Plato on democracy:

Plato mentioned that too, namely that good leaders (ie philosopher-kings) are generally not interested in leading unless forced to, on the grounds that leadership is extremely prone to Dunning-Kruger effect. Ignorant people (democratic politicians) are eager to do it simply because they're unaware of the evil they'd do.

There were systems accounting for this, sometimes practiced in polities of classical antiquity. Such as selecting leaders with quasi-mandatory participation in military where you can't buy, politically maneuver or inherit your way into being a good general, you either become or won't mostly on merit. Heinlein's vision of two tier militarism would be probably modern mirror image of it.

Unfortunately militarism is no longer an option in modernity.

Neither should everyone's opinion be equal. There is a vast gap between the opinion of the genius and the idiot.

I've come to realize that the Republic is right in every sense, but I don't believe it should be enforced. Firstly, as an account of structuring one's own mind, it makes complete sense. All the stuff about censoring music, poetry, etc., is so fundamentally right when it comes to being a rational actor. Assuming you are a rational actor, you want the Guardian (your rational mind) to prohibit your consuming soul from engaging in certain activities (such as degenerate poetry). If you feed the Consumers too much of what they want, they grow unruly and powerful.
I have trouble piecing together why he includes the part about soldiers sharing their women, but I think it's because the mind shouldn't worry about trivial differences.
Anywho, the second part is his correctness in terms of liter governing. The best ruled government would naturally be one where the best rulers rule. However, most citizens do not want this. And so, the best governance is the one that develops naturally. A meritocracy is probably the best that can be hoped for, but it will devolve in a generation or two. The better the government, the faster it declines. That's why America is, ostensibly, still "ok"; because it's dog shit.
Until humanity reaches a point where the rational over power the emotional, we will be stuck in constant flux between shitty and decent governments. When a perfect balance is reached, Plato's Republic will be possible indefinitely. When rational people are all that's left, government will no longer be necessary, and true freedom (anarchy) will be possible and necessary

YES. Freedom is bad. Sometimes I wish I was living in jail like breivik. Wouldn't that be great? I think I would be happy.

Please stop saying 'Dunning Kruger effect' it is such a cliche at this point

Degeneracy and hedonism don't have anything to do with freedom, but education.

Political philosophy from antiquity is bad. We've been declining on that front since we started trying to go Back To The Greeks/Romans.

yes

Yes ,but what's the alternative do we have?

Freedom isn't bad. What's bad is when people use it poorly.

Epistocracy or monarchism.

Plato mentioned some of them.

bad opinion and bad genius opinion, not much difference methinks

Whether he's right or not the whole premise of democracy is retarded. Almost all political/economic issues are extremely complex and require a lot of serious study that the average person isn't willing to do. Why, then, should this same person have the same amount of political influence as say, an economist or a philosopher who's studied these things in depth?
I would propose a system where everyone is required to take an exam before voting. This exam should test basic reading abilities, mathematical abilities, knowledge of economics and political theory, knowledge of the relevant situations, etc. The votes of the people who score higher should count for more than the votes of those who score lower. This way the effect of demagoguery and uninformed voting can be ameliorated.

of course he is right but where he is wrong is that goverment itself is ever sustainable. No form at all is forever, it is a cycle (for whites at least)
This is why having some break aways like myself who desire to live simpler and closer to nature will always exist outside the system. We will use it to our advantage without ever contributing. The true survivor is the family unit in the face of time. Keep family intact, keep people intact. A man can have his home in order but not his entire country

Epistocracy only works if the intelligentsia resists the natural inclination to operate as a class with its own agenda, goals, and interests. They must actually wish to do good for the people they rule, as Plato's philosopher-kings do, otherwise you end up with our contemporary dynamic of managerial overreach and populist backlash

You have a particular form of epistocracy in mind but it can implemented in a million different ways which don't have any of the problems you can think of and would still perform better than a democracy. Stupid people prefer counterproductive policies and even the most basic and simple voter test will be better than what we have now.

Like I said, an epistocracy done right would be a step up from democracy, but in the absence of an elite intellectual class that will refrain from labeling its subjects as "stupid people" who prefer "counterproductive policies" (counterproductive in regards to what?) and seek to take into account the interests of the organic community, irresponsibility at the ballot box is the only recourse.

>the level of freedom it gives people causes them to lose all virtue and self control
why?

Switzerland and it's cantons

>not supporting noocracy

Has anyone read pic related? What did you think? I'm not really too interested in politics anymore, but this was on my reading list for a while.

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I honestly think the Vatican City has the best form of government. Just the Cardinals vote on the next ruler, and they all could be considered "philosopher-kings."

