A generation of political pygmies

Wow, 'How Fascinating!!!" Mention @silviazuur and she appears! This place is amazing.

I would crawl over broken glass to attend such a conference.

@richarddbartlett I'd always vote for Loomio holding to the value of "agnosticism", if that makes sense. (I'm still pretty new here).

I don't imagine that co-hosting such a conference would threaten that value, or make Loomio 'outspoken' politically? I mean, you'd be there as yourself not as Mr. Loomio.

@silviazuur I'm sitting about 200metres from the Greenmeadows East Community Hall, where The Sea of Faith recently hosted retiring Napier Mayor Barbara Arnott for a great conversation on Ethics in Government. I think people are ready for this.

I can't yet imagine a suitable place for a workshop in Napier, but have strong connections with the Quaker Settlement in Whanganui. (I lived there for 5 years). Quakers and Young Quakers would lap this up, and so would other people I know in Whanganui.
The Quaker Settlement would be a perfect venue for a more intimate workshop of up to 50 or 60, and while I was there we stretched one event to just over 100 people.

http://www.quakersettlement.co.nz/

@richarddbartlett I have found that in relation to Loomio, the story that goes something like this can be quite powerful:

Everyone can see that traditional politics is not providing the solutions we need. In truth, democratic engagement is so much more than voting and engaging on that level. Democracy is not something outside yourself - it's a skill we can practice all the time in our daily lives, at work, at school, in our communities, anytime we are trying to act together with other people. Loomio is a platform for exactly that.

I think a message like that would be a great contribution to a conference like @silviazuur mentioned.

Also, James Shaw should be involved.

ha! Yup - I said not more conferences till the end of the year.... (2013!) 2014 is an open page :-)

Ya agree with the question of an enterprise making a statement/opinion being delicate - esp around politics - would be the same for chalkle. But I imagine the conf being quite open and more a platform for convos and then individuals (such as yourself) hosting and exploring specific details/opinions within it. And I already like that framing from Alanna.

It is the one time people seem to actually realise that politics affect them - NZ seems to fall asleep for three years and then only wake up at elections - so I am keen how to leverage that and make sure the conversation is not just about engagement in the current system - but also working towards and re-imaging a new one.

Of course this apathy is an opportunity. If you can find the reason for that apathy. And the reason is that people the effort foe participating is huge. So if we can find a way for it to be more easy people will engage. It's hard to go to the party headquarters every week, and if you go that is almost always not productive. So if we can allow people to participate in they party decisions over the Internet, and that would be productive, people will star to participate because it's easy. That's what we are working on in the project that i'm in.

Sorry for the bad english and those mistakes...

Don't say sorry @ricardoaraujo ! It was great :D

Just to bring in a bit more from Almeda M. Wright:

In her research she found that young people (in her not-particularly representative sample) were actually very active in their communities, and did volunteer/community work without it being a big deal - this is just what young people do. Hardly a picture of apathy.

What she also found, though, was that this volunteer work was seldom directly related to the issues they were really worried about. (or even despairing?). It's almost like they chose something 'safe' to work on to forget about the problems of the world.

I wonder how that fits with others' experience.

The funny thing about fixing New Zealand politics is that the "what to do" is almost trivial. We have very low levels of corruption by international standards, and excellent constitutional arrangements (embodying a lot of accumulated wisdom). It's a small country and the capital is in Wellington. So much excellent work and co-operation is already happening at the Select Committee Level.

Sometimes I think that simply implementing the "No Asshole Rule" is all it would take to fix the whole thing.

It's not quite that simple though. What would just about fix the whole thing would be renovating the main debating chamber and changing the rules of engagement so that it's a dialogue chamber instead of a debating chamber.

Just to back that up, Ken Cloke, transformative mediator (and my mediation hero) was in New Zealand, at Massey’s Dispute Resolution Centre a few weeks ago. He wrote the book on “Dangerous Mediation”, and his latest book is “Conflict Revolution”.

