At 12:46 PM 5/22/2008, Juho wrote:
Note that there are also cases where the groupings can not be
hidden. For example two white persons and one black person in a room
might easily elect a white person even if the back person said
nothing about the skin colours and all of them would behave politely
etc.
I also do not have full trust that only good properties of the people
would propagate upwards in the election process. It may also be that
people that are good at fooling other people and hiding their true
(maybe less noble) intentions will reach the top levels more often
than others.
Where I would agree with some in this discussion is that party
representation isn't representation of the people, at least not
directly. Political parties are really subsets of the electorate, and
the question then arises as to how parties make their decisions. The
answer to that has varied, but, often, the process is just as flawed
as the overall process, or more flawed.
The history of the FA/DP concept, for me, went through a stage where
I considered fixed groupings. It never occurred to me to consider
groups as small as three as a fixed size; rather, from my experience
with group process, I usually thought of ten. Besides, it made the
math easy....
However, I soon realized the loss of representation problem. I also
started with the idea of some imposed schedule for meetings, as a
national election process, but the bureaucratic complexity of it all,
plus the representation problem, nixed that approach for me.
Instead of having groups be composed by some external process, what
if people voluntarily join groups? Indeed, what if they join groups
based on the identity of the representative. Suddenly no election is
needed. And, indeed, almost instantly, the possibility of delegable
proxy presents itself. Suddenly there is representation that does not
depend, at all, on what we ordinarily think of as elections. It is
pure representation, voluntary, and chosen, not elected in some kind
of contest. There are no losers.
Now, TANSTAAFL. If someone is unable to trust others, they will end
up, unless others trust them (which is unlikely, mistrust is commonly
mutual), unrepresented at levels in such a structure high enough that
some restriction must exist on participation. In a small town,
individual might simply represent themselves at a Town Meeting. But
even with some small towns, individual who do that can sometimes take
up so much time that ultimately some controls or restrictions arise.
Now, given that very large numbers of people could coherently
organize themselves very quickly and efficiently with such a
technique (no elections, no campaigns, people just name whom they
most trust to represent them when they cannot represent themselves),
it becomes possible to consider such organization when there is no
public funding, no treasury, no large expenditures of funds. And it
then becomes possible to apply this concept entirely outside of
government, in very light, efficient organizations that would
classically be called anarchist or libertarian, but without the
political implications. I.e., they are "libertarian" because they,
rigorously, do not coerce. They encourage participation because
participation never is harmful. If you give $20 to some, say,
environmental organization, they will decide how to spend it by some
mechanism, and it could end up being spent quite contrary to how you
would want. But Free Associations, as I came to call these, don't
collect funds. They don't collect power. All they do is to
facilitate, through the delegable proxy structure, the negotiation
and discovery of consensus on a large scale.
And then the whole vision of an FA/DP revolution, taking place with
little fuss and no violence, the people simply waking up and
exercising their natural power, became clear.
I *do* think that wisdom and prudence and other qood qualities will
increase as we move up the spontaneous hierarchy of a delegable proxy
structure. The reason is that people will not be choosing strangers,
media images, they will, I predict, in the long run, be choosing
people with whom they can and do communicate directly. There really
is no reason to do otherwise, you gain nothing by choosing the famous
movie star, unless you are one of a few whom he is willing to
communicate with directly. So media image becomes irrelevant.
As to government, existing structures are already open to the power
of the people, the only reason government doesn't function that way
is that the people are asleep. And, in fact, the people, as
individuals, are not going to wake up, at least not most of them.
They have other things to do that don't involve being consciousy
involved in government and large-scale cooperation. They will, quite
properly, focus on raising their kids, taking care of their houses
and their jobs. But they will make one decision with vast import.
Among all those they know, they will choose the person they most
trust, if he or she is available and willing to accept that trust
(and responsibility). My opinion is that people, if we confine the
situation to people they personally know, will *more often than not*
choose someone as trustworthy, or more trustworthy, than themselves.
Hence the average trustworthiness will increase as we move up the
structure, because it is a fractal, self-similar regardless of scale.
Once established to a certain degree, my opinion is that there is no
force on earth that could stop it from continuing to grow, beyond a
total natural disaster that essentially wipes out all human life.
Political groupings and special interests have no power that does not
derive from the power of the people. I do not expect attempts to
repress FA/DP once it is established beyond a modest level. One of
the reasons is that FAs don't take controversial positions. If an
organization advocates, to take an example, nationalizing the oil
industry, it is *not* an FA. (Unless everyone, including those who
work in or own the oil industry have agreed, i.e., there is no opposition).
And this stops some people in their tracks. If it doesn't take any
positions, they ask, quite understandably, how can it get anything done?
The answer is that it is not an executive power. It is a judicial
power. It is the ultimate independent judiciary, the judiciary of the
people. It has no power to coerce, but it deliberates and measures
its own consensus. Others take this information and act based on it,
but not being compelled by the judiciary; there is, in this, a
rigorous and complete separation of powers. In an FA, the power
remains entirely in place, with the people or with whomever wishes to
be advised.
