I've solved politics. Hear me out.

You'll find a lot of different definitions for democracy, all of them focus on the population's ability to directly control their own government. Democracy is not without its "flaws", but I believe a vast majority of people can agree it is the best system we have. Democracy results in a tyranny by the majority, which can be dangerous and should be accounted for with systems such as the electoral college, but at the end of the day tyranny by the majority is clearly superior to tyranny by the minority. If anyone disagrees with me on that, I'd love to know why, but I believe that's quite an objectively true statement.

If we assume that democracy is essential for a healthy, sustainable and free country, we must ask ourselves what exactly a democracy looks like, and whether or not we live in one. What do you actually control. No really, ask yourself this question. What do you get to vote on? Think about it really hard. Every election, you get to choose between two different small organizations (we call them parties) to make decisions for you.

Do you get to choose to whether or not to pull out of iraq, legalize weed, lower taxes, socialize healthcare or any other specific issues you care about? No, you get to choose between two people who give you package deals, and worse yet, they're in no way legally obligated to fulfill their political promises to you.

What this means is that your only control over this government is which extreme political party controls it. You have no direct control over any policy or decision made in your country, you only get the privilege to choose who will make the decision for you. THIS is the root of all of our (preventable) problems in politics.

What this results in is two extreme, antithetical political parties, one who panders to the poor and another who panders to the rich. They spend all their time and money brainwashing us into inheriting their political ideologies. One party will promise us a strong economy only to unsustainably grow it, resulting in a devastating collapse, and the other side promises us over idealistic, poorly thought out social services that end up collapsing in a similar fashion. This ends up hurting both our economy and social services, and the needs of the left and right citizens go unfulfilled as these greedy rich f***s sit there in office raking in 6 figures a year, taking bribes and doing what they personally think is best for us.

What we need to realize is that we don't need to choose who will make decisions for us, we need to demand the right to make decisions for ourselves. We need to stand up and demand a direct democracy. We do not need "elected representatives", we don't need to choose between f***ing over our social services of economy every election. We need a functioning, centrist government controlled by the people, for the people.

Google "Direct Democracy" and read the wikipedia article. I'm currently considering taking the fight for direct democracy seriously and doing some activism, as well as working with others to create a proper framework for how a direct democracy would function, and how countries could transition towards being more directly democratic. I'd love to work with you all to make direct democracy a reality.

Having seen some users opinions on KTT politics section ima have to on this

I feel u tho

tldr version please

If you cant read this do us all a favour and just log out forever

real

part of me feels like direct democracy would be cool in a work environment instead of having management, board members and chairmans and s***

As much as i like this idealistically, think about how dumb the majority of people are. I dont think 100% direct democracy could work in our modern society, we’d surely have to have some experts with more authority. Not everyone gets physics, not everyone gets economics, etc etc

Anarchism in the workplace.

Thats essentially laissez faire management right?

Nah, he said no management and everyone democratically makes decisions. Laissez faire management would still have managers, they just kinda give the employees autonomy.

Reminds me of almost like a jury

The majority of people are smart, especially when faced with the responsibility of controlling their country. I believe so many people appear dumb because they have no reason to be smart, you don't get to make complex decisions so why put effort into learning or thinking? All you get to choose is rich people or poor people, so might as well blindly support one or the other.

I refuse to believe the majority of people are dumb.

It’s not la flame

Jk i haven’t read it. 😊

Aight, where do you wanna eat lunch tomorrow?

You get to choose between Spooky Ghost or Johnno, one or the other will decide what you'll be eating for lunch for the next 4 years. Oh, you want to go to burger king? Well, Spooky says he'll bring you to burger king every day, and johnno says you'll never eat at burger king, you'll just make tuna sandwiches everyday and get rich.

^ That's our current government, I want to allow us to actually choose to eat at burger king when ever we want.

