The Case for Direct Democracy

The problem with the World today, explained in 2 minutes...

The Time has Come
or
Democracy is Dead! Long Live Democracy!

"All the forces in the world are not so powerful as an idea whose time has come."

Victor Hugo

Part 1: The ‘Representative’ Problem

Most of the world runs using the same political system, where people get to vote for other people to form what is called a ‘Representative Democracy’ (or ‘Constitutional Republic’). The Representatives are then the ‘Lords of the Land’; they run an organization called Government which at the discretion of the Representatives, raises and spends taxes, creates wars and laws and loop-holes for those laws. When a large body of people is ruled over by a very small minority, this isn’t Democracy (rule by the people themselves), it’s called Oligarchy (rule of the many by a few). By providing your consent to your Representative once every 4 years; you are providing them a blank cheque to run your life, start wars and literally imprison you if you refuse to pay for whatever THEY choose. In the 21st century, with what purports to be civilization, the situation is quite ludicrous and perfectly explains why the world is the global dumpster fire we see today. Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under. H. L. Mencken The flaws in the system can be demonstrated with a very simple analogy: Imagine driving up to a fast food drive-through window and when asked: ‘What would you like?” You respond: “You choose, I already made my choice by coming to your restaurant, rather than that of your competitors” Now ‘Chef’s Choice’ might fly if you are wealthy and in a high-end restaurant, but if you are not, then giving Big Kahuna Burger’s employee carte blanche on your order is a green light to getting at least one of everything on the menu. Not only have you not told them what you want, but you’ve given them no budget. Not only that, but the menu you are served comes from the restaurant that got the most drive throughs, so you probably won’t be getting any of what is on the menu in front of you, unless you picked the winning drive-through. This is how ‘Representative Democracy’ (or Constitutional Republic) works; you hand your freedom to someone else, and they make all the governmental decisions for you and you accept liability for their mistakes. Take this a step further and realize that your visit to Big Kahuna Burger just set your diet for the next 4 years. You are duty bound to pay the bill each day, on pain of imprisonment, but remember, you consented (voted) for this, and not only that, the results of the vote are forced on everyone, even those that ate at home. The absurdity of the scenario should now be clear to you, but what must be said is that oligarchy is an improvement over it’s predecessor, which is monarchy (rule of all by a single person, usually a king or dictator). We’ve had Representative Democracy for a few hundred years, and this period has seen a logarithmic improvement over the lot of the average citizen, although for the last 100 years or so, our Representatives are quite visibly ‘captured’, so that behind the curtain we see Oligarchy, not democracy. It seems the more people decision making for government, the better the outcomes for all. Representatives are subject to pressures made by corporate, foreign and wealthy donors and not just the electorate they are supposed to serve and herein lies the root cause of corruption. People don’t get what they want from government (Health and Education), which is skewed towards the wants of the rich and powerful (arms manufacture, corporate welfare and the security surveillance state) who reward the representative in ways the electorate can’t (money, jobs, holidays, dinners, gifts). This is why politicians and their parties never seem to live up to what they promised. Our Representatives serve more than one master, and the electorate is the master who pays least. The most improper job of any man, ... is bossing other men. Not one in a million is fit for it, and least of all those who seek the opportunity. J.R.R. Tolkein The biggest problem with Representative Oligarchy system, one that no-one seems willing to talk about, is that it is entrenched. Evolutionarily, we are in a political cul-de-sac, it has been called ‘The End of History’. The only way to effect fundamental change is to organize a political party, making a new, better governance model as the manifesto and encourage a majority of the population to spend their vote on your parties Representative, instead of one from an established party. It’s a huge marketing effort to educate people on betters ways to do government, and that’s what this project is all about. This Representative Oligarchy is our ‘chains of bondage’, it is a problem we need to think our way out of, because it is not going away by itself. There is no expiry date – it can only be upended by either violent revolution (which usually results in a dictatorship – back to rule by one) or by a new, better system, to which the majority agrees is better that the system that is failing us now. The current system brings out the worst in humanity; it’s clear the Representative model encourages the elevation of the psycho- and sociopathic personality types to positions of power over us. Our wants and needs from government are distorted; we never get the better healthcare or education system promised during election time, instead we always get more warfare and corporate welfare, something very few would vote for. In order to replace the current system with a better Democracy, we need to look into the logic of why government exists and show how modern technology can fix the bugs (‘the Representative’ part) of the current system, so we can evolve past the current iteration of Government and towards more Democracy. You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete Buckminster Fuller

Part 2: Defining Government or 'What do we need?'