If anyone has time, here’s a great interview with him covering everything from neuroscience, to interpersonal relationship tips, to the Middle East, to gridlock in climate change talks and the U.S. Senate (that’s the context in which he mentions the need for redesigning the system, not just hating the politicians who seem stuck in it).

http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/ninetonoon/audio/2576722/ken-cloke-global-mediator

In my opinion the problem is the party system. To become properly political you need to be part of a party. The parties are built around multi issue policy platforms and by becoming a member of that party you are effectively endorsing those policies. This homogenises the views within the party structure solidifying their approach to every issue.

This means that the vast majority of people don't join political parties and therefore cant contribute to the generation of the party ideals or the selection of candidates. For instance there are many people who support the protection of the environment but who would never vote for the Greens based on their far left social policy.

If you support a party on one issue but totally disagree on another then you must make a balance call which parties then take as a mandate i.e. the Nats and asset sales. People didn't want asset sales but they wanted a Labour govt less at the time. It seems ridiculous in this day and age.

My personal hope for platforms like Loomio is that they start to show us the way towards new sorts of decision making (Liquid or Delegative Democracy would be my personal ideal).

Functionally this would require users to be able to start selecting different kinds of voting methods for their groups. This would expand the offering to more potential users and start to show these users the differing options available to them. Then you would effectively be running a huge live experiment and the data from that could be enormously valuable in the long run when democracies start to investigate new systems.

The issue to me is how does one define the term 'democracy.' The literal translation means people (demos) & power (cracy) from the Greek language. But how one defines 'people power' is a subjective matter, Mao proclaimed China a democracy because he was leading on behalf of the people..

Similarly, the current western liberal representative model holds that it is democratic through a very specific context. It was created at a time when it was believed by the emergent educated classes that if the public at large were given completely free reign the result would be the 'tyranny of the masses.' As such, the representative model was generally viewed as the best form of democracy because it did not allow for the creation of a leviathan (supreme power vested in an indisputable sovereign like a king) with society falling to its lowest base instincts. That is, member of the elite would represent the interests of all.. at the time, this was indeed an incredibly progressive idea relative to what came before. However, it is actually also highly elitist, at its core lies the belief that the common person is incapable of rational choice (at a time when rational choice theory was coming into its heyday no less, which i think goes some way to show that ideology is a tool not a genuine belief system).

Anyway, today what was a highly progressive political system has become so antiquated that it is now regressive. It was the dispersal of economic wealth (through the rise of the merchant class) that created the political class capable of creating a dispersed political system, today economic wealth is concentrating within the state, and political influence is once again concentrating, point in case, lobbying with money means far more than the power of a vote, especially when you can lobby every party/candidate but only vote once.

Furthermore, on a more practical level, the notion of 'representation' is a fallacy. It simply does not make any practical sense, take say, 50 people who all share the same ethnicity, cultural norms, history etc, you will find that on an individual level they are all in fact vastly different. One person cannot represent these 50 people in any meaningful way because to do so they would have to continuously contradict themselves. How then, does a politician, even a well intended politician, represent the views of thousands, possibly millions, is any concrete manner, especially when its not even from a homogenous background? To do so must be so superficial that it is not worth the term representation.

In short, both the political and economic system are intrinsically connected, and both these system are incredibly outdated.

@richarddbartlett Hi, I think it is the very same thing !! using loomio or running for the european parlament or at your neighborg community, let people decide !

We are leading a process in Spain to make the first truly open list for candidates for the European Elections in May 2.014. If you have an ideological mindset that comply with some "15M" ideas (occupy wall st. style) , you can present yourself as a candidate and the rest wil decide your position on the list.

And it gets better... once (and if) you reach the European Parlament, you are not a representative but a spokesperson of people's choice. We may end up using somethin similar to Loomio at the European Parlament.

Oh! I completely (AND FRIENDLY) disagree with @miguelpradosrodrig
Anyone is free to foster a new organization or political party and try to change the sistem within the system, of course. Good luck.
Also, I think techno-democracy can be even dangerous if we do not work first grassroot small solutions, understand the complexity in collective decissions, assume consensus is always slow (and sometimes individually painful), and moreover, to avoid ochlocratic decissions (majority dictatorship).

