An alternative form of governance

Disclaimer: The following post is only a fictional thought I had a few weeks back. I am just writing it down to see how others feel about it. I can be controversial, up right stupid or make a little sense in some areas.

Democracy

The Good

We have been habituated to Democracy for quite some time now for the past few decades. I feel like Democary has played a very important and pivotal turn in terms of free markets, rapid industrialization, globalization and the birth of other catalysts like the Information Technology, and now data science and artificial intelligence have all empowered us humans in innumerable ways. A lot of other areas like Health care, Women’s rights, LGBTQ rights, have also took tremendous leaps. I think that the world has definitely become a better place over time.

The Bad

Democracy just like everything else, has it’s own problems. One of the biggest problem I see is that we have largely failed to address the growing issues with social media, fake news etc, and this I fear can lead to really bad situations, for exampe in the case of social media, your feed is tailored to make sure you only get updates relevant to you, which I think kind of makes sense but in the long run you may have ended up created a very small social bubble and now you only consider certain things to be normal if they are accepted in your social bubble or community. It’s just like living in an isolated tribal village, you believe in your society, culture and most of the time think that outsiders and their habits and culture is not for you or that it’s not good etc. And the advent of fake news has already caused alot of harm. I feel like electing a representative is not enough, because not everyone is the same right? Everyone should definitely have a reasonable right to vote for and against, if not speak up on things that matter to them. I feel like we are putting so much power to make decisions on the Govt bodies these days. It is good to some extent, and it’s bad as well because you are centralizing an enormous amount of power in the hands of a few dozen people and most of the time, it’s unimaginable for a common man to get to such a huge stage and even if they did, you can never tell if they will be able to make a difference and make good decisions that will benefit everyone. And fake news, as it has always been, persuading a lot of people into believing things that can potentially be bad for our society. When you are able to control large groups of people via social media and further more influence their lifestyle

Enter, Dynamic Aristocracy

Before we start off, No this is not Aristocracy. I never really heard of this term, or the concept, but I guess I had to give it a name! Dynamic Aristocracy is when power to make decisions is relevently (unlike equally) distributed among people. So for example, There can be an electoral body just like in democracy that conducts these “decision-making” operations/elections. There is a little twist though, if you noticed the word “relevent” in the definition. Every time a country or a city wants to take a decision on a particular topic, what happens is that instead of the votes being equally distributed, the votes are relevently distributed among the everyone, with more vote power (I guess more points?) for people who will be directly influenced by that decision. If a town was taking a decision on irrigation, a business man probably doesn’t know anything about it, or might have a slight idea but really, he’s a business man so he should probably mind his own business.  So the point here is that a farmer gets more power than a business man when a decision is being taken on issues like irrigation or farming or cattle, food etc. So let’s say the farmer’s one vote has 10 points of value, where as a businessman likely has 1-5 points of value depending on his industry. So if he was a businessman and his industry is farming related, then he will also have 10 points just as the farmer on the decisions for irrigation or farming etc. I think that this process will hopefully bring fake news to control because a farmer or a businessman in the farming industry definitely knows what is good for their prosperity. It also means that you will not make any bad decisions that could have been influenced by things like intolerance (could be religious, caste based, culture based, skin color or identity based) towards certain communities. For example, Women have the right to choose what is right for them, and they have far more right than men to choose what is right for them and how they should go about with their life. And there fore, I think that if there is a decision on some women’s rights etc, Women’s vote will have a value of 10 points and men probably will have 1-5 points depending on their profession. The same goes for LGBTQ people for example or just about any industry  I guess. I think going like this would mean doing good to everyone, but at the same time, the reality is that the Govts, cannot always fullfill everyone’s demands, so there can be a little bit of settlement here and there to make sure everyone is being treated well but I guess letting a particular group of community to choose what is good for them and giving them more importance in the decision is much more better than everyone making a decision for that community.

Questions being raised

I talked to some people and I got some pretty interesting questions for this and I thiof making the decisions nk it will be awesome for you to ponder over these questions!

  • How will you make sure that there is no curruption in the electoral board that plays a very key part in this kind of governance?
  • How will you actually keep track of who everyone is etc?
  • What if someone who has more power and directly or indirectly gets influenced by a decision pays money to the people who have more or less power in a certain decision to choose something wrong?
  • If someone has more than one profession, aka a part-time artist and an engineer for example, how does that effect their vote power in decisions related to art or engineering?
  • What if people with more power make use of the power to make selfish decisions?

The goal is to decentralize that decision making power to relevent communities and groups of individuals so that we can chime in maximum efficiency because everyone knows their field well and therefore they will be able to distinguish between fake news and reality , and therefore the decision is most likely to be the best.

This is a very difficult task, and I don’t even know if it will actually work! It was a random thought, but it does seem interesting because democracy feels like one of those trains that keep adding goods on it’s back and keep dragging the past along with it. Maybe it’s just me, I definitely believe that education is good , tell me what you think! I’m open for all the criticism 🙂

 

Photo by Randy Colas on Unsplash

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