view from the cheap seats

No links to buy my books today, no fun pun title, not even any wutio nor whinging about being suicidal. No, this post is purely dedicated to the communication of one idea, namely that democracy is wrong.

So there were your three.

To summarise, democracy is wrong because it requires it' participants to be driven by personal motivation rather than the greater good; it only represents an elite, albeit a larger elite than other systems; it invariably results in incapable people being given positions of responsibility.

As I always say however, if you're going to bitch you should really have an alternative to offer.

To that end let's consider what would need to happen to make democracy work, to actually achieve that ideal.

In each case having a population of individuals, all capable of critical thinking and articulation, seems to be the solution.

Now I believe it is possible to achieve such a society and that any suggestion that there will always be 'some types' who are 'just no good' should be consigned to history along with Hitler and the rest of the fascist mentalists.

Every single human being has the potential to do something amazing. It's society's responsibility to provide a structure within which individuals have the opportunity to recognise and develop their potential.

Now the issue of how to achieve this is one another post but I will say I feel that escaping the systems that benefit from our current trend of mass ignorance and consumption, eg. capitalism, would be an essential step.

Putting this to one side however I'd like to finally get to the whole point of this very long post:

IF THE CIRCUMSTANCES UNDER WHICH THE IDEAL OF DEMOCRACY WOULD FUNCTION WERE ACTUALLY ACHIEVED, WE WOULD NOT NEED DEMOCRACY!

If we had a nation of individuals, all engaged and invested in society, all equipped with the basic skills of critical thought, articulation and empathy(1) why would we need leaders?

If there was a problem in your community who better suited to resolve it than those directly affected by it, those who fully appreciate the consequences of not dealing with it, or dealing with it badly?

I envisage the next step along our journey as being a step away from any kind of centralised power, the end of governance by elites. People running their own lives with their own hands.

Suddenly the people making decisions are no longer isolated from their consequences, apathy isn't a problem because you see the benefit of being involved played out positively in front of you every single day.

Now there are those who would argue that this is a step back into the past, a breaking down into the local that will inevitably build back up to the national.

There is an element of truth in this in that many of the new ways would be benefits of the past retrieved. What would make the difference however is communications technology.

Instead of a state infrastructure of governance, the infrastructure would be one of communication:

Myriad local communities, doing their own thing, finding perfect tailored solutions to their own unique problems and then sharing their experience with everyone else building up a vast database of knowledge and experience.

So when your community faces a problem or wishes to make an improvement, you have the benefits of a local level but can start by saying:

...right, what have other people done in similar situations? how can we adapt that to suit us, these people have half a solution over here, let's get together with them...

Endless collaborations, interactions, agreements of mutual help tying the nation together by individual communities being connected to one another.

No rhetoric, no empty philosophy or baseless theories fobbing people off while they just about get by, just people solving practical problems with one another and moving forward.

That's my idea of how a society should run itself.

Now some people would call it anarchism, implying that loosening the bonds of our current social structure would release the mighty ape and we'd all slip back into mindless chaos.

Well I mentioned above the many things I don't believe in, god, life, death, a soul etc and while some people, probably the same people, would see this as bleak and empty, it isn't because there is something I do believe in:

humanity

My faith lies in every single one of you, that, as a race, we have it in us to get past all the nonsense, all the riches and the bloodshed and suffering, and actually get on with LIVING!

The end of history? We're not even out of the starting blocks yet people! We're still packing the car and trying to work out the map.

Everything so far is mere preparation for what is to come, for once we finally get ourselves sorted and unified there is simply no end to how far we will be able to travel.

footnote

(1) it is my belief that the ability to think logically about complex ideas and then effectively communicate your conclusions should be absolute basic skills for every single person, in the same way as counting to ten and writing your name,

No links to buy my books today, no fun pun title, not even any wutio nor whinging about being suicidal. No, this post is purely dedicated to the communication of one idea, namely that democracy is wrong.

Here're the rest of your three:

REPRESENTATION

problem

Globally speaking the UK is a pretty small place. Our population of 60 million is fairly poultry compared to many and yet we share a political system with many of the countries larger than us.

Now is it really feasible that the lifestyles, ideals and principles of 60 million unique individuals, let alone more, can be neatly divided into two, possibly three, camps?

I say no.

Further to this I think it is safe to say that in our supposedly great and holy democracy, the majority of our population are not represented in either our government or our parliament.

Looking at the people running our country you do not find a pattern of diversity parallel to that of society. In fact you find a terrifyingly elitist trend of white guys from similar backgrounds and the same schools / universities.

And so the fundamental tenet of democracy, the idea of self governance, is found to be lacking. The result of our democratic system is actually just another elite, albeit a slightly broader one than in the past.

The impact of this is that those people making decisions are invariably insulated from many of the consequences of those decisions.

Being so specialised and similar in their backgrounds, they can have no appreciation of how their actions affect large parts of society and are thereby rendered incapable of deciding wisely.

example

I register to vote but do not. The reason I do not vote is because none of the boxes on the ballot paper represent me or my views. I have no voice within our democratic system because there is no-one to speak for me and there is no facility to allow me to speak for myself.