Here is a video I think it can be interesting for all, about how the social movements and the political parties have always, in Egypt, but also in every country, a complex relation:
http://latele.cat/contrainfos/entrevista-ezz-libertarien-socialist-contrainfos

Hi @zombilechuck ! both options (believe it or not) can work together, to try to change the system within the system and at the SAME TIME to try to change it from outside.

Myself I have participated in civil actions like "surround the congress" demonstration http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LlEe7swCmI (that was a hard one) and many others, but we thought that was not enough so, at the same time now, we are triying to "hack" the congress or the parlament by introducing participatory democracy virus in the form of elected people.

We want to do the same, let people decide on the matters that affect them, we should try every possible way.

@rorytb - I take your points, but I want to note that just because our current democratic system is failing in many ways, it doesn't mean that completely direct democracy would be free from the tyranny of the majority. Good examples of this are progressive human rights legislation, such as regarding racial discrimination in the US in the 1960s or recently marriage equality laws. Often times, complex political negotiation or a supreme court decision is what can push the law ahead when the majority of the masses might still hold bigoted our outdated views.

Here's an example I find fascinating, wrapped up in a bit of US history. You know how alcohol prohibition was enacted in the US in the 1920s? Did you ever wonder how this came about, consider the vast majority of people enjoy drinking and most were against prohibition? It's a great story for understanding how single-issue politics got so powerful in the US.

How did it happen? How did a freedom-loving people decide to give up a private right that had been freely exercised by millions since the first European colonists arrived in the New World? How did they condemn to extinction what was, at the very moment of its death, the fifth-largest industry in the nation? How did they append to their most sacred document 112 words that knew only one precedent in American history? With that single previous exception, the original Constitution and its first 17 amendments concerned the activities of government, not of citizens. Now there were two exceptions: you couldn’t own slaves, and you couldn’t buy alcohol. But in its scope, Prohibition was much, much more complicated than that, initiating a series of innovations and alterations revolutionary in their impact. The men and women of the temperance movement created a template for political activism that is still followed a century later. They also abetted the creation of a radical new system of federal taxation, lashed their domestic goals to the conduct of World War I and carried female suffrage to the brink of passage.

Read the whole article here

So, prohibition is bad right? And a disproportionate influence of a certain groups religious beliefs in politics is bad too right? But the story of prohibition is also the story of how women won the vote, and how the US enacted an income tax. Perhaps people could debate those, but personally I think those are good things.

California has a relatively progressive referendum system where the people can bring issues directly to a popular vote. This has led to pioneering legislation like legalising medical marijuana, and recent measures to stop gerrymandering, but also to terrible tyranny of the majority cases like Prop 8 banning same sex marriage (later overturned by a tiny, elitist, anti-democratic group known as the Supreme Court). Often this messy process leads to social progress, but without constitutional oversight it would be terrifying.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that we can't stop considering the problems of the tyranny of the majority. Representative democracy, in all its imperfection, has been key in gaining the political will (often through logrolling ) to pass unpopular but utterly necessary and ethical laws.

To reiterate what's been said in a different way:

While at the theoretical level I agree and disagree with nearly everyone,
I'd like to (in 'Where Are Your Keys' terms) throw in:

Technique: "Most likely to succeed"

Here are some options; which shall we work on first?

1. Un-invent party politics while retaining the positive aspects of our constitutional arrangements.
2. Ban party seats and make all Members of Parliament accountable to an electorate, while retaining a place for 'fringe' elements such as the Greens and Conservatives.
3. Tweak the Speaker's rules and introduce a Code of Conduct for MP's..

Note that (again harvesting our Greenmeadows East conversation with Barbara Arnott), Codes of Conduct have already been made compulsory at the local body level (along with compulsory production of long-range plans to prevent short-termism).

Note also that (in New Zealand) MP's are already 'self-regulating' in the direction of number 3, as evidenced by recent multi-party co-operation over transparency legislation for MP spending.

