Honest Johnny Dule's Anti-Democracy Ammo Dump (user search)
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  Honest Johnny Dule's Anti-Democracy Ammo Dump (search mode)
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Question: In my opinion, democracy is...
#1
The ideal we must strive for
 
#2
The best system we have out of many bad ones
 
#3
poop
 
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Total Voters: 22

Author Topic: Honest Johnny Dule's Anti-Democracy Ammo Dump  (Read 689 times)
Beet
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« on: November 07, 2019, 06:20:29 PM »

With regard to Point #1: Tragedy of the Commons does not apply, because this concept properly understood assumes that there is a single accepted good. It can be generalized to a narrow mathematical game theory question and essentially is the same thing as the collective action problem. In governance, the question of what is good is the very thing up for debate.

What you are really talking about is not Tragedy of the Commons but Social Loafing:

Quote
In social psychology, social loafing is the phenomenon of a person exerting less effort to achieve a goal when he or she works in a group than when working alone and is seen as one of the main reasons groups are sometimes less productive than the combined performance of their members working as individuals.

However, this does not apply either, as a single individual, no matter how well he or she tried to study the problems of society, no matter how fanatically they threw themselves at the task or how many hours dedicated, would not be able to comprehend the needs of millions of diverse individuals. And further, again, even if they could comprehend such a thing, would have no justification to decide the criteria of what is "good." This can only be decided by each person themselves.
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Beet
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« Reply #1 on: November 08, 2019, 07:14:09 PM »

Maybe by the bloodthirsty crowds in Paris.... but they don’t get sovereignty over a whole nation.
The National Convention, democratically elected, created the Committee of Public Safety after demonstrations throughout the country demanding it. The Reign of Terror wasn’t some sadistic plot by the new governing elite - the voters wanted it.

An alternate lesson of that episode is that military emergency/war drives societies nuts. A episode of the same nature but milder occurred during McCarthyism-- but it also fueled the popularity of anti-semitism during the Third Reich. And don't forget the "mob rule" of autocracies. If you were a communist Party official in Peking in 1966 you might have more thoughts on voting as a prerequisite for "mob rule."
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