If top of the society is immoral psychopaths with power, and most of the society is composed of people with good intentions, then there is not much hope for “beta uprising” until things go way beyond point of recovery, because powerful psychopaths will not let their power get taken away.

Not sure if this is just evolutionary biology, but this cycle of psychopaths at the top has been going on since when, at least ancient Egypt. And in all these thousands of years, the system that enables this cycle got way more reinforced than it got dismantled.

So is it maybe better idea to put benevolent people’s energy towards designing and preparing a new societal system that will have built-in mechanisms for preventing corruption and malevolence? “prepare” as in get ready to implement for when the current messed up system is about to grind to a halt and collapse? Well, it would be best to figure out how to go full Benevolent Theseus™ by replacing parts of currently failing system with the corruption-proof ones.

What are some resources related to this topic? Recearch on societal dynamics, designing political systems, examples of similar revolutions that already happened, etc. Post any links that you consider relevant

  • TotallyHuman@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    Liquid democracy is a proposed way to do a direct democracy in a large country. It’s only been tried on very small scales (Google used it to decide which food to get for their cafeterias), so we don’t really know if it would work, but I like the idea.

    I’d point out that there are countries which don’t have much corruption or governmental malfeasance. Nordic countries tend to score very well on the Corruption Perception Index, and also have good social safety nets and governments that (generally, for the most part) serve the people. They’re all small countries, though – I suspect that politics becomes an increasingly dirty business the more power a country has.

    If you haven’t already, you might want to look into selectorate theory. It essentially shows not only how the psychopaths at the top stay in power, but also why attempts to reform the system often result in a new crop of rulers who are just as bad or worse than those they replaced. (c.f. Cromwell’s revolt, French Revolution, Russian Revolution). A proponent of selectorate theory would argue that the solution is not to remove the psychopaths – it’s to create a system where things in a politician’s selfish interest happen to line up with things that benefit the people. It’s excellently summed up by this video.

    In terms of curtailing corporate power from the top down, studying the history of U.S. antitrust law would be a good place to start. Extra Credits has a good series about it.

    One reform method that has worked before is unionization. The vast majority of worker protections came about because of labour action. Unions are a lot weaker than they used to be, but it doesn’t have to stay that way. If you can, unionizing your workplace is probably the most impactful action you could take to improve the existing system.

    If your tastes are more radical, you could also consider mutual aid societies. A robust one could conceivably Theseus its way into failing institutions, or evolve into a provisional government if everything collapses.

      • TotallyHuman@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        I don’t see it as obvious. If anything it makes it harder for vested interests to have an outsized influence, since there are no traditional politicians to bribe. What flaws do you see that I’m missing?

        • ExLisper@linux.community
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          1 year ago

          The proxy naming is not anonymous. In normal democracy if Elon Musk wants to buy votes he can in theory pay million people $100 each to vote the way he says that there’s no way for him to verify how they voted. I can take his money and then vote the other way. He wouldn’t know.

          With digital voting systems (when those are correctly implemented) what you do is separate the vote signature from the vote’s content. I submit a encrypted vote and sing it with my certificate. It goes to system A which verifies the signatures but doesn’t have the decryption key to check how I voted. After verification the signatures are stripped and encrypted votes are moved to system B (which is air gaped). System B has the decryption key so it decrypts the votes and counts them but since it doesn’t have the signatures anymore it can’t check which vote is mine.

          The proxy system cannot function as an anonymous system. Once I pass my vote to someone I also have to able to retract it. Let’s say Elon Musk has 1000 votes and I say I want to retract one. The system needs to be able to check that Elon Musk does in fact have my vote. This means that Elon can pay me for my vote and verify that he actually got it. Which means that rich people will buy votes form the poorest and have greater power than other people. Which will lead to oligarchy.