ROGER REPLIES TO DILLON
I cut'n pasted this from Dillon:
"Democracy, someone said, is that form of government in which everyone
has to put up with what the majority deserves.Where it has failed, people
call it Mobocrazy - rule of the mobs.
"....Some societies resolved this paradox by a twin headed system :
A moral(dynamic ) head and a popular(static) head. The moral head
interviened only under unusual or dynamic conditions. The main job of
the moral head was to search, groom and force another person to be
the successor. This model was a success in small societies but becomes
insufficient for large, complex and technologically advanced societies.
"So a quad-headed model?"
ROGER REPLIES:
Competitive checks and balances seem to be essential in the evolution and
long term survival of societies. The following conversation between Kevin
Kelly and Stuart Kauffman that I borrowed from "Out Of Control" captures this
issue well:
"I mentioned to Kauffman the controversial idea that in any society with the
proper strength of communication and information connection, democracy
becomes inevitable. Where ideas are free to flow and generate new ideas, the
political organization will eventually head toward democracy as an
unavoidable self-organizing strong attractor. Kauffman agreed with the
parallel: "When I was a sophomore in '58 or '59 I wrote a paper in philosophy
that I labored over with much passion. I was trying to figure out why
democracy worked. It's obvious that democracy doesn't work because it's the
rule of the majority. Now, 33 years later, I see that democracy is a device
that allows conflicting minorities to reach relative fluid compromises. It
keeps subgroups from getting stuck on some locally good but globally inferior
solution."
The longer term evolutionary view of social/economic systems shows an
inevitable progression toward pluralistic checks and balances. The
legislative branch vs the executive, microsoft vs AOL, democrats vs
republicans, liberals vs conservatives, unions vs corporations, the
environmentalists vs the economists, The Chicago Bulls vs The Houston
Rockets. Modern democracy is just the current label for this approach. I
think you are right that the number of dimensions of checks and balances just
keeps growing.... and exponentially. That is what a large, complex,
technologically advanced society IS.
Rog
PS -- Note that there is a competitive/cooperative dynamic to these tensions,
and that it isn't so much that one side is right and the other wrong, it is
the tension -- the cooperatve/competition -- that leads to the 'fluid
compromises' of social advance and keeps us out of 'locally good but globally
inferior solutions".
------- End of forwarded message -------
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