Introduction No 3, from about Oct 2010 -- I think the best-read bit of this site, though the counter seems to have taken a walk.
If you think people welcome the message that communal life can be nicer, freer, friendlier, think again. People get angry, especially in places that spend much time griping that communal life is not nice, not free, not friendly. Instant response is: “cheeky bastard; who’s he to tell me I can live life like I wish to but never have!” So people want to find holes, and that’s fair enough. I’d do the same. Who wouldn’t?
But, oh, those holes get found in unseemly haste, and presented as the most resounding put-downs.
The classic is when someone talks of Denis’s theory, and someone else says “what?” and I must start “Well, I think we’re at the baseline of a higher grade of civilisation...” and I have up to nearly a whole uninterrupted minute before the new guy says a phrase that is inscribed inside my forehead: “Let me tell you why you’re wrong”.
And out come the ten flaws he has seen in 50 seconds that I have overlooked for 26 years.
So I think you have some humanitarian sympathy if I get scratchy here. At the same time, be assured you’re allowed to baulk at the Ten Big Holes. As you detect, everybody does. (Well, most people). And I accept that someone who assures you of big effects to flow from an abstract proposition sounds like he’s selling snake-oil. It’s my job to show you I’m not. Just know that after a while the impossible turns to the commonplace. (And if it doesn’t, write and tell me and I’ll try to help it along).
You see the picture above, which I borrow by kind courtesy 123OpticalIllusions.com. (Thanks for this, Messrs 123). What does it show? Two people getting friendly. Ah, really? Watch some more. You’ll see nine dolphins in a pale sea.
D2 is a little like that. For a while you think “What the heck is this guy on about?” Then you see the dolphins.
Okay, here are the big holes that everybody sees instantly, with mini-answers that are fleshed out elsewhere around the site:
Big Hole One: “Aaargh! The chaos!”
In pre-democracy, to give two power-wielders the right to control the same activity would ask for chaos. In bald democracy you are better off, in this respect as in most respects, but not very much better off. Bald democracy can still have power-hungry party leaders pulling their constituents into combat, which is why your standard democratic constitution takes huge care to separate local or provincial jurisdiction from national jurisdiction.
D2 changes the rules. Here, the people making the running are the cobbler and the piano teacher and your aunt Jemima – the voters, and at that, not all the voters, majorities of voters. Individual voters may be psychopaths, nutcases, ideological acid-heads, but majorities are not. Majorities of voters have no sense of humour.
D2 encompasses thousands of majorities, voting in a variety of forums for a variety of interests, with votes that pack clout. In these circumstances you can rely on majorities to be beautifully predictable. They will evict a council that spends their money frivolously, and they will veto policies that bring turmoil into their lives.
D2’s central claims, I’ve told you, are that (i) politics work better when office-bearers are on a short leash, to the people who elect them, and (ii) you shorten the leash by leaving communities to decide on their own powers.
You couldn’t have done this in pre-democracy, you can’t do it in bald democracy; it is not surprising that people say: “it can’t be done”. Oh yes it can. It can be done for the single simple reason that the harnessing of majority will (“consentience”, see here) gives politics a stability that eclipses all previous systems.
On paper it looks terrible: the neighbourhood is allowed to put a speed bump in the road, but the city can remove the speed bump, but the province can reinstate it, but parliament can take it away again... Wow, chaos is the word, on paper. But then -- on paper my nation is a haven of efficient non-racial human respect, hah hah wry sore hah.
D2 as I understand it is a maturing. It marks humankind’s ascent over a hump. The world of laws that promise peace and plenty gives way to the world where interaction of power-wielding people delivers definitely the peace, and if not “plenty” then at least a constant advance to higher levels of social justice. In the case of the speed bump outside your house, you are a voter at least four times. If you are paying for your local and municipal and provincial and national representatives to squabble about your speed bump, sending workmen at your expense to block your street while they remove and replace your bumps, you are going to vote someone out of power.
Since it does not take a crystal ball to detect that this is what you are going to do, the councils concerned do not take unreasonable measures to start with. What might happen is that over 1 in 100 speed bumps that a neighbourhood puts up, the city says “no, this is disrupting flow”, and over 1 in 1 000 the province might say “no, we object to this licentious city forcing its need for speed on quiet-living types”, and 1 time in 1 000 000 the nation may see the speed bump as symbolising some larger rift, and in all these cases the issue is worked out by basic principles of D2. The littler unit can never be TOLD what to do. On paper it can always be FORCED to do what the bigger unit wants but that forcing will invariably mean intolerable costs, and in practice the flow of wills or consentience will sort the issue out according to the permanent principle that the degree of affectedness and the vehemence of view come into the balance along with crass numbers.