That the people are organized, for communication and representation,
into an FA does not prevent them in any way from organizing in other
ways, and FAs provide a very simple, practically automatic form of
organization by default: we call it a "natural caucus." This is a
proxy together with all clients and all clients of clients, etc. Such
an organization has a natural leader, the single proxy who is
trusted, directly or indirectly, by all caucus members. So it becomes
possible to have the efficiency of "strong-leader" systems without
the coercion. Action in the world, the executive power, is in the
hands of the members, and then, to the extent that they delegate it,
in the hands of these caucus leaders, who then use the delegable
proxy system, overall, to estimate what degree of overall consensus
has been reached. To act prior to consensus is very inefficient,
unless you happen to get it right. Get it wrong, and your efforts
will be opposed, leading to far less efficiency, less result for more
effort. Narrow majorities in organizations that make decisions by
vote, controlling collected power, can move enormous power based on a
narrow majority. Once that ability is gone, the only real power is in
finding consensus. And thus there comes to be an efficiency pressure
for consensus.
Will it happen this way? We won't now for sure until we try.
Fortunately, the whole concept requires little effort. At this point,
the basic work to be done is to develop the concept and to publicize
it, and to attempt to apply it in whatever organizational
opportunities present themselves. I've seen so many organizations,
over the last few years, struggling with issues that could be very
easily resolved. Problem is, existing organizations, even if
theoretically compatible, have generally developed some power
structure, and so we run into the Lomax effect: power inequities
perpetuate themselves, because those with unequal power will see a
distribution of power as threatening their own power; exceptions to
this are rare enough that the effect seems to *always* take place.
Many organizations are nominally egalitarian, all members have the
same rights. Except that some are more equal than others. I.e., some
know the traditions and unspoken rules of an organization, have
extensive experience with how it works, the politics of it, know how
to move the levers and push the buttons, and, indeed, often do
actually understand what is best for the organization, more than the
average member. What if the average member suddenly has equal power?
The vision is not a happy one for far too many. It is really the old
fear of democracy, and anyone who has actually experienced Town
Meeting government should know that it is a false fear. But that does
not stop it from being widespread.
So it may be that FA/DP will first find most of its success with new
organizations. And starting a new organization just to start a new
organization doesn't work very often. But it will happen, I'm sure,
sooner or later. There are a number of fledgling efforts; I'm putting
most of my hope in the Election Methods Interest Group, even though
that has been dormant for months. There is a person running for
political office who is making delegable proxy part of his platform.
There are students who have written papers. The idea is starting to
get out. There was Demoex in Sweden which actually used delegable
proxy for a little while and found that it worked. They were not,
however, a Free Association, and though they were modestly
successful, had they done what they were doing as an FA, I think
they'd have been even more successful. Instead, they ran into
opposition and, frankly, at least some of the opposition made sense.
Demoex elected a representative to the town council, and that rep was
pledged to vote the way Demoex, through its process, decided. (Demoex
is a direct democracy party, "DEMOcracy EXperiment".) Understandably,
the other members of the council didn't like holding a deliberative
meeting with a rubber stamp. It violated some basic principles of
deliberative process. But if, instead, the rep had been a free agent,
chosen for trustworthiness, representing those who trusted her, no
problem. And then Demoex could have functioned in a far more
effective way, uniting the town instead of being one more cause of division.
But God bless them for trying, and there is nothing that says they --
and we -- can't learn and grow.
When considering your interest to avoid strong party style groupings
to take control of the political life, and on the other hand your
interest to allow the ordinary people to make the decisions, I came
to think that you might like (in addition to your "groups of three"
method) also the following method.
One can nominate candidates for some office/task freely. In some
cases any nomination and/or volunteering is enough. In some other
cases one might require the candidate to have some education/degree
in some appropriate area. Or one could require the candidate to have
at least 100 listed supporters (or 100 independent emails to the
election coordinator). The need for this kind of additional criteria
depends on if the position in question requires some specific skills,
or some level of trust. But in general the lists of candidates are
collected using this kind of open process that is not controlled by
any parties or other existing bodies. One could also check from the
"nominated" candidates if they volunteer for the task in case they
are elected before their name appears in the candidate list.
After the lists of electable persons (candidates) have been created
we can arrange the election. Winners will be simply picked by random
votes.
One modification. One could include in the criteria of making
someone electable that he/she must have received a certain number of
votes in the election. In this case the voters could give a (maybe
fixed length) list of candidates. All listed candidates get one
support vote for electability. The first candidate on the list that
is electable will be elected. (This rule could allow also write-ins.)
Another modification. Elect that candidate from this voter's list
who has most support overall.
Third modification. Arrange two rounds. First round picks
candidates for the second round. Candidates can be presented to the
voters in more detail before the second round.
Many of the possible rules that I described above take the method
away from pure random vote method towards a method that favours
candidates that are also competent (in addition to being the
favourite of one of the voters) and that have wide support (not just
the support of this one voter). I think it is possible to develop
this type of methods that may freely elect candidates outside of the
incumbent power structure, and candidates that are wanted for the job
rather than candidates that want the job, and that still tend to
elect quite good and competent candidates.
The (electability and election) conditions need to be balanced
carefully if the task really requires that the elected person is not
just anybody but one of the best for the job. For the very top jobs
like the leader of a country one maybe would come quite close to the
traditional methods since the criteria need to be very strong (it
would be e.g. too risky to just give nuclear weapons in the hands of
some randomly elected John Doe). But these cases are exceptions. I
think many elected jobs / representative tasks do not require much
more than a regular honest guy that is generally known to be
competent for the job (he/she may actually be typically better for
the job than e.g. some power hungry politically oriented person).
This method also avoids the need of the candidates to be skilled in
fighting their way up the ladders against other candidates. And it
is reasonably fair towards minorities.
(There are also other methods that are based on a very bottom-up
oriented approach like direct democracy and delegable proxy.)
Juho
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