It’s pretty simple
You can’t vote on everything. You don’t know enough to make an educated decision and you just don’t have enough time
So at some point you have to choose someone to make decisions for you
The moment you do that, you have a government
I wrote out this big thing to try to explain all of the problems with that link you gave me but honestly, the short answer, is that you just don’t know what you’re talking about
Not in “Anarchy is best”, I mean, in general, about most things, most of the time.
It’s not an insult, it’s true for all of us.
I’m a pretty good programmer but I’d make a real shitty brain surgeon. I’m bad at farming. I don’t know anything about cars, etc…
So collectively, as a group, we can’t vote on these things.
Not only can you not constantly ask a society to collectively vote on every decision (simply because you would just spend your entire day voting on a million things and never actually doing anything), but you can’t vote because you don’t know enough about most of the topics to make any kind of actual decision
And he kind of touches on this but at the end of the day he’s like, “trust the experts”
But experts don’t always agree and all they can do is tell you what they think is best and then you have to choose between the options they give you but some of you will know more than others about the subject (not enough to be an expert but also more than your neighbor) and your society will roughly be split among the choices… and that’s assuming this is one of the things they let you vote on. Again, you can’t vote on everything, you’d be so busy voting you couldn’t get any work done. So most of the time the experts make decisions for you and the rest of the time you have to choose between only the options the experts give you and half the people voting are going to be moronic on the subject
Any of this starting to sound familiar?
He tries to get around this by saying that these people don’t have any real power because today we’re voting on options for a road given to us by engineers and tomorrow it’s options given to us by Doctors, but this ignores that situations are usually not that clear cut and even they were, while that may very well be a better system of government, it’s still a system of government
You wake up one day and the doctors held a vote without you (because you don’t have time to vote on everything) that says sugary drinks are bad and you can’t have them any more. The city planners got with the doctors and decided to tear down three houses and put a road there because it’s better for emergency vehicles and the anthropologists voted without you that it would be best if there were cameras on every street corner
Jewish Rambo?
j/k
Focusing on the wrong thing. It doesn’t matter what it is, or even who you’re trying to get it from, the point is that you need something another group of people has. How are you going to get it?
Everybody in your town is just going to leave their homes and walk to the nearest town together; or are you going to send a representative to that town to negotiate trade for you?
How are you going to decide who represents you?
Uh oh, you’ve just reinvented government
sounds like you need an economist to represent you
How are you going to choose which economist represents you?
how?
We need to renegotiate prices on lithium with China. How do I do that?
who decides if there is an issue and who presents it to who?
Holy Shit it’s Donald Trump!
yeah.
I made a comment in a match thread and got the alert on the little bell icon that usually means somebody responded
But instead of a response it was an auto-message that said my comment had been removed because my account is too new and doesn’t have enough Karma to post. But this auto-message also said something like, “message the mods here” and then had a link I could click to message the mods of the World Cup sub, so that’s what I did
And all I was doing was explaining that I’m not a bot and I’ll take a picture or whatever to prove it, I’m just a dude who signed up for reddit that day just to post in the world cup match threads. That waiting days before being allowed to post isn’t the end of the world but considering the World Cup is a limited-time event, not allowing me to post for days would mean I wouldn’t be able to post in match threads for 12 or 13 of the games (at that point there were 3 or 4 a day)
So I was just asking if they could lift my ban considering the circumstances
But they came back and questioned why I had no posted anywhere else on reddit.
So I told them, “I don’t really like reddit. I don’t have any interest in posting anywhere else. I’m literally only here for the World Cup match threads”.
