The following discussion clip is from the Occupy Wall Street demand discussion list.
Here is the lead in post from DAN1:
Ooops! There’s that dirty word again. “Mob rule”. The best way to not have mob rule is to not have mob mentality. It is the responsibility of We The People to rise above and stay above this inferior mental state. The Will Of The People should be benign and productive and fulfilling of Our Nations Potential Destiny. Of course it is the minority rulers who most fear mob rule. They know deep in their hearts that they do wrong. I have every confidence that The People will attain a benign attitude and skill when they have practiced Direct Democracy for a while.
Nanook:
The “dirty word” “Mob” keeps coming up over and over because there are so many instances of it in our history. What’s your solution: “responsibility”. Unfortunately, history also has a lot to say about that – and most of it is poor. These two factors are small examples of the HUMAN PSYCHOLOGICAL LIMITATIONS that made BOTH socialism and capitalism fail.
Socialism fails because of laziness, greed and centralization of power in government. Humans are innately lazy and won’t work hard without incentives. Centralization of power is inefficient and, because of greed, leads to aristocratic control. Capitalism solves the laziness problem, but fails massively due to greed. Power is still concentrated in the leaders of industry, education, military and government.
I believe Direct Democracy offers PART of a solution. But it needs SUBSTANTIAL structure to control human psychology or it will quickly fall prey to emotionally driven short term (mob) decisions and irresponsibility driven by greed. If a SMART structure is put in place, ALL of the problems we have seen in history can be solved, AND we can come pretty close to our ideals for freedom. BUT! This structure doesn’t look at all like any of the government ideas floating around. So, making small adjustments to existing elements of existing constitutions will just bandaid the problem AT BEST!
What is our alternative? I present one of them in my books. There are summaries on my website http://a3society.org . I’m sure I’m not the only one who has spent 20+ years working on this. There must be other good models. Let’s find them and try to pull together a workable approach from all of them. But patching what we have is going to fail.
