| > It is unclear to me, though, why an individual that imposes his will over another by force is (aptly) considered to be a despot, but a group of individuals that band together to impose their collective will by force on another group of individuals is considered as being a moral and acceptable state of affairs. An authoritarian individual or group are equally immoral, although groups may be more stable given some diversity of thought and need to negotiate. But the ideal of coordinated rule is that the whole population negotiates to create the rules for the whole population. Democracy is an attempt at that, using multiple levels of representation to get around the inefficiency of everyone having to weight in on everything. But its worth noting there are three aims of democracy and other attempts at good government: 1. Getting the highest quality decisions made. This, it turns out, is very difficult. We could even say, unsolved. 2. Demilitarizing politics. Democracies are a huge (but not perfect) success in this case. Peaceful coup, after coup, after coup, (i.e. elections replacing encumbants) is a tremendous improvement over civil wars, purges, assassinations, violent intimidation campaigns, ... 3. Decentralizing power, to water down governments self-interest. Any individuals forming a government are going to be prone to ruling the state for their own benefit. However term and role limits create turnover and power checks that reduce each individuals ability to self-deal significantly. Corruption can be rampant, but if the system holds, then by definition the corruption is far reduced from a despot situation. Most people don't consider #2 and #3 the main reasons for having a democracy, but I think both are far more important and reliable benefit than #1. So effective (most of the time), that we mostly spend our times arguing about #1. |
I agree.