1046
Every UK petition
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2025
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Because the plebs are fucking retarded and change their opinions more often than their underpants. With a representative democracy, you have at least some chance that those in office try to think for more than 30 seconds about a topic before they vote.
If we had a direct democracy in Germany, I bet we’d see a ridiculous amount of racist and anti-poor legislation pass.
Or consider the anti-vaxxers as an example. I want my government policy to be made by somebody who doesn’t think “macrophage” is an insult.
Of all the arguments against democracy, I think this one is probably among the strongest.
In the past, this was solved by giving the power of the franchise only to the upper class, because those people at least had the time and education needed to consider their choices before voting. Of course, such a system would never work in the modern day. It would just result in a country turning into a cyberpunk hellhole.
But on the other hand, giving educated people stronger voting power than uneducated people seems to be a historically unexplored idea. Something like all citizens having one vote to start, secondary school graduates having a second, baccalaureate holders having a third, and then graduate degree holders having a fourth.
Yea, great idea, except that if you think degrees lead to general intelligence you’ve gotta get out more. I know way too many people with specialized degrees who really only know that one thing and half the time they aren’t even good at that. In the US, and many other places, education is something that is restricted and there are many barriers to it which just bring us back to a rich vs poor situation.
It turns out that earning a degree is actually quite simple and more a test of your ability to navigate the schooling process than your ability to learn and apply that information. I went to college and I’ve seen some absolutely braindead people graduate, and I’ve worked with university grads who are smart and also with university grads who are a step or two away from eating glue in the printer room. I’ve met people who never went to any post-secondary education who have a great handle on things but either their career doesn’t require “higher education” or they weren’t able to afford to even think about it.
Example: There are medical doctors and nurses who are against vaccines. A small amount, so few that it’s obvious that they’re completely wrong, but they still exist. There are engineers who can barely keep themselves together, and developers who can’t stop not understanding how the world works. Donald Trump went to a prestigious university and he’s about as stupid as they come, alongside pretty much every Republican.
Education is tightly connected to parents’ education. A voting scheme like this would cement another aristocracy.
And it’s also against the ‘everyone has equal rights’ thingy we kinda agreed on.
It doesn't go against everyone having equal rights. It goes against everyone having equal power, which is not the same thing.
I'm also going to make a very bold and very unpopular claim that aristocracy is not an inherently bad thing. Every country already has an aristocracy of some sort, because aristocracy is defined as the group of people at the top of the social hierarchy. Even so-called communist countries have had aristocracies in all but name.
The only difference is that by acknowledging that you can't get rid of the existence of an aristocracy, you can begin to think about how one might control who is deserving of being in that class of people.
It is natural for intelligence to be somewhat tied to the education of one's parents. I don't see anything wrong with that. But at least with education, as long as people are given roughly equal educational opportunities, there will be chances for social mobility, and much more so than today. If you take a look at China's imperial examination system, as flawed as it was (largely based on the arbitrary memorisation of Confucian classics and essay-writing), it still provided unprecedented social mobility for the time, where any literate peasant could obtain a well-paid job in the imperial bureaucracy and prestige for their family. Yes, already-educated people had an advantage but that is not necessarily a strictly bad thing, as unfair as it seems from first glance.
Let me give a scenario to think about (this is not a proposal but just some brain food): What would happen if we administered a university entrance exam to all seekers of legislative office and gave the positions to the top 100 highest scorers? Obviously the average rich person would have an advantage over the average poor person, because they have better educations, but at the same time, poor people would have a much better shot of actually getting the office than they would under a purely democratic electoral system, and we have the important benefit that whoever does get the job is far more likely to possess basic thinking skills.
Again, not a real proposal, just something to think about. The system described above would definitely suck in reality if implemented as written, and it doesn't stop smart but malicious people from obtaining power.
Sounds like sitution 1 with extra steps.