The Social Contract

Right then. Before I start, some random admin, because me not getting straight onto the topic is becoming rather traditional. Firstly, did you know that you can subscribe to posts, in a few ways. There’s a subscribe (atom) button at the bottom of the page, a follow by email button at the side, and if you have a Google account, you can just follow it. So you don’t have to deal so much with my incredibly random update schedule. Second, you can share my posts via twitter, facebook, google, email or your own blog, with the buttons at the bottom of each post. Please do, since I am hopelessly insecure, and judge my personal worth by the number of pageviews this blog gets. Thirdly, you can cet Acanthus on your phone now. Fourthly, Y27Q5NYQTHSJ. No, I’m not going to explain that.

Right then. Government. Where does the authority of government come from? Since we all live in a democracy*, I assume that we’ve all going to agree that it comes from the consent of the governed, rather than from some inherent right of those of superior breeding and intellect to rule over the unwashed masses**. In other words, it’s a social contract – the masses agree to let a certain group rule over them because whilst it’s in everyone’s best interests that there be a set of social rules which everyone else obeys, it’s also in everyone’s best interests not to follow those rules themselves. So noone does, and it’s then in everyone’s best interests to create a governing authority to force everyone to follow the rules. And that’s were government comes from. Hobbes took an entire book to explain that.

A more interesting question is what rights this gives government. One might argue that they have the right to force people to follow their regime, in their own interests, since that’s what they would choose if they really understood the alternatives. One could argue that governments have the right to force people to accept the social contract because the restriction of natural liberty that this involves is less than the restriction of natural liberty of others involved in rejecting it. One might even extend the above argument to say that, since it’s in everyone’s best interests, one can include in the social contract a right for the government installed by the social contract to force people to accept and follow the social contract.

Guess what? I don’t accept that***. You have the perfect right to reject the social contract – just so long as you accept that you’re giving up all the benefits therein, as well as all the responsibilities. You’d have no right to seek reparation if you were mugged, or even if you were murdered****. Shopkeepers could refuse you service with impunity. The fact is that there is almost noone who could, let alone would, reject the social contract. This is helped by the fact that by accepting the benefits of the contract – from the police to the NHS – you are implicitly accepting the social contract. By the time someone’s in a position to reject the social contract, they’ve probably already accepted it, and whilst refusing to accept a contract (or pulling out of a contract you never really understood you were agreeing to) is one thing, trying to pull out of a contract halfway, when you’ve got the benefit from it, and it’s starting to be less good for you, is quite another. Arguably, you should have the chance to pull out of the social contract if it changes significantly, but that begs the question of what, exactly, ‘significantly’ means.

There, is, however, a case where one might be able to reject the social contract without such a criticism applying – when one does so in a group. The interesting thing here is when areas of a country try to declare independence. It is perfectly believable here that one might have rejected the social contract from the moment they understood what the contract was. Since it’s impossible to accept a contract without understanding it (unless you make a conscious decision to accept the contract without understanding it, having been given the opportunity to understand it), that would make it perfectly acceptable for any group or groups to reject the social contract.

Thus, I would argue that in any area where the majority want to have independence from their government, they should be allowed it. One might say that this is a tyranny of the majority, but at least it’s a tyranny of more of the majority than with the alternative. And people do always have the freedom to leave this new country, although I accept that this might come under the ‘freedom to starve’. I still condemn extremist methods such as those of the IRA, but, frankly, I have a lot more sympathy for them than I do for armed minorities who try to force their values on the rest of the world- and depending on my mood, that could include the British Empire as well as Al Qaida.

On a completely unrelated subject, there may be a gap between this post and the next. Blogger is being annoying.

*Except any of you who live in America, obviously.

**Conservatives might not agree, but I’m going to ignore them until they give me an alternative that I think is reasonable.

***Who didn’t see that coming?

****As a side note, it would still be wrong to actually murder someone who had rejected the social contract, it just wouldn’t be in the responsibility of the government to do anything about it.

On Democracy 2

Sorry about the last post. The comment discussed annoys me rather. Actually, saying it sincerely is currently (along with a few other, fairly similar, statements) third on my list of 'fastest ways to annoy me. No, you don't get to know numbers one and two. I might mention it if it's relevant, but just publishing a list of 'fastest ways to annoy me' on the internet would seem... somewhat naive. But you won't get a rant like that unless several people say the same utterly idiotic thing to me in quick succession, and I'm annoyed enough about it to want to do a rant, rather than just posting a link at the beginning of a more interesting post.

So, continuing the theme of 'stupid things people nevertheless seem to believe, let's go back to democracy. Thinking people should have some say in how their lives are run. How ridiculous. This is the second part, and I'm going to assume you've read part 1 (here).

