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freerangebat | 2 years ago

I wonder if historically governments were ever controlled by the people. It seems democracies that can somewhat control the government are extreme outliers in human history.

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lstodd|2 years ago

Like it's said in Russia - government is controlled by the people, and we know who these people are.

dudul|2 years ago

Democracy via elected representatives is a lie. "Extreme outliers" may even be too much. Is there even a handful of examples?

still_grokking|2 years ago

It's not even a lie. It's just not democracy.

The whole point of democracy as it got invented was that the people can directly vote on any government issues. No direct voting on every day do day policy, no democracy. Simple as that.

"It would not be possible in practice" is the actual lie. We have since many years the tech to make it possible to vote on everything by everybody.

I'm not saying that everything would be perfect if people could decide about their fate in an actually democratic way. The majority is dumb on average. That's a sad truth. But I'm not sure it would be really worse than what living in our current lie is. Given some fundamental rules (like human rights), which couldn't be overruled easy by simple majority voting, such a system could work, imho.

The "only" question is how a society could arrive at a true democracy. Given for example into what the french revolution culminated I have no high hopes that creating a bigger democratic society is even possible.