Democracy Version 2 Made Simple

Newcomers start here:

To the curious passer-by: This site makes the case that the world has climbed partway up the hill we call Democracy; we're on a plateau that we mistake for a summit. Also that the next step up is simple; a twist of the mixture screw, that would mean no angry crowds in Tunis or Cairo, no looming war in Abidjan, and not even the dumbest of Brit tabloids screeching about race war in Jo'burg when Mandela dies. Plus that the 9 beggars now populating my local intersection recede to 8, then 7, then 6, and foreseeably to 0, Plus the razor-wire and electric fences that surround my life stop increasing, and quite soon start reducing.

Here below are four introductions to D2, Democracy Version Two. Personally I think that any one of them gives you the picture, but I concede this is not a majority view. Still, if you read all four and they make no sense, I'll be surprised. And then there's there's reams more picture-filling-in all over the site. Luv, Denis.

Democracy 2, Simple

The latest introduction, December 2010

• What is Democracy Version Two or D2? A proposal for an upgraded operating system of politics.
• Where does it exist? Nowhere, yet. It’s a proposal.
• What is its essence? That all the communities that any of us belong to – town, region, suburb, nation – will exercise whatever powers we their voters give them.
• That sounds bizarrely insane. Yeah, yeah. You’re on point 4 of, um, 86.
• Is there truly something real in here? Truly. You have to get through a few counter-intuitive bits to get there, though.
  