Now I have to admit that I do dwell on the fringes of society. My daily drug use makes me a perpetual criminal, I don't believe in democracy, capitalism, religion, life, death, money or the human spirit.

So maybe it's just the freak unique that are locked out, just a tiny minority while most of society, the proper, upstanding, respectable bit of society, is just fine.

Unfortunately the number don't stack up that way. I believe the current Labour government won the last election with just under a third of the vote.

Now let's be generous and call it a third, (because it makes the maths easier!) and let's also be even more generous and suggest that 42% of eligible voters cast valid votes.

This being the case, only 14% of eligible voters actually wanted Labour enough to tick a box. No matter how you carve it, that is a mandate for absolutely fuck all.

The other, more significant issue here, is that more than half of eligible voters didn't actually cast their vote!

Now luckily for our politicians, we refuse to record the reasons why people don't vote, so they can blame it all on apathy.

Instead of considering why people refuse to engage with the supposedly best and only hope for the political future of humanity, we simply trot out the spiteful little 'in-it-to-win-it' argument.

"If you don't vote you can't complain about the result..."

"You have to be part of the system to change it..."

If you don't like chewing gum, if you find everything about it unpleasant, does it matter whether I offer spearmint or mango and passion fruit? No, it doesn't.

This spurious argument serves only to perpetuate a deeply flawed system by attempting to make it socially unacceptable to question or challenge the basic assumptions on which our current system is based.

You may as well be saying:

"Play the game or shut your face, I don't care if you can't feed your kids."

solution

Again, a titanic shift in the attitudes of voters would be required to nullify this problem. If people knew their own minds, if they were furnished, as standard, with the skills to locate and analyse pertinent information, and if people refused to vote for anyone other than those who truly represented them, this problem would disappear.

Knowing exactly what you want, being able to articulate it and being able to identify the person best suited to deliver it. Again this would provide a kind of natural selection for politicians so that only those capable of actually making progress would be afforded the opportunity.

Of course this would mean the end of the dominance of our political scene by the major parties. As more points of view were accurately represented and the true vastly broad base of society encompassed, there would be no room for the monolithic party structures.

QUALIFICATION

problem

Popularity contests do not tend to result in the most able candidate being chosen. Our own form of political popularity contest tends to result in the election of the most believable candidate, rather than the one who can actually do the job.

Our obsession with the sacred nature of democracy then compounds this flaw further as we afford ultimate status to the elected just as we did before when we the bitches of kings and holy men.

Because someone is elected, conjuring up an image of the noble masses floating behind them; because they are a tool of the people, (cuts both ways that one, I like it ) they have righteousness on their side and so must be correct.

example

Another example from my day job involving councillors and the odd MP. Clearly we have a responsibility to both our tenants and the tax payer to spend public money as responsibly and effectively as possible.

To this end we don't repair and improve houses simply on request. If someone wants a new front door a qualified and experienced surveyor will attend the property and assess whether the situation meets various criteria.

There's the decent homes standard, a minimum standard of living set by the government to be achieved by 2010; there're Leeds City Council's own standards on what's acceptable for people living in their social housing; and then there's the on-the-ground opinion of the surveyor as to whether it's reasonable for someone to live with that door etc.

Only when, in their professional opinion, a surveyor decides that all criteria have been met and a new door is required will public funds be spent on replacing it, and it doesn't end there.

In order to stretch that money as far as possible we don't just run out and fit one door after another. Instead such replacements are organised into schemes so that they are bought and fitted in large numbers, thereby reducing the unit cost.

Now many people have genuine grievances about the service they receive from their city council. There's always room for improvement and things do go wrong. There are people however, who complain simply because they haven't got what they wanted.

It is not uncommon for someone who wants new doors, windows, a new kitchen or bathroom in their council house to complain bitterly when they are told that because they do not need such a replacement the council won't pay for it.

The problem arises when such complaints are directed at councillors and MPs. We have had instances where councillors have demanded that they accompany surveyors while they reattend inspections.

In one instance a surveyor stood his ground and stated that the window in question did not need to be replaced. The councillor, holding no qualifications or experience in the field, disagreed with the surveyor and overruled him.

Of course it's not good enough for the window to go into a scheme in the usual way either, it has to go to the top of the list.

This simply results in other tenants not getting their replacements, which were actually deemed necessary, until a later date, possibly the next financial year if we run out of money.

This is something that drives me absolutely crazy and led me to confront one such councillor over the phone. I was informing him that if he wanted a replacement doing I would have to arrange for a surveyor to look at it first.

"I've seen enough doors and windows in my time," he told me, to which I enquired did he mean he was a professional surveyor by trade before entering politics?
(This may have been the case, I didn't know this guy's background, it was a little tongue in cheek though )

"I don't need to be a surveyor," he roared, absolutely outraged, "I AM A COUNCILLOR!"

It was hilarious though I managed not to laugh until I was off the phone. What a cock.

And yet it's also very depressing too because this is another consequence of democracy: the people making decisions are NOT QUALIFIED TO DO SO!

solution

I guess you could say people not being selfish and wanting something for nothing could solve this but to hope to change that is, even by the standards of this article, is a little far fetched.