I don’t blame people for jamming at this. A mental hump is harder to get over than a speed bump. But once you are over it, you’ll see it as no more than obvious that the local guys do their thing by default, the city chimes in where there is upset in its ranks, and so on. Getting over the hump is not instant, but it’s not rocket science either. Let it dwell a little – ask yourself who are the right people to decide on the speed bump outside your house. It’s the people who are interested, right; for whatever reason they may be interested? If you accept that, the whole of D2 slots into place.
Big Hole Two: “Aaargh! The expense!”
What expense, exactly? Mostly, people think gravy-train. They’re used to elected office-bearers buying long cars at our expense, taking their families, or other, on exotic fact-finding tours at our expense, giving their friends Cup Final tickets at our expense, and so on. I talk of a magnification of elected office-bearers; you visualise the gravy train acquiring a million carriages.
Actually, no. The gravy train will, at minimum, lose carriages and, at best, run out of track. Why? Because you and I, the people who pay for public service, acquire a new force: an army of representatives with a foot on the ladder of power, who are scared of us.
Note, please, the word “scared”. Today as I write, a citizen of a democracy, no-one in the political structure is scared of me. There is not a single public representative who would lose sleep if I said “do X or in the next election I will vote for your opponent”. It is doubtful whether there is one who would lift a finger, other than dismissively. But there are many public representatives who, if their Party boss said “you seem to be getting out of line”, would leap into line. Their careers are at stake.
A big effect of D2 is to amend that relationship. As I see it, you or I might have several local reps, probably unpaid, primarily motivated by D2 empowering them to make things better according to their lights. To achieve their objectives they need active support from many of us and reasonable acquiescence from more. To them, you and I matter much and Parties matter little. They’re scared of us. That’s first base.
Second base is that some other power-wielders are scared of our reps.
When dealings with municipal government come up, my local reps will have a clout that I don’t have. They’re in the structures; they have chosen to be. While I’m playing darts at the bar, they’re figuring out ways to advance the interests that got them into politics, for which they seek more support and less opposition and they want to impress me and you, which gives them a vested interest in showing up flaws in the city council – not just corruption but, bigger, waste and mismanagement. If our city councillor is asleep on the job, they are, firstly, in a position to know, and secondly, in a position to galvanise. They are leaders in our neighbourhood; they can shout and howl, and swing not just one vote but many.
Third base: our provincial leadership is a mystery to most of us. We only hear of it when the newspapers dig up a corruption scandal. In D2 we will have city councillors, who depend more on our votes than on Party approval, watchdogging provincial councillors on our behalf, looking for ways to impress us, such as by using their positions to expose corruption and ways to reduce our taxes...
My point is: we screech and wail about how much we are losing to corrupt and inefficient government, and yet our best protection against worse loss is the scrawny democratic accountability that we already have. D2 as a system offers hugely more accountability and thus hugely larger savings. And yet people say “Aaargh! Expense.”
That doesn’t add up. No element of this “Expense!” allegation adds up. If your local councillors want you to pay them more than the majority of local voters think they’re worth, you’ll vote them out of power. If your local council duplicates services that the city is giving you anyway, you may vote it out of existence.
Thus please take the silly ideas about D2’s costliness – the gravy train and/or penniless council lashing out on grandiose projects, and toss them away.
The non-silly idea about D2 being costly is that it does, indeed, make it easier for the poor multitude to leverage their votes into twisting the arms of the rich few. That’s part of its job. We’ll come to it.
Big Hole Three: “Aaargh! The effort!”
Ja, I sympathise. You see democracy as a day of polls, a dramatic and often tense day after a year of disruption and division and distraction. You can’t get work done, you can find nothing on the news except more bloody politics, enough! Thus you picture ultra-democracy as polls 24/7, and as a diversion for madpersons.
Or, noting that in advanced democracies like Switzerland and Australia people get fined for not voting, you see extra-advanced democracy as policeman’s paradise, forcing you to stand in queues all day to vote on what colour to paint the town hall or whether the parish pump should be wind-driven or solar.