• Okay, how does it differ from the average workaday better-world proposal? First, it’s natural, no gimmick. Second, it is solely a mechanism, not asking for any belief/ behaviour/attitude from anyone. Third it is the logical next step of the route the world has been on forever.   
• What route is that? Away from the rule of the strong towards the rule of the many. 
• That’s over; democracy prevails. Current democracy lets voters pick a winning clique that’ll do the ruling on their behalf. In D2 the people literally rule. 
• What’s the difference? Let’s ask if Joe may keep a cow on his property. In today’s society – call it D1 – it depends on whether his land is zoned as rural or urban. Joe’s cow may be legal although its noise and smell blight the neighbourhood, or Joe’s cow may be illegal although nobody objects to it. In D2 – the next phase of democracy – the issue is how many people want to let Joe keep the cow, and how many are opposed.
• Which people, Joe’s neighbours? Interested people. You can take an interest in more than your back yard. You may have a religious view, or hygiene, superstition, any reason. You have a view if you choose to have a view. 
• So hold a referendum, isn’t that the answer? No. Maybe Jane is invested in Joe’s right to his cow; it touches raw chords about her people’s freedom. Whereas Jack vaguely dislikes animals for being untidy; milk should come from factories. Ernest democracy would not want a throwaway No to neutralise a heartfelt Yes. 
• Which implies what? That the referendum is obsolete, a blunt instrument in a world of nuance. It also implies that voting on issues may be tricky. After Joe’s cow up comes Sam’s cow, Duc’s cow, Abdul’s cow... Rather vote for leaders, lots of leaders, overlapping leaders, an interlocking web of leaders so that you, whether near or far, may angle your vote to support leaders who advance your position on Joe’s cow. 
• And either the world lets Joe have his cow or the world does not? Dead right. You may call that “consentience” and D2 would say it’s an absolute. If your entire nation has had full free opportunity to adjudicate on Joe’s cow, there is no higher authority. The people have ruled. There can be no we-wuz-robbed, no I-know-better. That’s it. 
• Until the world changes its mind? Of course. D2 is a broad slow river shifting its centre stream as society matures, splashing and lapping at the edges. 
• Do we always have a 50% chance of getting our way? No, in fact seldom. D2 does not want preferences, like a survey. It wants to know when I am opposed to something that you want to do. If I’m getting a square deal in my life I’m seldom very heated about what you do in yours. Thus, D2 gives us each (i) an incentive to want the other to have a square deal, and (ii) a large amount of freedom.    
• Does this process cover any issue? Yes, specifically issues that gets hot. Do you, who bathes in champagne, pay tax to aid me, whose children go hungry? When, how?   
• Is D2 the final step into pure democracy? Very unlikely, that might be D37 or D234.  What it definitely is, is the next step on mankind’s quest for the sound foundation. 
• Can you be sure? Yes, and so can you. History is a jagged march toward the point that people relate as equals, no-one a master, no-one a supplicant, everyone possessing a pinpoint of power. We have come through kings and tyrants and class wars up to now when 97% of countries claim to be democracies. The principle of democracy has won, as fully as the principle of cleaner energy. It’s the implementation that lacks.  
• What is the principle of democracy? That the people rule. We now know that power works best when everyone has a bit of it. We’re ripe for the mechanism.  
• What says that we are ripe? Zeitgeist. The flaws of D1 have become widely felt, in advanced democracies as well as barely-democracies. 
• Are all today’s democracies in D1? Yes. They all operate on the premise that the will of the people must be leashed, to keep power in order. 
• What is D2’s premise? That power is best kept in order by everyone having plenty of it, for exchange and negotiation in an appropriate market. 
• Does that say D1 is wrong? Did the laptop say the typewriter was wrong? Typewriters ceded their role to a successor with richer capacity [and painless correction of errors]. 
• Will we stop using D1 like we stopped using typewriters? Yes. We’re in a prism that relishes the wonder of a nation choosing its leaders. We’re moving to a prism that will look back on today’s elections as blunt instruments, a paltry measure of our will. 
• If bad results come from D1 or raw democracy, won’t worse ones come from D2? No, bad results come from rulers escaping the reins of voters. D2 fastens the reins tightly. 
• Will politics feel different in D2? Yes. You might participate in about one election a year; national, provincial, municipal, local, micro-local. Elections will be year-round, dozens a day, mostly covered in small-print like Stock Exchange prices. Local issues may take up more energy than nationals. The president as demigod will morph into a first among equals. You’ll take it as natural that you can influence your communal life in ways that were once out of reach. You’ll recall in disbelief the days of politics as a thing of fear, trauma, and endless psychoanalysis of a handful of famous figures. 
• Won’t we lack leadership? No, we’ll have plenty. When a suburb has real powers – over heights of walls or limits in wages or negotiations with places where the workers live or where the employers live or where the burglars go – there’ll be leadership. But it is you or I who decide if the leaders continue to be leaders.  
• Is the allowing of variety D2’s big thing? No. The thwarting of tyranny is the big thing. If Hitler at start-up had had to face thousands of local leaders who knew that their only boss was their electorate, we’d never have heard of the Gestapo.    