>Muh democracy let dumb people have a say
Virtually all goverments in history were some form of oligarchy dominated by economical elites(powerful landowners to everything pre-industrial revolution, the bourgeoisie after), with the exception of communist regimes, which were dominated by the inner party, even if they might say otherwise.

I think it's about the best case that could be made for libertarian monarchism. He also argues that you can have a free market without the free movement of labor which is not something you see from a lot of libertarians. It's definitely worth a read.

But he is right though

Whats eve the point of voting if youre some rural retard? Honeslty. Urbanites will decide every election for you the electoral system kind of mitigates this but its hard to argue rhats its really fair

Its a complicated topic

The narrator in notes from underground says something similar, but he is spiritually broken

i no longer respect people who claim stupid people are more confident, because they often (even by accident) use the converse

Its a cliche at best, but more accurately its a perverted way of living

Greek and Western democracies are fundamentally different. Greek democracy is rule by the man for the man, while the Western is rule by the people for the people. Sounds similar but there is a key difference. In Greece only male citizens were allowed to vote and they did so in physical gatherings in the agora. Every man had a say in the decision making of his polis and his polis alone. It wouldn't be incorrect to say that government in antiquity generally didn't extend beyond the polis. The nation of antiquity was the nation of the physical polis, they had no concept of abstract landscape nations like we do. Even the Roman empire was not a proper empire in the Western sense but a league of cities subservient to Urbs Roma. Western democracy is also highly abstract, many voters often never even physically seeing the people they're voting for, and everyone is allowed to vote. Many, many different people from across our landscape nations vote on issues that they may be completely divided on, based on their cultural background within the nation. This is what caused the American Civil War.

Plato's assertion that oligarchy turns into democracy is either purely philosophical or anecdotal based on his experiences in the Peloponnesian War. In our culture we can clearly see that democracy has led to oligarchy. But in both cases I think democracy does lead to "tyranny", in the Greek sense of the term, rule by one man without proper justification. This is most likely the fate of Western democracies. The strain that President Trump has put on the American constitution and republic is a landmark event; from now on presidents like Trump who test their constitutional limits and divide the country will be the rule, not the exception. Cultural tension is fanning the flames of tyranny. We have reached the limits of abstract Western democracy.

The papacy is essentially an elected monarchy, only the electors are all aristocrats themselves. It's a bit like how the government of Venice worked when it was a republic. And Venice was pretty stable, it lasted for more than 1000 years and only fell when Napoleon conquered it.

SOME voting is fine, but allowing everyone with a driver's license to vote is just asking for trouble, as the current state of America makes plain.

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S O R T I T I O N

Can’t believe I haven’t seen this word anywhere in the thread. It’s the best way for a large group of people to have a way to check a monarch/oligarch/tyrant’s power and have a voice in their government.

If you don’t even know the word sortition, I recommend reading up on it. I’m happy to answer any questions/challenges people have to it in this thread.

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Lottery? Stuff the ballot with puppet candidates. The shadow eminence with most puppets wins. Happened in 14th century florence.

An open source, auditable-by-anyone system for random selection. In the computer age this is a non issue.

Also a wise system would not actually be randomly appointing people to go serve in Congress but instead replacing Congress entirely with a jury system like we have for trials. When a decision needs to be made, such as a bill passed or a presidential appointment approved or whatever, you put together a citizen jury and, just like a trial, they spend a couple days or maybe a week or so examining all the evidence and hearing from experts and such on all sides and then vote yes or no.

This system kills almost all problems that elections have (vote buying, political parties, uninformed voters) while still providing the average citizen with a voice in the halls of power.

good post

Verifiably anonymous voting is designed to prevent vote buying and frankly, you don't need blockchain for that, a booth works just as fine.

But I'm not talking about buying votes. I'm talking about buying candidates. That's entirely different issue. The beauty of candidate buying is that you don't give a single fuck about who the voters vote for, you're playing a numbers game. You're merely giving an illusion of choice.

Gaming the lottery is no different than gaming house elections. Your power is proportional to the number of candidates you buy. Whether one is selected out of the bunch where you're propping up your odds. Worse still, with lottery you save expenses on the rest.

He was wrong. Read Jacques Ranciere's "Hatred of Democracy". Elites like Plato can't handle the fact uneducated oiks get treated equally to them and sperg out, even though this equality is the foundation of every political system

That’s not what I mean by vote buying. I mean that Republicans promise the middle and upper classes lower taxes meaning they can keep more of what they earn and the Democrats promise poor people that they will tax the middle and upper classes and give them that money. Both sides are just saying “Vote for me and I will give you money.” This is a fundamental flaw in any electoral system that cannot be solved except by removing election from the system entirely.