As with much of D2, your problem here is very temporary. You are (understandably) importing the rules from the mode you’re used to into new mode that makes those rules superfluous.
For instance, the logic of first-phase democracy has been deeply anxious about low polls, and insistent that you have to exercise your vote to keep it in shape. Stayaways could mean fear, or rejection of the structures, or rejection of the options, and suggest that forces of coup or revolt are building up. The logic of next-phase democracy is the reverse: the prospects of coup or revolt are drowned by the multiplicity of leadership structures. You have no fear of a 10% poll; you welcome it as indicating that 90% of the electorate are happy either way. You know that when they become not so happy, the only effective medium of expression is the vote. Tiny polls will become the norm, with occasional almighty blips.
Moreover, I think that people who take alarm at the allegedly excess work or effort of D2 are somehow envisaging 50 000 sites of decision-making meaning that every decision is re-made 50 000 times. If this might be your worry, won’t you take a moment to amble through your government’s Acts and wonder which of them your province or city or suburb may wish to amend – The Intellectual Property Amendment Act? The Dutch Reformed Churches Union Act Repeal Act? The Copyright Amendment Act? The Prince Edward Islands Act?(!)
It’s true that the principle of D2 allows the governing body of Bliksemswakfontein, population 412, to institute local amendments to The Citation of Constitutional Laws Act. It is correct that it should do so, because as soon as you restrict what your democratic institutions are allowed to do some minds begin to think of breaking out of the system. But reality is that nearly all national legislation will forever remain the default law of nearly all parts of any country. Sometimes a province will vary a law, and that will then be default law for the province. Sometimes a city, a village; sometimes doubtless as gimmick, sometimes controversial or pressure-valve, sometimes providing for lifestyle variation. In all cases the rule remains simple: if some people’s bright idea gets badly enough up enough other people’s noses, it gets squelched, usually before it starts. And when people who say around the drinks table “terrible idea” can’t be bothered to cast their vote against, D2 assumes that the idea does not get very far up their noses.
Big Hole Four: “We can’t handle basic democracy, forget the De Luxe.”
The belief persists amazingly widely that democracy is, deep down, really a reward for being middle class and properly schooled and probably homogenous and preferably pale, and that it goes pear-shaped when the other lot get hold of it.
Well, that belief is one for which a euphonious traditional Anglo-Saxon term is impeccably suited, the term “bullshit”.
If this site tells you nothing else whatever, let it tell you one thing that you won’t forget:
Properly employed, democracy is not a reward, it is a tool. It is a tool for stability and for peace and for social justice [without which, your stability and your peace are bogus].
Forgive a metaphor that I also use elsewhere on this site: the camera.
When I was a kid, 95% of us were lousy photographers. We had 36 pictures on a reel and 28 of them came out with wrong focus or wrong aperture or wrong shutter-speed.
Then the camera companies invented a magic gadget called “A”, for Automatic.
We didn’t say “we can’t even get ordinary cameras right, forget the De Luxe model.” We bought our automatic cameras and now our pictures work.
Well, that’s what D2 does for democracy. D2 is by no means a prize for getting ordinary first-level steam-driven democracy right. It is the tool by which you overcome the traumas that old democracy inflicts.
I try to be patient with the guys who keep telling me “wait until we’ve got things right, then you can tell us about advanced systems.” It can be hard, though, because when they have dismissed my naiveté and failure to understand the world they turn to the ever-mounting levels of corruption and ineptitude and they groan that nothing can be done, it’s all so tragic. Hey, Jim, Lindi, Leon, Paulus, you lot! Something can be done! It starts with you putting kop in gear!
Big Hole Five: “It’s a rich man’s trick!”
to be read with
Big Hole Six: “It’s a communist plot!”
What I want to know is why do I never get Plutocrats saying “ah!, clever!, this puts us smart guys on top!” and why do I never get Lefties saying “great!, fantastic!, we can take the rich to the cleaners!” I only get each lot saying “whoa!, we could lose out!”
Again – you’re getting to know this – I understand. The Haves see themselves as few and the Have-Nots as many. They see their little right to have their little vote for their little councilette as pathetic: when the multitudes get all this voting power they’ll trample it. The Have-Nots and their advocates envisage rich precincts with expensive lawyers tying the Honest Working Man in knots and profiteering like mad.
