It's possible to have a tyranny with freedom and a democracy without
freedom.

A benevolent tyrant will run a free tyranny. Democratic voters who don't want
freedom will elect a party that will remove their freedoms.

That is just the way things are.

I guess I am naive but I don't recall any tyrant who was benevolent, nor any true democracy which didn't have individual liberty(freedom) as its foundation.

It's just semantics, really. The only freedom democracy truly provides when left to its own devices is the freedom to cast any vote you'd like. Letum is exactly right - the word democracy has nothing to do with any other freedom than that of allowing you to choose what box to fill in on the ballot.

I don't see the vote in Iran as true democracy. The power lies with a mullah who is never up for a vote and by definition is a tyrant/dictator.

The Iranian president is a figurehead whose role, in Iran's case, is to speek badly of and threaten those the mullah deems fit to chastize. Am I wrong?

Well, the vote is democratic. But the nation surely isn't.

I guess by definition the vote in the former Soviet Union, while it was the Soviet Union was democratic also. Yet we all know that the premier would always be the same. The ability to oust a sitting government legally is the definition i'd like to go with. Not that I can do anything but bitch about it.

That is besides the point. Even if there where never any un-free democracies
and free tyrannies, both are possible.
A benevolent tyrant will run a free tyranny. Democratic voters who don't
want freedom will elect a party that will remove their freedoms.


That said, there have been plenty of benevolent tyrants. Monarchs of small
countries are very often benevolent.
There have been plenty of democracies in countries highly dependent on slave
labor as well. The freedoms in a democracy are only as great as what is voted
for.

First of all, a democracy is not necessarily the best system. A democracy is the governing of the majority, and therefore the democracy is only as good as that democracy is. And what is the average level of intelligence and education in many countries? What is the level of compromise with environment, future generations, etc.?

In my opinion, and given the average intelligence of citizens and their poor education, in the current situation a dictatorship would be much better if the dictator is a good and skillful enough person. A dictatorship has many advantages for the long term decissions, which the democratic governments don't have. Environmental pollution, taxes, subsidies, public debt, economy, and many other relevant questions are run best when you do not depend on virtually irresponsable voters and politicians who only do care about today, as if there was no tomorrow. The problem with dictatorships in history so far is that the dictators have been disgusting persons, like Hitler, Stalin, Franco, Castro etc. (To only name the most recent ones), but I f.e. would prefer a dictatorship directed by Emmanuel Kant instead of a democracy governed by Berlusconi :doh:. In any case, one must admit that it is way easier to find a good person to be dictator than several millions of intelligent voters who will choose well :shifty:

Second, and if we need to accept democracy because the dictatorship system has also its problems (The main one being who chooses the dictator), then at least we need a real democracy, and not a partitocracy. To be really effective, a democracy can't rely on locked lists and a monopoly of political parties. It also can't work on a national basis. Men as social groups work better in small units where everyone knows well the other, so a democracy must run from a very low level to the higher one. Ther must also be a better system of demanding responsability from politicians. For example, here in Valencia the regional president is currently investigated for corruption, and he has shamelessly presented the european elections as a referendum of confidence in him. What kind of democracy is that? Nobody should ever pretend to claim that voters can absolve him from any legal or even political offence, that is simply sick! :nope:

The current system, at least in Spain, is plain and simply an oligarchy of political parties which is shamelessly run by them in a continuous expansion of their tentacles to everything they can: The courts, the army, the trade unions...

Such dirt is nowhere close to a real democracy, and hence I do not by any means want to participate on it. I accept and obey it because the current legal system is that one, but I do not in any way concur personally to it, nor do I want that my forced vote could be considered a suppport of the system.

The right not to vote is the right to critize the system by legal and pacific means, and I demand it to be respected.