• How is D2 structured? On the notion “who cares?” Say you care about the times your local bar may open or close; you want to extend them, shorten them, or abolish them. You go at it. In D1 you’d see if the constitution lets parliament allow a provincial ordinance to enable a municipal board to hear applications for bar-hour extensions. In D2 you’d see who else cares. You’d ask with care, too, because if your local council is patently going to be squelched by the big guys, it won’t support you to start with. Then you put your evidence to your suburb council. They deliberate, they hear opposition, they publish notifications, they invite objections. They pass your law.
• And here comes the fullness of democracy. Your suburb is part of a town, your town is part of a province, your province is part of a nation. People in any of those places might care about this issue. If they do, they show it: “Councillor, either your party puts weight into opposing all-night drinking in that shameless province in the south, or you lose my vote.”            
• Is it just me, or does this feel chaotic? It’s not just you. In fact D2 means anti-chaos, not only politically. For instance, a crime is a slap at what your parents and sister and teammate have participated in creating. But what’s new needs settling-in. 
• You’d better advance that. Laws are seen as things imposed from above to keep people under control. To envisage them being made on the ground by people like you is frightening – Arrgh! Human frailty! Well, frailty is human, alright. You, too, may have slipped off a rail in your time. Even me. [Nearly. Once]. But for serious frailty, look at pre-democracy leaders. From Attila to Stalin via eight King Henrys, leaders have sent people to war over their egos. D1 leaders, too, can often pull unformed masses in their wake. But D2 gives “majority” a meaning that cuts out the unformed mass. It ensures that “the majority” will never be a mob and will seldom be “blind”. D2 will have many majorities; people who pay the taxes for what the politicians want to do, people who live with the consequences of what the politicians actually do. No curious eyes look on while these people cast their X. They cast plural Xs in different contexts, all of which may make a tangible difference in their lives. You and I can be frail to excess; bigoted, xenophobic, avaricious, and loud. We can talk as big as we like. Where it matters, at the ballot count, we’ll be drowned out by majorities, the people of peace and progress. 
• Okay, not chaos. But confusing at least. If the town says I must wear blue socks and the suburb says red socks, must I change socks at the main road? No, you must receive a wake-up. The confusion-and-chaos stories come from old society, where if the Pinks run the state and the Purples control a region, rigid law is needed to keep the peace. D2’s backstop of stability is reasonableness, imposed by the sound foundation. Long before policemen inspect your socks, stable majorities evict politicians who cause silliness. 
• It’d be nice for the letter of the law to display the stability. If your worry is conflict of laws, there’s no ground to wonder which of two laws applies in a place at a time. The bigger unit’s law is the default which the smaller unit displaces if and when it makes its own law. Otherwise the rule of the people is a mockery. On the bigger question of tolerance of oddball laws or challenging laws, don’t look to “the letter of the law” at all. The letter of the law lets every community make its own decision. On paper that could mean a hostile tribe sends hitmen, the city erects gallows, the nation drops a bomb. There is no limit to the chaos that the letter of the law permits. There’s an early limit to what sentient voting majorities of human beings permit. Majorities facing choices, in cool and calm, are the ultimate guarantors of stability. 
• I think I see why you call it Democracy Version 2. Yes, it is a different principle. When you first looked, you visualised it as mysterious reshuffling, and thought that “upgrading the operating system” was hyperbole. Now you’re rethinking, right? 
• Perhaps, but fill in why interaction as the driving force is now possible, please? In bottom-level politics, leaders could do anything. In half-way-up politics, D1, leaders still make the running, but in the broad limits of the majority’s tolerance. D2 gives the voter an effective vote, meaning she expects a result, whether a safe pavement or a redistribution of the nation’s wealth, and not a mere set of voting statistics. It also gives her the conditions to cast a deliberate vote, making a choice rather than ticking a box determined by her birth. D2 makes the voter not a passenger but a co-steerer saying “that way”. That allows the era of limiting power to give way to an era of multiplying power, made safe by law of timorous majorities. 
• Which says what? That the majority of every community, armed with a deliberate and effective vote, vote to optimise taxes and minimise conflicts. Thus can paper checks and balances be superseded by the big check-and-balance of natural interaction. 
• Is there a risk? You won’t always get what you want, but there’s no risk, or even possibility, that a vital interest of any reasonable segment of society will be abused. 
• If a whole community gets into ethnic witch-hunt? All other communities connect to it, as well as to the intended victims who use their hillocks of power to protest. 
• Some people say D2 has a naïve faith in human goodness. It was the same before D1 got going; shock and horror: “What! Let the peasants vote!? Destroy civilisation!?” 
• But D2 relies on goodness? No. The closest it gets is recognising that the person in the ballot booth is a better person than the same person at a rally. It doesn’t care whether people are “good” or “bad”, whether some groups are “more democratic” than others, and so on. It states that whoever your people are, they are better citizens on a square foundation than a skew one. 
