ROGER REPLIES TO DILLON I cut'n pasted this from Dillon: "Democracy, someone said, is that form of government in which everyone has to put up with what the majority deserves.Where it has failed, people call it Mobocrazy - rule of the mobs. "....Some societies resolved this paradox by a twin headed system : A moral(dynamic ) head and a popular(static) head. The moral head interviened only under unusual or dynamic conditions. The main job of the moral head was to search, groom and force another person to be the successor. This model was a success in small societies but becomes insufficient for large, complex and technologically advanced societies. "So a quad-headed model?" ROGER REPLIES: Competitive checks and balances seem to be essential in the evolution and long term survival of societies. The following conversation between Kevin Kelly and Stuart Kauffman that I borrowed from "Out Of Control" captures this issue well: "I mentioned to Kauffman the controversial idea that in any society with the proper strength of communication and information connection, democracy becomes inevitable. Where ideas are free to flow and generate new ideas, the political organization will eventually head toward democracy as an unavoidable self-organizing strong attractor. Kauffman agreed with the parallel: "When I was a sophomore in '58 or '59 I wrote a paper in philosophy that I labored over with much passion. I was trying to figure out why democracy worked. It's obvious that democracy doesn't work because it's the rule of the majority. Now, 33 years later, I see that democracy is a device that allows conflicting minorities to reach relative fluid compromises. It keeps subgroups from getting stuck on some locally good but globally inferior solution." The longer term evolutionary view of social/economic systems shows an inevitable progression toward pluralistic checks and balances. The legislative branch vs the executive, microsoft vs AOL, democrats vs republicans, liberals vs conservatives, unions vs corporations, the environmentalists vs the economists, The Chicago Bulls vs The Houston Rockets. Modern democracy is just the current label for this approach. I think you are right that the number of dimensions of checks and balances just keeps growing.... and exponentially. That is what a large, complex, technologically advanced society IS. Rog PS -- Note that there is a competitive/cooperative dynamic to these tensions, and that it isn't so much that one side is right and the other wrong, it is the tension -- the cooperatve/competition -- that leads to the 'fluid compromises' of social advance and keeps us out of 'locally good but globally inferior solutions". ------- End of forwarded message ------- MOQ.org - http://www.moq.org