Unless we are committed Self-sufficiency experts, we humans are inter-dependant creatures, sometimes we need to collaborate or outsource work effort to continue to enjoy our lives to the fullest. Sometimes this collaboration comes in the form of commerce; trade or barter, humans consensually co-operate to make houses, food, pencils, computers, education, healthcare with the aim of making a good living doing so. This is the ‘specialization of labour’ – perhaps if I do just one thing really well, I’ll be able to sell enough of my labour to avoid needing to be self-sufficient. Other aspects of human existence, where collective action (rather than self sufficiency) is best suited, are often not best resolved by private co-operative associations (commerce). Generally cited are the minimum functions of: • The law and it’s enforcement, and • The defence of the nation These are also more sensibly centralized at the federal level. This centralized collaboration is usually referred to as Government and the more aspects of life the government gets involved in, the more important it is that Government is done right, because there can be a conflict with consent. A key historical example of this is conscription – the forcing individuals, against their will, to fight in war the government chose to get into. "I have never believed that man's freedom consisted in doing what he wants, but rather in never doing what he does not want to do". Jean-Jacques Rousseau Being ‘free’ means we want to live our lives as we see fit, and as Rousseau says, to not be forced to do things we don’t want. Government is the imposition that the collectives desire might have over our individual freedom, that operates on the basis that a majority of the population voted for this organization to have power over you, your consent has been lost to the consent of the majority. Government and Freedom are direct opposites. However, as long as we aren’t harming others, it’s generally accepted that we should be free to do and be as we wish. These principles form ‘The Common Law’- Don’t harm others, steal their stuff or be fraudulent in your agreements with them; these are also the key tenets of most religious or moral teachings. “Do to others as you would be done by” The legal system on top of that Common Law is really just a collection of rules that previous Representatives have enforced over everyone else, stuff that only the Representatives got to vote on. We’re all obligated to these laws because a majority of individuals voted for the Representatives that did get to vote on them. We’re subject to laws that were written before we were born, let alone before we were eligible to vote. Consent is stretched to it’s limit, well past what Rousseau would consider freedom. Aside from raw legal issues (which you might call politics), most human beings can’t all satisfy all their wants and needs through self-sufficiency (what we call economics). Especially we modern humans have become reliant on collective action (through government or corporations) to have these needs satisfied. One of the reasons for this is technology, very few could build their own pencil from scratch, much less a cell phone or computer. We need, as individuals acting collectively, to consent at an issue level, and the representative model does not allow for that. This is why Direct Democracy is so important, everything else is an oligarchy, a society run by a few powerful people, who, if they were not rich before, always seem to leave government wealthy, despite never managing to balance the governments books. Nobody spends somebody else's money as wisely as he spends his own. Milton Friedman Representative Democracies in most large Western nations, are lucky to achieve a voter turnout of 60%, so over 1/3 of the people have lost faith in the system, they maybe apathetic to politics, the politicians, or simply apathetic to the Representative Oligarchy system. Given that the 60% who do vote are split between multiple parties (usually Left/Right front runner parties and a smattering of ‘also-rans’) no one faction can be called a majority (half of 60% is only 30%). Rarely is the ruling party able to count even a clear 1/3rd of the population, and many of those are ‘protest votes’, cast in order to stop the ‘other guy’. So it isn’t even ‘the consent of the majority’, but the consent of the largest ideological minority of the electorate. I believe that the actual majority want nothing to do with ‘Representative Democracy’ and do want the power to stop wars, laws and taxes they don’t agree with.

