Direct Democracy is Not Socialism!
I have had some conversations with people about Direct Democracy and in general about leftist ideas. But as I have thought about it more and more, I have realized that Direct Democracy (from now on DD) is not Socialism, and it's actually not even Collectivist if you really think about it.
It's not just intellectually provable, but we actually have practical examples that prove it beyond a shadow of a doubt: Blockchains.
A Blockchain is DD in action, where you have Nodes which all have equal voting power, and they all vote in their self interest, as humans always do, but as a result you don't get a government. How interesting? So you have people voting in their self interest, which does not give rise to a centralized monopoly. Unless you discount the Miners in Bitcoin as they are centralized, but that is just simply a flaw in the validation algorithm, think more about Proof-of-Stake algorithms like in Steem, NXT, Peercoin, or even Ethereum. Now of course none of it is a perfect system, but it's still a new technology and philosophy so we need to have more tests on them to see which one is the best.
The interesting thing about Blockchains and the cryptography that is applied, is that we aren't just creating and testing currencies here. We are actually creating and testing new political and societal structures, and they will compete with each other as currencies, for the demand of people, and the best one will win. So it's a giant competition out there in the Altcoin world.
And of course there is some social aspect to it, and it creates a group mentality, because humans are wired to be like this. But I would argue that this is not socialism. But the words "socialism" and "democracy" have been bastardized anyway, so don't let the labels misguide you.
We then have the famous quote of Lenin:
Democracy is indispensable to socialism.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/v/vladimir_lenin.html
And Marx:
Democracy is the road to socialism.
Read more at: https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/k/karlmarx136416.html
But I think these quotes have been seriously taken out of context, and the meaning of the words "socialism" and "democracy" are bastardized.
First of all what the communists mean by democracy, is a representative democracy, in the sense that they create a commune for localities, then they elect a representative, and send that representative into the soviet who will represent the commune there. This is the basic structure of communism, and it relies on people ceding their individuality to a collective of representatives. So by definition it's a centralized system, of top-down control, and government management of the economy with no private property. We know that.
However, what if they don't elect a representative, instead they represent themselves? As individuals. And for any decision to pass you need at least a 90% approval? So you need nearly unanimous agreement between nearly every person in the country, for any decision to take place? Well then you suddenly don't have collectivism anymore, but you have almost individualism.
Of course you can't have 100% agreement, that is just statistically very unlikely, and then humanity would not be very flexible. But a 90% agreement would be pretty pretty good. The NAP would only be violated by 10%, and I believe most libertarians would not mind it.
So here is the big one, the big theory of mine
The difference between collectivism and individualism, is just simply the approval percent threshold of the population.
Yes, only 43.91% voted for Hitler, and there was only a 88.74% turnout, so only 38.965734% of the population liked Hitler, but he still got the ring of power.
Yes only 23.5% voted for Lenin with only 48.44% turnout, that is only a 11.3834% support for Lenin, and he actually lost the election actually, but took power anyway through force.
Yes and Stalin wasn't even elected by the people it was appointed by his asslickers in the assembly with a 78% majority, but whom were probably coerced by his secret police. It was already tyranny in the Soviet Union by then.
What if the approval threshold would have been a minimum 90%?
You see people, nobody likes tyrants. Hitler was despised, Stalin was despised, Lenin was despised, but they still got power, through a shitty election system that doesn't really count the vote properly.
And the same election system exists today. There is practically nothing stopping another demagogue like Hitler to rise to power, if this issue is not addressed.
So I am telling you that with a higher threshold, we can filter out the scum, and that is actually individualism in action, and not collectivism.
Collectivism, is when you submit to the will of the minority. Individualism, is when either your interest aligns with others in an overwhelming proportion, or they can't aggress against you if it doesn't.
So I believe a DD with 90% threshold is the perfect method to create a voluntary society, and build a better humanity!
Interesting approach. How do you see the 90% threshold working? In Switzerland they have for almost everything a referendum. Mostly the vote to the referendum is NO, not only in Switzerland but also with the recent referenda held in various European countries. Based on referenda held, we learned the importance of how the question is asked; Same topic can have a different outcomes because of that.
I really like the idea of a high threshold, since I do not believe in a good part of the voters understand the consequences of their vote. With the high threshold, these votes may not be determining the outcome anymore. However, the challenge with the high threshold is to still keep the system dynamic rather than stagnating the society.
Well the 90% is arbitrary, it can very well be 89.75% too, that is not the point. We should find a number that ensures both social flexibility and evolution of humanity, and also as much sovereignty to the individual as possible. So I believe the number 90% is good for this. Maybe 75%, but I would personally not go lower than that.
Switzerland has already been debunked, it's not DD. You need to collect signatures and they have all sorts of checks and balances. It's still a representative democracy, and you can only have referendum on certain topics, so the questions are controlled, it's an Overton Window, it's just that it's less opressive than other countries. It's still not a free country.
I might need to read it again and again to even understand it a bit @profitgenerator
This post has been ranked within the top 50 most undervalued posts in the first half of Jan 25. We estimate that this post is undervalued by $4.16 as compared to a scenario in which every voter had an equal say.
See the full rankings and details in The Daily Tribune: Jan 25 - Part I. You can also read about some of our methodology, data analysis and technical details in our initial post.
If you are the author and would prefer not to receive these comments, simply reply "Stop" to this comment.
Direct democracy is not of necessity socialism, but it will be if the majority of the people voting are socialists. The majority of the people will always be stupid, ignorant, or both.
No, the problems are always caused by minorities. As you can see, historically, all tyrants have been elected by the tiny minority of the population in an unfair election, or a coerced election.