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Democracy is nothing more than a system that replaces swords/bullets with votes. That's it. The fight for power (aka. resources) it inescapable and the only thi

by sputr 7y ago

Democracy is nothing more than a system that replaces swords/bullets with votes. That's it. The fight for power (aka. resources) it inescapable and the only thing that democracy did, was to change the field that this fight is fought on. Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes. The only two benefits of democracy to "the people" are: (1) the fact that they have now become the weapons .. and if they are smart, they can use that power to influence which actions of the warring factions are needed for their supremacy so that they are more inline with the interests of the people. (2) the entry requirements and risks to become one of the factions are much lower which can help with (1) The only problem is that the warring factions know this and will do everything they can to conceal the reality of the situation so that the people do not exercise the power that they have. And they have been very successful at it. The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief.

Agebor 7y ago
Resources? The real fight is now for people's minds. We already have orders of magnitude more resources than 100 years ago and almost everyone can benefit from them.
- moate 7y ago
  Hello, conflict theory sociologist here. What? Absolutely agree that we have a ton more resources than previously. However, as has always been the case, they're not equitably distributed. Plenty of people are removed from resources they want or need. Look at the US. We still have homeless people. We still have people dying of curable diseases. The fight for resources is real to plenty of people.
lotsofpulp 7y ago
> The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief. If the alternative is swords and bullets, I would think most people prefer democracy. It’s the worst system, except for all the others attempted so far.
- repomies691 7y ago
  It's not the alternative, democratic countries also rule by force in the end. The governments wouldn't work if they didn't have guns, prisons and nice interrogation methods in their toolset. With democratic country everyone has some minimal effect on how those tools of violence are used, unlike in dictatorships or monarchies. So I think also it is a better system.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
igorkraw 7y ago
> Democracy is nothing more than a system that replaces swords/bullets with votes. That's it. > (...) >Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes. Leaving rebuttal of your other points aside, can you see how that is not the same thing at all? It's like claiming "a plane is nothing more than a system which can move through the air the same way a boat can move through water. That's it". The two lead to very different consequences! >The fight for power (aka. resources) it inescapable and the only thing that democracy did, was to change the field that this fight is fought on. It also opened up the field for consent on all sides. There is not way to wage a war in such a way that all sides win, a way to fight in a way where noone gets hurt. Democracies with minority protections (aka one of the ways we differentiate democracy from mob rule) make true win-wins possible. > The only problem is that the warring factions know this and will do everything they can to conceal the reality of the situation so that the people do not exercise the power that they have. > The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief. The first sentence describes the removal of democracy. The second claims that this is evidence for democracy not always being good for the people. Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people
- repomies691 7y ago
  > Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people I don't understand why people here see democratic system as a replacement for ruling by a force. Democratic countries also rule by force in the end. Democratic countries also need polices, guns, armies, prisons, tax inspectors, prosecutors etc. Those same institutions are also the tools for dictatorships, they are just governed in a different way. (I also think democracy is good, but however in the end both democracies and dictatorships rely on violence to be effective. I think that's quite basic lesson on how society works.)
  - merpnderp 7y ago
    Dictatorships rely solely on force. Democracies mostly rely on a common agreement to follow a social contract. There’s not nearly enough police in the US to quell a rebellion of the people if they lost faith in Democracy.
lexandstuff 7y ago
Getting a vote instead of a bullet to the head seems like a pretty significant upgrade to me.
- xenyal 7y ago
  If that's the argument it comes down to for electoral governments, I'd say that's quite sad.
  - chrchang523 7y ago
    It may be sad, but it's still a very, very important difference.
- sputr 7y ago
  Yeah, it is. But when you have that and start talking healthcare ... you should not relay on the system of democracy. But far too many people do.
ChrisSD 7y ago
> Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes This isn't quite true. People are killed over regional political struggles in democracies. The difference is one of scale, not of absolutes.
- sputr 7y ago
  But the point stands - the people in power, in most cases, are replaced with minimal deaths.
FrankyHollywood 7y ago
"The only two benefits of democracy..." In my opinion the one major benefit of democracy over all other forms is that a terrible leader can be voted away within 4 years. It's a political system with garbage collection :)
- RealStickman 7y ago
  If terrible leaders could be voted away there would be no politicians in power.
  - ivankolev 7y ago
    If we go on a tangent and debate leadership, I agree that the current crop of leadership examples are pretty bleak around the world. What makes a good political leader? Are there examples in the past of objectively good leaders? Is it always at the expense of the neighbouring tribe and what happens when your hood is planet-scale?
- brazzy 7y ago
  Potentially even more important: a leader (terrible or otherwise) who loses power does not have to fear being murdered by his successor, and can hope to regain power. Thus, they have a much smaller incentive to use desparate (i.e. violent) methods to stay in power. That's why the true test of a country's switch to democracy are not the first democratic elections, but the first democratic change of power.
- Xelbair 7y ago
  If only it worked that way. Under democracy you optimize for just a single metric - popularity. If leader is terrible and popular no garbage collection will occur. Rise of populism is inherently built into nature of democracy itself.
  - Spivak 7y ago
    I mean this is essentially how it works now but it didn't have to end up this way in the US. As-written we actually have a very nice electoral college where the people don't directly elect the president but instead choose someone (hopefully?) qualified to evaluate the candidates and vote on their behalf. And the states have the freedom to impose requirements on the elector nomination process so you get qualified people. But a consequence of the states being able to independently decide how those electors are chosen lead to every state basically having a law that says that "you vote for the candidate instead of the elector, and the elector's don't actually matter and must follow the popular vote." I really dislike the system as it exists now because the people directly electing 2/3 of the government in a checks and balances system kinda ruins the whole thing.