Part 3: The Answer - Direct Democracy

Voting is a challenging event for two main reasons; first, everyone needs to be able to do it and secondly, it needs to be secure. Historically, this has proven expensive, because it is done on paper and requires an army of vote counters and checkers (whom rarely seem impartial). If we’re voting on issues (Direct Democracy), perhaps as often as every month, that’s impossible under our current paper system of referenda or plebiscite (think Brexit, or Provincial/State Separation Movements) which are only held under very strict circumstances. This is because our ‘Democracies’ are still using 17th century technology, if we can secure banking, investment trading, digital currencies, flight traffic control, legal documents and such with todays technology; why not voting? As we say: “There should be an app for that”. Once we’ve on-lined a voting app (something even a novice developer could program the logic for), it’s no longer necessary for it to be about voting representatives. We can vote on issues – Direct Democracy, and have the computers do the counting. Visit directdemocracy.software to see our working prototype. A Direct Democracy would allow everyone to have their say on each issue, and even to exclude themselves entirely from any government program they no longer wish to consent to. While they will no longer have the privileges to a government program (Health, Education, Social Insurance), they will also not be required to fund it through their taxes. They should be free to chose to be self-sufficient, or seek a private/alternative provider. This provides a free-market for collective action; the freedom to act individually when you wish, and collectively (commercially or non-commercially) with like-minded people when that suits you. Put bluntly, anything else infringes on our consent, forces us to do what we don’t want. Those people that want to act collectively this way are able to do so and can know how much it will cost them in taxes/fees, bearing in mind how many others are also voting for the same. In a Direct Democracy, those individuals running the Government Departments hold the power, the responsibility and the mandate from the people to implement the results of the vote. They too could be voted upon using the system; this could allow subject matter experts to run the Departments, instead of arbitrarily chosen Representatives. Similarly, Voting System Admins (those who write the vote questions and answers and manage their jurisdiction’s user base) would also be voted in using the system. A computerized Direct Democracy can also provide a feedback loop; the system can let people request issues come up for public vote, those most requested make it into the next voting cycle (which needn’t be just every 4 years: every quarter? every month?). Voting can also happen within all the jurisdictions in which one lives (Municipal, Regional, Federal). Right now, not only do only the Representatives get to vote, but only they decide what issues get voted on. Direct Democracy would thus lead to a massive decentralization of power, a huge reduction in corruption and an infinitely far more effective government. It’s a long needed upgrade for the system of democracy, the old model is no longer fit-for-purpose and certainly not one we should be using as a justification for war (the ‘Democratic Peace Theory’). None of the current political parties or structures will support Direct Democracy, as it kills their golden goose, boots them off their taxpayer-fed gravy-train; there would be no position of power to attract the psycho- and sociopathic personality types that thrive under the Representative democracy system, there would be no need for Political parties and their ever changing toxic ideologies. Instead we would live free to choose self-sufficiency, commerce or collective action to satisfy our needs, regardless of the issue at hand.

Part 4: The Time has Come

To reach this apparent utopia, what is needed is, in each country, a ‘Direct Democracy Party’. Each current electoral riding needs a ‘representative’ to put themselves forward in the next election. The Party has a single manifesto item – to institute Direct Democracy in their jurisdiction (wether it be local, regional or federal) and let the people decide what society they want to live in. We have to beat the Representative Oligarchy at it’s own game, by making Direct Democracy ‘go viral’. Once voted in on a majority, the Direct Democracy Party will then have the ability to disassemble the Representative model and replace it with an ecosystem to implement issue based voting. Voting on issues makes political parties, and their ideologies redundant, removing the corruptible Representative ‘bug’ in the system. The whole Left/Right, Red/Blue, Coke/Pepsi, dog and pony show that has plagued government for the last centuries is gone. Democracy will have evolved beyond the restraints of the representative model. We will have worked our way out of the political cul-de-sac, and moved humanity past the constraining ‘End of History’ mindset. If voted in without a Party majority, a Direct Democracy Representative can still then relay the Questions given to them as Representatives to vote on, through to their electorate, handing the sovereignty back to the individuals in their riding or district (acting like a System Admin). Voting also happens at municipal and regional (State/Provincial) levels and those levels of government should be run via direct democracy as well. We’re taxed at different levels of government, we should have a say in how those tax dollars are spent, wether its Local roads, Provincial Courts or National Defence. Direct Democracy provides an evolution that can satisfy those on the left (who want increased collectivist action to resolve issues), the right (the ability to limit the power of government) and those from the libertarian/voluntarism/self-sufficiency camps, who will now have a mechanism to choose to extract themselves from government programs where it suits them. Win, Win, Win; the only losers are those that have been living on hog of the taxpayer and therefore pushing our children and grandchildren further and further into debt. We’ll be left with an entirely consent based system and your tax bill will be itemized according to how much was spent by each Government Department on those programs you consented to. Now a coercion-free Democracy can be run like a fast-food drive-through, one that serves everything and delivers what’s on it’s menu, at the price advertised.

Part 5: Action Items

1. Share this article and start a Direct Democracy party in your country, if no-one else is standing in your riding, put yourself forward as candidate. 2. If you have skills in marketing, promotion, law, fund-raising, coding or other disciplines that can help advance Direct Democracy, use them to promote the Direct Democracy movement in your nation, province/state and local municipality. 3. As Direct Democracy Parties gain traction at the various level of government, people will get introduced to Direct Democracy and, in time, will prefer it, as they see it clean up government, city-by-city, state-by-state, nation-by-nation. That’s all there is to it, clearly the Time has Come for the evolution of Democracy. But it can only work if you participate and give or deny your consent. Otherwise we’ll remain driven by the choices of others, regardless of who we vote for.