• What about cost? This is about placing power in the hands of ordinary people. The binding interest of all ordinary people is to keep taxes down. Anyone who seeks your vote by wanting you to put your money into things that you don’t want, will not get your vote. 
• That’s the way things are now, theoretically. Precisely. Now it’s theoretical, but in practice tax is far out of your hands; you grumble and pay. In D2 you’re connected all the way. Your local rep has a toehold on power, and a need for your vote. Note, about this need, that (i) it is direct, not a theoretical need. Your D2 rep, if you lose confidence in her and tell your neighbour why, can lose her job to someone nudging the world the other way from where she wants to go. Note (ii) that the power pyramid is seamless. Her job is not just to get your streetlight fixed. It’s to impress you wherever she can. She must convince you not about billions for projects you don’t understand but on 10 bucks a month for a school traffic warden. (And you tune in to being a decider on tax, not only its payer.) More than that; she is extra eyes and ears for you at regional council, where she sees and hears more than you do. Your regional councillor carries the same role to the next tier. You the voter are linked in to what used to be a distant “them”. 
• Meaning less chance of fishy arms deals? Yes. Let alone the corridors between the citizen and the minister, the structure reverses the self-interest of politicians. To an ambitious MP in most democracies today, voters count for much less than do party  bosses. D2’s several fields of overlapping play switch that. They are several times more sensitive to voters’ choices, favouring savers of expenses and nailers of graft. 
• On the spectrum running from unitary to federal to confederal, where is D2? It is not on the spectrum. On a D2 foundation any of those forms of state may come and go. 
• Won’t we pay in salaries what we save in corruption? You’ll pay what voters think is worth paying. A council with “Our Salaries” as top priority may not get set up. 
• Won’t it be law to set them up? No, the people rule, remember. Parktown North may choose a precinct council and Parktown South may stick to a city councillor. 
• There must be the same rules for everyone. Not if the people are making the rules that suit them. In one part of your country you may have tension, ancient enmities, conquest issues; you may need a super-dose of D2, bringing the ballast of elected leadership to micro level. In another part, comfortable people sail through an easy life. There, D2 might look a good deal like D1. 
• So in that part, you could dispense with D2 altogether? Except for two things. You don’t know which part that is, until people have made it known via D2. And you don’t know when the cosy quarter runs into trouble of its own. Your “dispense” implies relief – “whew, at least we can avoid this part”. Get beyond the idea of D2 as a strain or cost or last-resort. Once it’s floated there’ll be no avoiding. There’ll be all-round embracing, with as much or as little usage as any community chooses at any time. 
• It’s hard to see why “little use” is fine but “dispensing” is wrong. Because of that question about when you meet trouble. Where D2 is most needed is in strife: when you can have mobs with machetes and Mr Ordinary stirred into believing that killing the dissenters is the right thing to do, or you can have a blanket of leadership figures and Mr Ordinary choosing one of them with his pencil.   
• Rich places will have councils that poor places don’t have. Then rich councils will push and shove to help poor councils get going. There’ll be twinnings and the like. 
• Why? So that when the Lefties say “vote for us, needy people, we’ll take money from the rich for you” the rich can reply “ignore them, you do better co-operating with us”. 
• While the Left respond with strikes and tough stuff? Not in D2. If you upturn my cart and steal my tomatoes while you march down my street preaching worker solidarity, my next few votes won’t go to your party. Tough stuff boomerangs. 
• The Left won’t sit back to be undercut by rich man’s propaganda. No, it will undercut right back, persuading voters that it delivers. D2 reverses the axiom “when elephants fight the grass gets trampled.” It makes the elephants vie for the favour of the grass. 
• Tell me again how that differs from D1? Where rift is a big factor, D1 politics makes war-talk viable. Fierce messages can appeal to people who vote at five-year intervals on the same recurring topic: how to deal with the rival/enemy tribe. In D2, you vote this year on a public transport plan, next year on the siting of a stadium, year after on brothel policy... your party is in various alliances with various others. You might not be looking the votes of the other tribe, but you don’t alienate them gratuitously. 
• That also makes voting more relaxed. A D1 election day is terrific for the fortunate – togetherness, sense of nationhood, friendship in the queues – but terrifying for the vulnerable, such as people who are, or look like, Purple Party supporters in a Puce Party stronghold. Moreover, while you can supposedly vote the old government out, you are nervous to try. You’ll upset your God or your ancestors, not to mention the government if it chooses not to step down. In D2 these issues don’t arise. Nothing stops you from voting doggedly for the party your granddad was born into, but the system makes it easy to reset when you want to focus on aims rather than memories. 
• Why won’t ruling parties dismiss D2 as a minority plot? Because it respects majority rule. Rulers will therefore be ambivalent in their own minds as well as nervous of voter revolt. They expect political pioneering to mean escape-routes for minorities, which are easy to dismiss as betrayals of majority rule. D2 is unprecedented in this respect. To dismiss it is to say in effect: “we don’t want you, our supporters, to acquire powers that lift you out of dependence on us, your leaders”. 
