Forum Post: Consensus Doesnt Work in the Real World
Posted 12 years ago on Dec. 13, 2011, 9:09 p.m. EST by hchc
(3297)
from Tampa, FL
This content is user submitted and not an official statement
There is a reason we have representatives and elections.
Gathering million of people together, to discuss everything, and come to a consensus, is impossible.
Humans have already been down this road of headaches before. Lets not go there again.
That being said- down with central banking and bought politicians!
It works well with maybe 100-300 like minded individulas. If you gathered a good representation of the 99%, it would be a disaster.
You might be able to stretch it to a few thousand. There's a place in south Africa, I believe, a town of many thousands that seems to work well using a consensus. A south African town is worlds apart from the US however, so I wouldn't be too hopeful it would work here as well.
JFYI, 4 swiss cantons still have direct democracy. There are many places with that. There's also a lot of different systems possible, not just a choice between an oligachic republic and that mythical "mob rule" nonsense which frightened the slave holders so much. Have you ever wondered why the biggest enemies of so-called mob rule were big plantocrats?
And yes, the reason we have representatives is that the new wealthy ensured they'd keep the system in control when they overthrow the feudal regimes.
Walinsky's Law: Intelligence in a discussion is inversely proportional to the square of the number of people involved.
Shanahan's Law: A meeting's length is proportional to the square of the number of attendees and its productivity inversely proportional to its length.
I'll second this sentiment.
In the best turnout in a decade, the 2008 presidential election, saw a 62.2% turnout. http://elections.gmu.edu/Turnout_2008G.html
In off year elections the turnout drops by a third.
Americans do not want to be that involved in the process of governance now. Direct elections would make citizen governance a full time job between local, state and federal legislative issues. Not to mention developing an entirely new Constitutional legislative process for getting laws the substance of laws to the direct ballot.
Much simpler is to clean up the existing system. But OWS opposes what it will take to do that. PARTICIPATION. This great power that is the bringing together of a mass of angry Americans under the OWS banner will be totally wasted if it is not now channeled into the elective process in new and creative ways that undermine Wall Street's willful subversion of our democratic birthright.
I very much respect the thrust of what you are saying here. Real, monitored, vote of the people is possible now; not just in America, but globally. This brings to the forefront the question, is humanity really ready to govern itself, without some moderating forces in place to prevent some potentially disasterous outcomes. The prospect of true democracy is scary, in a way; yet the simple fact is that humanity will stand or fall on it's ability to govern itself no matter what system is in place. Any structure designed to check that power, as we have seen clearly in recent years, is open to corruption and the age old tiresome tyranny.
Humanity is really in a state of unpresidented crisis. Things the way they are, are not working. Sometimes desperate times call for radically new thinking. I think global, one vote democracy, is an ideal that is not to be lightly dismissed.
Its kind screwed if ya do, screwed if ya dont. Things are going into the crapper as they currently are. But Ive seen enough in the world, the general public, and on sites like this, that show the population has a horrible understanding of how the economy functions. I certainly dont want most of the people on this forum crafting legislation. And I certainly dont want the .001% controlling everything either. .......screwed....
Yes. "These are the times that try men's souls!"
I think that folks are seeing that road is a dead end and are turning around before they're too far down it. The road to Philly looks far more promising : )
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e-3hZsXrxaI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4mkRFCtl2MI
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1SQqjTxI3vc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EewGMBOB4Gg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z9WVZddH9w
http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/
http://blog.thezeitgeistmovement.com/
http://www.thevenusproject.com/
In Iceland they are using facebook to write a new constitution. 318,452 people discussing voting and creating the most important laws of the country. How about you try to realize that because something didn't work before it doesn't mean it won't work again? If that was true then a better world wouldn't be possible and we should just resign ourselves to be modern day slaves.
Humanity is constantly arising towards a high level of equality and fairness. 7 billion opinions aren't an unmanageable number in light of today's user handling technologies. We don't even need a supercomputer to process that, a normal server farm will do.
There is a reason the smartest political minds (our forefathers) intentionally made us NOT a democracy. and they did far more research than you. and i sure as HELL wouldnt want a bunch of idiotic facebookers discussing the future of our law.
I don't have a facebook account, but i'm seeing a lot more trolls and bullshit on here than on my roommate's facebook account. Like it or not FB is mostly comprised on normal people. It's a fad, the majority of the populace enjoys fads and if it can be used as a higher democracy tool why not embrace it.
Also calling our forefathers the "smartest political minds" is laughable. Awareness grows with the ages, even if culture declines.
^ load of crap. look at facebook. the more uneducated, the more facebook.
^ more loads of crap. they will always be smarter than any of us. all they did was sit around and devise a near perfect system of checks and balances by studying thousands of years of politics and governments. you would be a fool to assume that the ages has taught us anything. especially when you look at the fact that our country gets worse and worse in almost every way throughout the "ages". the more we revert to the original plan for our country, the better it gets.
I'm a physics major and most of my classmates, as well as professors, use facebook. If my roommate wasn't in the same course i would have made an account already.
That's not because they were smarter, but because our laws got warped by corrupted individuals, whereas the original was made with true ideals in mind.
Your assumption intelligence and ideals have a proportional correlation between them is a grave mistake. Uneducated people are more likely to embrace ideals. Food for the thought.