On how fairness in democracy can lead to a better society

In many ways, the need for democracy is driven by fairness and the perception of fairness. I've said before that democracy is a bit like the golden rule. The conventional golden rule says "do unto others as you would have done unto you". As a society, we need laws that limit freedoms in order to protect us from violence, theft, and arbitrary limits on those same freedoms. The golden rule of democracy then is about how those laws should be created "as you would have done unto you".

My "golden rule of democracy" could then be "make laws for others as you would have made laws for you", but I don't want laws made for me. That is more like "the golden rule for tyrants".

This leads me to a different sort of golden rule. Something like "you should not make laws limiting another's freedom any sooner than you would have laws made by another to limit your own freedom". To paraphrase - "Do not rule over others any more than you wish to be ruled over".

What happens when we break the conventional golden rule? When we behave in a manner towards others that we would not tolerate if they behaved that way towards us, we invariably have problems. Other's see us as at least "anti-social" and at worst criminal.

A government has the ability to elicit the opinions of its constituents or not. But this is not the same as democracy. A government can listen and then ignore what the constituents say (most modern democracies don't even listen). The fairness comes from the way that the measure of the opinion becomes the law.

For example, a referendum is often considered more fair than a law imposed by an elected body. Imagine as well that you could take part in the writing of the law and controlling the funding of the program that implements it. The more participation you have (or at least potentially have), the more fair you will perceive the system. It's also quite possible that you will be more likely to honor the law.

If we measure most modern democracies with the golden rule of democracy in the same way we would measure the behavior of a person with the conventional golden rule, we see that most modern democracies are abjectly anti-social. All our voting does is elect our tyrants. It only very peripherally reflects the golden rule. It's certainly not fair.

Imagine the reaction of a country going from a dictatorship to democracy. They start with no political parties, and a government that imposes laws based on the equivalent of a single political party. With the progression to a democracy, you have multiple political parties that compete and often a single political party that gains power in an election. This single political party then imposes laws. What's the difference? You just exchange one sort of tyranny for another.

Electing a party gives the marginal benefit in that the party must try to implement laws people like or they'll not win the next election. Unfortunately, that means that laws are sometimes written only to reelect a party or candidate. Those laws could end up being completely different from laws created from active participation and a careful measure of consensus.

This "representation instead of democracy" is the root of many problems we see in the world. We see corruption, the imposition of laws based on the opinion of a select group, or just plain tyranny.

Currently, our democratic systems reward those that covet power. This type of person is often even less likely than average to empathize and produce laws that respect the opinions of constituents. A democratic system that keeps such people from power and instead promotes a universal perception of fairness is more likely to create a kind of social harmony.

If each of us can see clearly that the laws are created with the careful consideration of everyone's opinion, including our own participation and that of our culture, it is more likely we will accept those laws. We'll do so for the same reason that the conventional golden rule encourages social harmony - your reflection on how you'd like to be treated helps you to gain the good-will of others.

So what am I trying to say? We need to design a new type of democracy. One that's participatory and does not marginalize anyone. Where each person sees clearly how he contributes. Where each person can participate as much or as little as he wants. It still has to have all the earmarks of good government. It still has to administer a public service. It still has to have laws, enforcement, and courts. It still has to have taxation and budgets. But all of these aspects of government have to flow from everyone rather than someone.

The root of this new democracy has to be fairness; fairness and the knowledge that when we break the golden rule, we make that government and society fundamentally less effective.

If we are to have peace in this world, every single person on the planet has to perceive their democracy as fair. The golden rule has to apply.

One man, many votes?

Here's an idea I've been mulling for some time for a new type of democracy (or at least one that I've not read about before). It's intended to improve the ability of people to participate while preserving the ability to have representation where it's desired. Keep in mind that it requires some sophisticated on-line voting mechanisms, but they're just technology problems, and nothing makes me think they're not solvable.

