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Reason has always decried impulsiveness! Democracy seems appealing if you're insecure and/or naive enough to think that the next guy probably knows better and
by qop 8y ago
Reason has always decried impulsiveness!
Democracy seems appealing if you're insecure and/or naive enough to think that the next guy probably knows better and you're willing to rely on that as a rule.
The real world is many orders of magnitude more complex and idiosyncratic than most political thought expresses.
Admittedly, I didn't read TFA, but the headline is a glaringly obvious conclusion that nytimes is undoubtedly parading as some radical, innovative revelation.
In my (very limited) experience, the fewer logical and polariZed jumps a person is willing to make, the more rational that person is, or at least that thought they're pursuing at that time. People jumping down a spectrum of subjectivity are not engaged to a paradigm of any reason or rational or logical thought, it's all emotional and egotistical. One claim never begets another, only evidence.
- echotango 8y agoGreat point about the complexity of the real world. I would add that people who favor simple explanations are more likely to be centrist (supports status quo) because they are less likely to question the simple explanations handed to them. George W Bush in so many words said "We must invade Iraq or they will nuke us." Compared to that, any arguement against the war would have seemed like a lot of logical jumps, but the simple argument was a lie.
- qop 8y agoGreat example, that's along the lines of the kind of weird rhetoric politics is known for. Iraq is an entire country! Thousands of villages, micro and macroeconomic activity, relationships with several dozen other countries! It's got everything every other country has: complexity. Simple minded "let's get em" shit didn't work then and won't work now.
- pasabagi 8y agoDemocracy doesn't work because a popularity contest is a good way to solve problems. It works because the central problem of society is how to make people communicate without murdering eachother. That's why we have police, why we have the courts, and ultimately, the vote. All these things are ways of resolving disputes without violence. Any effective decision-making that comes out of this is purely incidental.