• @[email protected]
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    1 year ago

    No, the idea of Democracy is surprisingly not to put the best idea into practice, but instead to create a societal framework that the majority of members can live under. It’s not about creating good results but the legitimization of the government.

    That IS the best idea, the societal framework that gives the best outcome for the population. Come on, with this reply, seriously.

    • @[email protected]
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      11 year ago

      No, Democracy brings about not the best idea, but the most commonly accepted one, and there is often stark difference. There is a reason the democratic philosophers never actually mentioned “the ability for democracy to find the best idea” and many instead outright warned of the potential for bad ideas, going all the way back to Plato’s accounting of Socrates, in the works of enlightenment and revolutionary philosophers such as John Lock, or the governmental structure of the United States its self.

      The governmental philosophy that does promise the best results on the other hand is a technocracy.

      But do, please keep going about the platitude you heard.

      • @[email protected]
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        1 year ago

        That is the formula for the best outcome in a democracy. Nobody is talking about how Greek philosophers described it. Pipe down.

        This is one of those really nasty reddit patterns I was enjoying not encountering here. You leave a thoughtful/well-reasoned message one morning, the next day you wake up and some guy is still hounding you about his bad-faith reading of your comment. I write “the entire idea behind a free democracy”, in context clearly I’m talking about how you actually make a society work best with a democratic model, and he starts replying with a “correction” about early Greek philosophers’ takes on democracy, like this is in any way what I was talking about.

        • @[email protected]
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          11 year ago

          but your message is not as thought out and well reasoned as you think it is. You are literally just repeating stuff you have heard somewhere, without knowing the context or the entire surrounding school of thought, and then of course you double down on your dunning Kruger interpretation of what a democracy does.

          And I wouldn’t call John Lock or Alexander Hamilton a “Greek philosopher”, but you do need to understand that their idea of democracy stems from the Renaissance and Enlightenment era’s rediscovery of Greco-Roman philosophy, so if you are referring to democracy as a governmental structure, you are talking about these Greek philosophers.

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            1 year ago

            I am not “just repeating stuff I have heard somewhere”, I have reasoned out myself the basic truth that a society where the will of the public dictates its structure benefits immensely from the population being educated. Regardless of what Socrates or Plato said, regardless of what the American “founding fathers” said. Done with this conversation, blocking.