
The Basic Problem of Democracy (1919) - jashkenas
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1919/11/the-basic-problem-of-democracy/569095/
======
ajna91
"If we substitute the word indifference for the word liberty, we shall come
much closer to the real intention that lies behind the classic argument.
Liberty is to be permitted where differences are of no great moment. It is
this definition which has generally guided practice. In times when men feel
themselves secure, heresy is cultivated as the spice of life. During a war
liberty disappears as the as the community feels itself menaced. When
revolution seems to be contagious, heresy-hunting is a respectable occupation.
In other words, when men are not afraid, they are not afraid of ideas; when
they are much afraid, they are afraid of anything that seems, or can even be
made to appear, seditious. That is why nine tenths of the effort to live and
let live consists in proving that the thing we wish to have tolerated is
really a matter of indifference."

EDIT: Wow, the entire article is full of gems like this. Most lucid writing
I've ever read in the Atlantic.

"But in public affairs the stake is infinitely greater. It involves the lives
of millions, and the fortune of everybody. The jury is the whole community,
not even the qualified voters alone. The jury is everybody who creates public
sentiment—chattering gossips, unscrupulous liars, congenital liars, feeble-
minded people, prostitute minds, corrupting agents... If I lie in a lawsuit
involving the fate of my neighbor’s cow, I can go to jail. But if I lie to a
million readers in a matter involving war and peace, I can lie my head off,
and, if I choose the right series of lies, be entirely irresponsible."

~~~
pdonis
The key thing to remember about Lippmann, though, is that when he says these
"lucid" things, he is not actually complaining; he's _describing_ what he and
people like him intend to do to "manufacture consent". Lippmann actually had
no problem telling the people lies if he thought it was in a good cause. His
objection to the lies others told was not that they were lies, but that they
were not in what he considered to be a good cause.

~~~
peterwwillis
And this is basically Machiavellian political theory. Acting in an immoral or
unethical way is not necessarily a bad thing if it is warranted to bring about
a good thing.

~~~
Digit-Al
The end justifies the means?

The problem is that 'everyone is the hero in their own story'. Everyone who
spreads falsehoods in service to some cause is convinced that they are doing
the right thing and are trying to "bring about a good thing".

Is there any advantage in winning the war if by doing so you lose your soul?

~~~
nl
_The end justifies the means?_

This is - of course - a very rough synopsis of Machiavelli's treatise - even
if he never actually said that.

But the other way of looking at his work was that he was the first person to
develop a code of ethics that led to the idea of "doing the greatest good to
the greatest number of people"

I highly recommend the series from the blog of the this Renaicance scholar and
specialist in Machiavelli which I discovered via HN the other day:
[https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p-
q-f/](https://www.exurbe.com/machiavelli-s-p-q-f/)

He argues quite compellingly that Machiavelli's work led to classical
utilitarianism ethics ("the greatest good to the greatest number of people")
since he was the first to consider judging actions on their consequences
rather than "what was in someone's heart".

~~~
0x445442
> "doing the greatest good to the greatest number of people"

Determining this, even with the information available today, seems like folly;
like a never ending circle of statistical manipulations and justifications to
support preconceived notions.

Action on just about any social issue of note can be argued one way or another
to be satisfying this guideline.

~~~
api
I recall a rather amazing paper a while back arguing that markets cannot be
perfectly efficient unless P=NP. There are too many brutal NP-hard
optimizations involved. I suspect the same would hold for any attempt at
central planning. If these things were possible we would live in a utopia.

~~~
pdonis
_> I suspect the same would hold for any attempt at central planning._

It would be worse for central planning, because in addition to the problem you
mention, central planning has the problem of getting the necessary information
to the central planner, which in the general case is impossible: the
information goes up as the exponential of the population size, but the
bandwidth of information channels to the central planner only goes up linearly
with the population size.

~~~
indrax
Markets are no better on any of these issues.

~~~
ric2b
They are at least in the sense that instead of a small group of individuals
attempting to process all the information (impossible), you have a large
number of individuals processing subsets of the information (possible, but can
have it's own issues like missing the forest for the threes).

------
Iv
I'll restate something that's often misunderstood about democracy.

The use of elections is not to find the "best" leader (for any definition of
"best" that you have) but to prevent civil unrest. It offers an alternative to
pushing for opinions violently in order to be heard.

For this it needs to offer a credible and legitimate path towards political
changes.

~~~
erichocean
That reminds me of a truism I heard about protesting:

The purpose of protesting is to demonstrate the need for violence to the
fence-sitters. If protesting results in change non-violently, so much the
better. But the _purpose_ is to demonstrate that violence is absolutely
necessary.

~~~
richk449
That seems like an odd thing to believe is a truism. Sure, it’s occasionally
correct, but always?

You believe that MLK and Gandhi were really in it for the violence?

~~~
buzzkillington
How well would have Ghandi fared if he were not in the British Empire?