People usually find it hard to identify themselves with a dictatorship/tyranny. Why not a feudal system, a monarchy, with a far greater potential that people could identify themselves with it? the voting process in democracies is not about the competence of the candidates. Indeed it is a highly irrational affair, that has a lot to do with - old habits and traditions in social peer groups. In a just and fair-functioning monarchy, however, the next generation of leader(s) is educated and trained for their later responsibility from childhood on. But like in a democracy, the risk with a monarchy lies in the situation of a monarch having a deficitary character, to put it that way. However, deficitary characters seem to be the rule in democracies. And often we even have incompetent deficitary characters at top levels. Not too mention that the ammount of lobbyism and influence by interest groups makes the independance of politics a dream of the past.

A feudal structure seems to be the better solution for large-scale communities, while democracies may function well in small-scale communities. Somehow the two should be combined: feudalism on the national and supernational level, democracy on the local level.

A political study done some months ago found democracies by tendency to be in global decline, and tyrannies/dictatorships winning ground, btw. It also found the latter often abusing the first to strengthen it's status, a good example is Iraq that formally seems to be a democracy but in fact the Shia president Malikhi is strongly collaborating and taking orders from the Iranian autocracy. and throughout the ME, the more free democratic elections are held, the stronger non-democratic islamists become - and see their anti-democratic and islamic attitude officially be legitimated by democratic elections, which gives them a status of being unavailable for democratic criticism.

I think it is a widespread symptom that democracy is no longer taken serious, but just is instrumentalised for pushing interests that are anything but democratic. And that is true for the West, too.

You made my day with this statement Skybird. Thank you. Now where did I leave my book draft...?

You worry me when you say things like this, Sky. This is at least the third time I have heard you suggest that a feudal system might be the best way to go, so I can only assume that you are serious.
Intelligent as you are, even you cannot suggest a way that an effective and responsible feudal government could be created other than that democracy and feudalism could be "somehow" combined.

For someone as wary of religion, the collusion of business and state, and irresponsible concentration of power as you seem to be, feudalism should appear to be completely unviable. The potential for catastrophic abuse of power is tremendous, and inevitable at some point, no matter who is chosen as the first monarch. Furthermore, you have stated how influential genes and reproductively-aligned biological proccess can be in affecting a person's judgement (something I agree with, btw, mostly along the lines of Ridley's works), so how can you advocate a system as nepotistic as feudalism?

I think you have fallen prey to the idea of the "philosopher-king" in some form or another, my friend. While it sounds nice, it is completely untenable in the real world.

As always, I offer you what I consider to be a true resolution in the limitation of the power of the state. You need look no further than the U.S. Constitution if you seek a basis for an ideal (as far as that is possible) form of government. There are problems with the Constitution, to be sure. Loopholes and unclear statements do exsist within the document, but it was really the first attempt at such a thing.
A strict Constitution, properly drafted, and ratified by overwhelming majority, can embrace and preserve the goals of a society far longer than any other type of system.
The solution is to base the society upon that document, and vigilantly guard it against any re-interpretation or threat other than overwhelming support for amendment. Naturally, the document must be enforced by popular mandate, so an armed populace is crucial to its' survival.

Pfft! Feudal system, indeed! That is simply tyranny by another name, even more prone to corruption than pure democracy, as it requires the military support of vassals and lords, entities with centralized power, whose loyalty must be bought or bartered for. By seeking pure order, you will only create more chaos. Someone as familiar with human psychology as you should know that.
A Constitutional Republic, with strict limitations upon centralized power, and a representative democratic electorate, is the answer. Through the will of the individual, bounded only legal protections of the rights of all individuals, order can be achieved in a form that is most beneficial for all.

I judge the democratic model by the resulting state of nations in the present. And the result is not as that I would become enthusiastic. Democracy shows a lethal weakness to lobbyism and forming of "secret" elitarist structures that erode it, and this degenerative process runs the faster the bigger the community is. There are example of democracy working, but these examples depend on community size not exeeding a certain size, and that size seems to be connected the social perception of the whole by the individual. but the individual can only overlook so and so much, but not more, and it can feel attached to and being part of only so and so much context, and not more. Where this direct, immediate, inter-human interaction mode gets lost in the system size, anonymous abstractions find the opportunity to set it and replace true humanb-human relations. sub groups form up, having interests defined not by the context of the whole, but the context of the single group only.

