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The devil is always in the details. Democracy, freedom, and due process are abstract concepts, ending them won’t intrinsically cause any issues. But what concretely do you (or Hanson) propose to replace them, and how? For me, just what is enough for now, because I haven’t heard a good proposal yet.
Personally, I still hold “democracy is the
bestworst government except for all others that have been tried”. I’m not against dictatorship, if the dictator is competent and has a good successor strategy. But who does, and how do you get this person in charge and ensure they’re not overthrown?Likewise, the problem with taking away citizens’ freedom is that what’s done instead isn’t better. Communist governments were ultimately less productive and lost to capitalist ones. We already don’t have total freedom (because that’s impossible), and maybe we need more laws restricting more freedom, for example drug use and being a nuisance in public or to service workers. But what kind of restrictions are you really talking about? Criticizing leaders? Free speech? Then what do we do when leaders start making bad opinions and decisions (since, like everyone, they’re not perfect), going further and further astray like a stalling plane (with no one to correct them, how would they avoid this)?
You may argue we’re already going astray; but there are forums like these, my argument is if opposition was illegal things would degrade faster (and I’m optimistic there will eventually be a course correction in either scenario, but only the latter requires a revolution). You may point to China; but before today’s government, China suffered the “Great Leap Forward” which caused more proportional death than any democratically-caused disaster (at least that I’m aware of); it’s still suffering from centrally-planned failures like its housing; and what do you think will happen when Xi Jinping dies? I think Singapore is the strongest counter-argument; but seeing the War on Drugs and vast difference in culture, I don’t believe America (individualist and expressive) can reach their (collectivist and routine) stable equilibrium, nor any European nation for nation-specific reasons.
Lastly, the illusion of autonomy is important: it makes people happy and complicit, and permits extreme outliers which may be vital. For example, instead of explicitly limiting peoples’ calorie consumption, it would probably be better to just provide free GLP-1s and encourage them via propaganda (in this case outliers probably wouldn’t be vital, but they’d be few enough they’d negligibly affect public resources like healthcare, while appealing to fat enthusiasts). More generally, instead of officially eliminating basic values like democracy to massive resistance, enabling extreme failure modes, why not just manipulate people and use procedural tricks to achieve the same outcomes? I mean, most nations already do that today…
In fact, I speculate a reason people are disillusioned and ironically proposing authoritarian measures is because we live in unofficial creeping authoritarianism. Correlation doesn’t imply causation, but especially without a good proposal, it hints that we shouldn’t accelerate into that path.
What if, instead, we propose and start implementing ways to restore unofficial liberty, democracy, and due process? (I threw myself into the immigration storm last week; I won’t suggest what to do here except not deport massive numbers of integrated citizens or decades-long immigrants, because explained in that thread, I doubt it can happen in a democracy with free press that remains a democracy with free press).
Somewhere in the last 250 years, freedom became synonymous with democracy. Before the United States, freedom was considered to be attained when you were under the rule of the (relatively autonomous) lordship of one of your countrymen or clan. Tyranny was to be ruled by an outsider, who may set up puppet members of your tribe but whose commands were dictated by the foreigner.
Because democracy became synonymous with freedom, democracy is seen as an end in and of itself. But this is incorrect. Democracy is a means to good governance: to prosperity, well-being, and good order. If democracy is not providing good governance, democracy is no longer a reasonable means. It is the height of hubris to think that democracy is the final state of government. The world has seen city states, empires, democracies, monarchies, dictatorships. Additional governance structures will evolve, some of which will almost certainly improve on democracy.
For myself, I desire freedom. I desire the ability to walk my clean streets in safety. I want my neighbors to look and act like me, to believe in similar things, to hope in similar things. I want my children to grow up around adults who will seek to instill similar morals and myths. I want to be led by someone who genuinely has my best interests in mind, and not simply simpering for my vote. I want to be free of the tyranny of the election cycle.
I desire freedom over democracy and realize they’re orthogonal, but in practice, I see no better system to guarantee everyone’s freedom.
How would you ensure the party in charge gives you clean streets and similar neighbors without accountability at least to yourself (e.g. by voting yourself)?
And of course everyone wants to be more free than others, so how would you ensure you’re on top? Personally, I’d do the usual: propose a system based on Rawls’ Veil of Ignorance which looks good enough to convince others but ensures I’m content. Most people are only convinced to join a system if they have some political influence, so to get enough support to put your system into power, usually it needs at least the illusion of democracy.
