I have heard a lot of talk lately about people who "get in others' way" or who have a "Crab Basket Ideology". These were in context to the country in general. So I had to wonder how a system designed to place people on an equal footing, so that every exceptional person gets an equal chance to find his way to the top irrespective of the socioeconomic conditions he/she comes from. It occured to me that problem with democracy does not lie in it's design but in the scale of it's implementation. What I mean by that is Democracy works as long as it is possible to have everyone's opinion listened to. So the problem introduced by scale is that of getting all the opinions accross. Now we can go for a "Manager's Solution" by placing more people on the job of listening to opinions, or we can take an "Engineer's Solution" by modifying the design of Democracy just a tad to accomodate the fact all men are not created equal. That an exceptional person can be expected to compete with maybe 10 or a 100 or a 1000 people in one challenge but not several orders of magnitude more. Where am I geting with this? I am saying that one person one vote does not work beyond a threshold of population size. As the number of people in a society gets larger, formal or informal mechanisms will present themselves that will stratify society into classes of people. Informal mechanisms that I have seen working in this way are
- Education - It stratifies people into classes on the basis of privilege. What they are capable of doing. Who they will prefer to interact with. What their perception of society is.
- Money - Their is a great rift in the attitudes of people who are born into money and those who spend their life acquiring it.
- Society - Not just the people that live with you, but where you live, how clean or wide the roads are, wether there is greenery in your locality or not. These simple aspects of the infrastructure that you are used to modify your perception of society.
- Family - The pepople around you the ones you are intimate with the ones who affect your personality as mentors, as friends as competitors. Not just those related to you by birth, but all those whose lives are tied to yours.
These mechanism are part of our upbringing. The proponents of the one man one vote system would say that we are all created equal. If you forget all you know or have heard about genetics and for a moment assume that to be true, we still have our entire lives to grow up into diverse beings. In short, even if we were created equal we've come a long way from there. Democracy needs to acccount for the fact that people are different. Some care only for themselves, some care for themselves and those they consider their own while there are some who care for everything under the sun. To add to that, in all of them there lies a pretender who tries to make them beleive that they are something other than what they actually are.
The modification
To account for differences really complicates things. We need to determine the attitude of each individual. We need to ensure that the mechanism is transperent and stringent. We need to give privilieges that balance the progress of society with the growth of the individual. We need to protect those privileges. I had a vision of a society which works a lot like our corporate societies. Where individual capability is appreciated when brought to light by the efforts of the individual in a group of peers (It's getting silly but i need to finish). In government the capability of a person can be tested by various psychological examinations. Any one can appear for such an examination, no one has to. Success implies a change in status to an elite citizen. With your vote carrying maybe twice the weightage of an ordinary citizen's vote. One can hope there from that these elite citizens will be able to better direct the course of their country. The social advantage, from what I understand about people, would be the better upbringing of future generations where more parents will invest time and effort into their children to fashion them into better human beings. If only for the petty purpose of being known as the parents of an elite citizen. Recognition goes a long way in promoting effort.
The problem now boils down to the eternal question
what of the idiots?
