Democracy

In the original Greek practice of democracy, people participated directly in civic decisions. We need to get back to this, especially as we become a more connected society.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 12:09pm and is filed under Appreciative living. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “Democracy”

  1. Brian Hayes
    April 29th, 2006 06:42
    1

    Your work describing networks is also work discovering networks, wherein we make decisions, thus democracy.

    Certainly we will see progress as interaction is enhanced. Effect. Studies in group process seem to show that raw interaction is often all that change & benefit require.

    Didn’t Plato warn that city states should be constrained to about 5,000 people? If larger, he thought the human eye could not visualize each adjacent citizen as an individual. Thus not ’seeing’ his neighbor, he could not sensibly accomodate his neighbor. I’ve often thought democracy, any government, fails after a certain scale. It’s somewhat absurd to ask a smidgeon of leadership to steer this boat.

    Finally, again admiring your ingenious and diligent effort,

    Network from matrix
    And matrix from node,
    to coin a modern ode,

    and best regards,
    Brian

  2. steveg
    April 29th, 2006 15:01
    2

    Brian, that’s a pretty piece of poesy and I never really thought about where economies of scale begin to breakdown in democratic structure. I sense that the failure is around the rigidness of structure, so if a flexible structure or an organic structure is in place, that may extend the life of the system.

    But then self-organization that allows break-off and new communities to form has that implicitely. Kinda like the mitosis of ameoba, springing off children to pursue different goals or even parallel existences.

Leave a Reply

« Haiku
Tools »