About government forms
“Democracy is the rule of the people , by the people and and for the people.” - Abraham Lincoln
Don’t ask me why I was thinking about democracy. Probably the fact that what we expect from our politicians is that they try to see our problems and try to fix them. The problem is: how they will see the problems if they have to stay locked in a room voting laws all they long? And how they will understand the problems if the country is so huge we can’t even understand the people that live on the next state?
“Democracy is the worst form of government except from all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” - Winston Churchill, speech in the House of Commons, 11 November 1947
“Democracy is nothing but the Tyranny of Majorities, the most abominable tyranny of all, for it is not based on the authority of a religion, not upon the nobility of a race, not on the merits of talents and of riches. It merely rests upon numbers and hides behind the name of the people.” - Proudhon, Demokratie und Republik, S. 10.
The only way is to force politicians to go all the way from the bottom level till the top. But there are many more people in the bottom level than spaces on the upper levels. So we need a way to select the few good ones that can stay on the upper levels. Democracy doesn’t offer a good way to show us what the people we elected in the first place actually did something. We tend to check people we voted for, not the others. What if the others actually did a better the job than the one we voted for?
There is, however, a way that we don’t need to keep an eye all the time on everyone. Meritocracy works fine for open source government, but we don’t have it on real world. The problem with meritocracy is that it works from top to bottom, so we need someone with strong power at the top and that person needs to really care about doing a good job. It works for open source projects because the top leader is, actually, someone who is really interested on doing a better work for the project. Where we could find someone who is really interested in helping people? I mean, truly helping people. Of course, there is such person, as every man has his price. So, even if I’m also an advocate of meritocracy, I don’t think it will work for a whole country. Take a look at the wikipedia link: all supporters of meritocracy were either philosophers or dictators.
So, meritocracy won’t work for a country. But would probably work for small communities. That’s probably the problem with current government: it is so big it can’t care about the whole picture. So the minorities created by democracy become bigger. In a way, even democracy could work for small communities, except that people get elected due marketing tactics than really being worth for the job. One person at the top of a small chain could do a much better job choosing who is good enough to take his place when he comes down, or who can do a better job taking care of a ministry.
But, again, it is a matter of breaking down the power chain, taking a big power from one person and splitting into million pieces. And power corrupts, so this person won’t give up his power now. We are trapped into democracy, even if something better comes along.
