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Democracy can work but we all need to practice and support it. The citizens need to have leftover mental energy and time from everyday life to think and learn
by barnacs 10y ago
Democracy can work but we all need to practice and support it.
The citizens need to have leftover mental energy and time from everyday life to think and learn about politics, form opinions and engage in discussions with each other.
Academia needs to be heavily invonved to provide unbiased, politically independent facts, pros and cons for each choice.
And there may be a role for online platforms as well to support direct democracy, proving information and a forum for discourse.
- zghst 10y agoWe cannot trust academia, they are a special interest in their own right. Their power depends on bureaucracy and big government, not to mention that their field is incredibly undemocratic itself, lots of research is funded or excluded depending on the political flavor of leaders.
- barnacs 10y agoIndeed, academia as we know it is somewhat broken. We can either fix it or replace it completely (eg. by some crowdfunded model) and give it a new name. Either way, democracy would greatly benefit from an independent information source. While there are some purely subjective decisions to make in a society, a lot of them have some objective underlying facts (eg. is smoking harmful? is there a global warming?). Without an independent information provider, there's no way the average citizen could cast an informed vote on these matters.
- zghst 10y ago+1 a million times. Maybe we should have an AI consult the voter before voting