Well i guess we just completely disagree on peoples smarts.
Even if we are smart however, do you think its realistic to expect the entire population to make a decision on a nuclear power plant one day and the next day a decision on urban planning, and the next day on euthanasia, and the next on the education curriculum, and the next on the exact wording of a law, and so on and so on.
I really just dont think people have that ability, at least by themselves. Sure they could probs give it their best but theyre gonna f*** up sooner than later. And if they are making decisions based on facts, data, and information, who is supplying that? Because at the moment its the media and we all know how that story goes.

Like i said, im a big fan of this idealistically, but if implemented, everything would have to be changed fundamentally from the ground up

yeah DD makes sense for sweeping, macro level policies. then democratically elected boards with strict term limits coordinating the minutia of government services and regulations.

Direct democracy is unhinged tyranny of the majority, which is a hilariously bad idea on a federal level. Representative democracy is little more than a smokescreen for plutocracy, where the rich subvert the representatives through lobbying.

In my opinion, we award democracy far more merit than it has really earned. There is no good reason that, for example, the aboriginal populace should be beholden to the will of the white majority, or vice versa even.

That's one of the most important questions to answer if we want to implement a direct democracy. I believe deep down that there is an answer, but I don't have one that I am confident enough in to march the streets demanding immediate direct democracy.

When thinking about how direct democracy might work and what flaws it might have, it's ALWAYS ESSENTIAL to compare it to the current representative approach, otherwise, you'll see flaws in the direct approach that are only worse when done representatively. No government will ever function flawlessly, it can only be improved upon.

What I can do is explain current approaches to this problem, since it's already something faced by elected representatives. What exactly does a member of congress do when they're faced with a policy decision on nuclear energy, foreign affairs or technology that they're unfamiliar with?

They ask for the advice of their advisors, the general public and established professionals in the public and private sector. When a citizen is asked a question of similar complexity, all that's expected of them is to be able to sort the bullshit from the facts, which I believe to be quite easy, most importantly, it's easier for the general public to figure out the truth than it is for a small group of individuals to.

If 9/10 dentists tell you to brush your teeth, brush your teeth. If most of the university professors, college students and public figures known to be trusted and intellectual in the fields agree with a proposal, odds are it's solid, and if it's not the public will soon be victim to their own failures and be forced to improve themselves and their ability to tell fact from fiction.

Second, you'd need to run elections regularly, roughly once a year, and announce the votes in advance so people can do their research. If you only have 10 questions a year and 6+ months to think about them, it's really not hard to figure out the best solution, regardless of its complexity. At the end of the day, if people have to spend 100 hours a year voting and thinking about voting to make this country function, wouldn't we all be better off? Like isn't it a bad thing that we spend so little time actually controlling our own government? I don't see that as a bad thing, efficient governments are built by the people not by small organizations of people.

Although yea, that was a rough rant, I don't know dude. I want to get a bunch of people into a room to think about it, maybe start an organization. I'm not confident enough in DD to demand it yet, I know I sorta said otherwise in my OP, but I think there are solutions to these problems, we just all need to work together to figure them out, then fix the problems w/ trial and error as we go. I gotta think more about how exactly the voting process would go, if you have any ideas please let me know.

I partially agree with your statements of DD not working on a federal level, I see it working better on more of an independent state, city or community level. I honestly don't like countries much, it just becomes too many different types of people to manage.

I also agree with your statements on representative democracy being a smokescreen for plutocracy, I figure it's harder to bribe an entire nation or city than it is to bribe a few individuals or a party.

But again, tyranny of the majority > tyranny of the minority, do you disagree? Nearly every flaw I can find in direct democracy is even worse under representative democracy.

Mans wants direct democracy to enact some lame ass centrist policies lmfaoooo

Mans wants to socialize the means of production and abolish capital lmfaoooo

Maybe there's validity to the power of the free market and the importance of social services? But go ahead keep thinking centrists are just stupid and don't care about politics, I can't convince you otherwise, it has to come from within.

I don't think centrists are stupid, I think theyre right-wingers who are too much of cowards to admit as much.