To my mind the sum total number of basic ways that this relationship can in reality work out amounts to one (1). There can be, will be, an infinite number of specifics but the essential process is not alterable. It will be the Have-Lesses pushing for more while the Have-Mores think up the most painless ways of delivering the more.
I borrow a case example I have written elsewhere, with apologies if you have read it. Once I rented a country cottage for a weekend, at R1000. In the cottage was a sign from the owners telling us to not tip caretaker Martha more than R20, or we would disrupt local norms.
To me, that imbalance is obscene. To Martha’s sons and neighbours, the same, which is why the cottage is surrounded by burglar bars, burglar alarms, triple-locked doors and Alcatraz fences that make a rustic stroll mean carrying a kilogram of keys.
The status quo is not only revolting but also impoverishing, turning my tribe into neurotics, paranoiacs, and emigrés. Martha’s tribe tried the trick of a rampaging leftist government, and got the virtual shutdown of everything from schools to waterworks, with wholesale re-routing of public funds to private pockets. I submit that the answer is simple and certain: it is to give Martha a weapon, the most effective social-justice weapon: a vote with clout. Let the Wild Left appeal “Martha, vote for us and we’ll give you the house” while her employer lures “Martha, if we leave I wonder who’ll supply your R400 per weekend”.
Sometimes Martha will think the rich bastards need a fright and her vote will drift Leftwards; sometimes she’ll thinks the hairy radicals threaten her stability and her vote will switch course. The same goes for her neighbours. There’ll doubtless be losers, and when a loss is direly unreasonable there will be counterblasts from other sections of society’s consentience. Drastic action at any level will always be subject to the ratification of other levels, and always up for review according to experience.
Bottom line
D2 stimulates good behaviour by the strong towards the weak. It causes a drift toward equilibrium, where the Have-Less is more or less happy with what he has in his life, and tacitly accepts that the more that the Have-Mores have is fair compensation for working more, studying more, knowing more.
This, I may say, is where D2 matters to me. In some countries, D2’s value will be the cutting-out of coups and civil wars. In mine – where these things were real when I first argued this case in the ’80s – the cutting-out of poverty is what counts. There’s no dignity in poverty and there is no security either, neither for the person who lives in it nor for me, through whose kitchen window he may wish to crawl by night with a weapon in his teeth. I need him to have a weapon that works, so that one day his son won’t be crawling through any windows, and my granddaughter will feel fine about catching a train home at 2am.
Now, why don’t the poor many simply steamroller the rich few? Because, firstly, the poor are not a mob, they are a vast variety of organised forces all with their own cautious majority. Secondly, because it isn’t that easy. The rich have their own hillocks of power; if one is unfairly walked over by a provincial jackboot, hundreds or thousands of outposts of resistance will crop up.
And why don’t the complacent rich set up their structures, making use of the system, and leave the squatter camps to fry in poverty and disorder? Because they need orderly squatter camps. They have problems in their lives, mainly the C- word, C-R-I-M-E. They want someone with whom they can negotiate: for what kind of reduced crime-rate will they provide what kind of clinic/school/factory/subvention?
Big Hole Seven: “It’s just reinventing the wheel.”
to be read with
Big Hole Eight: “It’s unreal, it’s never been done.”
Both of these are right, really. A million voices are saying “we need better democracy”. That’s not news, though D2’s wheel differs in a few ways.
Most (indeed all, that I have seen) more-democracy proposals involve mechanisms that would increase accountability by 5%, 10%, 15%, modest gradual sums. I’m arguing that a huge magnification, a multiple, will not only work better but will also be – after a bit of settling-time -- an easier thing to get.
I also offer a particular content to this “more-democracy”, namely the principle that the allocation of powers works best when the people who are affected make the decisions as they go along.
As I’ve said [many times] around this site, I do not claim that this is the only way of enriching democracy; there may be hundreds, thousands, of ways. This one is the best I can see, being completely pure, uncluttered by constitutional gimmicks or catch-clauses or buts & excepts. It is also the logical next-step on the track that history has been heading down for, oh, a few millennia now.
However it has big initial drawbacks, in that at first sight it looks all wrong – to nervous minoritarians it looks like majority tyranny gone wild, to defensive majoritarians it looks like devolution gone wild, to cautious minds like anarchy gone wild, and so on. There is a not a lot I can do about this, beyond trying my best to help you through it. But for a lot of people – who are, not unreasonably, primed to reject – first sight is simply baffling. That is where the consoling response “it’s just reinventing the wheel” comes from.