If he was in the USSR or Nazi Germany he would have been quietly murdered one
night.

~~~
eklavya
Let's not pretend British Empire was any bit less evil than the other ones.
This seems to be a common theme everywhere including in India.

[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-35-milli...](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/india-35-million-
deaths-britain-shashi-tharoor-british-empire-a7627041.html)

~~~
buzzkillington
If the British empire was as evil as the Nazis there would be no Indians left.

~~~
harimau777
I don't think that's necessarily accurate. The Nazi's conquered many countries
without exterminating their population. As I understand it they only attempted
to exterminate Jewish people, homosexuals, and the disabled.

Granted even that is deeply evil, but it doesn't mean that they would wipe out
any given people group that they conquered.

~~~
TheCoelacanth
They also planned on wiping out 100% of Latgallians, 85% of Poles, 85% of
Lithuanians, 75% of Belarusians and large portions of most of the rest of
Eastern Europe[1]. The groups you listed were some of their top priorities,
but by no means where they intended to stop.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost)

------
kiterunner2346
I think it relevant to mention Lippmann's statement on Congressional
investigations:

 _" So bad is the contact of legislators with necessary facts that they are
forced to rely either on private tips or on that legalized atrocity, the
Congressional investigation, where Congressmen, starved of their legitimate
food for thought, go on a wild and feverish man-hunt, and do not stop at
cannibalism. "_

p. 6, PUBLIC OPINION (1921) by Walter Lippmann

[http://wps.pearsoncustom.com/wps/media/objects/2429/2487430/...](http://wps.pearsoncustom.com/wps/media/objects/2429/2487430/pdfs/lippmann.pdf)

------
awinter-py
lippman also wrote a fake dialogue between socrates, thomas jefferson and
william jennings byran after the latter died -- worth a read and also it
dramatizes his views on elitism in public thought

[https://artsone-
test.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2013/08/lippman_...](https://artsone-
test.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2013/08/lippman_american-inquisitors.pdf)

------
amilein7minutes
What strikes about the theory Lippmann develops in this piece back in 1919, is
that the entire argument remains coherent and powerful just as is, a hundred
years later in 2019. In the meantime, various implementations of democracy
across the world (differing in the way the elections are held, the
distribution of power between the legislature, executive and the judiciary and
the elections of those etc) have all pretty much encountered the same
faultlines emerging.

By that I mean that the majority votes based on a confused jumble of
propaganda and misinformation and this voting pattern has not produced the
best outcome for 1) the protection of the minorities and 2) solving problems
that impact every individual, that also require collective effort, such as
climate change and poverty.

While Lippmann blames the impossibility of gleaning facts from the
"inconceivable confusion" that is presented to the common person -- and this
problem has only become much worse in 2019, given the ease of access to
opinions in the internet age -- is it possible that fake news to undermine
democracy is an inevitable feature? In other words, is it possible that even
if everyone was presented with crystal clear facts, they would not become
rational agents? That the opinion of the masses will still converge to
something based on external variables rather than facts?

The article gives the impression that once the problem of misinformation is
eliminated, the democratic model will truly achieve liberty, as Lippmann
defines it, but it does not seem rational to subscribe to this belief, simply
because there is no historical precedent (fake news and propaganda are as old
as democracy itself and the information age has merely provided
infrastructural strength for its spread) and if we were being
factual/Bayesian, there is no reason to believe in the redemption of democracy
in the absence of misinformation.

------
ryacko
>If I asserted that the Japanese secretly drank the blood of children, that
Japanese women were unchaste, that the Japanese were really not a branch of
the human race after all, I guarantee that mot of the newspapers would print
it eagerly, and that I could get a hearing in churches all over the country.

Given how well Icke is doing, Lippman wasn't wrong.

------
basicplus2
"In a passage quoted previously in this essay, Milton said that differences of
opinion, ‘which though they may be many, yet need not interrupt the unity of
spirit, if we could but find among us the bond of peace.’ There is but one
kind of unity possible in a world as diverse as ours. It is unity of method,
rather than of aim; the unity of the disciplined experiment. There is but one
bond of peace that is both permanent and enriching: the increasing knowledge
of the world in which experiment occurs. With a common intellectual method and
a common area of valid fact, differences may become a form of coöperation and
cease to be an irreconcilable antagonism."

------
badrabbit
> We all use absolutes, because an ideal which seems to exist apart form time,
> space, and circumstance...

A 100 year old typo!

I always understood that the terms
liberty,freedom,independence,slavery,bondage and servitude must imply a
subject to have meaning. Two persons can talk about liberty but they presume
the other person agrees the subject of the term in the listener's understand
is the same as theirs. I think that's what the author means. But also, it's
not just an ideal that is the subject but specific person(s).

------
amai
The basic problem of our democracy in fewer words: „It is accepted as
democratic when public offices are allocated by lot; and as oligarchic when
they are filled by election.“ Aristotle
([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition))

------
walleeee
> We are peculiarly inclined to suppress whatever impugns the security of that
> to which we have given our allegiance.