People recognising ability before charisma is perhaps a more appropriate notion. In order to recognise ability people would have to understand the requirements of the job and thereby the workings of the system.

Again, allowing and encouraging people to become rational, informed, thinking individuals resolves the problem as dickheads like the guy described above wouldn't get a foot in the door.

More tomorrow...

No links to buy my books today, no fun pun title, not even any wutio nor whinging about being suicidal. No, this post is purely dedicated to the communication of one idea, namely that democracy is wrong.

In the interests of making that communication as successful as possible, ie. avoiding being drowned in a tsunami of hysterical rhetoric and bile, I'll start by laying out a few caveats.

Seems to me that since we stopped being a race of individual animals and stepped up to become inherently interconnected through abstract thought and communication, that our social structures have moved, slowly and overall, in one direction.

As we've gradually got to grips with our communicative abilities we've slowly moved away from the fascist dictatorships of religious and / or aristocratic rule, communism and / or military tyrants.

The elite at the top, the lucky few who have the knowledge and the skills, has swollen over time to include more and more of society. Now I freely admit that democracy may well be an entirely necessary step along this road.

It's the first instance where there is, in theory at least, a genuine attempt to allow people to govern themselves. One of the main problems with democracy however, is actually a much wider sickness, infecting many areas of our current culture.

I've written about end time thinking before, usually referring to capitalism. This is the notion that we are at the end of history, that we have arrived and that the systems we have today are final and everlasting.

The notion, somehow universally accepted within the mainstream, is that capitalism and democracy are not perfect but that they are the only possible ways of running our lives.

Six billion people, millennia after millennia past and more to come, and somehow we think there's just one single idea, one path only. Madness, utter madness.

So the initial proposal here is not that democracy is 100% evil, or that parliaments should be burned in favour of silly hats, but rather that our journey is not over.

There are still great and unimagined things over the horizon and if we ever wish to reach them we must keep pushing. It is my belief that democracy has several inherent and terminal flaws which should serve to drive us toward the next step on our journey.

What follows are descriptions of three major failings of democracy as a political system, real life examples to demonstrate the problems and then proposed solutions.

It should be noted that the solutions as posed are not practical suggestions of how to fix democracy today, but rather abstract ideas of how society would need to be for that problem not to be an issue.

Each of these solutions focusses solely on the ways on which the eligible voting population would need to be different. the reason for this is that, by definition, the burden of validity for democratic system lies with the people.

If such a political system is overrun with scumbags and tricksters, perverting it to their own ends and those of their friends, it is only because the voter in the street has given them the power to do so.

So here's the first of your three:

MOTIVATION

problem

It's important to note that none of this is about individuals. We're talking about democracy in the context of the human race and all of humanity's past and future. The nature of the system is on trial here and over such scale the personal intentions of individuals are evened out to become irrelevant.

No matter whether a prospective politician wishes to make the world a better place or line his pockets the question of motivation is the same. Neither wannabe MP can achieve anything without actually being in power.

Getting, and remaining, elected therefore must always be the single overriding concern of any politician.Whatever is required to stay in power, even if it is directly opposed to their core beliefs, must be done for the greater good.

example

I have long had serious doubts about democracy, ever since attending my local MP's surgery at age 18 and being sickeningly patronised, but it's the last year or so of working in local government (1) that has finally driven me to reject it utterly.

A common example of elected officials putting votes before anything and anyone else is when local councillors become involved in complaints from tenants.

Pretty much without fail the councillor will demand that some course of action be undertaken to appease the aggrieved tenant that will come at the expense of dozens of other tenants.

Nor is it uncommon that councillors insist that, when informing the tenant of the special treatment they are to receive, we make it absolutely clear that they are only being favoured due to the intervention of their current or would-be councillor.

At face value this seems counter productive as the councillor is actually reducing the level of service delivered to most voting council tenants.

This service failure however is too removed from the councillor's intervention for the two to ever be connected and the tenant's taking a back seat are left to assume that the council as a whole is simply failing them.

Of course this actually allows the councillor to tout for their vote too by promising to improve the situation they helped create!

I encounter the culture of 'look-after-my-mate-so-he'll-vote-for-me-and-fuck-everyone-else' on a regular basis, usually from councillors as there are a lot more of them about, but occasionally from MPs as well.

solution

As outlined above we can't really blame the elected for acting like this. They may have grand and noble plans to make the world a better place but if they don't keep the voters sweet they'll never be anything more than plans.

So what fundamental switch could we flick, what basic change could we make to our population to remove this stain from democracy's holy character?

Well if our population were, as a whole, informed and engaged; if we, en mass, understood the realities of running a country and appreciated that good things take time and commitment, then politicians would be given the room to devise and implement genuinely robust policies.

Also, those politicians who make their way solely by greasing hands would be recognised as the conmen they are and promptly ousted. Only those presenting practical, feasible solutions to our problems would be given positions of dominion over us.

More tomorrow...

footnote

(1) I work as an Assistant Information Officer in the Repairs & Maintenance Team of one of the Leeds City Council ALMOs responsible for managing social housing.