The flip side – “it can’t be real because it’s never been done” seems a bit perverse to me, from the generation that has presided over inter alia the Internet, the cellular phone, the mullet, Viagra and Wikipedia. It recalls the famous (apocryphal?) US Director of Patents who allegedly resigned at the dawn of the 20th century, saying that everything had now been invented.
This objection also has a cousin: “if it was for real it’d coming up in an advanced place.”
Nowhere could have begun to explore D2 until it was accepted that that power works best when everyone has a bit of it, which is a very new idea in the timeline of history and indeed often still a lip-service idea.
More than that, I don’t imagine that the premier league countries have the incentive. It’ll be the middling-scarred nations that first go into D2 or something like it. The seriously bad-news places that need it most will follow, presumably midwifed by the UN. (By “something like it” I of course recognise that comprehensive democracy may have very different specifics from what I am describing. I mean whatever system under whatever name comes up to move power into the hands of ordinary people, treating today’s democracies as foretaste.)
Big Hole Nine: “But the people know nothing!”
This should really have been Big Hole One. But then, maybe they all should.
This is a marvellous myth and an old one; it has attended the birth of all democracies – as a caterwaul from the “higher” classes – and has been disproved in every case where the alleged democracy has in fact meant that ordinary people exercise a voice (which is by no means all the places that call themselves democracies).
It is true that successful democracies have mainly been “educated” (and middle-class and homogenous and customarily a bit melanin-deprived). There is also a correlation with how long they have spent warming up to it. Personally, I would argue that this does not, strictly speaking, say anything about the capacity of the people to be democrats; it says more about the capacity of the system to contain the people who it inherits. You may say I am splitting hairs but in any case we need not argue that now, because D2 makes the level of people’s education wholly irrelevant.
Let me amend that. D2 makes education wholly irrelevant as a measure of the calibre of democracy. Education remains relevant to your health, wealth, welfare, crossword capacity and much else. But for a D2 society to work, it doesn’t matter whether your average citizen is a professor or a peasant. You have given people choice – real, effective, choice, not phoney nominal choice like “here, choose between your tribe’s party and the other tribe’s party”. Give a real choice for someone to represent them, people choose someone whom they trust to represent them. This is almost always someone who they assume to be wiser or more knowledgeable than they are. That’s all that is needed to make democracy work.
Big Hole Nine has an adjunct – Big Hole Nine (A): “But the people vote wrongly!”
I love this statement. It always comes from a person who is convinced that his/her class/ethnic/group Party is the one that God anointed, as it were, the one that is best for everyone else, too, if only the poor benighted imbeciles understood. They seem to think that other people think “oh, I’ll vote against the interests of mankind as a whole and in favour of my own narrow class concerns.”
People, I hate to burst your bubble but here is the terrible truth: even in first-phase democracy there has never really been “right” voting and “wrong” voting. We all vote according to our own skew perspective, which nearly always is (by pure coincidence, you understand) the same perspective as most of the people we share a job with, a neighbourhood with, a church with, a bar with. Moreover all of us always are certain way deep down that we are the ones who are right and the others are merely selfish.
In D2 there is not even a shadow of right or wrong voting. The process takes over. It is the richer process that creates a richer outcome.
Mostly, the people who tell me that “the people vote wrongly” are people who wish that all this democracy stuff would go away and we could be ruled by a philosopher king such as, they admiringly say, Plato recommended. I confess that when after 50 seconds I must listen to these guys telling me how wrong my 26-year-old quest has been, I do sometimes feel the milk of human kindness curdle a tiny bit, and I get an impish wish to ask them questions. For instance: do they also believe in the tooth fairy? And: would they prefer these erroneous humans to be outside the democratic system (presumably saying to each other “how lucky we are that people who know better are making the decisions for us”)?
I’m also tempted to ask if they’ve actually read Plato’s politics, but that would be unfair, as the fact that they quote him admiringly is proof that they have not, they’re seduced by the image of an ancient senatorial-looking guy with a classy robe. I do, though, look forward to someone giving me an answer to: “So if you’re so impressed with 2 400-year-old political philosophy, when you next have a tooth problem may we try out some 2 400 year-old dentistry?”
Big Hole Ten and (whew) last: “The government will never permit it”.
This is the ultimate put-down, for many people. “Hrmph. Do you expect me to put my valuable time into thinking around a talk-shop subject that the government would never allow?”