Read it? Good. Now, there's a mistake I left in there intentionally, because solving it would take me a lot further from we have at the moment, which I didn't really want to do in my first post. That's what this post deals with. Also, this post will be a lot more radical, because pretending to be sane for an extended period gives me a headache.

So what's the problem? Well it's the question of how exactly you'd implement what I suggested. It's easy to see how you'd make sure people voting in referenda know what the basic issue under discussion is. But how do you do that for a general election? You can increase the number of referenda, but that only goes so far. You could ask people about the general issues that are biggest at the moment, but that has problems with people deciding which issues are biggest*, as well as the fact that, when electing a government to rule the country for the next five years, electing them on the basis of what the biggest issue is right now seems somewhat short sighted.

So could we elect them based on people's understanding of their major policies? Well, if we at least checked that they knew what those policies were, that would seem a step forward without changing too much - that way, when someone was elected, we'd know that it had at least something to do with their policies, rather than being because people's dads voted Conservative, because voting Monster Raving Loony seems like a good idea when you're drunk, or because people fancy Nick Clegg**. Unfortunately, knowing what a policy is and understanding the effects of a policy are somewhat different. Wanting to send the foreigners back where they came from is one thing, but how many BNP supporters do you think actually understand the diplomatic, economic and cultural impacts of such a decision? Even worse, there's the Dunning-Kruger effect, which means that the people who think that they understand what they're talking about probably don't*** (which, incidentally, is another problem with democracy: the people with Opinions stomp off down to the voting booth to make themselves heard, whilst the people who'd probably make good decisions aren't really sure; they can see both sides of the argument, and they don't really have enough expertise in the subject to make a good decision, so they're less likely to actually vote). So you could ask them questions about some of the basic consequences of the decision****, but you'd have to make the questions rather basic to avoid making the pool of potential voters ridiculously small, or even eliminating them entirely (which would be amusing, but rather impractical as a system). It might make things better, but it would still have similar problems

But there's another problem with that idea, which is far more serious. It would stop people who know about one thing from giving input on it because of total ignorance on something else. Remember the scientist from last time? He's an economist now - spending all your time alone gives you a lot of time for study^. Unfortunately, his total inability to see others as something other than complex automata has given him a rather warped understanding of the impact of foreign policy. He's still probably a better person to ask about the economy than a first year International Relations undergraduate who happened to do AS economics, but this system would be more likely to ask the former than the latter.

Which, actually, leads onto my biggest single criticism of dictatorship - that there is not a single person in the world who actually has the expertise to know what they're talking about in all the areas you'd need to know about to run a country effectively to the levels you'd need, at least until we finally transhuman strong AI and hand over control to it in order to prevent the inevitable machine revolution. In theory, a human dictator could appoint advisors - which is why the best possible dictatorship is better than the best possible democracy. Unfortunately, dictatorships don't tend to be the best possible dictatorship. That's not to say that it's never been done. The Romans managed pretty good dictatorships a few times. But that was on a temporary basis, and there were some very stringent controls on what they could and couldn't do. Trying to build a better society by relying on dictatorships being good dictatorships is rather like trying to program a computer by slight atmospheric changes caused by the careful timed release of butterflies. It might work, but you're probably just going to end up with Vista.

So what's my suggestion? Simple. Lords reform. We replace the House of Lords with several houses, all elected, each specialised in a particular area, and with authority over that area equivalent to the authority exercised by the Commons. I'll call them the Experts, because creative naming is not really my strong point. A bill would have to pass through both the Commons and the parts of the Experts to which it directly related (a change in taxation would probably have to pass through the Experts related to economics, for example) in order to become law. Parts of the Experts more tangentially related to the bill might have delaying power similar to that currently wielded by the Lords, although that would have the problem that nothing would ever actually get done. The Commons would remain, but be almost entirely focused on the interests of their constituency, whilst the Experts would be elected by proportional representation; allowing people to vote on subjects about which they have some level of knowledge.

This is actually a lot more moderate than my first idea, which split up the entire government rather more thoroughly than this one did, but which had some rather obvious problems with a Conservative Treasury refusing to give any money to the Labour Foreign office. Like America at the moment, but all the time. It might work - Conservative government can work moderately well with Labour councils, but there are problems even there. I wouldn't really want to rely on them working together in government. The coalition has enough problems as it is. So consider this a substitute. It has problems, of course - it would make laws a lot harder to pass, and you'd end up with extra elections, which would cost quite a lot (about a billion pounds over the course of the rest of the average person's lifetime I think, based on the cost of the last election, the current life expectancy, one extra election every five years, and a bit extra to make the transition). So you'd probably have to make voting computerised before it would be really practical, which has significant problems of its own. So it's not perfect by any means, but that's as far as I'm going to go for now. The next time I talk about politics I'll probably move onto world government.