Couple this with an economic dieology that bases on maximum selfishness and egoism, and attitude of having the right to seek one's own advanatge at the cost of the whole.

The result is a very self-destructive society - the societies we have today in the West. they are oligarchies and a tyranny of lobbies that are democratic only by label, but not by content and meaning.

I mean modern democracy fostered a form of capitlaism that threatens to put mankind on the list of endangered species. How could one claim that to be a successful model?

We need to find an alternative. Make better proposals than the "draft" I offered. I tried to combine democracy and feudalism without making one of them purely representative only, making the valdiity of both depending on the level of the social orgnaisation level: democracy in independant local regions small enough that it can function as intended, a somewhat feudal structure on national level to coordinate their interaction. In that model, both depend on the other as long as both agree to keep a national identity together.

Offer something better, I don'T say my quick draft is already perfect, it is just a general hint at one direction. Just don't tell me that there is nothing better than democracy or ultra-laissez-faire for the market - it kills us in multiple ways. It destroys us and the basis of our life, in materialistic and comfortable ways, but nevertheless it destroys us. That simple. - The weak state of yours is a too weak an idea as if it could convince me.

Revolutionary changes are never a good idea.
If we need to change what we have, we need to do it bit by bit and in such a
way that we can always take a step back. We are feeling our way in the dark.

I completely agree, but I have never advocated democracy. Democracy is simply tyranny of the masses. The U.S., unlike many democratic governments, was never intended to be a democracy. It was supposed to be a Republic. The President was supposed to be elected by Congress, which was in turn elected by landholding citizens.


You assume that human interaction of a certain type is required or desireable in modern society. I agree to some extent, but someone as familiar with the biological peculiarities of the human psyche should know that the nature of the interaction is not nearly as important as how it is percieved. People interact on this forum across thousands of miles and time zones, despite cultural differences, because it a rewarding social interaction.
As for the desireability of traditional interaction, there is certainly something to be said for it, but it is anathema to any kind of viable economy, unless we were to be content to live in huts in a village.
The market does not require face to face interaction to benefit all. The person who makes a nice pair of boots for me does not need to know me to do so, he does it for his own benefit, and I do not buy them to support him, I buy them for my own benefit. In that way, the market brings people together in pursuit of mutual benefit across all sorts of barriers.
It is true that sub-groups form, but that is why the state cannot be allowed much power. It has a tendency to cater to such groups if it is able to do so. The state must be walled off from the marketplace where we all interact as much as possible, lest some take advantage of it.

Maximum selfishness and egoism are a base part of human nature. As a social species, some behaviors of that nature are confused with altruism, but the truth is that people are selfish. For the most part, they cannot be otherwise. They are programmed to be so by their very selfish genes. It takes a good deal of introspection and effort to defeat that programming, and even then it retains some influence.
Where I feel you continually "miss the forest for the trees", so to speak, is in your attitude towards the market, which harnesses those selfish drives for the good of all. In its' most perfect form, the market requires that one provide a good or service of value to another in order to benefit oneself.
I realize that the equation is more complex than that, as one must take into account the fact that the market serves the wise better than it serves the foolish, but it also makes wise men out of fools. Even the most banal idiot on the face of the planet can only be fooled so many times before they change their behaviour.

No.....the result is a society that continually moves onwards and upwards, overcoming all obstacles. For all the problems with modern forms of democracy and the market, it cannot be argued that humanity has not progressed by leaps and bounds since the beginning of the modern era of trade and democracy. Even when one considers the tremendous cost paid in lives and material because of wars perpetuated by states as they make the painful transition,there are still mroe people, with a better standard of living, than there has ever been before, and the trend continues.

