RT @pwang
Voting is not a great way to surface the “best ideas” from a group.
The primary purpose of voting is to maintain legitimacy of the regime in the minds of the losing cadre; you get their “buy in” bc they were part of the “process”
It’s not a tool for collective sense-making; it’s a tool for popular control.
Always has been, always will.
If, somehow, some general sense of “the collective will of the people” can emerge from a voting process, it’s a nice side benefit.
(the following is my own. not pwang's)
1. i had never considered that voting was a tool for legitimacy, instead of how its usually presented as a tool for discovering and implementing the will of the people
2. this kinda makes sense though. we've had plenty of corrupt votes here and no one could dare challenge the government for it. absurdity is a feature of authoritarian regimes, not a bug. 2 + 2 = 5 and no one dares challenge it, dont stick your neck out
@AbstractFairy I hate this take, it's a classically technocratic perspectives the world isn't screwed because we can't find the right thing to do, it's screwed because decisions are taken in favour of the few not the many. So critiquing voting on technocratic grounds is totally missing the point, sure from the point of view of a ruler(s) it's a concession/compromise to maintain power, but from the perspective of the whole system it's power sharing.
@zimablue yeah you cant finance large projects / wars without getting people/investors/countries backing you
i've studied fiinance so its easy to find examples
but this doesnt translate to helping the masses
e.g. the IMF provides loans and economicc reforms to states. these reforms will help the state in international trade in the long run, but in the sgirt term harm the masses
also they have a history of working w dictators who misuse loans & leave the state in more debt w a worse economy
@zimablue my problem w voting is that mobs can be manipulated w fear mongering and lies. and that most people (incl. myself) are not educated well enough to properly understand how the gov is doing, how to organize, etc.
also government staff is not voted in. but they still have a critical role in gov
@AbstractFairy there are alternatives like better voting systems (than fptp), direct democracy, sortitions which I think would be steps in the right direction. As a kind of utilitarian humanist I don't think we should try to lock people out of power, we just have to try and improve our culture, education, institutions in step with empowerment.
@AbstractFairy there's a theory of economic development in foreign aid that uses a Dutch war to argue that nations decentralising power is inevitable because it allows borrowing at lower rates which is required to win wars, but I think that's more a case of needing to align political power with de facto (economic) power, and decentralisation of economic power is not inevitable