ancestors, and if you force equality of outcome upon them, you take away their opportunity to try to better themselves in respect to their peers, so then society spirals downward into everyone refusing to work or at most doing the bare minimum since there's no incentive do work harder if you'll end up equal to Bob the uneducated alcoholic.

>Wealth gives opportunities, so differences in wealth mean differences in opportunities.

Yes the lottery of birth in life is unfair, welcome to the real world. Some people are born rich some are born poor, some are born tall some are bone short, some are born pretty some are born ugly, some are born smart some are born stupid, some are diligent and hard working, some are lazy and procrastinative.

You can't EVER equalize outcomes because everyone is born differently and will have different physical and metal abilities and will max out at different skill levels. The only thing you can do is tax inherited wealth better, and try to equalize opportunities so that everyone gets a shot at the same opportunities regardless of birth RNG, but you still want the best one to win regardless, if you want society to progress through fairness.

>I'm hoping technological breakthroughs like LLMs will eventually enable new forms of democratic decision-making that could function as effectively as a small group of experts could.

Yeah, no. It's gonna be the exact opposite of that: more surveillance, more targeted propaganda, and less democracy. See Palantir.

> No way. I'm shocked.

Please don't do this. Criticizing and thinking about the outlines of new solutions is a necessary first step. Details can be figured out after people agree on what the problems with the current systems are. Obviously I'm aware of the problems of previously attempted systems and don't wish to repeat them. If we can't figure out better details than those tried before, then of course I would prefer the current system.

> people don't want to be equal as humans are hierarchical creatures

Sure, humans have many kinds of needs and wants, and climbing the social hierarchy is just one of them. Why should we base our governance and our economic system on that need instead of something less destructive? There can still be hierarchies, just not the kind of hierarchies that give people power over others. An olympic gold medalist is at the top of a hierarchy, but doesn't have much power to control other people. Hierarchies like that could still remain to satisfy the people who have a strong need for such a thing.

Also, as I've said in other comments, I do believe there might be a need for some level of differences in rewards, as not all jobs are such that enough people would want to do them purely from intrinsic motivation. In such cases there should first be attempts to find rewards that don't provide control over other people, and if that is not enough, then we should figure out if the job is absolutely necessary and increase the rewards little by little until we have enough people doing it. Not all power differential can or should be avoided, but creating them should be the last resort and they should be as small as possible.

> You can't EVER equalize outcomes because everyone is born differently and will have different physical and metal abilities and will max out at different skill levels.

Maybe not entirely, but we could do much much better than what is happening now. It's important that we have a system where people are encouraged to use their abilities to improve society, but the huge differences in the resources people get is surely not the only way to achieve that. A lot of scientists do science not because the pay is great, but because they're interested in the topic and there's fame and knowledge to be had. Also the rewards that people expect are relative. In a society where someone gets paid 300 times more than others the most skilled people won't want to do the work for less than that, but in a society where the highest reward is 5 times more than others the most skilled people would still gravitate towards that work. Maybe personal interests would have a larger part in deciding what a person chooses to work on, but I don't think that would be a bad thing.

> try to equalize opportunities so that everyone gets a shot at the same opportunities regardless of birth RNG, but you still want the best one to win regardless, if you want society to progress through fairness.

But this will eventually lead to the winners taking more and more, we end up with a system similar to what the soviet union was and we will crash. The direction we are heading in is plainly visible. The capitalist system is better than the soviet one, as it's slower to centralize power, but eventually the power differentials and resulting corruption will be large enough that the system no longer functions, and we are very close to it I think.

We can continue this way and crash and reset every few hundred years, or we can acknowledge that it is the centralization of power that causes these issues and try to build a system that avoids it as much as possible.

This is nonsense. Most/all democracies have laws that only certified doctors can practice medicine. This makes doctors unequal from other people. Is this incompatible with democracy?

Depends on what the doctor can do with that inequality. If it means the doctor gets paid 20 times more than others then yes that is incompatible with democracy, as over time that wealth difference will be used to increase the inequality. But if the power is limited to only decisions about health, which is necessary for healthcare to function, then it should be acceptable. You'd still have to make sure that even that level of power is not used to gain more power, though.

One can argue whether 20 times more is too much or too little but I would say that it is correct that a doctor gets paid quite a bit more than unskilled labor. Some people who become doctors might still go through with it if it were not but most (sane) people would not go through the lengthy and very demanding path that is medical school and residency if it was not a better paid than a job that very many people could do. I can tell you here and now that I don't think I personally would have had the stamina to become a medical doctor.

Sure, I can agree with that. There does need to be some kind of incentive to do jobs that enough people don't naturally want to do. But the differences in rewards should be kept as small as possible and created only as a last resort. As I said, power concentration should only be allowed if absolutely necessary. If no one wants to become a doctor, then I'd consider it absolutely necessary to increase the incentives of doing so bit by bit until we have enough doctors while keeping in mind the risk that comes with the power differentials created. At some point an extra doctor might not be worth the extra risk of power concentration.

> Is this incompatible with democracy?

Yes. This is why every society of note limited the franchise prior to the 1900s. You can only have debates among equals among people who are equal. The sort of equality communists imagine requires that you either radically re-engineer the human pysche or implement Harrison-Bergeron-style handicaps on exceptional people.

Democracy is about equality of rights, not equality. People are not equal in every aspect, but they should be equal in front of the law, for example.

Freedom is not absolute because your freedom stops where somebodys freedom beginns.

Hence, if you practice medicine without qualifications there is a high chance you will hurt somebody. It is not undemocratic to protect against hurting others. Hurting others is not a right.

Interesting thought exercise though.

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