• Won’t the rich few fear the poor many? Fear as in hearts sinking when some parties win elections, certainly. But that is an on-your-toes fear, stimulating the brains and resources of the well-off to help the ill-off become less ill-off and therefore less keen to vote for those parties. Get-your-money-out fears are stifled by the structure, with opulent areas and indigent areas sharing regional interests and local interdependence. That means involvement, trading capacity for votes. Involvement ends the split-level life that sows minority insecurity in third-world countries. 
• Is “involvement” also known as “soaking the rich”?  Some people will say so. Some will say “perpetuating privilege”. D2 does not care about the words but is interested in the effects. One is a releasing of energy. In many riven nations skilled retirees yawn in boredom while public service dies of incapacity. D2 gives the chattering classes both the mechanism and the motivation to supercharge development. 
• Does “majority tyranny” come up? No. The term is a misnomer. It means that a ruling clique, put in power by a D1 vote, issues decrees in the name of the majority. D2’s “majority” is actual interaction by many people, the antithesis of “majority tyranny.” 
• Must little units have these frighteningly big powers? First, please register that the bigness of the powers matters not a whit. Pofadderskroon can have the “power” to declare war on China; it’s a power they’ll never use because the local majority has sense-of-humour failure when it’s proposed. Second, note that a smallness in the powers can wreck the system. If the ballot rules everything and I get nil support for my plan to banish infidels, I must swallow the bitter pill that my peers are not behind me. My plan dies for lack of oxygen. Whereas if Banishment of Infidels is exempted from the judgment of the ballot, I claim a hidden mandate, I say “unfair, my supporters are suppressed, I resort to car-bombs”. 
• Why can D2 achieve this if D1 could not? D1 is the highest and last incarnation of leaders pulling followers behind them. D2 opens the era of control belonging to the bulk – who do not go to the rallies, do not chant the slogans, do not wave the flags. If a leader wants a fight, he must get the guy who’ll lug the gun to agree, while alone, in calm, in a booth. Also that guy’s mother. 
• What about people who love war? I think you mean people who talk war at the beerhall. Insofar as they still want war when their X can give it to them, the logic of D2 holds. They can push their case. They’ll lose because the representatives of the majority will find third ways or win-wins. They’ll accept their loss because the will of the majority is too solid to cut through. 
• But huge masses cheer armies on. Of course. Once war has been decided, you cheer your side. Evolution’s task is to bring you into the deciding.   
• Okay, people don’t chose war but they can still be bullies. Here’s a scenario: crop failure and financial melt-down in a shaky tropical country with an indigent majority and an opulent minority. An Idi Amin wants to expel the minority. What now?
• In a D1 country, that rests on Election Day, the day of choosing the president. Town or regional administrations do not enter the picture, this is not their issue. The build-up involves threat and fear, with human-rights interdicts that mobs do not always us observe and police do not always enforce. The day is fraught, especially for “sellouts”, individuals from the majority group who support the tolerance cause. If Idi’s side wins, minorities and sellouts are openly hunted. If that side loses, arson and stealth attacks set in amid uproar that authentic votes were hidden by foreigners and their puppets. Either way, there is flight/emigration, market implosion, recession.
• Now let the same issue arise with D2 in place – a spread of councils of order, whose authority derives from their voters. If we allow 10 provinces, 100 regions, 1 000 towns, 10 000 precincts, there are 11 111 nuclei of leadership, with the Cabinet as first among equals. These “equals”, varying down to tiny nuclei, are equal in one way only: they cannot be told “it has been decided that you are dissolved.”
• If Idi is elected, the minority learn that they are very unpopular. But between them and kristallnacht – lynch mobs and pillage – are eleven thousand nuclei of order. Each has its own exigencies, its own avenues to meld what the Haves have with what the Have-Nots need, and its own mix of human stimuli, from threat to dependence to appreciation to affection. What lies ahead is not easy times, but nor is it mobs with axe handles. 
• Does this say that bullying can’t happen? It says that bullying gets sifted through a very fine sieve. But it implies more: that in a harsh society – thefts, assaults, knives in pockets; that sort – D2 is your way up. It will lift people’s self-worth. 
• Possessing a vote makes me a better person? Not just that. Being part of a structure that elicits the best sides of behaviour makes you a better person. 
• Would D2 start off in places like Scandinavia and Australia? More likely in troubled countries, with big rifts and high incentives. 
• Don’t those places need to get D1 right before trying D2? They think they do, like a chap on a ledge in a cliff yelling “Get this rope ladder out the way! I need my concentration to clutch the ledge!” 
• Well, second level is what you’re promoted to when you pass first level. When you are talking of tests, that’s true. This is not a test, it’s a structure; the improved version fixes flaws in the first version. 
• You say the peasant is as ready for it as the professor? More ready. The professor supposedly assesses the contending ideologies presented in D1. The peasant normally treats them as other people’s stuff done for other people’s reasons; nothing to do with his job, which is to endorse his people’s party. D2 gives him actual choice, founded on the soundest and simplest criterion: where is his trust being met, and where is it not being met? 
