It’s maddeningly simple. We have an interactive tool here now you’re reading these words on which for the first time in history potentially allows us to directly participate in the governmental decision-making process and all but eliminate the self-serving middlemen. With it we can participate as much or as little in the real-time business of governance as we individually choose.
But who has time for all the mundane business of government? the implementation of the grand decisions? you ask.
The answer is our “leaders” who would be demoted to managers whose job it would be to carry out the big-picture decisions made daily, weekly by the “board of directors” of the country – the people – and if they’re not up to the task they get fired when their on-line approval numbers fall below a threshold.
It could work. It wouldn’t be easy in the beginning and there would be many false starts but there’s no inherent reason why direct democracy wouldn’t work in this age of instant global communications.
I can hardly wait to see how the Jews, Illuminati and Shape shifting lizards can control the world through the Internet. I mean it will be all so virtual that it will be so much easier for us to manipulate, er that it will be easier for those Evil Forces to manipulate innocent, law-abiding, decent folks such as er, you know who…
Right now, the average citizen is allowed access to the actual process of governance for maybe ten minutes or so every four years – and even then his or her choices are largely pre-digested and pre-packaged. The rest of the time he’s not much more than a spectator whether he chooses to be or not. Surely we’re not so incapable and irresponsible that that’s all the access to our own government that we deserve even if the practical means for fuller participation one day become available.
Until about ten years ago, the perfectly good reason given for citizens being largely excluded from the business of government was that it required actual or near actual physical presence in some central location to be able to effectively participate in the complex decision-making process. That’s practically, to anyone who has the technical and political vision to see now, no longer true.
We’ve reached a conventions-shattering crossroads in the evolution of politics and government whether we want to open our eyes and acknowledge it or not.
Spook, how would you overcome the fickleness of public opinion (using the net well, we could poll twice a day and get different results, leaving us where?) and the lack of expertise that 99% of the population possesses when it comes to 99% of the issues? Beyond general guidelines (expressed in constitutions and citizen forums), and an intuitive embrace or rejection of specific policies, popularism tends to bog down in the details, where the devils be. More could, and should be done, but how?
As citiizens, we’re much like children now, and just as children our “parents” shouldn’t just hand us the keys to the family car, a credit card and carte blanche to go and do just as we please because they’ve finally conceded that it won’t be the end of the world if we grow up and become independent.
There’s no doubt that we, the citizenry of the world’s major “democracies,” don’t have the skills and political maturity currently to govern ourselves. How could we? We’ve had virtually no practice at the business of self-government and the constant message bombarding us is that democracy is wonderful in the abstract but extremely unwise in practice so most of us long-ago all but gave up on being anything more than noisy, disillusioned spectators to the whole process.
Well Spook, even taking as an example the tiny number of people posting in IP, how much concensus has ever been reached on ANY subject discussed there? I’ll save you the bother of checking – the answer is none. Not a jot. What makes you think extrapolating that to entire populations would make a blind bit of difference?
All you’d get would be months and months of bickering, petty point-scoring and flames. How would you translate that into “governance?”
That sounds like a spot-on description of the U.S. Congress “at work”, doesn’t it? At least we’d have our own best interests at heart rather than paying someone else to pretend as if they did while pursuing their own agendas.
One of the (many) ironies here is that almost all citizens think they’re perfectly capable of governing themselves more than they do now if given the chance but few if any of their fellow citizens are.
Even given the admittedly messy nature of people running their own lives rather than handing the task off to a cadre of nannies and gatekeepers, eventually they manage to take some polls and do a fairly credible job of reaching rational conclusions.
