Towards an Ideal Democracy
Why can't we have an ideal Democracy? When governments were first created, I'm sure the best leaders honestly wanted to know what their constituents thought of certain issues. The problem was talking to all of them. There are town hall meetings, of course, but you can't fit everyone in the village/town/city/country into the same building to work things out. Even if you could, it would surely devolve into a shouting match.
So the real reason we can't implement an ideal democracy is an utter lack of communication. However, that's what we've created the internet for.
If the internet was going to save us, how would it be done? It seems to me that Facebook, with its 500 million users, is more than capable of handling the opinions of 350 million Americans.
The evils of our world are government and money. Using the Internet to replace both is something that is not only possible, but is something we are obligated to do. So how do we do it?
One website would keep track of our personal consumption and production. This is the essential idea behind the use of currency, but money has many fundamental flaws that cannot be reconciled on a global scale. This method would provide extremely accurate and useful economic data, as opposed to our stock markets whose stability rests on the whims of men.
Another website would be something of a voting or decision-making website. However, most people are not logical thinkers and incapable of beneficial decision making. The proof of this is simply seeing where the 'moral majority' has led us so far. I believe this problem was patched in former governments with 'representatives' that understood more than the common person how governments and societies operated. If this voting website could take into account logic and rationale in decision making, it would be for the best.
However, both our current system and the system I propose here are subject to the same fatal flaw. As with any system, it can be hacked, exploited and manipulated by those that favor their self-interest over that of everyone else. To solve this problem so far as it can be solved, we turn to the Open Source ideology.
The Open Source community has taken the Internet by storm and completely revolutionized it. Suddenly, valuable products can be had for free. Not only are these products free, but they are also, in a lot of cases, better than proprietary, closed-source software. The point of this is to allow everyone the ability to understand what exactly these websites are doing behind the scenes. This creates trust and stability. The more eyes there are looking at something, the more likely we are to identify problems.
To have an Ideal Democracy, we must maximize our communication.
I believe the right answers are impossible to ignore forever, for the truth can always be rediscovered. Communication is the key the everything.
11.03.2010. 09:27
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