Well, people, here is what will happen:
Bit by bit over maybe a decade, maybe more or even much more, but inexorably, the idea will wear in that the democracy we now live in is a staging post and not a terminus. As that idea wears in, under whatever name and with whatever specifics, people will see in it a resolution of hindrances in their lives. They will start adopting it as a cause, because it is better than what they’ve got. In time there will be a clamour to live in it, and no government will, for long, resist that clamour.
That’s important. I say it again: “... no government will, for long, resist that clamour.” That is D2’s most unique feature. In many countries there is plenty of clamour for more and better democracy. Nearly all the time, this clamour assumes devolution – take power away from big main government to give it to regions and minorities. Thus, main government can lightly say “it’s a minority trick to thwart the people”.
In many countries (arguably none more starkly than mine) this message pulls quick historical triggers, and in effect guarantees the ruling party an impenetrable majority no matter how loudly its members complain.
Well, consider D2, allow for settling time and tune-in time, and envisage the day when the notion of a comprehensive democracy is fairly widely (and definitely vaguely) known to be a concept bearing enquiry. At this time, an entrenched ruling party saying “no, people, stick loyally behind us your established leaders ...” forfeits the traditional second half of that sentence. It can no longer add “... because otherwise the other tribe’s leaders will get too much muscle”.
In a D2 set-up, the defending ruler’s message will mean “... because otherwise you will get too much muscle of your own.” This is not a message that any ruling party is likely to spell out in precisely those terms, but that is the message that will be read as being behind opposition to comprehensive democracy.
Here is a classic case for the Lincoln dictum to apply – you can’t fool all the people all the time.
No class or category of society is severely threatened by a D2 democracy. (The rich may find their social investment spend rising higher than they want, but they share a lot of control over the process and get a lot of security from the outcome.) No-one is about to be recruiting saboteurs to fight for it or sending police to close it down. Many people within the ruling party are going to see it as a furthering of the democratic target that got them into politics in the first place.
This thing about “the government will never allow it” is not a real objection. Indeed it is a silly red herring. I commend to you that if you look at D2 and see an outline of a life you would like to live, you do not toss it out of the window on grounds that “oh, the government will never allow it...” Explore it for yourself. Explore it with others. Go tell your greengrocer, your auntie, your school principal, “hey, did you ever think that if democracy actually meant what it claims it means, that the people rule, we’ll stop living amid perpetual poverty, threat, incapacity, crime and kvetch?”
You’re in no danger, truly. No-one is going to arrest you or torture you. They are of course going to say “Huh?” plus “but that’ll mean chaos!” and “the poor will steal us blind!” and all the rest. Expect that. But compared to what previous revolutionaries have had to face, the Revolution for Rich Democracy is a doddle: guaranteed not a shot, not a sjambok; unlikely that a punch will be cast. Being constantly told you’re crazy, you’re gullible, you’ve been hoodwinked, can admittedly become a touch tiresome, but it’s handlable, believe me.
You may like to read Themba’s Head – more of the same at greater length. Or, as I’ve promised, all sincerely raised doubts and problems get dealt with (fairly) patiently.
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written by Jim Powell , July 26, 2010
written by Stewart W , August 24, 2010
written by Denis Beckett , September 02, 2010
Boykey, Jim, Stewart, hey, sorry, I only find you guys now, by chance. This site is sprawlier than I had realised. (And I re-excuse myself for having been 3 weeks absent; beg pardon.)
How nice to have 2 non-criticisms. Boykey, double-thanks, first for reinforcing the Ten Big Holes -- PEOPLE PLEASE NOTICE, THIS BIT MADE MOST SENSE TO THIS READER -- and second for the real-world backup. Yes, music and news are going where politics is bound to follow, where ordinary people are main players as opposed to "voting cattle". (I've been on this case since snail-mail ruled; until now I hadn't registered this deep-reaching way that the Internet supports it!)
Jim Powell, I'm interpreting you as a full-bore supporter, perceiving more stability, more benefit, more accurate representation. In which case I am encouraging you and requesting you: don't go away, stay involved, hopefully via this site. There is going to be movement towards making this theme a known theme. That movement will happen according to how fully people like you speak about it, write about it, alert the sceptics that it's not just pfft, a lunatic with a bee in his bonnet. (Of course, for a while they'll say "pfft, two lunatics", but then there'll be three, and so it'll grow...)
