Michel, I want people to engage in politics. But we should not view reality through our own political prejudices ,as many actually do. Every social structure has internal properties that can be analyzed mathematically. To avoid messy sciences, like evolutionary biology, you would have to be as general as possible. This makes the problem harder to solve but also more difficult to contradict, if proved. I wouldnt use biological studies unless I was really desperate. I dont think that the power law applies to every structure. ex. Lets say that we randomly select 300 people as representatives of a society. The probablity that half of them are corrupt can be precisely computed from the average probability a person is corrupt. The messy thing here is that we believe that an average threshold of probable corruption will never be reached. We cant easily find that probability. But this system has certainly more guarantees than representative democracy. ex. Bitcoin can only work if the majority(in computation power) is not corrupt. This is a technical solution and it is precise. ex. There has been a paper here in the p2p-f mailing list a year ago that described proxy voting and was looking into possible ways that someone can game the system. The difficulty to game a system is also a property of a good social structure. With the advent of the internet and computers, social connections can be more easily formalized in a way that more precise technical social structures can emerge that have stronger guarantees on their ability to protect themselves. 2013/1/12 Michel Bauwens <[email protected]>

Hi Mark,

As far as I understand it the original western democracies, and especially the U.S., were designed as Republics, and explicitely anti-democratic, i.e. designed to defend the power of the enlightened property owners against the 'mob'. All the more real elements of democracy, such as universal suffrage of all genders, were imposed later through long-standing social mobilizations ... The Electoral College is just one example of an technique specifically aimed at not having the people directly decide ...

Michel

XXX

Date: Fri, 11 Jan 2013 16:05:04 -0600 From: Mark Janssen <[email protected]>

Subject: Re: [P2P-F] Fwd: Ancient Athens didn't have politicians. Is there a lesson for us? To: P2P Foundation mailing list <[email protected]> Message-ID: <CAMjeLr-K=13yqx3x2Z3LOw7ESQT-56xrkQ7+rg= [email protected]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1

On Fri, Jan 11, 2013 at 9:19 AM, George Dafermos - TBM <[email protected]> wrote:

...

i suppose that was probably meant as a joke, right? x,

Hah, I guess I should have clarified. I mean "nominally" or legally it has a government of, by, and for the People since the Constitution remains the "highest" Law of the United States. Such as it is, if one were to take the issues to court on where it was failing, the courts would have to uphold this standard and ideal. The fact that the People have let their government deteriorate through neglect, and the void of power, left thereby, be filled by those with less noble ideals is a shame. But, nonetheless, I don't think it can copy Greece's model of democracy, where it was supposed to be an indivisible unit.

mark -- P2P Foundation: http://p2pfoundation.net - http://blog.p2pfoundation.net

<http://lists.ourproject.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/p2p-foundation>Updates: http://twitter.com/mbauwens; http://www.facebook.com/mbauwens

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