America Is Now A Zombie State

I question your judgement and sanity all the time

 

I would suggest for the most part, we don’t have popular votes for decisions. Only when electing some of our leaders do we employ that approach. For basically all other matters, eg construction of legislation, questions of legality, and appointment of secretaries and justices, only government officials take part in the decisions.

Since the example in the article was the choice of Biden vs Trump (which would be close enough to a popular vote), I assume you are thinking specifically about the appointment of leaders.

How would you appoint them, if not through popular elections?

 

I suppose if we want to be that general about it, it's going to sound weird either direction.

Perhaps some people want to feel like they have power and independence while others want to feel controlled or protected? And that may depend upon context, too. It wouldn't surprise me if personality differences can explain a lot of peoples' various views about religion and politics. Probably sexual inclinations as well, although those three might not overlap in the same way. Like the Paul Giamatti character in Billions, there are apparently very powerful people who have to make decisions all day and obtain relief by being whipped and bossed around.

The thing Hitchens said that resonated with me personally is that I'd feel more anxious if I knew the party was going to go on forever (whether I wanted it to or not) than I would thinking that the party is going to continue but in my absence.

 

I think this is why some people mistakenly thing of democracy as some kind of tyrannical approach. I dont think the idea of democracy is that some elected officials should decide the conditions in all work places, it should be up to the people that work in those places to decide their conditions of employment, etc. Of course the way some people view it is that the boss is the only interest that matters and gets to decide everything. That is tyrannical or despotic to me. But collective bargaining is democratic as all workers get to decide jointly. Of course there is an element of delegation there too, because the workers dont decide the nitty gritty of the contract, they appoint a bargaining unit to handle that, but the full membership votes on the final deal. I think any country calling itself a democracy would practice collective decision making at all levels, and the less a national government has to do broadly, the better.

 

I don't have any kids of which I'm aware but I've had experiences that I felt at the time I didn't want to end.

Would those experiences remain as satisfying after a few billion years and I found out that they were never, ever going to stop? I don't know. The notion of eternity and how that might play out is kinda hard to wrap one's brain around. I am just not that bothered by mortality generally with the exception of the understandable pain and fear of losing loved ones, which people of faith battle as well. C.S. Lewis didn't have children but was quite distraught by the death of his wife and wrote about it. I don't discount the potential for an afterlife by the way.

 

Im not sure how much this improves our situation. If people can’t be trusted to elect their leaders, can they be trusted to elect the people that elect their leaders? Instead of electing Trump or Biden for president, it seems we would just have Trump or Biden picking the president.

 

I think there may be two separate matters that are sometimes being conflated: 1) the decision to make a single collective decision, and 2) the decision rule used to carry out the collective decision.

I can see how the first could be construed as a form of tyranny in many cases. Why have a single type of movie or grocery store that everyone must enjoy? Even if the single movie for April was determined by popular vote, it almost certainly couldn’t be better for everyone than just allowing many films to be released. However, once we’ve determined that we need to make a /
single collective decision, eg what will be the fire budget for a particular town, I don’t see why we should ever prefer an individual to a population for making this decision.

 

I still don’t think that I have yet understood a true alternative to voting. If we don’t trust popular sentiment, what is our alternative, unpopular sentiment? Since the list of unpopular ideas is basically infinite, this doesn’t provide any useful framework for decision making.