Tuesday, July 22, 2014
Majority Rule
Is it right that your personal preferences and opinions should affect what options another has? On one hand, we all want to live in like - minded communities, it eases social cooperation and helps us achieve harmony. After all, our entire culture works with majority rule, so the majority's views tend to control what happens in a country, state, city, etc. But, many times, the popular view may infringe upon personal liberties of groups and individuals within. Take the pre - Civil Rights Movement era: the majority view was that Africans were less than human, and undeserving of basic human rights in our country. Or take the Holocaust: millions of people died because the majority saw them as parasites and trash. However, we have also seen where majority rule has saved us from, surprisingly, holocaust and brought us closer than ever to true equality. When Adolf Hitler began his war to leave Germany the supreme powef and to create the perfect race, the majority of the world's powerhouse countries decided they didn't agree and stopped him, ending the Holocaust. And then take the Civil Rights Movement: Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr. protested and risked life and limb to convince the majority to change, and to make life more equal for all. Ever since then, repressed groups have protested and made their plight heard to achieve equality. People imposing their opinions and perceptions on others has caused a great deal of bad, but it has also caused a great deal of good in this world. So what are ways we can use majority rule for good? How can we ensure it isn't used for things like the Holocaust again? Leave me some comments, I'd love to hear them! And by the way, this is just a quick look at this topic. Later, well go through it more deeply.
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Interesting topic. Look forward to debating this
ReplyDeleteIf you have any ideas you want to mull over, just post them here in the comments or email me at dillonhovind@gmail.com, thank you!
ReplyDeleteThis idea is compelling. Perhaps we should put it to a vote: should we adopt some sort of libertarian socialist syndicalist anarchic system of self-sovereign yet mutually dependent city-states, or retain the status quo? Better question: how can we decide whether to change our system if not through a majority vote? O_o
ReplyDeleteIt's tricky. The larger the group you live in, the more diverse it becomes, making it harder and harder to reach consensus. By no means would everybody doing whatever they want work, either. For example, suppose you run a club of say 10 people. If one is always doing whatever they want and disrupting work, then the overall productivity will drop and the effectiveness of the group will go down. But on the other hand, when you reach high levels of diverse people the odds of reaching a consensus on any important, let alone controversial, topic will drop dramatically. So essentially you would need a system for everyone to come to a consensus in a somewhat short period of time. That isn't going to happen at all, even a majority of people coming to an agreement is tough and takes awhile. So majority rule kind of makes everything work (somewhat) and tries to offend the least amount people in the process. It's the best system we have, so until we discover how to quickly reach consensus across a nation of very diverse people, we're stuck with the majority, with all its flaws and issues.
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