Stewart W, I'd love to hear more from you too, china, asseblief. Here I reply on two things.
First, "federal" and "devolution" are kinda wrong. These two things on their own are, like any kind of divide-and-rule, okay for rare places with specific backgrounds, but zero use where you have a big jealous poor majority.
Now hear me well here, Stewart: D2 isn't on that spectrum. It takes things a notch up, to a higher realm. That is why it (a) is received with overwhelming scepticism, it has to wear in, and (b), will in the end be the "operating system" that replaces existing or prototype democracy. It does not empower dissidents or fringes or regions by weakening the big basic central majority. That's what's unique. That's what's vital. It empowers the whole lot.
Second... hey, Stew, this "voter ignorance" thing, you've truly got to get past. I know, you've grown up with it, a long-standing statement of middle-class superiority "WE make an informed decision to vote for the party that stands for our class interests, THEY ignorantly vote for a party that does not". It's balderdash, Stewart, really. Democracy is all about inclusion and nought about philosophy. Everybody -- including the professor, the dominee and the guy who bangs his fist loudest on the bar -- votes for who they believe is good for them. What you need to change is not what people think; it is the format in which their thinking finds expression. That is what D2 is, and the meaning of that is all round this site.
One little last thing, say you are dead right about Africa's voters being "ignorant of everything", so? What then? Does that mean they're better off being ordered around until they revolt and after blood and carnage start getting ordered around by a new boss until they revolt against him, too?
Nay, broer, education is damn good and helpful in a heck of a lot of ways with one massive exception. The quantity of your education has nought to do with the quality of your capacity to identify a leader you trust.
Jus, mense, sorry for long reply. Love you all. Please keep on.
Denis
written by John van Sittert , September 06, 2010
Me?? I think you are peeing against the wind.
Oh, the reason you are peeing against the wind?? You forgot number 11 - the bell curve. Democracy has not worked in one african country - why should we be different???
Now before you cry racist and banish me to the webcretin corner, how would you go about converting me using good simple logic??
I've set the RSS feed, let's see what materialises...
written by Patrick , September 06, 2010
I don't presume to speak for Denis, but I don't think his theory reflects a specific country. He's talking about the progression of democracy around the world.
That aside, your contention that "democracy has not worked in one African country" is, I would say, exactly the sort of reason that a better form of democracy is necessary. Africa has not failed democracy. Democracy, in the way it has been implemented, has failed Africa.
written by Denis Beckett , September 07, 2010
Sorry, sorry, John and Patrick. I had a lekker full reply to you two last night, but while I was called out for a while the computer ate it. At least I learn to not do long replies in the little block that forum sites give you.
In these circs Reply 2 is never quite up to what Reply 1 was (the fish that got away), but here goes:
Patrick, your first par is 100% correct. This isn’t about one country, or one continent. (It started off that way, in some previous millennium when park benches said Whites Only and the Limpopo was the edge of our world, but it has grown in concept.)
As to your second paragraph – that one is a million percent correct. It puts music in my ears and joy in my heart. You sum it up sublimely. I hope you will be much heard on this site. Not that I ask you to agree with me all the time, but damn, you’re an historic presence; the first ou who, from the word Go, is tuned in to the most central point. (And then you state it nicer than I ever have, too. I need you, china!)
John, relax about Webcretin Corner. It’s not for critics, even fierce ones; it’s for skulking sewerbrains who hide behind pseudonyms to hurl filth at races, tribes, or a continent. You let your outlook hang out between your lines, all right, but not in the lines. You seek discussion, not belittlement, and anyhow you are a real person with a real name, which is instant disqualification from cretinhood.
So no relegation for you, and, look, don’t worry overmuch. You got me and Patrick working on you, you’ll come right yet.
As you see, I support Patrick’s reply to you. But he is a more polite chap than me, so I go a bit further and submit that the chief curse of SA is the segment of people – mainly pale of pigment – who take the view that the agenda now is bitch and moan until the dark multitudes line up with gnarled fingers raised to their forelocks to say “oh, please, please, brainy baas, return and run things with the same ineffable genius as you did before 1994”. Which is to say, the agenda is permanent bitch and moan.
Of course, I wouldn’t say for a moment that you, John, are into that slightly unhelpful cast of mind. But it may be possible that you know some people who are.