That is only true if one subscribes to the idea that man is destroying the planet that provides fuel for a market economy. I, for one, believe that this is your strongest argument. It is very true that humanity has a voracious appetite for resources, and that this drive for exploitation hurts other species, and may end up hurting us as well.
My solution is, as you are well aware by now, to press onward and rely on the technological innovations of the free market to solve these problems. Private industry has a history of success in this area, when it is permitted to function. Where there are not enough crops, it revolutionizes agriculture. Where there are not enough materials, it finds more or develops alternatives. It must do so or it will die. It is driven by greed, but it must provide for its' customers to fuel that greed. It innovates where innovation is needed, and it conserves as much as possible to save on costs.
To be fair, the market does do damage to the environment, a lot of damage. But humanity, and all living beings damage the environment. Any species, if it is successful enough, will destroy its' own ecosystem. That's just how nature works. As humans, we have the unique capacity to overcome that deficiency, and have done so in the past(via the market, and free political systems) on many occassions. If you could provide at least a vague outline of a viable system other than free trade where we could overcome our tendency to exploit the environment, I would carefully consider it, but you never do. All you ever say is that things need to be changed, without providing any kind of acceptable system.
One thing is for sure; Feudalism is not a way to limit harm to the environment. Centralization in general is not a way to limit such harm. The countries with the worst environments, the ones where resources are exploited the most and where the earth is the most abused, are poor countries with centralist power structures.
Poor countries cannot afford the luxury of contemplating what harm is being done to the Earth, they are too busy just trying to survive. Imo, we need a society that is made rich by trade, and emancipated by the decentralization of power, to enable inherently selfish people to take some time to think about the environment and have time to restore it.

And I am interested in the idea. I have been running it through my head for a few hours now and trying to develop a way in which it might work. I doubt I will come up with anything soon, but I will consider it in the days to come. Perhaps you are on to something, but I don't see anything viable yet. I keep coming back to the same conclusion; who can be trusted with the power a monarch is capable of wielding? How do we ensure that such power does not fall into the wrong hands?
It takes many lifetimes of effort to build a prosperous society. It only takes one fool to tear it down, if he is given the means to do so.

I will continue to consider it, however.

I did read this paragraph before I began typing this response, but the truth is that I have nothing else to offer you, Sky. I have been a resident of many sectors of the political spectrum at various times in my life and based upon those experiences, I have settled on the Libertarian perspective.
I am not sure that it was a wise decision, which is why I continually challenge the views of yourself and others, that I might gain some insight that changes my perspective for the better. Thus far, my perspective has only been changed a little, not enough for me to abandon my general stance. I see the same thing over and over again; that things should be different or made better, but no one has any kind of realistic way to realize that aim.

In truth, Sky, I think that you are a victim of the same selfish short-sightedness that you regularly accuse the rest of humanity of being guilty of. You may think you want a system that is better for the species and the Earth as a whole, but what you really mean is that you want your system and ideals to be the standard.
I may be wrong about that, and I do not mean to be offensive, but I came to the realization that I desired such things some time ago. That is part of the reason why I adopted the positions I support now. Consider it, at least.

Hi, Lance, need a read? I've got a little thing for you... :D

1/2

Okay, I take it - since it is said so often by conservative Americans - that the United States are not democratic, and the claim to be the great messiah of democracy is only posturing.

:hmmm:

It is a totally new, because it is non-direct/unpersonal/non-vis-a-vis form of social interaction, even less "binding" than a letter that takes more effort and time and care to write. The whole web is likem this, and it'S ontent is extremely fluid, and temporary, unsubstantial. It is a revolution in thinking, and a cultural revolution maybe even greater than the invention of book printing. And it causes massive psychological as well as social changes. And it seems: also many problems.

Either you have misunderstood something or I explained something in a misleading way, since you put so much attention on existence or absence of face-to-face communication. I wonder what all this has to do with your criticism and my explanation of my argument that we need to change our communal system, since the current system fails to give us the needed reaction space and speed to sail off the high waves to come.

