( A Five-minute read)

A common complaint about representative democracy is that it creates a distant class of lawmakers who will often collude with vested interests, or become so detached from the lives of the general public, that they will make decisions that the public does not support. By contrast, in a Direct Democracy system, such corruption of decision-making is impossible if every citizen is an equally powerful participant in the process.

However, it does not make any sense to think that direct democracy is somehow ideologically predisposed in any particular direction.

Direct democracy is simply a median-reverting institution.

It pushes policy back toward the center of public opinion when legislatures move too far to the right or left or is it, in fact, an opportunity to organize a kind of socio-ecological revolution to break away from the western development model of politics.

We know that every political system man has invented is open to corruption.

It is obvious that modern western democracies are now confronted with a change in culture mainly due to the integration of migrants, globalization, terrorism, and artificial intelligence.

Direct Democracy is presented as a solution to these challenges mainly by Social Media with its partitions and manipulation of voters with false news and software bots that amplify specific conversations on Twitter and Facebook by posting videos, photos, and biased statements targeting particular hashtags and wordings.  

Resulting in phony debates, nurtured by cliches and prejudices that are destabilizing the political systems we have had for hundreds of years.   

At what cost?

One of the obvious cost is Brexit and the not so obvious Donald Trump.

It is simply impossible to have direct democracy as the common Googlefied smartphone citizen does not have a grasp of political understanding nor the cognitive capacities to achieve direct democracy.

However, this view cuts against democracy in general.

As it implies that politicians always know better than the average citizen.

This is far from the truth when one looks at the current state of the world that is crying for some common action.

Politicians don’t necessarily show expertise and interest and certainly don’t know all the issues and are not always well informed.

They depend on shortcuts and have to ask other politicians and experts.

This morning I received an email from John Taylo in response to my last post ( The Beady Eye ask’s: Does anyone really know what quantum chips will do.)

He sums up the situation by saying and I quote

” We have yet to invent a political system that will harness the knowledge of mankind. if AI can be used for the benefit of all to reduce poverty and increase living standers of all without wrecking the planet it will be ……. Only dreaming”

I replied  “What a dream”

Perhaps I should have said ” Where do dreams come from. Look around you. That is where dreams come from. The only planet we know. ”

All human comments appreciated. All like clicks chucked in the bin.