And I guess me telling them that reddit sucks was a trigger because the response I got back after that was super nasty
It wasn’t until later did I think, “I be the World Cup sub is a sub created by reddit admins themselves because of it’s popularity. So I bet the mods of that sub are people who work for reddit. And I just told reddit employees I think their site sucks shit, hence the nasty response”
It’s just a bit ironic because it was their chance to change my mind and prove that reddit doesn’t suck. Instead they banned my entire account and just kind of proved to me that everything bad I think about their site is not only true but actually much, much worse
I got banned for making an account just to post in the World Cup threads but the sub wouldn’t let me post because my account needed to be older and have a certain amount of karma
This “you can’t post message” came with a note saying I could message a mod and then a link to click to do just that, so I did
I explained I wasn’t a bot, I was a human, I’d prove it however they wanted, but I couldn’t really wait days to post because the World Cup is happening now and in 3 or 4 days I’d miss like 12 games
They responded saying that I had zero karma and had not made any posts…
So I replied that yeah, this is exactly true because I don’t like reddit I only signed up to post in the World Cup Match threads
I received a very nasty reply where they told me that reddit was super popular with millions of users and that it wasn’t their problem I didn’t like reddit and then my account got banned
I believe the World Cup is super popular and so it’s not just a random sub ran by random people in the world… but a sub made by reddit and moderated by reddit employees. So I just told a reddit employee I hate their site and so they banned me
It’s a pretty shit site
where do you guys live where you see enough swastikas that you need to know how to alter them?
This feels like such an imaginary problem
I did, and it’s a lot of words to over-simplify complex issues in large societies that can’t get around the fact that you can not vote on every single decision that has to be made and therefor you must choose people to make decisions on your behalf and that doing that is a government
For example, you can’t ask just the Doctors why hospital visits are up by 50% because not everyone will even agree it’s an issue for doctors. Architects and carpenters are going to say it’s a problem with bad buildings and crooked stairs. Safety people are going to argue it’s a problem of crime. City Planners are going to say it’s an issue of confusing roads and too much traffic. Farmers are going to blame it on a lack of plentiful potatoes, religious people are going to say you need to sacrifice more goats, etc…
And the doctors aren’t all going to agree on one solution. And neither are the architects or the carpenters or the city planners. So the doctors bring you 3 solutions, the architects bring you 5 solutions, the people in charge of safety bring you 3 solutions, etc…
And even if you could just ask one group of people and have a simple vote, that’s not the only problem you’re facing. Yeah hospital visits are up 50% but food growth is down 15%, crime has increased by 7%, tests are showing a drop in education, people are just generally less happy than they were 3 years ago, Mrs. Smith is accusing Bobby Duncun of trampling her flowers, etc…
You can’t just be like, “OK, the doctors say build more beds” so lets do that because you don’t have infinite resources and now you have to figure out what to do with the limited resources you have. Do you build beds or barrels for apples? You can’t do both. And it’s not just two things, it’s a hundred things, that all need to be done, and you can’t do them all because you don’t have the resources or the time to get them all done.
And again, you can’t have a trillion votes on every single decision, you don’t have time. And even if you did, you don’t know enough about any of this to make any kind of decision. And the solution isn’t as easy as snapping your fingers and making it happen
You have to ask your neighbors for supplies, and they also have resource issues so they may or may not be able to give them to you. They don’t have infinite wood to give to everyone who asks and you’re not the only one asking them for wood.
Oh, and your neighbors are asking you for shit and you don’t have infinite resources to give to them
So if you need wood and the town the has wood needs apples and you have apples… well, you’ve just invented trade. You give us the wood we need instead of giving the wood to that other town and we’ll give you the apples you need instead of us giving our apples to that other town. We would give everyone all the apples and wood everyone needs, if we had enough apples and wood to give to everyone. We don’t.
So now add in to your complex resource issue the fact that you want to build beds, and barrels, but also you need to give some of your steel to your neighbors, and you need to get wood from your neighbors and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah
Even if you think you have a solution you can’t actually do all of the solutions. So now you have to ask questions like, “Should we bargin our limited resources on this solution and hope it fixes a big issue but honestly we don’t know if it’ll work OR do we spend our limited resources on this project that we know will work but solves a problem that isn’t as serious”
And you’re doing that a thousand times a day
So you just say, “Fuck it, lets just pick a few doctors to make medical decisions and a few city planners to make city planning decisions, and a few accountant to manage the resources, and a few safety people to manage our security and they can figure it out”
And that’s what they do. And then you wake up and find out that the doctors decided sugary drinks are bad and so you can’t have them anymore and the safety people have decided to put flock cameras on every street corner and… oh, you’ve remade the government