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This was covered in an earlier essay in the series: https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part... """Again, the benefits of democracy have been well-documented. Amartya Sen (whose work we will review this coming February) won a Nobel Prize for showing that people in democracies do not suffer from famine. People in democracies are better protected against disease, are more likely to be vaccinated against common childhood illnesses, and tend to have better educations provided by their governments. In the long run, democracies tend to experience more economic growth than non-democracies, though at any given time there might be a non-democracy that is growing very fast. One study has shown that men are taller in democracies. And yet, there is substantial evidence that most voters do not care much about politics, do not understand the issues, do not want to engage in study of the issues, and often sabotage their own interests. (See previous essays.) So the benefits of democracy probably don’t come from the voters. The benefits must come from structural factors, such as the voting itself, the transfer of power among different political parties, the ability of the political parties to funnel the frustrations of the people into productive channels (rather than resorting to civil war), the ability of newspapers and media to mediate the conflicts among the most powerful interests, making the tensions transparent so that they can be better managed, or possibly the free and unfettered activity of the most important professions, such as lawyers and health professionals and religious leaders and the accountants, plus other sources of accountability for money. As we noted in a previous essay, those democracies that have frequent changes in power among parties tend to have less corruption than those democracies where one party has held power for several decades in a row, so the mere transfer of power among parties seems to limit corruption (and this is true even when the leaders of all parties are known to be corrupt!)""" |
Economic opportunity comes from the masses clearly not wanting to kill each other but collaborate. If the opposite was true we’d have done it already.
The politics of it are a synthetic inner monologue implanted by power structures. Circle English constructs all they want, the scientific truth is people collaborate without the high minded bullshit of Anglo-gibberish. We did it before formal language, why believe sermonizing in historical script means anything?
Bridges and machines need a formal language for safety. I am unconvinced formal language defining social truths can be anything more than mind viruses intent on thought policing.
Am I freer by ogling images of Pelosi with her magic scepter and nodding along with McConnell’s obvious equivocations? No. I’m surrendering agency to standing there nodding along, memorizing their platform and sermons.
Coddling such things in our inner monologue is antithetical to free speech and agency.