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Go google Tyranny of the Majority. Then respond after educating yourself. Unless you genuinely believe that the majority always makes the correct decision. In w
by yareal 3y ago
Go google Tyranny of the Majority. Then respond after educating yourself. Unless you genuinely believe that the majority always makes the correct decision. In which case I can't help you.
- Rochus 3y agoThen take the chance and make a name for yourself by proposing a better state system than the one in Switzerland. I hope you are not suggesting the tyranny of minorities, on which various works also exist. It is in the nature of human beings that a few will always be dissatisfied, no matter how well off they are or what form of society is applied. The sovereignty of the Swiss people is a compromise that came about on a voluntary basis through the coming together of people from different regions and languages. No one is forced to live in Switzerland, and yet a considerable part of the world seems to want to do so.
- yareal 3y agoSwitzerland didn't allow all women to vote until 1990, and didn't allow any women to vote until 1971. You might say, will they did eventually and recently fix that, but what systemic inequalities allowed that to last so long? For what it's worth, I do think direct democracy is good, but I don't think direct democracy always solves the most urgent problems or ensures that nonmajority people can survive. Let me be extra clear, Swiss voting system sounds pretty good. But it's not flawless. It can even be the best system in widespread use and not be flawless. The will of the majority can be wrong, and it needs to be acceptable to challenge it. Here in the USA the will of the majority was to segregate schools and prevent Black kids from attending them. That's what the majority wanted. It was wrong, and the minority using the courts to overturn the will of the majority is correct. Waiting to convince a new generation to integrate would do irreparable harm. Challenges to the majority viewpoint are crucial and healthy and normal in a democracy. Whether that majority is conservative or progressive, we need to test the results regularly.
- Rochus 3y ago> You might say, will they did eventually and recently fix that The values and legal system of a democracy essentially reflect the will of the people, and fifty years ago people had a different attitude to these values than they do today. And we cannot expect each country to come to the same conclusions. The question is: do we know a better system than (direct) democracy to improve society in the long term? Likely not. An ever-growing danger that is damaging society and democracy is the ever-increasing polarization and thus the reduction of pluralism of opinion and discussion culture, fuelled, for example, by lobby organizations that have very large financial resources at their disposal, or by the corruption of science through tendentious funding systems such as we have today. It is becoming increasingly difficult to form a sufficiently objective opinion on factual issues and to isolate the relevant facts from the many fake news and paid bogus experts. In Germany in the 1930s, for example, we saw how systematic misinformation and indoctrination can affect the will of voters. In relation to the present discussion, see also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39995558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39995558.