@alanna Yes, I too see your point, however, I do disagree with your argument on a few points. Firstly, the whole 'tyranny of the majority' as an argument really doesn't make much sense if you extrapolate.. Yes, a majority opinion does not equate to the highest ethical ideal, as can be evidenced throughout all history, however, the same and actually a lot more can be said for minority opinions, in particular, minorities that hold positions of influence within the social strata. Further, it is often ruling ideologies that have a pronounced influence on commonly held beliefs and values. It is the ruling strata that also creates and allows access to the education system. There is ABSOLUTELY NO evidence that a smaller collection of people are better suited to morality (like some kind of representative/monarchal elite) than a larger collection of people. You mentioned marriage equality, I live in Australia, vox pops have shown that a vast majority of Australians are in support of equal marriage rights, however, our Prime-minister has the power and inclination to our right refuse any changes to the legal definition of marriage. To add to this, I would add the notion of invested interests and cultural learning, by which I mean that an elite minority is biased towards the institutions, norms and structures that place it there. Point in case, slavery did not decline because the minorities that controlled and produced slaves had an epiphany but because industrialisation along with specialisation and higher-yield production lead to a decline in the profitability of slavery and expansion of domestic consumption (to consume you need a wage). Meanwhile, in an 'anarchic' system, such biases are actually less influential. If you would like a case study to evidence such as argument, there's a really good book called 'The Invisible Hook' by Peter Leeson, its about pirates and their system of political organisation. Its quite eye opening and shows that throughout history, there have indeed been participant democratic system and that these were by and large far more ethically sound than the alternatives. The problem with direct democracy is not that people need to be governed but an issue of scale, the larger the group the less efficient organisation and mobilisation becomes. However, the internet and sites like Loomio are and amazing tool for overcoming that problem! To be clear however, I'm an not trying to outright dismiss the benefits that been created though-out history by representative governments, indeed, given the scope issue, in many contexts I believe the representative system WAS the best form of democracy, not because of the whole 'tyranny of the majority' nonsense but because the participant model is highly impractical for large numbers of people with little to no communication or management systems such as the internet.

Lastly (sorry the rants nearly over haha) I think that if there are opinions still held by the majority that are ethically questionable, coercion by a few 'for their own good' as it were does very little to create much momentum towards changing those views, often because the are passed down the social hierarchy but also because we are talking about culture here, if a society is denied the ability to self-reflect it is denied the ability to grow.

You make some good points @rorytb - there absolutely are cases where a minority, due to elite status or influence, holds the majority back from making positive progression. And of course so many instances where an elite grabs money and power to the detriment of the masses (most government, it seems).

On the other hand, how do you protect marginalized minorities in a system of direct democracy? Or counter the very real influence of propaganda on people who aren't educated about a certain topic? Prop 8 in California was a good example of this - big money from the Mormon church and others came in with massive media campaigns and convinced a lot of average Joe's that Prop 8 was an "affront to traditional marriage" or something, and it was voted in my the majority (even though it was later overturned for violating civil rights). By their very definition, concerns of marginalized minorities are often not well understood by the majority, and all issues are subject to propaganda campaigns by vested interest, even if the final vote is by "the people".

@alanna It is a complex issue isn''t it. Unfortunately I doubt there's a simple answer. I'm no expert on Prop 8, so I really can't comment there, however, it seems that a large part of the issue again is inequality to access the debate. This is in part what I was talking about when I mentioned the practical limitations of direct democracy, its not just the right for everyone to have a vote, but who creates the topic for the vote and of course, who has more access to disseminate their view? I think if we were to create a hypothetical political system that was completely open and equal, it would only be sustainable in a society that was open and equal. In this sense, the problem once again becomes a minority that while not in representative power has enough structural power to influence the decision making process. That said, there's no guarantee for the results even in a completely open and fair debate.. I think there'll never be a perfect system, we can however infinitely continue to improve what we have. A large part of the issues from what I can tell with the Prop 8 situation relate to hang ups from established and continuing inequalities. You can't really have political equality with economic equality etc. i guess my argument is that if you were able to create a more equal super-structure, the chances of biases in the majority decline. As to how one goes about doing that.. I haven't a clue. Conversations like these are a good start though.