From https://existentialcomics.com/comic/651
Mazdak was an ancient Iranian Philosopher, who believed the scriptures (Zoroastrianism scriptures, this was pre-Islam) dictated radical social equality. He thought all property should belong to everyone, and wealth shared equally. He was so convincing that he even convinced the king to go along with it, and was able to successfully implement many of his social reforms. He also believed in getting rid of clerics, because they held religious authority over the population, which he thought was illegitimate. Since they were the judges, he of course “lost”, and was executed, along with thousands of his followers. As with most ages and societies, those with huge amounts of power and property have never been too keen on philosophers that want to take it away.
Eventually other rich and powerful Zoroastrian and Christian kings got wind of it, and challenged Mazdak to “debate” their clerics. These other kings were the judges, so naturally their guys won, and they brutally executed Mazdak and thousands of his followers. If Mazdak was a prototype for socialism, or even communism, I suppose you could say their reaction to it was a prototype for how to defeated socialism in the good old “marketplace of ideas”.
(b.t.w., it may be out-of-topic, but it’s everyday)
As you want, i won’t bring you into a multi-hours debate, but i.m.o. :
Yes, more than in the u.s., but less than in a confederation of city-states with their own constitution(, and a small common set of base laws throughout the confederation).
Local/Municipal referendums for local decisions(, or even more wide-ranging as Venezuela and other socialist countries showed with their communal councils that vote on the budget and the rest).
National referendums for decisions that affect everyone.
I may have misunderstood your point here, so forgive me in advance.
I’m convinced that hearing the different sides of this debate(, in a municipal assembly here,) would be enough for citizens to make the decision.
You’re convinced that citizens wouldn’t be able to make the correct decision.
How can we know who’s right here ?
At least there wouldn’t be corruption by building companies that divert millions each year for relatively useless construction projects whose main purpose is enriching themselves(, private-public partnerships likely are more often a scam in capitalist-owned countries than in the p.r.c.).
I’ve got in mind one of the rare examples of direct democracy in a very small village in France(, a few hundred inhabitants, called Ménil-la-Horgne), where they ended up building a small dam to store their energy. That’s a real-world example in which they successfully came around together on a solution to diminish their carbon emissions, after weighing the different alternatives.
And, again, it doesn’t take that much time, for Ménil-la-Horgne i.i.r.c. it was something like four or six 3-hour reunions per year(, i don’t remember exactly but it was in that range, perhaps less).
And that’s scalable for larger cities, e.g. by organizing it into districts(, and after all Athens was quite large already). Another option would be to leave the vote to citizens drawn by lot, forming a mini-society representative of the other citizens, as long as they’re not manipulated of course, and eventually afterwards a confirmation of their decision through referendum.
(Also, it’s my belief that in our current system, our “leaders” and deputies shouldn’t be paid at all(, or only the minimum to survive whenever their bank account force us to make an exemption). It’s unbelievable that some are here for the money or power, wtf frankly, they should be here for ideals and nothing else)
If what you suggest was effective then that’s how we’d be doing things. Surgery would be done by vote. Instead of surgeons spending years learning how to do it, you’d just get a bunch of people off the street and what on where and how to cut. Bridges would be designed by vote, where people would just get together and figure out what materials to use and how to arrange them. There’s a reason these things aren’t happening anywhere in the world.
There’s also zero reason to believe that there would be no corruption in such a system. People would still try to influence others for their own benefit, make deals, and so on. And as I’ve already pointed out at the very start, direct democracy works at small scale. The problem is that it runs into physical limits both in nature and in society. Complex organisms like humans aren’t organized as a form of a direct democracy either. You end up with hierarchical structures with cells organizing into organs, organs into organ groups, brains coordinating the operation of the organism as a whole.
At the end of the day it comes down to thermodynamics. A society has to organize with a sufficient level of efficiency in order to function. As it grows in scale, it becomes necessary to delegate and abstract things because the scale escapes human comprehension.
As i said above, « [Choosing t]he solution is often a moral choice, while its implementation is often a technical one »
We ought to listen to experts obviously, who else would we be listening to apart from them, but we should be the ones deciding, not them, and we’ll agree with them whenever the experts of both sides agree with each other because it’s so obvious, but we’ll be the ones deciding between both sides in the case of disagreement, after all we’re the ones impacted from
theirour decisions.You can’t corrupt a whole population is what i’m saying, only individuals/decision-makers.
(You can certainly still manipulate a whole population for your own personal benefits, in which case journalists ought to read the public contracts and verify stuff in order to reveal scandals)
But ok, thanks for taking the time to exchange with me :) 👍
But then you see how experts have to be involved at least at some point in the cycle here. For example, you could have a solution where you vote on the problems, experts come up with potential solutions explaining pros and cons for each, then you have a second vote on the approach to adopt. My key point is that understanding what practical solutions are requires experience and domain knowledge. And that’s the key reason why we end up needing abstractions. You have different groups of people who focus on understanding different types of problems, and they become the best equipped people to solve these problems. People outside the domain have to delegate to the people who are the experts.
Meanwhile, when it comes to corruption, the real issue here is in economic inequality. If wealth is evenly distributed within the society, that problem largely goes away because nobody has a significant financial leverage over others that they’re able to exercise. It’s an issue that’s completely separate from hierarchies.
And you’re welcome. :)