[EM] teams

[Abd ul-Rahman Lomax]

At 09:48 PM 5/16/2006, Paul Kislanko wrote:
>Anybody who thinks candidates know more than they do and transfers their
>rights to vote to a candidate deserves the inevitable dictatorship they wind
>up with.

Yes, I encounter this position. It is totally insane. When I wrote 
that candidates know more than I do, I am referring to the personal 
knowledge that they often have about other candidates. Personal 
knowledge is more direct and likely more accurate than impressions 
formed from media.

As to "transferring rights to vote," this is what we do in a 
representative democracy. The forms of democracy that I advocate, and 
which I am occupied in establishing, for this establishment does not 
depend on permission from anyone, allow anyone to vote on any issue 
of concern to them, but also allow the delegation that is essential 
in large societies. We routinely delegate responsibility to others. 
We do not tell the pilot of the airplane how to fly it. We do not 
tell the man who maintains the pumps that keep our neighborhood from 
flooding how to do his job -- unless we happen to be his supervisor.

It is universally claimed by political scientists, in the works that 
I can find, that direct democracy is not practical except in very 
small societies which cannot compete successfully with larger, 
hierarchically organized ones. The early writers on democracy 
considered representative democracy to not be democracy at all, but 
this position has largely been discredited, and representative 
democracy has come to be seen as necessary.

In representative democracy, the rights to vote directly on 
legislation, as well as the right to administer, to exercise the 
sovereignty of the state, are delegated. Indeed, there is danger of 
dictatorship in this, and, in particular, in the electoral 
democracies that exist, there can be the tyranny of the majority, 
which is sometimes as oppressive as the tyranny of any dictator. But 
the benefits of scale in human society, of larger organizations, if 
they can operate successfully, so far outweigh the risks that almost 
every society has moved that way, and, so far, no better method than 
electoral democracy has been found that maximally preserves 
individual freedoms.

Except one.

Proxy democracy, which is standard in business, has almost totally 
been ignored by the political scientists. Reading the book On 
Democracy, a recent publication I don't have in front of me so I 
don't remember the name of the author, it is remarkable how 
statements are made by this very knowledgeable and widely-respected 
author and professor that don't seem to realize that such a thing is 
even possible. That there could be representative democracy without 
elections .... it is not that they claim it is impractical, it would 
be more that the words don't mean anything.

Proxy democracy runs into the problems of scale at a higher level. 
The political scientists analyze the communication necessary for a 
representative to properly represent his constituency, noting the 
physical impossibility of a representative in a modern district 
successfully communicating with all those represented, or even of 
being open to much in the way of communication from constituents.

And delegable proxy is an answer for this problem. I won't go into 
more detail here, my purpose here was only to note that I do consider 
it impossible for a person today to be knowledgeable about every 
aspect of public life, sufficiently to make decisions about the 
details, nor is it possible to even consult experts about these 
things; all of this would take so much time that it is hard enough 
for the specialists we call politicians to actually understand what 
they are voting on, not to mention for the citizen who holds a 
full-time job and takes care of a family on top of that. And there 
are similar difficulties in choosing representatives and 
office-holders, once they are chosen on a scale that makes personal 
contact impossible.

To me, the key question in politics is whom to trust. It would seem 
that Mr. Kislanko's suggestion is that nobody can be trusted. But 
from my point of view, there is no choice. We must trust someone, or 
we will have no choice at all. That is, power is going to be 
exercised, and we cannot personally control more than a little of it. 
Do we choose someone we trust, in which case we can add our resources 
to those coordinated by this person -- or the process that he is a 
part of, or do we not make that choice, in which case we have only 
our own separate tools, uncoordinated and probably next to useless, 
against the vast coordinated resources of special interests who 
*will* trust, that is, they will delegate authority, they will 
collect power, and they will exercise it.

It's completely insane: we would trust so-and-so to run the country, 
to have his finger on the nuclear trigger, to compose the Supreme 
Court, to exercise the myriad powers of the Presidency, but *not* to 
merely vote for someone to fill that position, if it is not going to 
be him? Which is more dangerous?

The Constitution established the indirect election of the President, 
through electors. Does Mr. Kislanko think that therefore the U.S. 
deserves dictatorship? After all, that is "trusting someone to vote 
on one's behalf."

The fact is that the Electoral College was long ago subverted and not 
allowed to perform the envisioned function. The failure was not in 
trusting the electors, but in trusting the legislatures not to follow 
narrow goals, pursuing party interests over democracy itself. We 
have, now, an opportunity to rectify that; unfortunately, it does not 
truly restore the college, but it would remove the warp introduced by 
the all-or-nothing choosing of electors.

I would solve the more general problem by moving the *real* process 
entirely outside the legal, governmental system into NGO development 
of consensus. I think it can be done. The *real* process is how the 
society, as a whole, decides whom to vote for. It can be much more -- 
and even freer -- than a collection of individual decisions.