On a side-note, let me just say that I'm not actually writing this in an attempt to mock the stupid. I don't have anything against people less intelligent than me. I actually quite like both of them, and besides, when mocking people for being inferior, I hope I'm at least smart enough not to leave a written record of it publicly available on the internet under my real name. I use a pseudonym. Not only do my suggestions have nothing to do with intelligence - only knowledge of relevant subjects, but I'm not saying anything about them except that if they don't know about it, I'm hesitant about asking their advice on the subject. There are people I would go to for information about economics, who are different from the one I'd go to if for some reason I wanted to know about ballet. That's not a judgement on either group, and doesn't make one group in any way better than the other. I know I'm probably insulting most of the people reading this by even including this paragraph, but at least one person will misinterpret me if I don't.

Also, this would've been up yesterday, but someone asked me about my schedule, so I delayed it out of petty spite. Also, blogger crashed on me. But it was mostly spite, I'm sure. The idea that I just hadn't finished it is nothing but malicious slander.


I have no idea what my next post will be about. You get to be surprised. Fortunately, it probably won't make sense anyway, so what it's about shouldn't matter too much.


*The BNP is unlikely to agree on with the Greens on whether we should focus on immigration or the environment, and to a lesser extent, there is likely to be disagreement between the Lib Dems and the Conservatives on the same issue.
**I've been told he's rather attractive. If I have any readers who can tell that sort of thing and wish to confirm it, deny it, or mock me for my ignorance, that would be helpful.
***It is for this reason that I know I'm the greatest French speaker in the Universe.
****Multiple choice: Revoking citizenship from all Muslims, smashing up the mosques, officially reclassifying the religion as a 'cult' and making the first Sunday of June the official bank holiday 'draw Mohammed day' would make the international community: A) amused B) happy C) annoyed D) furious beyond all reason.
^I should know.

On Democracy

NOTE: This was originally posted on my Facebook page, which is why I mention at the end that I should get a blog (why yes, I could remove that bit, since it is indeed entirely pointless). Since I have a blog now, I'll definitely do another one of these.

Since I’m trying to convince people that I don’t think I’m better than everyone else (I lie sometimes – I totally am ;) ), it seems like a good chance to explain my views on democracy, since it occurs to me that joking about how I think I should be dictator of the world might give the wrong impression (and because I enjoy writing about my views; I’m human like that).

So, just to clarify, I don’t think I should be dictator of the world, for reasons I’ll go into. The rest of this is just going to be me going on about my political philosophy. Just to clarify, no matter what I might say when I’m rushed to explain things, my view is not ‘people who are unintelligent shouldn’t get the vote’. Nor is it ‘one person should rule the country as dictator’. I might be being cynical, but I don’t think anyone is qualified for that, and even if they were, what about the next person? Checks and balances are always good. I simply think that noone, regardless of intelligence or education, whose knowledge of economics is limited to ‘taxes are bad’ should be given a say in the country’s economic policy. And yes, I’m aware that a decent economist supporting someone might cause people to support that candidate, but when they disagree (i.e. always) the result is based on people skills, not economics, since explaining advanced economic theory is rather difficult.

The same applies to almost everything else from the environment (people still don’t believe in human-caused global warming, so either their knowledge of climate science is woefully inadequate, or mine is) to science (should we give this grant money to the friendly and charming man who works with animals who works with animals and is rather a joke around other biologists, or the autistic savant neo-Nazi who pulls the wings off flies* and who other biologists think has about a ninety percent chance of curing cancer?).

So my first proposal is simple. Hardly ground-breaking at all. Before you’re allowed to vote on things, you have to show that you have at least a basic understanding of the things involved. And I really do mean basic, if only because as soon as it goes beyond the most basic understanding possible, the risk of institutional bias is far too great.

Yes, there are practical problems with this. That’s why I say that I have theoretical objections to democracy. You’d need to do at least some work on the practicalities, although you’d probably be able to get a group of experts which would be accepted as neutral (think Select Committees and juries).
I might do something else on this subject, going into a bit more detail on my politics, at some point. Or I might do one on world government. OTOH, this is getting a bit… bloggy.

EDIT: BTW, anyone who wants to criticise or in any other way make fun of this, feel free. I'm fairly confident in my opposition to democracy, but I'm not quite arrogant enough to think that I can just come up with something better at sixteen that noone's thought of yet. There are probably a few problems with my ideas (actually, there definitely is at least one, which I'll deal with if I do another one of these).

*Note: I’m not implying that any of these things are linked. Especially not the autism.