[governance] Internet Voting, self determination

[Paul Lehto]

On 10/10/09, Eric Dierker <cogitoergosum at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> It would be my hope that someone will take the torch and help to create more
> comprehensive voting and process rules for this "group". It seems that most
> with an open mind have learned a great deal from the latest vote here and
> certainly gained some understanding from Mr. Lehto's posts.

Thank you for the positive comments. I myself learn from reading posts
here if and when I can do so with an open mind, albeit no one's mind
should be so "open" or so constituted as to ignore the most important
principles.  When that happens our brains are so open that the brains
themselves fall out of the process.

> One must surmise that the wizened gents that control things believe that
> they would lose control of those things if there were a vote. Or perhaps
> they are protecting us from ourselves, benevolent old men who just want to
> make sure we as people do not mess things up.  So I believe that we should
> really look and determine whether or not the masses are mature enough and
> trustworthy enough to decide what is best for them.  I am not being
> facetious here.  Is the public ready to have a say in governance?

To require that a population or sub-population be deemed "ready" to
vote is tantamount to condemning that population to wait FOREVER.
Those who have control, influence or a vote already will only see
their control, influence or vote diluted by the addition of other
voices or votes, and those with experience in controlling, influencing
or voting in a given area will forever deem themselves, with some good
justification, more experienced and knowledgeable in such things, and
thus will forever view newcomers to the process as insufficiently
"ready" to have a say in governance.

Instead, democracy is based on not only a belief that it's
illegitimate to deny a voice to those who one governs, but also that
once given a voice, those same persons will rise to the occasion (if
it's a real vote in real elections with real substantive issues of
concern) and make themselves "fit" and "suitable" for the exercise of
the franchise.

>
> My conclusion may surprise some that think I am an ideologue purist. I am.
> But what I am most sure of is that matters change. That growth is the
> antitheses of dying. And that by trying to keep things the same we really
> muck them up.  The world population is not ready to determine by free vote,
> those matters relevant to Internet governance.
> The kicker is  -- They never will be.

Because the only way to get experience with governance is the actual
experience itself.  People generally don't waste their time getting
ready for processes if the end result is that they will not or likely
will not be taken seriously.  Thus, relative "ignorance" or even
seeming apathy is primarily and sometimes exclusively a quite rational
judgment that it is not worth one's while to invest in the desirable
education since the payoff is either non-existent or quite uncertain.

> (in the late 1700s a fellow with initials BF wrote his president GW. GW had
> asked how a country's revolution to democracy, away from monarchy, was
> going. BF responded in part: "A fool sir is still a fool, the fact that you
> gather them by the multitudes, only aggravates the situation")

The multitudes always express a diversity of levels of sophistication,
no multitude is composed 100% of "fools" and one political party
always finds the members of the opposed party to be "fools" so this
term of disparagement is hardly reliable in politics.

That being said, in a multitude composed of even a sizable plurality
or even majority of "fools" in someone's (faulty or biased) estimation
tends to relatively quickly go through a rapid educational process if
a proper PROCESS of public deliberation goes on where the public
interest is a motivation of a critical mass of participants.  In such
a process, "wiser" thoughts are communicated to "fools" and the fools
over reasonable periods of time adjust their positions to accord with
more and more of the facts, making them less "foolish."  Of course,
this process doesn't happen unless the multitudes are enfranchised.

My personal experience with juries and with judges, consisting of many
decisions rendered by the two bodies, is that juries get it
approximately "right" just as much and sometimes more often than the
"experts" -- the judges -- even when the judges have the same amount
of time as the juries do - over the course of a multi-day trial.

I recognize that there are often news reports of seemingly strange
results reached by juries, but given the fact that the jury sat
through days or weeks of testimony one ought to give the jury the
benefit of the doubt until such time as the outside observer has
invested at least an equal amount of time, heard all the evidence and
not just news clips of portions of the evidence, and deliberated.
Even then, however, a solo person misses the benefit of the different
perspectives and ideas offered in a 12 person jury, and also misses
evaluating the credibility and demeanor of the witnesses in person, in
court.

