RE: Change the World using Minds not Swords
I have heard that argument, and used to believe it to be true, but I have realized that it's not.
While it is true that mob rule is dangerous if you live in a community full of crazy people of say 30 people. So yes if 30 crazy people vote and you are the only sane guy amongst them, then it's bad.
But as you scale it up with more and more people, it is much clearer, and the crazy people will become the minority. Because if you think about it, it's actually the politicians who are the crazy people with their wars and other evil stuff. So outvoting them would actually make humanity better.
In today's society the biggest problem is political corruption, nothing even comes as close to it. So if the political class doesn't exist, then either way it will be a net benefit to society.
Also the IQ scare is a fallacious argument. And small IQ doesn't necessarly mean they are evil people. Cleaners have usually low IQ, but they are sometimes one of the most kind people, who would not do violence to anyone.
So the voting pool will be very diverse, and IQ is not the only factor that matters.
Maybe a transition to individualism won't even be needed, if peace and prosperity will already be achieved. And if the consensus happens voluntarly, maybe that is individualism already. Because here on Steemit, I am an individual, and I can vote and express my thoughts here, yet the decision making is actually a direct democracy, combined with voting power. That is very close, and yet I don't feel like my individual rights are opressed here.
Let me rephrase then...What about a community whose educational system was purposefully broken and used to indoctrinate the masses?
Thankfully that is going away, as most people get their information from the internet, and as mainstream media collapses, the news sources will probably be social media.
Now social media is still a coercive and censorship prone platform, unless it's decenralized.
So we should work 110% now to ensure that people will go to Steemit, Synereo or other decentralized platforms, instead of Facebook or Twitter.
If you're talking about a global direct democracy what it really means is China deciding everything.
Well hardly. 1.7 billion out of 7 billion is still a minority.
Besides, don't you think that western birthrates would be better if socialism would fall? It's all the taxes and unemployment that is the sole cause of this problem.
A direct democracy is not socialism, or it doesnt have to be, think of it like the bitcoin nodes. They are impartial politically, because they all have their common goal, but it actually works.
If society could be built that way, that would be wonderful.
It may be a minority, but it's not like everyone in America would vote the same as everyone in Africa. Hell, it's the reason the US has an electoral college. The rural areas don't agree with the urban areas on much of anything, but since the urban areas are more densely populated they'd run the show if it was direct democracy.
So you'd have 1.7 billion people voting for things that aligned with Chinese culture, and 7 billion people voting for things divided up among another 100 cultures or so.
No, I don't think that at all. In fact there's no basis on any front for that. Even if you were right that a purely free market would increase our wealth, which I don't buy at all, it would actually reduce the birth rate. Wealthy people have fewer children, that's been shown again and again throughout history. Poor people have more children.
Oh wait, unless you expect the eradication of "socialism" to drive the US into poverty? Well then maybe...
But it would still be generations before we caught up.
I don't even know what you're trying to say with this...
Of course not, Africa is not a developed continent. It's the Maslow pyramid:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maslow%27s_hierarchy_of_needs
You cant engage them in debates about philosophy until there are people starving on the streets. Those things have to be solved first. But eventually they will evolve.
That is meaningless. We have internet and cryptographically provable identity. Anyone could basically vote online. You dont need ballot stations.
Yes that is called decentralization. But also putting all Chinese people under the same category is a little bit racist. I am sure there are marxists, capitalists, christians, buddhists, and various other sub-groups there. I doubt they would have a 90% consensus on anything. Don't mistake the government for the people.
Not in that sense. Middle class and poor people would have more children, instead of 1 they could have 3. Now there are still people who have 3-5 kids, but they do it on welfare. And those that want 3 kids but only have 1 because they have to pay the taxes for the other guys, that is bad. So the lazy are incentivized to have more kids , but the hard working must stick to 1.
Besides having 1 kid if you are rich, although you could afford more, is simply quality vs quantity. And the only reason the government incentivizes people to have kids, is to maintain the pension system,that requires more new investors (social security payers) to join in, like a ponzi scheme.
In bitcoin you can have direct democracy amongst nodes, without them implementing any silly socialist policies like hardforking money out of rich addresses into poor ones. The distributed consensus mechanism, in this sense is not socialism. Socialism is always centralized, direct democracy is not.