(Continued next comment: the computer censors me for overlength)
written by Denis Beckett , September 07, 2010
So, yes, I do want to convert you. That’s why I started this site. I am quite sure that when this society gets round to operating on that truly sound foundation, when you have your little hillock of local power, when your tendrils stretch right through the wide society whose boughs and branches and roots support you, when you recall in wonderment the time that all you saw was a big them and a shrinking us and a dread of not belonging, when you see leadership gravitating to the hands best fitted for it and being exercised in assured transparency and integrity, when you feel direction-finding as a broad, calm, river providing plenty of space for eddies and cross-currents within the broad shared service of obedience to gravity, when you feel confidently at home and confident that home remains home for your progeny with no flight or refuge ever to come, when you are a timeless beneficiary of the features that are beautiful and a player in the erasure of the things that are not... I am sure that when that time comes you will be damn glad to have “converted”. Because unless you and others had done that, that time would not come, not so?
So I will put in all I can to settle your doubts. However, at this point it is hard to know what, exactly, to put in now. My [simple!] basic proposition is that when the social contract is upgraded to root every public decision in the will of the people who care about that decision, the possibility of chaos, coup, corruption or collapse is removed.
This entire site is addressed either at establishing why that proposition is true or at outlining a knitting that combines all those thousands of majority-wills into a realistic package. So far this site has seen lots of people querying “what about X aspect”, “what about Z aspect”, but you seem to be saying “Um, start again, would you?”
Let me offer you a deal. If you’ll go through what is already here, I’ll offer a reply to ever single query that arises no matter how long they go on. I know that the site is “text-heavy” as one of my sons-in-law puts it. But it is not meant to be laugh-a-minute. There are some depths to be dealt with. I know also that it could be better organised, clear, all that. For which, apologies. We’re getting there.
But kindly note that the whole lot, including the book Themba’s Head, which is barely longer than a comic, is lot less than you’d read in a single Economist.
So, do we have a deal? I’m not fobbing you off, strue’s bob. Just asking.
Oh, yeah, and I love your complaint “peeing against the wind”. You’re marvellously wrong. We’re so ready for an improved way of doing things, and a million ways are on offer. But they all want you and me to embrace an ideology, a faith, an attitude, a particular way of understanding the world. D2 doesn’t. It says solely that whatever weird thing you may want, you have more chance of achieving some portion of it this way than any other way. There’s nothing to oppose in D2, merely novelty to be overcome. It’s the opposite of peeing against the wind. Which somehow isn’t quite expressed by “peeing with the wind”.
written by Zac Graham , March 01, 2011
In your article,'Dubious E.mails'in the Witness a while ago you accuse the author of the 'Quote of the century' e.mail of being insulting and racist in assuming the electorate of South Africa to be unreasonable - and then back up this point of view with one red herring, and one strawman disguised as an axiomatic fact, both of which themselves are an insult to the intelligence of your readers.
Red herring - 'If your electorate is unreasonable it does not have full enough means of expressing its will'
Nowhere in the e.mail is anyone accused of being unreasonable - lacking common sense and good judgement, yes. Anyone is able to be reasoned with; all we need is to go to Mark Anthony or Adolf Hitler for evidence of the the danger of 'reasoning' with people lacking commonsense and good judgement.
And then the Straw Man: "Every electorate consists mainly of people with the same three priorities - a peaceful life, fair taxes and a square deal"
Ag puhleeze, Denis! Do you think those lines of ecstatic people queuing to make their cross in our first free elections had anything like taxes and a square deal on their minds?
Do you think that the people chasing opposition voters up and down the streets of Harare before their last 'free' election had a peaceful life on their minds?
If only. If only in the sad history of this world people with common sense and good judgement with "a peaceful life, fair taxes and a square deal" as their mutual priorities, had been allowed to carry the day.
Unfortunately, Boytjie, our chief priority is a lot more parochial than that. Most of us vote culturally - we vote for people of our own tribe, people who look like us, talk like us, are like us - and that is why King Louis will always get the vote of the Bandar-log.
written by Denis Beckett , March 01, 2011
Allbest
Denis
It also struck me, on reading through the rest of the site, the D2 is much in evidence, in a non-political sense, on the Internet - simply witness the disintegration of the previous elite of the music industry, the leveling of news/journalism playing fields (for better or worse), and a myriad other towers now toppling because of the democratising effect of the Internet. Worth a closer look as a model for your vision?
Boykey