Your friendly neighborhood blogger is still under the weather and might prefer passive rereading as against proactive posting for most of today.
About two million enfranchised adults electronically attend the Great Khruath of Avalon. It seems that there are three categories of speakers:
regional meetings elect delegates to Year-Khruaths, covering larger territories, and the Year-Khruaths send representatives to the High/Greath Khruath of the whole planet which meets every six years plus on extraordinary occasions like now during a war;
any free adult can attend and might ask to speak;
many individuals, like a north Coronan rancher and the chief of the West Coronan guard, are asked to present brief factual reports.
Staff with computers filter questions and comments. Repetition is avoided. In just under six hours, 83% vote to continue resistance to Terran aggression. The omniscient narrator comments:
"Humans couldn't have done it."
But we can work towards it. We have developed democratic systems long regarded as impossible. Ythrians are less talkative than human beings but human cultures change.
"Modern communications, computers, information retrieval, and educational techniques helped the system spread planetwide, ultimately Domain-wide." (V, p. 497)
- although there cannot be a single Domain-wide Khruath.
Communications and education (as opposed to indoctrination and propaganda) can certainly be used to democratize human society more. Many people are apathetic precisely because they are neither informed nor involved. Populations vote in greater numbers when they think that it will make a difference.
I would suggest eliminating the second group of speakers listed above, at least from the Great Khruath. Any enfranchised adult can speak at a regional meeting and can communicate with delegates sent to Year or Great Khruaths. That should suffice to ensure that nothing is left out.
Years ago, members and officers of Lancashire Education Authority were to address a public meeting and answer questions in a school under threat of closure - and later closed. A group of teachers held a pre-meeting to agree what questions should be asked and to assign each question to a specific teacher, thus preventing repetition while ensuring that nothing important was left out. One teacher did not attend the pre-meeting because he wanted to be sure that any question asked by him was his question, not one assigned to him by anyone else. He missed the point of the pre-meeting. He could have attended it and said which question he wanted to ask and the pre-meeting would have agreed to him asking that question.
Let us admire the brevity of the North Coronan rancher:
"'Food production throughout the Plains of Long Reach has been satisfactory this year. The forecasts for this season are optimistic. We have achieved 75 percent storage of preserved meat in bunkers proofed against radioactive contamination, and expect to complete this task by midwinter. Details are filed in Library Central. Finished.'" (p. 562)
Within three quarters of a page, the West Coronan guard chief begins:
"'Uh, Arinnian of Stormgate.'" (p. 563)
- and ends:
"'Finished.'" (ibid.)
And I will finish for a while.
12 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I still don't agree. The fact Ythrians themselves had to organize and categorize those could speak at khruaths, including filtering out needless repetitions shows their system had limitations and potentially fatal flaws. I stand by my belief anything like khruaths would not for humans, that all you would get is endless debate and wrangling.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
As a matter of fact, I agree. The present divided world is incapable even of agreeing on the adoption of a more representative system in the first place. For my ideas to work, first there would have to be a much greater sense of shared common purpose (as in a war etc) and secondly that sense would have to be sustained without being enforced. The next stage of the argument becomes whether that is possible and it is already predictable what answers will be given to that question.
Paul.
Paul: nothing is sustained without being enforced!
The purpose of governments is to make -collective- decisions; and if made collectively, they have to be binding -- to be enforced -- on those who disagree as well.
Taxes aren't voluntary; nor are, say, sanitary regulations; nor is participation in a conflict, if the group decides on one.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Correct. At most you can WIDEN the base on which that collective decision making is made. Which is why we have congresses or parliaments.
Ad astra! Sean
IF we do not forcibly ban but naturally transcend the struggle for survival/economic competition, then that will remove many current causes of conflict and confusion.
Paul: that's just an aspect of the general struggle for power and dominance, and -that- is instinctual. Competition is hardwired into the physical substrate of our consciousness. What exactly the competition is -for-, what are the markers of success, varies. The struggle does not.
By the standards of our ancestors, we already have transcended the struggle for survival; how many people are constantly wondering about their "daily bread" in a society in which it is, incredibly, a marker of poverty to be -fat-?
Yet the struggle for power continues unabated, as strongly as ever. Trying to 'transcend' that is like trying to outrun your own sweat.
There's too much, and there's too little, but there is no such thing as "enough".
Kaor, Paul!
And Stirling's comments above ably explains why I cannot agree with you. You are still asking for what I have to consider impossibilities. The desire or instinct for competition is permanently hardwired into human beings. It might not be as strong in some as in others, but it's there.
And if you somehow magically remove that competitive urge from the human race I have to wonder if the species would even still BE human at all. Probably more like the Zolotoyans of Anderson's "The High Ones." No, thanks!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I think that a great deal of what we do is cultural, not genetic, and there are more than two possibilities.
Paul.
Paul: a great deal of what human beings do -is- cultural. We're a behaviorally plastic species.
But we're not blank slates, either. Our cultural variations exist within limits, parameters, set by our evolutionary history.
An example I like to use is "territoriality".
Humans and wolves both have territorial instincts. The difference is what they apply to.
With wolves, it's physical territory; they pee on the edges, and that's it.
With humans, it can be physical territory -- that's the default, and the easiest. In both cases, it's an aspect of our social nature; the territory is a collective possession, with the in-group welcome and out-groups not.
But with humans, the feeling of collective possession can be applied to other things besides dirt; to ideas, to jobs, to the reputation of a sports team.
The emotions aroused and the attachments felt are the same, but the object may be different, and the collective entity may be something else besides a kin-group.
A political party acts very much like a tribal grouping defending its turf, for instance.
Not blank slates, agreed.
Kaor, Paul!
I missed this comment by you. Much that human beings do is cultural, not genetic? I agree, but we are STILL competitive and territorial, as Stirling stressed. And those things are simply not, cannot be waved away as I get the impression you wish would happen.
Ad astra! Sean
Wave away, no. Redirect, yes.
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