this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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Be very careful with this, because this is also the very foundation of democracy. If we start saying humans can't decide for themselves over insignificant phone charger, how could we trust them selecting the people who has much more power than that?
That’s actually the opposite of the foundation of democracy. Democracy spreads the power out through as many people as possible in order to lessen the potential for abuse by any individual actor. Electing representatives who have near unlimited power and no recourse for constituents isn’t democracy, its oligarchy.
Well, that's not our democracies work. We don't let people vote every law by referendum, that would be spreading power as much as possible.
In ancient Athens it was common, as was common for judiciary decision to be made by 3-4 hundreds people drawn at random. But that's something almost universally considered stupid now, we have a judge, who we consider an "expert" in law.
By your definition, we don't live in a democracy, on the contrary, democracy is extinct on this planet
There are indeed democracies on the planet that work in a way that both allows the use of representation and maintains the power in the hands of the constituency by allowing easy recall processes and mandates that officials follow the will of their constituency. We just don’t have them in liberal democracy, which was created, in part, to specifically guard against the possibility of majority rule, as mentioned in multiple of the Federalist papers, including but not limited to Federalist 9 and 10.
Who else is there to trust but us humans?
Individual humans don't have the ability to choose their phone based on their preferred charger. Each purchase is made between one buyer with fairly limited funds and few large corporations with extensive funds.
Which is the same as saying that every vote is transferred between one voter, with very limited knowledge and political awareness and a few politicians with extensive power because politics is what they do their entire life.
Democracy is, in many practical sense, a market for votes. One which is way less regulated than the one for goods and services
There's nothing to be careful about, it's absolutely true. Democracy isn't flawless and is capable of leading to demagogues and reality-denying lunatics coming to power precisely because humans aren't rational actors. But just because democracy isn't perfect doesn't mean it's worse than the other systems we've come up with.