1. Each person gets not one vote, but many. Votes are of two types. Program administration votes, and legislative votes.
2. Program administrative (PA) votes - One government meta-program declares all other programs. Each person gets one vote per program. The meta-program is governed like other programs.
3. Legislative (L) votes - For every statute, a person gets one vote. The vote is applied either to a version of a statute, or against its existence. Anyone may create a statute version.
4. All votes may be proxied to another person or organization. The recipient knows approximately how many proxy votes he controls, but not exactly (to avoid forced proxies).
5. A person can determine where his votes are at any point, can change a vote at any point, but must change or validate the vote once every voting period.
6. When a person reaches majority, they must cast their votes. When a person dies, their votes are removed.
7. All personal taxes are distributed to programs by nomination of the individual. Tax allocation profiles may be established by organizations and used by individuals.
8. All non-personal taxes are collected and distributed to programs either by using the aggregate profile of personal contributions or by nomination of a government budget program.
9. Each program has an administrator determined by program vote. 
10. Administrators are nominated by anyone and must accept the nomination to be considered.
11. The term of a program administrator is determined by program vote, by statute, or by instant recall (reallocation of a program vote).
12. Legislation determines what program policy or regulatory processes require explicit program votes.
13. Legislative votes may be automatically allocated to the same proxy as program votes or a different proxy.
14. If L to PA automated allocation is in effect, one government meta-program assigns draft legislation to a program. That assignment may be controlled by the meta-program's program voting. 
15. If L to PA automated allocation is in effect, bills cannot be 'omnibus'. 

Most readers will get to the second item and say "that's just too unwieldy". But remember, most people will not want to be involved in all programs and will delegate their votes to a (hopefully) knowledgeable or responsible proxy. Those programs they wish to have an impact on, they can control in detail.

For the third item, people will say "we'll never pass any laws". But again, because of proxying, this system allows either party-based representation or personal participation in government decisions.

Why are there no recipes for peaceful revolutions?

One thing I always wonder about is why there is no "recipe" for secession or technical revolution. Why can't the UN create some fancy committee and it goes over the possible ways a country can peacefully succeed from another or a bloodless coup can happen? You could even create different scenarios like all-out civil war, separatism, technical revolutions etc.

Like a recipe for food, there are certain parts of it. For example, a food recipe has ingredients, preparation, cook time, cooling, serving etc.

For a "secession", the recipe might be -

• Determine if there's enough evidence to warrant a referendum through polls or petitions.
• Determine the scope and geographic voting divisions.
• Determine the threshold required to invoke a secession.
• Determine the consequences of the vote for secedors and secedees (for example, debt and movable assets).
• Determine the mechanism of immigration for those that wish to join or leave a seceding area.
• Setup an international court to adjudicate issues related to secession such as loss of business or property.
• Vote first on what percentage of votes indicates zone secession and what conditions the entire secession should not occur. As an example, the zones interested in secession might not want to secede if there were less than a certain number of zones in agreement.
• Vote on the secession (with international observers).
• For zones passing the secession, invoke the period of allowed migration.
• Establish a temporary constitution based on a UN template or the old constitution (if appropriate).

For a "technical coup", the recipe might be -

• Determine which government bodies are no longer recognized.
• Determine how long transition from the old bodies to the new can last.
• Explicitly declare how old state actors might be impacted by future government, for example
  - Determine which old government bodies, organizations, or cultures groups need to be protected against retribution and how.
  - Determine which old government bodies, organizations, or cultural members might expect future proceedings against them due to previous regime's actions.
  - Determine the means by which resistant state actors can exit the jurisdiction peacefully. 
• Establish a temporary constitution based on a UN template.
• Setup a mechanism for choosing new government body members and transition road maps (which might have its own templates).
• Invoke the transition.

For a country like West #Papua for example, the indigenous people might say "We would like to invoke secession recipe 2013-883 with these appended parameters using template constitution 2014-4041 and charter of rights 2014-4042.

These are just simplified examples. I suspect there are people that have actually gone through such upheavals that could write better examples.

I know it's unlikely that such recipes would end the conflict associated with regime change, but they might shorten the conflict because all sides know the objective. The uncertainty that keeps people riding the fence between factions can be reduced, hopefully encouraging a resolution.

I also know it's naive to expect any nation to spend money (even at the UN) funding a program which might support its own downfall or a diminution of powers, but perhaps an NGO or University might.

My motivation for the 8rules

The 8 rules started out of frustration and maybe a bit of fear. In 2006 and 2007, I was living in Paris started getting more and more concerned about global warming. Some documentaries and some scientists were making it sound like the issue was not rising sea-levels, but more catastrophic change.