Lawyers and such don’t really buy juries as much as Hollywood might lead you to believe. Furthermore, in a citizen jury type system, that bought juror would be a regular school teacher or receptionist in their normal life. So if they suddenly paid off their mortgage or bought a yacht it would raise eyebrows more than when an already millionaire congressman buys one. Also, because the corrupt juror would just be a receptionist, they wouldn’t have anywhere near the institutional protection or connections that a United States Senator has, and would be much more likely to be investigated, tried, and convicted if they were actually taking money to change their votes. Whereas when a Senator does that it is within the bounds of an entrenched system that is designed to allow such things and designed to protect the Senator.

Lastly, your argument that the system could simply be entirely fraudulent, such as a rigged lottery, is an invalid criticism because it could be true of any system. A bunch of illegal immigrants could be voting in our elections. Whatever system one might suggest for choosing a monarch or philosopher-king could also be corrupted by criminals. This is something that could happen with any kind of system and one that every system would try to police, so the argument that this one could be corrupted by criminals is not a valid argument against it.

It’s like saying “Well, this safe could be cracked by someone skilled enough to crack it, therefore it’s a mistake to buy a safe at all. I’ll just leave my valuables sitting out.”

The problem with jury of proles is the same as with direct democracy. While you can't buy candidates in DD, all policy must be reduced to least common denominator. Jury doesn't have mental capacity to make informed political decisions, they'll just decide based on manufactured opinion. This is why juries in court are not allowed exposition to outside influence about the case - jury tampering. With public, everyone is in conflicting interest.

You'd get something equal to 24/7/365 election news cycle to create the opinions, with conflicting policies (competing shadow oligarchy backers) slinging banal shit at each other as that's what will influence the jury in the end.

This is already happening just for the representative elections, as well as to pozz up opinion about unpopular policies. With jury-per-policy, it would be a bit more intense.

>It’s like saying “Well, this safe could be cracked by someone skilled enough to crack it, therefore it’s a mistake to buy a safe at all. I’ll just leave my valuables sitting out.”
You're talking about a safe to the kingdom. I'm not saying buy a better safe, I'm saying, allow for as most oligarchs to compete, in order to keep the cost of breaking the safe sufficiently high.

This is basic bitch philosopher-kinging of Vetinary. The only way for a philosopher king to rule is when oligarchs are convinced *he is* the best "puppet" for them, who, in fact, plays all sides, and incidentally in net favor of the common man. Everything else is idealistic bullshit fed to proles with no understanding of power.

>Jacques Ranciere's "Hatred of Democracy".
interesting

I don’t know why you think individuals are less capable of making rational decisions than the masses when mass hysteria/group think/etc are well documented facts.

Furthermore juries can be and are more informed than the masses. That’s what trials are for: every side presents all of the facts for the jury to see. It’s exactly the opposite of news media spin. And sequestering juries could work just as well in this case as it does in criminal trials.

Examining US history shows that in any given time frame the masses were fairly reasonable and the intelligentsia preferred counterproductive policies.

You can't sequester public (from which jury will be randomly drawn later) from lobbied policy. You want to lobby in fracking? Fine, launch a massive media campaign so that average poll gives you >50% for-fracking opinion. This is even easier if the jury demographic is known beforehand.

The worst part about fracking is that it's not yes/no policy which is about as much "rational" a jury can get (guilty/not guilty). It's a highly political thing about which watertables to ruin for good, trading oil prices, jobs. Hundreds of regional interests at play. The policy which lands in congress is a hairball of those interests, a compromise of various oligarchies, but also do-gooders and political posturing. And even then it can go back and forth several times. Jury has pretty much zero chance judging all that, they'd need to trust an expert witness in politics. An expert which can't go on record about all the standard backroom dealing and favor trading involved which produced the policy in the first place.

And if your point is to get rid of all that backroom dealing as well as media influence? Oligarchies will remove your system. Oligarchies allow for current system because it's sufficiently apprehensive to their wishes and it is at least quasi-fair.

The masses being "dumb" is not necessarily a bad thing. The Western "intellectual" tradition has led the intelligentsia to believe that hormone therapy and/or genital mutilation makes women into men, importing Mexican peasants is good because increasing the population makes GDP go up, etc. dumb people are not smart enough to follow the logic of this, they just instinctively react against it (and that's a good thing). Between American Progressivism and Communism on the other side of the Atlantic I think it's clear that rule by the intelligentsia is about the worst thing you can have, and any attempt to do this indirectly via epistocracy etc. will be a disaster.