• You mean, it’s not D2 that is “too sophisticated” for humble people; it’s D1? Yes. Political science laments the failure of so many new and sudden democracies. That’s the failure of D1. D1 is a semi-sound foundation that works in relatively easy places. D2 is industrial-strength, for hard cases. 
• It is known that democracy is a “fragile flower” needing “fertile ground”. D2 will kill off those clichés, along with the one about the decency of ordinary people being suppressed by their fear of the fanatics. 
• It’s still hard to believe that rich and poor can both win from the same policy. D2 is not a policy. It’s a structure for policies to test their claims and a foundation that outdates some ancient assumptions, such as that one faction’s win is another faction’s loss. Reasonableness is the essential winner, meaning fewer gripes and less stuff-up. 
• So everybody should welcome D2? There’s never an “everybody”. Some will fear not gaining enough, some will fear losing too much. But for most people, yes, given time to sink in the assurance of reasonableness will look pretty good.   
• That worries me, too. If 1 000 squatters think it’s reasonable to take my house, I’ll look unreasonable saying “no, thanks”. That’s why it has to sink in. Put flesh on your worry; imagine particular people in this equation, people you know. Tease out ways it could go. Are you alone, for a start, or are some people on your side? Will your hillock of local power have something to say? Will your leaders raise your case with the squatter leaders? How many of those squatters actively want your house? Does your version of Sophie Mthethwa fit with “Yeah! Take her house!”? Or with “Oops, here comes trouble”? Or “what do I want with that house?” Or “Let her keep her house and help me find a job”? The notion “reasonableness” looks floppy in the abstract, where you expect a law saying Thou Shalt Not Confiscate. Explore possible brands of reality and the picture changes a bit. D2’s permanent if unwritten security looks quite bright [and D1’s list of written but unmet promises looks quite long]. 
• Meaning I get more protection from D2? Yes, but also meaning that the squatter gets more. Often, both sides get more satisfaction than either gets in D1. 
• You’re getting impossible again. Someone must win and someone must lose. No, someone must let her mind stretch. The uplift that is impossible from a floundering public service and a few NGOs becomes possible when a million middle-classers get a rocket under their sitplace. D2 is that rocket, and moreover it’s a targeted rocket. For instance, D1 land reform is bored officials in a hunt for statistics (“transfer X% land by Y date”). It usually ends in lose-lose-lose, triple loss as old owners are forced out, new owners can’t cope, bush reclaims farmland. D2 incorporates the affected people adjusting when waste occurs, accommodating to productivity or employment habits, mobilising local farmers, or agronomists accountants, jointly seeking the successes that hasten the time of equilibrium? 
• Equilibrium? When the Have-less says “I’m alright, I’m not bothered about what the next guy has” at about the same point where the Have-more says “That guy has every chance now, and he takes life easy while I work like mad, I deserve higher rewards”, society is at equilibrium. D2 is the mechanism to get there. 
• Is there common cause with Tea Party? It would give Tea Party more people-power than they’re asking for but it may not chime with the way they want that power used. . They have a very strong, beg your pardon, flavour. They are Right and Republican. D2 is a structure; flavour-free. A better sound system is better whether Stalin is using it or Hitler, or Mother Theresa. 
• And the British coalition? Pointing the same way. They’re looking for incremental advance in a D1 system. D2 makes the case for switching now to the system that would come up at the end of their process. 
• Their way might be wiser. It might be, in countries where when the government falls everyone goes to work as normal, and the furniture removers call at State House. Some other countries are in traps they may only escape by doing D2. 
• But those countries won’t do small reforms. Why would they do a big one? For many, concession is the thin end of a wedge that ends with the tribe who hate you getting on top. When they see an end result that they can live with, they get freed up.  
• Rulers don’t laugh off the privileges of power. Don’t be too sure. I doubt that clinging to power is a lot of fun. Let them envisage abdicating in confidence, and we shall see. In any case, once D2 is a visible option, their supporters will get pushy. 
• Can a pilot D2 be done?  D2 is not small-is-beautiful; it’s about comprehensive power. Its basis is that when the tiller is shared by millions of humble hands, the ship of state will sail better. To try to prove this by thrusting a test-village into limelight like a low-budget Survivor is bound to flop. 
• So how does it come into being? Having been adequately built upon, it’ll be introduced by a statute permitting communities to do their thing.
• You sound like everyone will just agree. On the basics, they will. A sound foundation is a sound foundation, whichever side you approach it from.
• Now what do you want me to do? Go and build and propagate the concept of D2.
• I tell everyone “buy into Denis’s system”? No thanks, killer. You take two ideas, no copyright on either, and develop them in your way. The main idea is that the world will work better when people really do rule. The other idea is: unless you see a better way of arranging the real rule of the people, work on freeing power to be picked up where people wish to pick it up, in that comprehensive web.
• What do we get out of it? That’s for you to know. I know what I want. I’ve had six decades in a country of exceptionally rich human calibre, messed up by inadequate politics. I want to end my time knowing we’re on the path to fulfilment.

