[mjburgess]

And how often do we hear a demand to 'direct' democracy, egalitarianism, the end of policing, and so on.. from those with a-little-to-much but clearly not-enough, power?

There's rarely anything more in people's political prescriptions other than, "I do not have enough power, and I want more" -- and there's nothing inherently wrong with this demand. Only that when it is disguised by the false promise of power for everyone, it means power for almost no one.

[soco]

Now now, let's not forget that there are already direct democracies at work in the world ahemtzerland and the general inland consensus is that they work.

[dbspin]

Yes - and there are hundreds of thousands of small groups applying principles of direct democracy in practice, from democratic schools to consensus based art centres.

People have been collectively organising movements and spaces for many decades now, and the processes are pretty well worked out. Comparing utopian dropouts in the 60's running farms on vibes to dedicated activists establishing and maintaining consensus based social contracts is disingenuous. There's plenty to be criticised in terms of the practical aspects of these systems - from implementation to scalability, and good luck to the folks doing the hard work of improving them. But dismissing them out of hand is an argument from ignorance.

[Nevermark]

> small groups applying principles of direct democracy

Small groups. That is the problem. It can work but doesn't scale.

As the number of people go up, the need and benefits of more complex coordination go up. People's interactions, dependencies, needs, understandings and problems multiply in quantity, complexity and diversity.

People O(n). Decisions O(n^2).

Direct coordination becomes too costly in time and effort. And people get asked to make decisions in areas where they have no skin in the game, so put little care into their decisions, or seek selfish benefits opportunistically. Things get difficult and ugly.

The default is a descent into anarchy, which gets counter weighted by emergent initiatives that centralize decision making around people who care, have expertise, are good at taking power, etc. Acknowledged or not, "direct", as the universal principle of decision making, no longer works.

Better to see it coming and as directly and openly as possible, prescribe how indirect governance is to be done. As openly and accountably as possible.

Organizations and societies, like computer memory and and processing cores in server centers, need to bifurcate and modularize into different levels, types and policies, to remain efficient and reliable at scale.

[soco]

Once again for the last row: Switzerland. 9 millions inhabitants, 5.5 millions with voting rights, 0 anarchy. Is that still not big enough for the no true scotsman?

[Nevermark]

They have councils and parties, classic institutions of centralization and decision delegation. The people in those organizations, especially the leaders, have tremendous outsized power to decide and frame what issues and candidates are exposed to votes by the democracy as a whole. And of course, in the best position to maintain their own positions or set up their successors chances.

So no - they are not a direct democracy. For the unavoidable reasons I gave.

However yes, they are doing a fantastic and inspiring job of maintaining as much directness as possible. And at keeping the centralized and indirect processes formalized, open and accountable.

Vs. the US, where even the president isn't elected directly; lower offices are heavily controlled by whoever draws district maps, often the incumbents; only two parties have much power, and conspire together to maintain that - reducing citizen choices to only two preset menus of policies & governance styles; parties enforce litmus tests on their own candidates at all levels of office, vastly increasing party leadership power at the expense of eliminating 99% of potential alternative views. The result of all this power hoarding are many laws in significant opposition to majority views, and an institutionalization of two way service and influence with the rich. The highest court nomination process and members of the highest court have become aggressively politicized and brazenly unethical. Overall, the US system has become increasingly dysfunctional, corrupt, divisive and dystopian.

Switzerland is amazing.

[dbspin]

I think this is a tremendously important discussion to have, perhaps the most important one we can have right now. One point I'll make not to counter what you've written above, but to reframe it slightly - is that many of the decisions we make about what needs to scale are cultural (and only narrowly rational).

We've somewhat arbitrarily settled on nation state scale geographic / population scales for governance which (a few less than democratic mega-nations aside), are pretty similar in size and complexity. This is a local maxima, rather than an inevitability. The ideal balance between federalised aspects of governance - which do need to be abstracted to some extent isn't obvious. It's reasonably likely that much smaller micro-states within stronger federalised economies could be more effective. That workplace level democracy can and does increase productivity. That in fact states where the level of consensus decision making is the business, the cooperative and the housing complex, could be more cohesive, less fractious and more stable. Could be more effective if we judge efficacy as best meeting the wellbeing needs of their population.

I'd take issue with the idea that centralisation of decision making is necessitated by having multiple layers of governance. I'd argue a canton style system of carrying forward the decisions and decision making authority of lower houses can also work. Where representation is absolutely essential, sortation can be used to prevent the creation of a distinct political class that is inevitably suborned by capital.

In terms of skin in the game - essentially all forms of consensus (which it's important to point out is radically different in theory and practice from direct democratic voting), require participation as the price of involvement. There is no voting without engagement, in fact in most consensus systems there is no voting at all. Participants become politically sophisticated through their involvement, and their level of involvement inevitably dictates their level of influence. For this to work, groups have to structure themselves such that a lot of the groups effort is spent engaged in decision making. Many of the specifics of the various consensus approaches push proponents of decisions into being responsible for the implementation of those decisions. There's no pretence that people don't affiliate, don't form minimal group paradigm loyalties, aren't selfish, or don't manipulate one another - an understanding of these processes is built into such systems. In fact they what leads to the cohesion that allows consensus to function.