You literally discarded your own argument in your last line (what you're describing is, by and large, alread happening, and has been for the last century at least). And you were right in doing so. kys

>and incidentally in favor of the common man.
I think this is a leap. I also think the real idealistic bullshit is the idea that you’re going to have a system where the common man doesn’t at least have the *illusion* of having a voice in government. That’ll never happen unless society literally completely collapses like a Hollywood post-apocalyptic move.

You’re just talking about going backwards, not proposing a real system than can be implemented going forward.

>implying a philosopher king is not a tyrant
voila, plato was a brainlet with cognitive dissonance

>Jury has pretty much zero chance judging all that, they'd need to trust an expert witness in politics.

This is obviously a contradiction. A jury can judge all that if they are hearing testimony of multiple experts. In fact I would much rather have a handful of ordinary people (even if some are dumb) doing a deep dive on something like that with a bunch of “experts” weighing in on their various sides and so on, rather than our current system where these decisions are made by people whose loyalties are divided by virtue of the political parties they serve and the monied interests they serve.

A jury really is more likely to make a decision, as best it can, that is in the best interest of the people than any elected official ever would.

Media influence would exist regardless, but would be mitigated in a sortitioned citizen jury system by the fact that the people making the decision are put in a room with various experts to have it explained to them in a way that the ordinary citizen never will by watching CNN. The jury is more well informed.

>the common man doesn’t at least have the *illusion* of having a voice in governmen
It depends on what the common is brainwashed with. Russia never really got used to the democracy.

As for going forward? Neo-Cameralism kinda makes sense because it reduces nature of coercive power to what it really is. Proles still need to get behind the idea it's just about cutting off the pointless middlemen.

What I mean in this post is this: a jury is more well informed than the ordinary masses, and also has the ordinary masses’ best interest in mind more than any elected official or oligarch ever would.

>the truth has become a cliché, you should stop making reference to it

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It's worth noting that congressional hearings are a thing. Those are for the purpose of informing the bureaucracies about things they don't have a clue about though. Never about backroom politics.

As for expert witness openly elaborating in front of jury about extortion and bargaining web that drives most politics, the notion is laughable. You're still assuming that men in power have any sense of merit and duty and policies can be made without backdeals with oligarchy.

That indeed happens occasionally (ie Trump himself at first), but what it accomplishes is throw a spanner and in the power market process - everything grinds to a halt as backrubs can no longer be exchanged. The whole point of politics is to seek a compromise between shadow power of the oligarchy and at least some semblance of public input. You're still strongly arguing for completely cutting off oligarchies, a notion unheard of. Even Hitler had to jump to oligarchs as they sung, if they were in entrenched position.

This whole post is just defeatism. Empower the people by killing the oligarchy. Otherwise stand aside while we do it.

For me? Absolutism

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This is Utopianism. The oligarchy can only be the enemy of the people except in the circumstance that they are ethnically and culturally and religiously the same as the masses. That isn’t true in the US and won’t be. The system must be designed to empower the people against the oligarchy, such as by making every meaningful government decision pass a citizen jury.

>Empower the people by killing the oligarchy.
Killing the kulaks generally doesn't end well. Not only they own shit, but they're generally the only ones with levers to operate it.
>defeatism
Nope, realism. Smart and realpolitik thing to do is pit oligarchs one against another, so they have less time conspiring against the proles. Politics has power to do it, because it's a market for brokering power. Proles ultimately run that market, and can dictate how the market operates. Oligarchs are fine with almost any market (case in point: china), for as long the market is fair relative to other oligarchs and the market itself is allowed to exist.

But so far we're in almost in inverse position - oligarchs are united, and proles are pitted one group against another. This is nearly the worst political configuration, and indeed can be improved.

If you ever get rid of money (post-scarcity), you won't probably need politics and top-down governments at that point.

>pit oligarchs one against another, so they have less time conspiring against the proles. Politics has power to do it, because it's a market for brokering power. Proles ultimately run that market, and can dictate how the market operates. Oligarchs are fine with almost any market (case in point: china), for as long the market is fair relative to other oligarchs and the market itself is allowed to exist.

This does not preclude a citizen jury sortition system in any way. In fact, if this is your end goal, sortition can enable it.

Frankly, any system which explicitly acknowledges politics for what it is can do it, because they'll be forced to operate in open.

It doesn't matter whether its per-proposal-jury, or just legal contracts between oligarchs and state (then only disputes would be settled by jury, far more efficient than bothering jury per each "trade"). The problem is that realpolitik as such is not even acknowledged to exist as far as a prole is concerned.

Yeah at this point we are barely talking about specifics anymore. We definitely agree the system we currently have needs an overhaul.