On Democracy, Two~
I was listening to the radio here a while back, and this blurb came on over the station: “Democracy only fails when every voice is not heard”. implying, of course, that everyone should raise their voice and be heard.
A great idea and a noble one, to boot. However please refer to my earlier post on democracy and robots.
An Allegory:
Democracy is a society of robots. The robots all know pretty much how they should be governed, since they’re all robots. However, since they’re robots, they’re not terribly bright, and when it comes time for election, they elect for themselves a ruler. Not a robot, but instead, an iguana.
That’s democracy. Thanks for playing.
This tells us something crucial: That no matter how much the robots want to be heard, the iguanas won’t listen, understand, or even care. For fuck’s sake, they’re iguanas. why should they care about individual robot needs?
That’s democracy. Thanks for playing!
Furthermore, if one were to take it one step further one might see an amazing alteration in the U.S. Government and how our Iguanas are voted into office. the iguanas aren’t voted in by the robots. In fact, there’s a lengthy process that actually determines our iguanas and here’s the secret, the robots aren’t involved at all.
First, the robots elect several iguana to represent their state. This group of iguana then decide to elect another iguana with or without the robot’s permission. This new iguana’s responsibility isn’t towards the robots, but instead to voting in the Head Iguana, or President. For the sake of clarity we’ll call him the Purple iguana. So all the robots believe that they are in fact voting for the Head Iguana, but they’re not. What’s supposed to happen (theoretically) is the majority of the robot’s votes are tallied and the Purple Iguana then casts his vote for the Head Iguana the robots want most. In reality, what happens is the Purple Iguana is not beholden to the robots votes at all, so if the Robots vote for Head Iguana Candidate A, but the Purple Iguana is preferential to Head Iguana Candidate C, he then votes for Head Iguana Candidate C.
That’s right, the Purple Iguana Committee removes the functional votes of the Robots. What you then have is Iguanas that vote for Iguanas and the robots have no say in the Head Iguana vote at all.
That’s U.S. Democracy, thanks for playing.