Tellus
Banned
I've played with many scenarios in my head about how to improve democracy based on the premise that all my life, I've been somewhat annoyed that socially and politically conscious individuals (like myself, Ill dare claim) have ultimately the same say in politics as the uninformed who based their political opinions on hearsay, a single highly-publicized "debate", or who just lack any sense of the big picture, records of parties, or even just how their republic operates in the first place.
I imagined various systems that could give more electoral weight to those who care about and understand the system.
Then I realized - as I grew older - that the electoral system is largely in place to create something that is indeed truly best achieved through universal suffrage; a sentiment of political equality, largely meaningless, that thrives on the average voter's ignorance alot more than on amateur analysis. If real life was a (realistic) game, picking Democracy as your political system would be about lowering revolt risk, not choosing better leadership. It may be jaded, but our democracies are aristocracies - or at best meritocracies - and the true reasons why the elites would not like to skew the voting systems towards the knowledgeable are firstmost that such a system would lose much of it's "apparently egalitarian" quality, while also undermining the fabric of the aristocracy by actually widening considerably the amount of people who have to be taken into account to achieve power.
What? You think it's about the voters? Go ahead and run as an independent anywhere. It's about getting an established political party and the huge money machine behind it to give you a job. Getting elected afterwards is NOT the hard part, largely because there's a huge electoral mass of "average" voters that you can get it simply with an established party and a huge money machine. (The fact McCain is even competitive should be proof enough of that.)
Yes I'm a bit jaded about democracy. You all ought to be to, because by your presence here, you've gathered enough historical data and modern information to come to the same conclusions if you think about it long and hard.
I imagined various systems that could give more electoral weight to those who care about and understand the system.
Then I realized - as I grew older - that the electoral system is largely in place to create something that is indeed truly best achieved through universal suffrage; a sentiment of political equality, largely meaningless, that thrives on the average voter's ignorance alot more than on amateur analysis. If real life was a (realistic) game, picking Democracy as your political system would be about lowering revolt risk, not choosing better leadership. It may be jaded, but our democracies are aristocracies - or at best meritocracies - and the true reasons why the elites would not like to skew the voting systems towards the knowledgeable are firstmost that such a system would lose much of it's "apparently egalitarian" quality, while also undermining the fabric of the aristocracy by actually widening considerably the amount of people who have to be taken into account to achieve power.
What? You think it's about the voters? Go ahead and run as an independent anywhere. It's about getting an established political party and the huge money machine behind it to give you a job. Getting elected afterwards is NOT the hard part, largely because there's a huge electoral mass of "average" voters that you can get it simply with an established party and a huge money machine. (The fact McCain is even competitive should be proof enough of that.)
Yes I'm a bit jaded about democracy. You all ought to be to, because by your presence here, you've gathered enough historical data and modern information to come to the same conclusions if you think about it long and hard.