That is true, but it is also true that scientists started to conclude that a certain ammount of social behavior also is genetically transported, since it improves the chance of survival and reduces inner tensions of the tribe, herd, social group the individual ape is living in. This is concluded from research being done on chimps, I mentioned it in earlier threads. It started with the observation that chimps show altruistic behavior.

You also ignore that although man is genetically programmed, he has the ability, due to his mind, to go beyond that original programming, even act in violation of it. We do it all the time, to varying degrees. If we wouldn't, we would end in jail this very day. Nor wuld there have been true wise man and "saints." Self-sacrifce. Selflessly coming to the help of others. No waste of time like creating a piece of art. No letting go of the loved one, for he/she loves somebody else. No intentional starving oneself to death in protest. Etc. Etc. Etc.

But you are right that we also are often controlled by genes in our behavior and not realise it or do not want to know it. That is specially true in our extremely complex games we play in our mating behavior. When it comes to sex, then... :lol:

Nevertheless. Do not compare genes and human beings directly. It does not work. That is a bit like comparing a heap of metal ore and a bundle of plastic and wires with a manufactured Ferrari. Or like comparing a nut with a forest.

Oh, I perfectly understand your reasoning behind it, it's just that I do not buy it. You again propagate here, and in the paragraphs before, a society of isolated individualists that shall have the right to act egoistically and push their intertests at all costs, unregulated, even at the cost of the others. The market regulates it all, you say. But what you do not want to see is that man nevertheless is a social animal, like it or not, and that you defend a total anarchy in which economical oligarchs are allowed to form up and dominate the weaker by their monopoles that you see no reason at all to prevent and assume to be taken care of by the market (that is absurd since the market left to itself establishes monopoles). You assume that just leaving human egoism to itself would level out over the whole social system or culture, where in fact it means an unregulated fight between everybody, with bigger fishes becoming bigger and smaller being eaten until only some monopolists are left that have the power to impose their conditions and rules, dicated by their egoist interest, onto the others. and that my friend is anarchy par excellence. the law of the jungle. the survival of the fittest. The economic variation of Social-Darwinism at its best. Maybe that is fine with animals in the jungle. but we are self-aware, fairly intelligent on the individual level, unescapably social human beings. and it raises my eyebrows to hear how easily you are willing to leave behind those that are not given by nature the strengths to compete in that monopolistic environment that is to form up. Those that became ill, or had an accident, simply are weaker than others but not by their own fault. Weak and lazy, being depending and being a parasyte, ate two different things.

You're strange. Even more, you criticise me when mentioning a "feudal structure" above, but you do not care for feudal-by-functionality structures already being established in form of economic monopolists and lobby groups and political family dynasties and established, crusted structures that already are beyond any countercontrol or need not to legitmise themselves to the public, and that nevertheless project an enormous ammount of power and influence that makes mockery of your claim that "the market regulates itself" You completely ignore that these things boosted the developement that led to the current banking crisis - I do not buy your excuse that it was not the system, but too much state control. the market was given the freedom - that just allowed these perversions taking place.

As I said before, the way you want it to have, opens the lane to the tyranny of monopolists, since that is what capitalism is about: getting rid of rivals, preventing competition and winning a monopole that allows to go after maximum exploitation, and the less regulation there is to prevent that, the faster it goes into that direction. Under this circumstances it is totally illusive that the generation of starters that enter the race at a later point of time, would do so under conditions of equal chances - they face established power structures that aim at denying equality of chances, and the older these old bulls are, the more such power they have.

As I said in a posting above, what you hail as the big victory of material comfort, destroys us. Even more so when assuming that the rest of mankind would live by the same materialistic living conditions like the few happy people in the rich western nations. Could you imagine what it means for the planet, if our rate of consuming energy, our rate of people owning cars, our rate of consuming resources and goods, our rateof wasting, would be reached by the remaining 5.5 billion people on the planet? You should think about that, and please do not imagine that just some technical innovations would solve the problem. If the situation would become as that all 6.5 billion (growing!) people would live in the same material way like we lucky 800 million, it would mean a cataclysm destroying the biosphere and the regenerative potential of the planet to a degree where it can no longer support higher forms of life. We see a widening of such a destruction already now, with just us 800 million doing the damage. Multiply it by a factor 8 for the present, and have a happy suicide party. - It took just us 800 millionto bring us to where we are - and that was already enough to make the situation is grim, really grim.

