Comments by "SkyRiver" (@SkyRiver1) on "Richard Ojeda To Bloomberg: 'The Dirt Poor Will Eat The Filthy Rich'" video.
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I can imagine an alternative that is outside of the usual: capitalism,
communism, socialism, anarchism ruts. OK well anarchism may not be a
rut, and in a sense it is almost as if an underlying subtle substrate of
anarchism may be both present and necessary for the vitality of the
other isms, but it seems to me that a purely anarchist state, or region,
if you prefer, would be at the mercy of nations that are otherwise
organized.
First of all, I mention in the spirit of full disclosure that I find
government and it's mechanics boring, and somehow grey and depressing,
and consider the people who have a desire to acquire temporal power over
the physical existence of others as sick, deeply self-deluded
individuals. I think that in general our leaders, in whatever flavor
basically suck ass when it comes to administering a government. We are
told that governments are the most dangerous entities on earth, not to
other governments or other peoples, but to their own people. But of
course it is not governments, no matter the formal codification of
society in the form of laws and regulations, but the people who enact
same, supposedly for the benefit of society, but more realistically in
the service of their own organically pragmatic predilections, whether
apparent as in the case of libertarians, and various utilitarian
movements, or subtle and convoluted and perhaps even unconscious as on
the part of various idealists, and utopians.
Anyway, enough of this and to the point. I suggest a governing system
in which the body of government employees, whether a janitor or the
chief executive, is chosen by testing and continual performance review.
Sort of a Techno-Neo Confucianism where anyone who is able to score
higher on a series of tests that are generated by machine learning
logarithms to optimize a governing system that is entirely relative to
an established constitution or declaration of stated national goals,
such as the optimal health wealth and well-being of all citizens or the
earliest possible establishment of an extra-planetary colony that is
self-sustaining, or some other orientation or constellation of
orientations that is established by and modified by the adult populace
with varying degrees of voting powers, which degree would also be
determined by a test designed to test the intelligence, knowledge and
correlation to reality of their internal conceptions. They would be
voting directly only for the goals and general prime directives of the
nation and not the leaders or manner in which these goals are pursued
except in so far as they have established restrictions on such
pursuits, such as environmental regulations and standards of dignity and
freedom regarding all individuals.
New and future technology will allow earthlings to establish a society
that is superior to any that humans themselves are capable of designing
the social and physical dynamics and details of. Thusly the human race
will expand into the limitless resources of the solar system and
beyond, to evolve in concert with our technology to a destiny which is
presently beyond the capacity of even the most creative futurist to
imagine.
In such a system, the tests for positions of higher responsibility would
be complex and not limited to written exams, but would include virtual
reality scenarios, real world assessment and performance review, as
well as extreme depth of psychological testing. I might add that in
regard to such "higher" positions it may well be determined and required
that it would be necessary for them to experience a mental state of
awareness that is beyond the consensus thought-centric and quite
mechanical mental processes of humanity, whether by psychedelic agents
or some other mode of transcendence.
In addendum: democracies do work, I should say "can work", this is
illustrated by the fact that if a problem is too complex, such as
guessing the number of jellybeans in a huge urn. If enough people
guess, say tens of thousands, the median of all the guesses is always
more accurate than any single guess. Ok theoretically a single guess
can be just as, or more accurate than the median of all guesses, but not
very friggen often and it is just luck. Now if you have some agency
that obscures the urn or finds a means of exaggerating certain qualities
or merely using persuasion to misrepresent the number of jelly beans
this will obviously fuck things up. This is analogous to the present
state of the world with regard to the disinformation and propaganda
generated by all manner of sources like Fox News, or any news outside of
peer reviewed journals and even then. . . .
So of course in this society, as it should be in ours, the penalty for
knowingly reporting inaccurate information as fact would be death. No
excuses.
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@DraconianPolicy In my view the bases from which the people, at a fair for instance, would arrive at their individual estimates of the number of jelly beans in a large urn is subjective also.
They have no real objective measure either of the total volume of the urn or the volume taken up by each bean.
It is a guess based on limited, though unobscurated perception, and no real possibility of actual measurement.
This is a phenomenon that is noted by the emerging field of epigenetics. Pardon the pun.
So we have an actual situation wherein ants are able to function as an efficient colony, or humans are able to make the most accurate estimate of the number of beans by the average of all guesses.
If you are interested in an entertaining exposition of same, Radio Lab did a show about this entitled Epigenetics, or something like that, .
If the result obtained by the mean of all the guesses were dependent on some form of objective measurement, then of course your objection would be valid. However this is not the case.
This phenomenon would be equally in effect in a voting process that determined the goals and objectives of a government {not the winning candidate} when such choices were presented to the public without any spin of any kind.
For instance instead of voting for a person, all voting would be upon issues such as. "What percentage of the national budget should be spent on the military?" With a blank space in the ballot were a citizen could provide a percentage they believe to be appropriate.
Remember: this citizen has not been subjected to any disinformation or propaganda, or even any idiotic pundit spin, just such facts as are available at the time, without "expert" prognostication about the resulting impact of various outcomes.
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@DraconianPolicy Certainly though it can be said that there is no correct answer to such questions as that about the military budget, it could be seen that outlier answers such as "We should spend one hundred percent of the national budget on defense", will be balanced out by both the mass of opinion and the outlier opinions on the opposite end of such a continuum.
It really doesn't matter to the mechanism in play if there is an objectively correct answer. This will still provide the best possible option at a higher rate than any other method that can be employed.
You bring up the objection that everyone will be bringing their own prejudices to their personal opinions when they vote. Thus the death penalty for anyone that propagates falsehood or unsubstantiated news as facts.
Try to imagine a culture that is not awash in disinformation and propaganda by various interests. One were the pundits, instead of filling up air time with what will increase advertising revenue, will simply say, "I don't know." or "This matter is unknown or still in question." when addressing any issue that is not a proven fact. (Strangely reminds me of the Platonic debate as to whether new poetic forms would lead to the degeneration of society.}
As long as the populace is not immersed in disinformation from which they form their opinions, their individual attitudes will only serve to insure the effectiveness of the results of such questions.
Though really this "democracy really works, but not why you think it does" proposition is a minor and really fungible element of the Techno-Neo Confucian course that I have proposed.
We presently live in a world were some governments call themselves democracies and some communist, but the reality is that in both cases, with few exceptions, they are both functionally fascist.
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