Do you think we can end now, referring people to www.democracyversiontwo.com for more? Yep.

Comments (4)

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written by rian malan , June 01, 2011

Denis, is this you? It has to be but your name appears nowhere, or nowhere that I could find, anyway. Does this mean you are tired of being yourself and intend to become someone else now? I would sympathize. But anyway -- it's a GREAT website, very nicely designed and easy to use, and the brute-force summary of the D2 philosophy is very useful. If you claim credit, niemand sal jou kwalik neem nie.

Chers MalJan

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written by Philip Machanick , July 08, 2011

I think we also need Economics v2. Politics in its traditional form has ultimately been about rationing scarce resources, with the underlying assumption that it's a zero-sum game (I win, you lose). There's increasing evidence that economics is not in fact a zero-sum game. A selfish approach where there are winners and losers results in increasing inequality and in the long run, can be harmful for all. Here's an example of the contrary logic: http://www.contour2002.org/art...production

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written by pat cronin , July 18, 2011

The devil is always in the detail.

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written by Adri Verster , September 20, 2011

D2 sounds an aweful lot like Libertarianism, my system of choice.

One of the reasons, I think, that D1 failed is collective inertia (laziness). It was simply erected on the burned-out foundations of Autocracy. Words wield power on a subconcious level. Can we tolerate words such as "ruler" "insubordination" or "law" when they undermine the mindset necessary for self-rule? Law should only be used for natural laws which cannot be broken. To create the correct foundation for cooperation would it not be better to have agreements and to call representatives just that? Representing a group should happen on a rotational basis, like jury duty. It might also be a good idea to bring back the rite of passage to adulthood and only let adults vote, small humans are known for perversely irresponsible decisions, like voting for the sexiest councillor.

This system also needs standard, across the population education as an imperative. Otherwise agreed in principle.

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