Awesome sentence

------
i_am_nomad
Matt Stoller puts this into context in his recent and excellent book
“Goliath,” specifically the pro-monopoly, proto-fascist forces dominating
America at the time. And of course, he brings this forward to the present,
where we are currently contending with and suffering from monopolization.

------
peter_retief
The Republic, a state of laws to protect democracy and to protect the people
from the tyranny of the masses. I love its recursive nature.

------
galaxyLogic
I find this discussion a bit pedantic and ivory-towerish.

Fact is that democracy is constantly under attack say voter suppression etc.

The question should be about what can be done in practice to make democracy
work better, not whether it "is" a perfect system or not.

Democracy can be made to work better if people get informed, there are
proposals like
"[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy"](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquid_democracy")
and
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ranked_voting)
which should be discussed more in the media.

And how about making the election day a national holiday?

~~~
dantheman
I think people being informed is actually part of the problem - you want
democracy to do very little.

The more informed people are, the more willing to believe they can engineer
the society that they want. This seems to always fail.

~~~
DubiousPusher
I see no reason to believe that ignorance decreases the human desire to act
politically.

~~~
Supermancho
I see no reason to disbelieve that ignorance decreases the human desire to act
politically. If you don't know you've been wronged (or limited) and you don't
know what change is effective, or you are supplied with necessarily limited
misinformation...you spend your efforts in other pursuits.

~~~
DubiousPusher
I neither believe or disbelieve in this hypothesis. Given an absence of
evidence upon the issue I see no reason to believe either way.

~~~
corford
Perhaps consider leveraging Occam's razor while you accumulate more evidence
to satisfy a firm position. Or do you adopt a similarly ambivalent approach to
everything you encounter if it lacks immediately presented evidence?

~~~
mistermann
A potential problem I see in this approach is that many people seem to mistake
Occam's Razor conclusions, aka _intuition_ as far as the common man is
concerned, as the truth.

I would argue that widespread adoption of explicit acknowledgement that _in
fact_ , many (if not most) of the the current Top 100 Disputes in the public
sphere _actually_ have an answer of UNKNOWN (as opposed to what 95% of
politicians, intellectuals, and thought leaders would have us believe), would
go a very long way towards kicking off a process whereby global society could
start towards reaching consensus compromise on all issues.

I fully realize this belief is amazingly naive if considered within the
context of objective reality and history, but I also believe it is absolutely
true (if perhaps unachievable given our current state of affairs).

~~~
DubiousPusher
Knowing things for certain is hard. People are uncomfortable when an answer is
unknown. They are usually even less happy when told something can't be known.

But I agree. My hope is that the frailty of human reason and the limits of
human knowledge can become wider spread and that can help people stop holding
such confident and unwaivering views.

------
incompatible
If you support unrestricted speech, then you support legalisation of lies,
fraud, vilification, threats, child abuse pornography, yelling "Fire!" in
crowded theatres, abandonment of copyright, spreading of state secrets,
insider trading, you name it. It's not surprising that few dare to advocate
it.

~~~
incompatible
As the article discussed, people generally want free speech for the things
they approve of, and restrictions on speech about things they think are bad.
There are some things that seem to have overwhelming public support, like bans
on child porn, terrorist videos, and copyright violation. I'm thinking of
specific events like the Christchurch shootings, where there was a lot of
public outcry along the lines of "such things shouldn't be allowed on the
Internet", and 8chan was eventually kicked off Cloudfare. I guess when people
want something banned, they want it gone for good, including from the likes of
Tor hidden services. But that won't stop them from going to the same kinds of
services to access some information that they think has been unfairly banned.

I also find it ironic to be censored when commenting on topics related to
censorship, or at least greyed out to -4, which is about as much as can be
achieved without moderator assistance, I think.

~~~
int_19h
A very curious thing happened in Australia wrt the Christchurch shooting.

In NZ, there was a law at the time that allowed the government to basically
designate the video as illegal, forcing ISPs to take it down - or perhaps it
would be better to say, allowing them to avoid making a choice either way. But
that was not the case in Australia. So after NZ took it down, the Australian
ISPs _voluntarily_ censored the video - all of them in concert, acting,
effectively, as a private censorship cartel. And it was a very intrusive form
of censorship - not only they blocked the video itself, but any blog or forum
that posted a link to it, and refused to remove it, was itself blocked. There
were several large forums that were blocked in that manner, because they had a
subforum with an "everything goes so long as it's not illegal" policy, where
people can rant and vent and have flame wars. Furthermore, the ISPs refused to
publish the exact list of websites that were banned, or even confirm or deny
whether any particular one was banned.

And despite it being a country-wide block on some information - much as the
Great Firewall censors e.g. any Tienanmen photos - as a private action, it was
completely legal, with no third party review, oversight, or appeal. Something
to ponder when we're talking about freedom of information in developed Western
countries...

~~~
matheusmoreira
ISPs should be neutral information carriers. It should be illegal for them to
try to influence society by censoring data flowing through their networks.
What stops them from voluntarily censoring everything related to a political
party they don't support?