mtgx 7y ago
Exactly, in the past the only way to change the leader was to kill him, and sometimes that meant sons having to kill their fathers, or their brothers, having to start civil war, etc. Democracy is a way better alternative to that that allows a leader to be removed without having to kill him or her (which is generally good for both said leader and his rivals). Putin was smart that he announced he would retire ahead of time, so that people and his rivals could tolerate his assassinations and vote stealing just a little more instead of taking him head-on. I wonder if Xi will do something similar or he actually intends to die on his new Chinese throne. He seemed to take the whole "permanent president" thing pretty seriously.
Retric 7y ago
Historically, monarchy’s seem to be more stable and result in less open warfare (civil wars). The US did not even last 90 years before the first civil war. A rather large number of democracies have fallen and been replaced with dictatorship. Democracies have other benefits, but stability does not seem to be one of them. PS: I am ignoring assassinations and power struggles as we have lost 4 sitting US presidents without it being considered a civil war.
- paulryanrogers 7y ago
  Many suffer silently under monarchy's. And democracies require an educated and relatively honest, or homogenous society to function. If people can't agree on fundamentals--even to disagree peacefully--then there's no hope.
- nfg 7y ago
  > Historically, monarchy’s seem to be more stable and result in less open warfare. How did you come to that conclusion? It seems like ahistorical nonsense to me.
  - patentatt 7y ago
    Well the history of democracy is very short compared to monarchy. Let’s check back in on this in a few thousand years to see how both fare.
  - Retric 7y ago
    Plenty of research supports this, for example this trying to find why so many new democracies result in civil wars: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20752195?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/20752195?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co... By comparison England lasted from 886 to 1642 without open civil war. At the extreme Harappan civilization seems to have lasted 2,000 years without an open civil war or really any major wars.
    - gamblor956 7y ago
      Except for the Hundred Year War, the War of the Roses, and the many other smaller English civil wars. But yes, if you exclude all the civil wars then England had no civil wars during that time period.
Xelbair 7y ago
>> The only problem is that the warring factions know this and will do everything they can to conceal the reality of the situation so that the people do not exercise the power that they have. And they have been very successful at it. The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief. Democracy is neither evil nor good. It is just a popularity contest. Merit doesn't matter - only popularity does.
- patentatt 7y ago
  Surely you can see some causal relationship between the two though? On a “whole society” scale, how is merit defined? If you come up with some rigid concrete definition, someone else may disagree. So democracy stands for the proposition that the most reliable way to define merit is to trust the majority of people’s consensus. How else would you propose that merit be defined and evaluated, long term, on the scale of an entire society?
  - Xelbair 7y ago
    Counterpoint - rise of populism. It is popular, but useless. I do not have a better system, but i do not lie to myself that democracy is perfect.
buboard 7y ago
I don't know to what extent this adversarial definition of democracy is true. Democracy literally means the power is with "the many" instead of "the few", and in recent centuries it reemerged due to the rise of the urban class who could no longer tolerate centralization of power. In ancient times, democracy was largely ensured by allotment, in our times it's almost exclusively through majority-election. The principle though remains similar.
- sputr 7y ago
  > I don't know to what extent this adversarial definition of democracy is true. I'm being more and more convinced of this because in my experience it is much better at explaining and predicting reality. It's not pleasant and I didn't want to accept it. But here I am.
kazagistar 7y ago
That's only internally though. When the "wrong" faction wins in south america, another "democracy" sends armed forces and supports a coup and a dictator to protect its financial interests.
grawprog 7y ago
>Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes. Tell that to the family of a friend's friend that was ambushed and decapitated in the middle of the night by an opposing political party because they made statements denouncing a political party during elections in a Democratic country. ETA:News story to clarify what I'm talking about. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/world/asia/philippines-negros-killings-duterte.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/world/asia/philippines-ne...
- xenyal 7y ago
  TIL Philippines is a democratic country
wufufufu 7y ago
> Democracy is nothing more than a system that replaces swords/bullets with votes. That's it. Why stop at bullets, why don't you say aircraft carriers or something
malandrew 7y ago
> The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief. Not just inherently good, but unquestionably good. It has so many flaws, yet it's goodness is assumed as unassailable. The design of a Republic serves to address some of the most obvious flaws. The biggest issue I see with the way republics currently operate is that there isn't a clear mechanism for handling bandwidth and processing constraints. When the US was founded for example, congressional apportionment was one representative per 57,169 people. Today it is 747,184. The problem here is that it becomes impossible for a representative to effectively represent the disparate interests of that many people and it's also difficult for the representative to adequate sampling the interests of that many people. There are bandwidth constraints between representatives and constituents and there are processing constraints with handling more constituents. Having a mechanism to manage apportionment for better outcomes seems like one key overlooked feature. We should have far more representatives and we should have more senators per state. This would also create more processing power for those representatives to spend time refactoring and improving existing laws instead of merely serving as commit generators. Today we discuss the power of the 1%, but that's nothing in comparison with the power of the 0.00016% (538/327.2 million). https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/31/u-s-population-keeps-growing-but-house-of-representatives-is-same-size-as-in-taft-era/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/31/u-s-populat...

