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Submission FUGGER-1419 (Online)

Submission By Ryan Fugger
AddressVancouver, BC,
Organization
Date20040826
CategoryDemocratic government
Abstract
How can the four democratic values I list be applied to our society, so that we may properly call it a democracy?  The answer is to design a system to collect each individual's proposals and register their support or opposition. [2 pages]

Submission Content
Evolving Democracy

The Citizens' Assembly process has got me thinking more deeply about what democracy really means.  "Democracy" is literally "rule of the people". Democracy, simply, is about how we make decisions as a group.

In a small group of people, democracy naturally means that everyone gets to say what they think ought to be done when faced with a collective decision, and register their support or opposition to ideas that have been  proposed.  How much support an idea requires to be accepted depends on the particular idea and the traditions of the community, but is logically somewhere between 50 percent (majority) and 100 percent (consensus).

If some members of the community are wiser, others will want to defer their voice in collective decision-making to them, and they will become leaders.  Is this still a democracy?  Of course, since the leaders speak for others only with their consent.  If a majority of the group Disagrees with a decision taken by the leaders, they can overrule that decision by speaking up and reclaiming the power they had deferred to the leaders. When the leaders use force or the threat of force to maintain their power, "rule of the people" turns into "rule of some people" -- democracy becomes dictatorship.

In a group of people larger than a small village, the line between democracy and dictatorship gets more blurry.  For democracy to function in a large group, there needs to be a more structured system to manage the potentially huge amount of information representing each person's ideas and opinions.  Traditionally, it has been necessary to ignore nearly all of that information -- there was simply no way to bring it all together in any useful way.

To solve this problem, we've relied on the idea that it is natural to defer one's power to a community leader who represents one's opinions. So, every few years, we ask all members of the group, "Who do you want to speak for you in the collective decision-making process?"  The way we ask this question and how we process the answers is precisely what the Citizens' Assembly is going to decide for the province of BC.  But I think it is important, before addressing this specific issue, to put it into its broad context.


Representative "Democracy"

Our system of elected representatives compromises a lot of the values of small-group democracy:

  1. The right to speak for oneself, to submit one's ideas and vote on the ideas of others, is sadly absent.  This is the entire basis of small-group democracy.
  2. The right to defer one's voice to chosen leaders is severely hampered by having a very limited choice of representatives at each election, none of whom might properly represent one's opinion, and by the fact that the representative one actually voted for is most often not elected.
  3. The right to revoke one's support for a representative or change representatives is extremely limited by having elections only every few years.
  4. The right to override one's representative on a particular issue is nonexistent.
Actually, very few of the democratic values of a small group remain in our large-group representative system.  Many observers have pointed out that what we have is in fact an "elected dictatorship".  One hundred years ago, this severely compromised solution was the best we could do to solve the information management problem of representing  veryone's ideas and opinions in the collective decision-making process.  Elected
dictatorship has proven to be "the worst form of government, except for all the others," a lesser among evils.

But now, if we think about it, we have far more choices.  We are living in an information age where we have developed techniques for managing billions of times more information than even existed a hundred years ago. And yet we have not even begun to seriously apply those techniques to democracy, arguably the most important information management problem of all.  This is sad, but understandable, since we are after all governed by dictatorship, albeit an elected one.  Any kind of dictatorship will always be concerned, first and foremost, with maintaining its power to rule over the people.

New Directions

How can the four democratic values I listed above be applied to our society, so that we may properly call it a democracy?  The answer is to design a system to collect each individual's proposals, register their support or opposition to the proposals of others, allow them to delegate their voice to the proxy representative of their choice, and thereafter withdraw their voice from or override their proxy on any issue.  Such a system would likely rely heavily on computers for data storage and processing.  However, even those without access to a computer would still be able to use it as a more powerful democratic tool than anything available today.

How would any decisions every be made with this system?  Simple. Whenever over 50% of citizens supported a proposal, it would be adopted, and if its support slipped back below 50%, it would be repealed.  The participants on the system could raise the threshold higher than 50%, put in lag times, or introduce other measures to make the system behave the way they wanted it to by submitting proposals to alter the system's behaviour.

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