Democracy

   Democracy (also democrazy) stands for rule of the people, it is a form of
   [1]government that somehow lets all citizens collectively make political
   decisions, which is usually implemented by voting but possibly also by
   other means. The opposite of democracy is [2]autocracy (for example
   [3]dictatorship), the absolute rule of a single individual; possible yet
   greater opposite of democracy is final stage [4]capitalism, rule of no
   people at all, with money enslaving everyone. It can also be contrasted
   with [5]oligarchy, the rule of a few (e.g. [6]plutocracy, the rule of the
   rich, which we see under advanced [7]capitalism). Democracy may take
   different forms, e.g. direct (people directly vote on specific questions)
   or representative (people vote for officials who then make decisions on
   their behalf).

   Democracy does NOT equal voting, even though this simplification is too
   often made. Voting doesn't imply democracy and democracy doesn't require
   voting, an alternative to voting may be for example a [8]scientifically
   made decision. Democracy in the wide sense doesn't even require a [9]state
   or legislation -- true democracy simply means that rules and actions of a
   society are controlled by all the people and in a way that benefits all
   the people. Even though we are led to believe we live in democratic
   society, the truth is that a large scale largely working democracy has
   never been established and that nowadays most of so called democracy is
   just an illusion as society clearly works for the benefit of the few
   richest and most powerful people while greatly abusing everyone else,
   especially the poorest majority of people. We do NOT live in true
   democracy. A true democracy would be achieved by ideal models of society
   such as those advocated by (true) [10]anarchism or [11]LRS, however some
   anarchists may be avoiding the use the term democracy as that in many
   narrower contexts implies an existence of government.

   Nowadays the politics of most first world countries is based on elections
   and voting by people, but despite this being called democracy by the
   propaganda the reality is [12]de facto not a democracy but rather an
   [13]oligarchy, the rule THROUGH the people, creating an illusion of
   democracy which however lacks a real choice (e.g. the [14]US two party
   system in which people can either vote for capitalists or capitalists) or
   pushes the voters towards a certain choice by huge propaganda,
   misinformation and manipulation. Take one example from [15]Czechia, a so
   called "democratic" country -- in the 90s it adopted capitalism and as
   capitalism progresses, the age at which you can retire is getting higher
   and higher, recently getting very close to your life expectancy -- do you
   think anyone from the people wants this? Ask literally anyone if he wants
   to work until death, 1000 people of 1000 will tell you they don't want
   retirement age to increase. Why then -- if will of people should be
   realized under "democracy" -- is it happening? Because in reality the
   country is ruled by 5 richest people in it and these want everyone to work
   until death, so that's what will happen. That's what they call
   "democracy".

   Also nowadays democracy has mostly degenerated to "let's bully those who
   disagree with majority", i.e. "rule of the mainstream" (and of course, the
   mainstream is fully controlled by handful of rich etcetc.).

   Small brain simplification of democracy to mere "voting" may be highly
   ineffective and even dangerous. Democracy was actually considered to be
   very weak or even downright bad by many Greek philosophers such as Plato
   and Aristotle. We have to realize that sometimes voting is awesome, but
   sometimes it's an extremely awful idea. Why? Consider the two following
   scenarios:

     * On simple issues wisdom of the crowd work very well, as demonstrated
       by the famous experiment in which averaging guesses of many people on
       a number of beans in a jar resulted in an extremely precise estimate,
       a much more precise than any man alone could give. This is an example
       of when voting is the superior solution to making a decision.
     * Non-experts voting on complex issues and voting on issues requiring
       large vision is a disaster (which is why we mostly don't have direct
       democracy but rather representative one). Many retarded rightists
       believe direct democracy would somehow be "better" -- no, it would
       indeed be infinitely worse to let braindead rednecks vote on complex
       issues. When a [16]chess grandmaster plays against thousands of people
       who make moves by voting, the master easily wins, as demonstrated e.g.
       by the Karpov vs the World (or Twitch plays Pokémon lol) experiment
       (later projects such as Kasparov vs the World had to somehow moderate
       and filter the move votes to give the world a chance). The reason is
       that the majority of weak moves voted by non-experts outweight the few
       good votes of experts, but also ADDITIONALLY even if only expert votes
       are takes, the result may be inferior because different long-term
       plans and visions will collide with the long term plans of others,
       which is probably the reason why e.g. Romans used to elect a single
       dictator in times of a crisis rather than relying on a council of
       experts. In such cases democracy may be similar to wanting to create a
       nice picture by averaging all pictures ever made by all people, the
       result will probably be just an ugly gray noisy blob (imagine e.g.
       creating a picture by having many pictures "vote" on color of every
       pixel simply by voting for the color they have on the same pixel
       position { Actually I've tried this now and yes, it looks just like a
       noisy gray blob. ~drummyfish } ). This is why it's a very bad idea to
       have people vote directly e.g. on complex economic or diplomatic
       issues. We have to say [17]we do NOT advocate for dictators (we are
       anarchists) -- we rather believe in implementing a [18]decentralized,
       self-regulating society in which we avoid the need for any dictators
       or governments.

   The democracy [19]paradox: what happens when it is democratically decided
   that democracy is not a good tool for decision making? I.e. what if
   democracy denies its own validity? If we believe democracy is valid, then
   we have to accept its decision and stop believing in democracy, but then
   if we stop believing in democracy we can just reject the original decision
   because it was made by something that's not to be trusted, but then...

Links:
1. government.md
2. autocracy.md
3. dictatorship.md
4. capitalism.md
5. oligarchy.md
6. plutocracy.md
7. capitalism.md
8. science.md
9. state.md
10. anarchism.md
11. less_retarded_society.md
12. de_facto.md
13. oligarchy.md
14. usa.md
15. czechia.md
16. chess.md
17. we.md
18. decentralization.md
19. paradox.md