by sputr 7y ago

Agebor 7y ago

Resources? The real fight is now for people's minds. We already have orders of magnitude more resources than 100 years ago and almost everyone can benefit from them.

moate 7y ago
Hello, conflict theory sociologist here. What? Absolutely agree that we have a ton more resources than previously. However, as has always been the case, they're not equitably distributed. Plenty of people are removed from resources they want or need. Look at the US. We still have homeless people. We still have people dying of curable diseases. The fight for resources is real to plenty of people.

lotsofpulp 7y ago

> The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief. If the alternative is swords and bullets, I would think most people prefer democracy. It’s the worst system, except for all the others attempted so far.

repomies691 7y ago
It's not the alternative, democratic countries also rule by force in the end. The governments wouldn't work if they didn't have guns, prisons and nice interrogation methods in their toolset. With democratic country everyone has some minimal effect on how those tools of violence are used, unlike in dictatorships or monarchies. So I think also it is a better system.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

igorkraw 7y ago

> Democracy is nothing more than a system that replaces swords/bullets with votes. That's it. > (...) >Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes. Leaving rebuttal of your other points aside, can you see how that is not the same thing at all? It's like claiming "a plane is nothing more than a system which can move through the air the same way a boat can move through water. That's it". The two lead to very different consequences! >The fight for power (aka. resources) it inescapable and the only thing that democracy did, was to change the field that this fight is fought on. It also opened up the field for consent on all sides. There is not way to wage a war in such a way that all sides win, a way to fight in a way where noone gets hurt. Democracies with minority protections (aka one of the ways we differentiate democracy from mob rule) make true win-wins possible. > The only problem is that the warring factions know this and will do everything they can to conceal the reality of the situation so that the people do not exercise the power that they have. > The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief. The first sentence describes the removal of democracy. The second claims that this is evidence for democracy not always being good for the people. Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people

