WelcomeRepresentativocracy v. Democracy
The United States is not a democracy; it is representtivocracy: rule by representatives. People do distinguish between "representative democracy" and "direct democracy" but I think this is a trick to make people feel good about being in a representativocracy, as if it was a democracy → just of proper subclass of democracies, like Rolexes and Timexes are both subsets of wristwatches. But it's not: it's a disjoint set. A representativocracy is a democracy of representatives.
Elizabeth eisenstein noted that represenative democracy ws only made possible by the printing press which greatly faciliated downward promulgation of commands. Prior to printing, the ide of representative government was virtually unknown becaue ther was no available communicative technology. So the printing press gave us individuality but also insignificance of the individuated individuals. Theoretically, the size of a representativocracy is unboundedly large, so that, correlatively, the significance of the individual citizen can be unboundedy small. My value is 1 divided by the number of citizens, not by the number of representatives because I am not a representtive, only one of the represesented. That does not make me feel imporatnt and I do not like feeling small. do you like feeling small, my reader?
In a representativocracy ther is still generally some direct or real democracy: referendums. This is true. But if the polity is so populous that is needs to be a representativocracy your (my) vote still cannot count for much. I think the picture of Pericles orating before the Athenian citizenry, above, represents the upper bound to the sice of a real democracy, both in its deliberative and its decision making aspects. Pick a number! I'd like to say 2. 4 is OK. 20? 200? 2,000? I don't see more a=than maybe 20,000 is doable. If somebody protests we do have real democracy: at the local level, that has some merit, but the local polity does not go to war and coerce men to do conscript military service and suffere and often enough die in Viea\tnam or Ukraine
Fully human life cannot be a matter ofhte one and the many: the beehive. It need to be the individual as universal and the universal as individul. Long story short, this is actually the way society ovften works, but by hijacking and exploiting it: soldiers do not fight and die for htie country → they fight an ddie for their buddies, and then are h=not fighting "the war' bu ttheir immediate engagement. That's a complicated issue to work out fully, and free from "society's" cynical use of it yes?
 Unfortunate for themself, the person who lacks one; unfortunate for others, the person that is one. Don't be an a**hole! |
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