More of the ways that we already have? We can pack our things and leave from the stage, then.

honestly said, you sound so thoughtless and unprepared here that I think you simply have not even an almost realistic idea of the ammount of problems man has already caused. I could talk about certain precious key ores that have become so rare that we fuel civil wars in africa just to get them for our hightech and military industry. I could talk about the biological collapse in the oceans, and the change of the energetic dynamics in currents due to the changing balances in salt and sweet water, and the effect on climate. I could talk about the desastrous loss of farmland, the exploding desertification, the falling of the ground water levels, and the complex damages being done by overfertilizing the shrinking ammounts of agricultural lands that are left. I could talk about the atmosphere, and the thawing of the methane-saturated permafrost areas. I could talk about the enormous risk we accepted by having reduced the former several dozens of thousands variations of grain to just a few hundreds, and the existential risk of maintaining too many monocultures. I could talk about the shrinking ammounts of food produced, and the growing ammount of agriculture focussing on energy production. I could talk about the dying of plancton and certain algas and the loss of woods and how that affectes the atmosphere, and the return of the dominance of yellyfish in the oceans and regular fishes dying out and the spreading of other algas intoxicating the ocean and doing damage to instead of helping the atmopshere, and damaging the remaining higher life in the seas - and finally on land, too, since the loss of maritime life directly impacts on land-based life, too, just with a time delay. I can talk about the disappearing of oil and the economic turmoils it causes even decades before the last barrel of oil will be sold.

Not too mention the drama of human mass dying due to stravations, illness and natural desaster, and epic migration movements as a result of people fleeing from the pleagues.

As long as this underestimation of these fundamental changes (often: collapses) is present, there is no real sense in continuing to debate over this - and that may be the reason why conservatives and classic economic hardliners fight so bitterly against seeing the environmental collapse taking place, and invest hundreds of millions per year in huge campaigns to hide it from the public and to bring established research on these issues into doubt so that people shall reject it: a problem not admitted is a problem that cannot interfere with one's own shorttermed profit interests - the bill hopefully needs to be payed not before one has had one's party and then has bitten the dust.

It is said to be a typical and very sympathetic - although maybe stereotyped - American quality: optimism, "not talking long, but getting something done". But this coin has two medals. It leads to the observation that people prefer to mess up things and repairing them, instead of preventing them from breaking, and although optimism boosts one's energy in situations, it also carries one away and makes one falling for unrealistic assumptions on how easy and bright and managable things will be. the truth however is that we have caused consequences on this planet that I see us being completely unable to "manage". Or as the saying goes: "pessimist" is the optimist's decription of a realist.

Man, is there something in the world you do not think of as having been founded, fostered and turned for the better by "the market"? I start to think about it in terms of obessions and fixiations. :D

Am I the omni-potent, all-knowing messiah? I do not know for sure what we must do and what me must turn to, but I know for sure that more of what we already have had, will just seal our doom. And that is perfectly legitimate to make a statement, then. I just have drawn a simple draft for an idea how I think it could eventually be turned if we still have the time left, and earlier you just attacked it for being what it is, "feudalism", not giving argument for it, but just referring to your holy grail, the ungoverned market. I know that it is a very anglosaxon hobby, to turn the idea of the unregulated market into almost a religion, it is not by chnace that it were anglosaxon economists pushing the idea in the main - but I still do not buy it in the extremist form you outline. To me you propagate open anarchy and open monopolism, and nothing else than this. And both are not acceptable to me, for the sake of the higher interest and for the sake of those having come into this world a bit weaker in strength and more limited in chances and both not being their fault.