repomies691 7y ago
> Compared to ruling by force, yes, democracy is inherently good for the people I don't understand why people here see democratic system as a replacement for ruling by a force. Democratic countries also rule by force in the end. Democratic countries also need polices, guns, armies, prisons, tax inspectors, prosecutors etc. Those same institutions are also the tools for dictatorships, they are just governed in a different way. (I also think democracy is good, but however in the end both democracies and dictatorships rely on violence to be effective. I think that's quite basic lesson on how society works.)
- merpnderp 7y ago
  Dictatorships rely solely on force. Democracies mostly rely on a common agreement to follow a social contract. There’s not nearly enough police in the US to quell a rebellion of the people if they lost faith in Democracy.

lexandstuff 7y ago

Getting a vote instead of a bullet to the head seems like a pretty significant upgrade to me.

xenyal 7y ago
If that's the argument it comes down to for electoral governments, I'd say that's quite sad.
- chrchang523 7y ago
  It may be sad, but it's still a very, very important difference.
sputr 7y ago
Yeah, it is. But when you have that and start talking healthcare ... you should not relay on the system of democracy. But far too many people do.

ChrisSD 7y ago

> Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes This isn't quite true. People are killed over regional political struggles in democracies. The difference is one of scale, not of absolutes.

sputr 7y ago
But the point stands - the people in power, in most cases, are replaced with minimal deaths.

FrankyHollywood 7y ago

"The only two benefits of democracy..." In my opinion the one major benefit of democracy over all other forms is that a terrible leader can be voted away within 4 years. It's a political system with garbage collection :)

RealStickman 7y ago
If terrible leaders could be voted away there would be no politicians in power.
- ivankolev 7y ago
  If we go on a tangent and debate leadership, I agree that the current crop of leadership examples are pretty bleak around the world. What makes a good political leader? Are there examples in the past of objectively good leaders? Is it always at the expense of the neighbouring tribe and what happens when your hood is planet-scale?
brazzy 7y ago
Potentially even more important: a leader (terrible or otherwise) who loses power does not have to fear being murdered by his successor, and can hope to regain power. Thus, they have a much smaller incentive to use desparate (i.e. violent) methods to stay in power. That's why the true test of a country's switch to democracy are not the first democratic elections, but the first democratic change of power.
Xelbair 7y ago
If only it worked that way. Under democracy you optimize for just a single metric - popularity. If leader is terrible and popular no garbage collection will occur. Rise of populism is inherently built into nature of democracy itself.
- Spivak 7y ago
  I mean this is essentially how it works now but it didn't have to end up this way in the US. As-written we actually have a very nice electoral college where the people don't directly elect the president but instead choose someone (hopefully?) qualified to evaluate the candidates and vote on their behalf. And the states have the freedom to impose requirements on the elector nomination process so you get qualified people. But a consequence of the states being able to independently decide how those electors are chosen lead to every state basically having a law that says that "you vote for the candidate instead of the elector, and the elector's don't actually matter and must follow the popular vote." I really dislike the system as it exists now because the people directly electing 2/3 of the government in a checks and balances system kinda ruins the whole thing.

mtgx 7y ago

Exactly, in the past the only way to change the leader was to kill him, and sometimes that meant sons having to kill their fathers, or their brothers, having to start civil war, etc. Democracy is a way better alternative to that that allows a leader to be removed without having to kill him or her (which is generally good for both said leader and his rivals). Putin was smart that he announced he would retire ahead of time, so that people and his rivals could tolerate his assassinations and vote stealing just a little more instead of taking him head-on. I wonder if Xi will do something similar or he actually intends to die on his new Chinese throne. He seemed to take the whole "permanent president" thing pretty seriously.