I can't remember exactly, but perhaps one thing that contributed to my fear was the Youtube called The Most Terrifying Video You'll Ever See. In this video, some guy uses Pascal's wager to present the risks of global warming. It's very persuasive and I still haven't changed my mind. Since then, despite climategate and the climate-hoax theorists, I've become even more convinced that we're playing with fire at an inconceivable scale.

I started discussing it with my colleagues. In France, lunch is often a kind of social event. Even work lunches. The French tend to stop business and discuss other things. I got to discussing my fears about the environment. What my friends told me is that politicians have no interest in changing the status quo. Who wants to impose special taxes and levies that are unpopular, losing votes, to save the planet?

Damn. Even if we could get very strong public opinion in favor of the drastic change necessary to control global warming, representative government dependent on votes would never implement the change. Our democratic system could eventually kill us.

We need to change the way government works first. The simple desires of the public could not be the sole driver. We needed a government liberally salted with brains and persuasion and something more complex than representation.

At the same time all this was happening Wikipedia was growing like mad and I saw better organized free news as one way to change people's minds. I wanted Wikinews to succeed the way that Wikipedia had. I thought that it needed more structure and democratic control to succeed. But I realized that democracy would create a news site full of stories about pop-artists instead of keeping track of the spread of malaria. We needed the malaria stories, not the Madonna stories.

At one point I suggested on a talk page that perhaps we needed some sort of voting, but voting that was weighted towards ability, rather than popularity. Someone responded that I sounded like I wanted a meritocracy. This was the first I'd heard of "meritocracy". And even though I think the responder was being negative, I thought it sounded great. That's when I started looking into other forms of government.

What is necessary to give the experts the authority to implement change, yet retain democracy?

How would a small village have done it? You wouldn't get the innkeeper, the most popular guy, to tell you how you should manage your sheep pastures; you'd get your best shepherd. How would you know who that is? Well you'd ask your other shepherds. Well that doesn't seem very democratic though. So how could you bring democracy into it?

If I was Joe Public in this mythical village, and I wanted a say in it, but I wanted the best person for the job, I'd think about the people I knew who knew anything about shepherds, and ask them who should do the job. In fact, I'd more or less "delegate" the decision to them. They know more than I do, so they should decide.

It sounds almost like "proxy" voting. You proxy your vote to someone else. Then that person could proxy yours and theirs to another, and so-on. At a fine grain level, on any particular problem, it could lead to the really good people working on the problems for the community. Interesting, but how can I prove that it's the right way to do things? I've got the solution, now I needed to get the requirements.

I started looking more deeply into the problem.

Instead of climate change, I started discussing political theory with my friends. I didn't go out and buy a book or surf blogs. I tried to go back to basic principals and work it out myself.

What is democracy? Where does it come from? What makes democracies work?

Over the course of a few friendly debate / lunches with my colleagues, I soon came to realize that there are very few concepts that are important, and that are often forgotten, and need to be considered when talking about government.

Of course money and capital always enter into it, but I tried to abstract them out. Here they are, for better or worse.

The 8 rules

1. Democracy and liberty are not directly related (democratic governments can as easily abuse rights and liberties as non-democratic systems / need for balance of power).
   
2. A government respects liberty to the extent that  it does not restrict individual behavior beyond what consensus considers just (consensus should decide what liberties we should have).
   
3. Democracy follows from the golden rule (democracy is not "two heads are better than one" but rather the consequence of the idea that we should no sooner rule another without consent than we would wish to be ruled by another without our consent).
   
4. The degree to which someone can contribute to the creation of a law is the degree to which they can justly be held accountable to that law (franchise).
   
5. Representative government is only democratic to the extent of the representatives' ability and inclination to determine their constituents' consensus and use that consensus to impact governance (representation is not any more democratic than voting for your tyrant).
   
6. Voting is only a measure of consensus (voting is only part of the consensus-forming process and should only happen when consensus cannot be determined in any other way).
   
7. Informed consensus is better than uninformed consensus (if you let stooges create laws, you'll get bad laws).
   
8. Political party platforms can at best haphazardly represent consensus (one-size-fits-all parties are unlikely to represent your opinion on any given topic).