But my key insight here is that many of ills of modern society arise from the idea that things should in fact 'scale'. Climate change and ecocide, the homogenisation of culture, the commodification of everyday life, the alienation that leads to polarisation and sensitisation and ultimately political extremism. All of it's rooted in an appeal to competing in a global scale market economy where goods and services move freely and people do not. Where all nations must grow or stagnate, where legal systems and free trade must be imposed at the barrel of a gun in order to allow the extractive system to continue to expand. This is one possible way for the world to work, in no means inevitable. Societies have existed with radically different affordances and compromises historically.

[Nevermark]

> But my key insight here is that many of ills of modern society arise from the idea that things should in fact 'scale'

Somehow, one way or another, dispute resolution has to scale to the number of people in the world. That isn't a chosen scale, it is the scale determined by present conditions.

For that to happen, given how many disputes exist between 8 billion people and all their groups and subgroups, there is going to be non-direct decision making.

You can point at subgroups with direct decision making, which is great when it works well, but that only works between those people, and they will invariably care about many things that extend beyond their group.

[dbspin]

> Somehow, one way or another, dispute resolution has to scale to the number of people in the world.

This isn't the case today. A small number of superpowers resolve territorial disputes mostly through court cases and negotiations, sometimes through violence. In all of these cases a tiny number of people are involved in the decision making process. What's happening is not dispute resolution at scale, its capricious and stochastic decision making corrupted by the same forces of transnational capital that put those decision makers in charge.

The global south isn't making any of the key decisions around climate change, AI, international trade etc. Neither are most developed countries. It's at most a cohort of G8 leaders and billionaires. It doesn't work, and moreover its failing - as the collapse of the liberal political order demonstrates. Our choice is to allow it to collapse into a new form of feudalism, or to actively participate in replacing it at every level of governance through civil dissent, and consensus based approaches.

[eru]

Switzerland works because it's Switzerland, and despite the direct democracy.

Day to day their government is run via elected representatives, just like almost anywhere else.

[marxisttemp]

All the goals you named are about literally removing tyranny and adding structured egalitarianism. Curious that you only mention leftist policy issues when rightoids are the ones whose entire ideology is about the will to power

[mionhe]

Yes, I suppose you can summarize their positions as the right is in favor of self-determination, whereas the left appears to prefer to let others determine their fate.

Looking at it that way, though, I find myself concerned with the people who are setting themselves up as the arbiters of my fate. Regardless of party affiliations, they don't seem to think very highly of me or care about my personal happiness.

Seeing that is the case, I'd rather they stay out of the business of pursuing my happiness and instead support my freedom to pursue happiness. I can be responsible for my own happiness.

[wredcoll]

> Yes, I suppose you can summarize their positions as the right is in favor of self-determination, whereas the left appears to prefer to let others determine their fate.

I find this meme, in the original sense, rather odd. Speaking as an american, over the last 40 years the right wing of our political institutions have been extremely hierarchical and authoritarian. Right wing ideologies are almost entirely based on which group should obey which other group and why.

The term left-wing has gotten a little vague recently, but I think you could say that the common premise of most of their political theory is that there's already/always going to be a powerful government that everyone has to obey so we might as well make that government the best it can possibly be for as many people as possible.

(I have a personal theory that political power, much like energy, can never actually be destroyed, merely moved.)

[BigFnTelly]

> (I have a personal theory that political power, much like energy, can never actually be destroyed, merely moved.)

This journal article discusses power in two forms:

- 'Power to' (freedom, from others): a variable-sum game

- 'Power over' (others, ultimately denying freedoms): a zero-sum game

I'm no scientist and this is just from the abstract: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00323187.2020.1...

[eru]

> - 'Power over' (others, ultimately denying freedoms): a zero-sum game

You are being way to generous here. You are suggesting that no matter how much we deny freedoms and give some people power over others, the sum will not change? (And in reverse, no matter how much we stop denying freedoms etc, the sum will also still stay fixed?)

I doubt that.

[marcosdumay]

If you speak for the US, your political system has only 2 powerful entities, one on the far Right, flirting with corporation capture, and the other on the far Right going into fanatical Fascism.

[eru]

If only corporations would actually capture anything.

[marcosdumay]

Hum... You mean on the US? Except for the military products, telecom, fossil fuel production, automobile and aviation manufacturing, health-care and drugs manufacture, audio-visual industries, retail, information service, what industry ever captured anything?

[pixl97]

>I suppose you can summarize their positions as the right is in favor of self-determination, whereas the left appears to prefer to let others determine their fate.

I mean, no I really don't summarize it that way at all.

>Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect

Is a better, but much more politically charged saying.

Moreso, self determination is more of a libertarian thing rather than right directly.