Retric 7y ago

Historically, monarchy’s seem to be more stable and result in less open warfare (civil wars). The US did not even last 90 years before the first civil war. A rather large number of democracies have fallen and been replaced with dictatorship. Democracies have other benefits, but stability does not seem to be one of them. PS: I am ignoring assassinations and power struggles as we have lost 4 sitting US presidents without it being considered a civil war.

paulryanrogers 7y ago
Many suffer silently under monarchy's. And democracies require an educated and relatively honest, or homogenous society to function. If people can't agree on fundamentals--even to disagree peacefully--then there's no hope.
nfg 7y ago
> Historically, monarchy’s seem to be more stable and result in less open warfare. How did you come to that conclusion? It seems like ahistorical nonsense to me.
- patentatt 7y ago
  Well the history of democracy is very short compared to monarchy. Let’s check back in on this in a few thousand years to see how both fare.
- Retric 7y ago
  Plenty of research supports this, for example this trying to find why so many new democracies result in civil wars: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20752195?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/20752195?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co... By comparison England lasted from 886 to 1642 without open civil war. At the extreme Harappan civilization seems to have lasted 2,000 years without an open civil war or really any major wars.
  - gamblor956 7y ago
    Except for the Hundred Year War, the War of the Roses, and the many other smaller English civil wars. But yes, if you exclude all the civil wars then England had no civil wars during that time period.

Xelbair 7y ago

>> The only problem is that the warring factions know this and will do everything they can to conceal the reality of the situation so that the people do not exercise the power that they have. And they have been very successful at it. The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief. Democracy is neither evil nor good. It is just a popularity contest. Merit doesn't matter - only popularity does.

patentatt 7y ago
Surely you can see some causal relationship between the two though? On a “whole society” scale, how is merit defined? If you come up with some rigid concrete definition, someone else may disagree. So democracy stands for the proposition that the most reliable way to define merit is to trust the majority of people’s consensus. How else would you propose that merit be defined and evaluated, long term, on the scale of an entire society?
- Xelbair 7y ago
  Counterpoint - rise of populism. It is popular, but useless. I do not have a better system, but i do not lie to myself that democracy is perfect.

buboard 7y ago

I don't know to what extent this adversarial definition of democracy is true. Democracy literally means the power is with "the many" instead of "the few", and in recent centuries it reemerged due to the rise of the urban class who could no longer tolerate centralization of power. In ancient times, democracy was largely ensured by allotment, in our times it's almost exclusively through majority-election. The principle though remains similar.

sputr 7y ago
> I don't know to what extent this adversarial definition of democracy is true. I'm being more and more convinced of this because in my experience it is much better at explaining and predicting reality. It's not pleasant and I didn't want to accept it. But here I am.

kazagistar 7y ago

That's only internally though. When the "wrong" faction wins in south america, another "democracy" sends armed forces and supports a coup and a dictator to protect its financial interests.

grawprog 7y ago

>Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes. Tell that to the family of a friend's friend that was ambushed and decapitated in the middle of the night by an opposing political party because they made statements denouncing a political party during elections in a Democratic country. ETA:News story to clarify what I'm talking about. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/world/asia/philippines-negros-killings-duterte.html https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/29/world/asia/philippines-ne...

xenyal 7y ago
TIL Philippines is a democratic country

wufufufu 7y ago

> Democracy is nothing more than a system that replaces swords/bullets with votes. That's it. Why stop at bullets, why don't you say aircraft carriers or something

malandrew 7y ago

> The amount of people who believe that democracy is somehow inherently good for the people is beyond my belief. Not just inherently good, but unquestionably good. It has so many flaws, yet it's goodness is assumed as unassailable. The design of a Republic serves to address some of the most obvious flaws. The biggest issue I see with the way republics currently operate is that there isn't a clear mechanism for handling bandwidth and processing constraints. When the US was founded for example, congressional apportionment was one representative per 57,169 people. Today it is 747,184. The problem here is that it becomes impossible for a representative to effectively represent the disparate interests of that many people and it's also difficult for the representative to adequate sampling the interests of that many people. There are bandwidth constraints between representatives and constituents and there are processing constraints with handling more constituents. Having a mechanism to manage apportionment for better outcomes seems like one key overlooked feature. We should have far more representatives and we should have more senators per state. This would also create more processing power for those representatives to spend time refactoring and improving existing laws instead of merely serving as commit generators. Today we discuss the power of the 1%, but that's nothing in comparison with the power of the 0.00016% (538/327.2 million). https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/31/u-s-population-keeps-growing-but-house-of-representatives-is-same-size-as-in-taft-era/ https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2018/05/31/u-s-populat...