Case in point, my understanding is that most feudal lords abused their serfs. I’m sure it was better in small clans and pre-US American villages, but only because everyone knew each other, and more importantly an ordinary citizen could physically confront their leader(s), so they were still accountable.
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It's almost as if the cliche of conservatives being enamored extreme conformity is correct. I thought Stepford Wives and Invasion of the Body Snatchers were hyperbolic and insulting notions of what conservatives want. Maybe not?
I think most people would prefer clean streets and nice things versus whatever freedom means.
Isn’t that what Heaven is suppose to be? Ruled by a dictator but nice things?
A dictator who also occasionally sends people to Eternal Tortureland.
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You replace them with what they replaced: republicanism. That means layers of representation, and it means not everyone gets to vote.
The amendments 14-19+24+26, where 14/15/19/24/26 all expand voters indiscriminately, and 16/18 are centralizing authority and control, with a special place in hell for 17 which allowed the fedgov to fully control the states.
The people who vote need to have a stake before they are allowed to vote, other wise they will just vote themselves other people's money, and in the case of immigrants, all of their cousins be allowed to become voters, too, so the whole clan can vote themselves other people's money.
Democracy is not the solution, it is the problem. If you have a solution to the problem of voting yourself other people's money, then I'm glad to hear it, but it's the obvious consequence of expanding the franchise in misguided worship of Demos.
Then the problem becomes, who gets to vote and how do you decide?
Non-citizen immigrants already shouldn’t be voting. Children of immigrants, maybe if they have ties to their origin country, but otherwise they have no less of a stake in their host country than anyone else.
The median voter will vote for themselves to have other people’s money, unless the selection process is very careful and has a way to prevent corruption (which seems unlikely because the selfless voters will be taken advantage of by definition; it must prevent their selflessness from being misallocated to parasites). Even when voters benefit someone else, they’re still benefiting themselves, just next prioritizing who they prefer over who they don’t: e.g. when high-ranking Democrats support immigrants over ordinary citizens, they still put themselves first. I think it’s more important to figure out why the under-prioritized group (ordinary citizens)’s votes aren’t working to keep their money and fix that; if you only deprive a different group of votes, they may still be under-prioritized (e.g. Democrats may redirect money from immigrants to citizens they think will vote Democrat, but they’ll give no more to citizens they think will vote Republican).
Also, how do you divide the layers? In the US gerrymandering (and FPTP) have locked Congress from doing anything and entrenched ideologically extreme candidates. But I think this easier and something simple would be good enough like: (pick n) 1 candidate for n-2n people and each candidate has vote power proportional to how many they represent.
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Truer words have never been said.
I don’t believe this is true in all environments. It is better for European societies, but a lot of other areas seem better with other systems. The Monarchy has worked well for the Saudis. Africa hasn’t been great with Democracy or much of Latam.
It’s not the overwhelming thinv that Capitalism has had over communism.
Democracy has been less bad for Africa than the actually existing alternatives, which are Soviet-style communism and military juntas. There is an open question about whether British colonialism was better, but it isn't clear if Britain still produces competent colonialists.
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Locke for the West, Hobbes for the Global South.
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I actually forgot the last part: “others that have been tried”.
Maybe in the future we’ll have a better government run by and/or with the assistance of AI. But not today: LLMs are too suggestible, so in practice I’m confident it would be hijacked by humans.
Well, the joke was that the original quote says "...the worst..."
And this is why I don’t speak much publicly. “I’m sorry that happened, your feelings are completely unjustified…wait wait I mean justified, sorry again, sometimes I get mixed up you know”.
I’m curious how much other people think (or write or say) the opposite word without realizing. For me it’s frequent: I recall several earlier cases, usually when speaking. I think it’s interesting, a glitch in the opaque process that is human thinking.
Mine is getting the relationship between things backwards. It's indistinguishable from yours when it's like "1 is more than 2", but very different when it's "Alice is Bob's brother".
I also do that: “Russia should be allowed to defend itself from Ukraine…wait, I mean the other way, Ukraine from Russia”
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All the fucking time (though the substance might be a bit different — often it’s a phrase rather than a word).
In recent years I’ve started analogising it to my Wernicke’s area throwing an LLM hallucination.
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The only dictator I would be comfortable with is myself, and given that a) that cannot be guaranteed, and b) would be a terrible idea, am therefore against a dictatorship.
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