| > can't imagine a better government As an American, I sometimes wonder if it is too dogmatic to treat democracy as the end all be all of governments. As I understand it, democracy refers to a heuristic for solving the problem of reaching consensus in a decision making scenario in a system of multiple agents each having a differing opinion. In this heuristic, every agent has the right to vote on an issue in order to influence the consensus. (America is a republic so we vote on other agents to do the voting on our behalf rather than the issues themselves.) Computer scientists can come up with all sorts of different ways of tackling the consensus problem. For example, one strategy is to choose the agents with the most information about the system (most educated) and treat their opinions as more important when reaching consensus. (As society advances and modeling societal problems become more sophisticated, solutions may require people with increasingly more domain knowledge.) Although variations of such strategies are probably not democracies, I don't think they are necessarily inferior, if as a heuristic when tried out, are actually effective. If there's a formal proof that democracy is, in fact, the best government, I'm open to hearing it though. When people say they want democracy, don't they often mean more specifically that they want rule of law / due process? Is it not possible to have both a government that have characteristics that make it authoritarian / not democratic but also have rule of law? |