Justin van Deventer's comment via Facebook: "Democracy must be something more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner."
Justin, hullo, thanks for your comment, pleased to "meet" you.
No offence, but I herewith come back at you a bit heavy and brutal. Not that I want to dump on you but I do want to put Democracy Two on the map, and I appreciate you giving me this useful peg.
The wolves and sheep story, currently cluttering inboxes everywhere, is the latest of a long line of meaningless clichés. It has always been smart among the chattering classes to denounce democracy.
The implication is supposed to be, in SA particularly, that the rapacious unenlightened thickwit poor will always screw you the brainy wealthy informed recipient. That's untrue of plain old Democ 1, let alone of Democ 2. Majorities always vote moderate. Why did frightened Afrikaners in the 80s not go Conservative? Because the Nats were their moderate option. Why did undertrodden Africans not leap to the PAC? The ANC was their moderate option.
It's where the ballot does not rule that you get rulers doing what a hostile population segment is expected or presumed to want, such as the clichés a la eating the sheep. If Lenin had had to ask the Russian peasantry what to do with the Tsar, the box saying "massacre him and his wife and four daughters and little boy in a bloodbath in a cellar in Sverdlovsk" would not have gotten every tick.
Moreover, the more real, the more close, are the consequences of your vote, the more deliberately you vote. As Ueli Gosteli puts it "all power to all groups to decide on the best survival for their group, aware that survival means getting on with surrounding groups". If you want really full-scale deliberate voting, have lots of groups.
Had Lenin put that question to one big referendum he'd get some ticks in that box. Had villages and towns had to give a second opinion, with the blacksmith saying "if the Tsar gets killed I'm emigrating, and you'll go 50Ks through the snow to Moldovstokvlosk to get your horse shoed", and the pelt-dealer saying "if the Tsar does not get killed, I'll pay an extra 40% for pelts", there'd be fewer ticks in the massacre box.
So Justin, for e-mail fun-'n-games the wolves and the sheep are sortof lekker. If you actually want to live in a satisfying set-up, think a little further.
By the way, one of the other big clichés is Churchill. Ouens tell me "ag, no, man, don't you know what Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others". The idea is gee whizz wow, even CHURCHILL puts democracy down; that must be definitive.
That idea slightly misinterprets the catch-clause – that democracy was the best of a bunch of bad options. But more than that, pallid democracy was all that Churchill knew. That's exactly the point I've been trying to make since Noah was a youngster – prototype democracy is way up on what came before, way lesser than the rich democracy that will succeed it. Cheers, Justin, allebeste!
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