Juries are how the people control the judicial system (in free
countries), together sometimes with judicial elections. Elections are
how the people control the executive and legislative systems (in free
countries).

If one points to an alleged mistake by a free jury or free people, and
somehow that "mistake" remains palpable even after a similar period of
deliberation, two or more major factors still militate against any
judgment against that alleged mistake:

(1) Under majority rule, the minority has to abide by the decision,
even if a mistake.
(2) No person, and no people, are free unless they are free to make
mistakes, even great mistakes.
(3) A person or a people who have their freedom, which must include
the ability to make even disastrous mistakes, taken away from them in
the name of avoiding mistakes has their HUMAN DIGNITY confiscated from
them:  The people whose right to decide is confiscated are rendered
like wards of the state requiring guardians to keep them from killing
or seriously injuring themselves or others.

In light of the above, we either grant all their human dignity via a
real voice and vote (democracy with universal suffrage) or else we set
up a class-based system in which elites protect their wards in the
nature of a guardianship, and those elites then make themselves a
superior class over the rest, forming a classic aristocracy or
oligarchy or plutocracy -- depending on the structural details of the
upper class or classes.

The allegation, or the fact, that some people or all people are
relatively dumb and unsophisticated is the very foundation of all
undemocratic societies.  The idea is that such fools need and require
elite guardianship in the form of experts or philosopher kings of
various types FOR THEIR OWN GOOD.  To call this patronizing is to make
a polite understatement of what this situation is.

> It is not ours to judge or to decide who is ready to take control of the
> Internet Governance. It is ours to build and protect and to provide for
> those users to be in control of the destiny and choices that they want.

Agreed.  My comments above don't necessarily dispute the position of
this post given the paragraph immediately above, since it colors and
reframes what went before.

> The systems are not perfect, the people are not ready.  But governance is
> not about prevention it is about guidance.  Good governance requires lack of
> control to an extent which thereby guarantees that control be placed where
> it belongs.  If the goal of those here is to direct and control Internet
> activity they are frauds. If their goal is to cede power to the people they
> are not perfect but good.

Good governance is about guidance (a loaded word, given my discussion
above) but the direction of the guidance must be provided by the
people for legitimacy.  Thus, the people are like the commander in
chief of a military force who points to the goal to be achieved (like
"capture that strategic asset"), and the governors are like the
commanders in the field who are in charge of all the details
operationally in terms of how to achieve the big-picture goal.

Even in aristocracies, the claim is made that the policies are for the
public good of the country in question -- i.e. for the good of those
who are governed.  Yet the governed are the ones in the best position
to decide and report "if the shoe fits" so to speak.  The governors
are simply guessing or giving opinions about the effects of their own
governance, and humans are naturally suspect in their ability to
objectively investigate themselves, evaluate themselves or their own
policies, watchdog themselves, or second-guess themselves.

All of the above things are in the nature of "checks and balances" in
a broad sense and as such they require other, relatively "outside"
parties to do perform the checking and balancing objectively.  THe
insider experts (even presuming they are every bit as wise as they
think they are) are institutionally disqualified from such checking
and balancing for the fundamental reason that power corrupts those who
exercise it, and blinds them greatly as well to their own felts. As
the near-ancient poet Bobby Burns put it, (from memory) "O wuld the
Lord the giftie gie us, To See Ourselves as others see us."   None of
us have this gift except in small occasional part -- we NEED outside
people to hold up a mirror for us, as it were.

In fact, (and this flips most of the aristocratic justifications of
dumbness right on their head) it is actually one of the great
irreplaceable strengths of democracy that there are so many seemingly
and relatively ignorant outsiders who nevertheless have power via a
vote, for the following reasons:

1.  There are more people who are outside the system enough to see and
say when the emperor has no clothes.
2.  For all policies made to affect or for the good of the people,
those people are in the best position to know if the shoe fits or not
since the best way to evaluate how something feels is to ask the
person or persons who've been asked to wear the shoe or the garment in
question.

Another core strength of democracy consists as follows (and is a much
better formulation, IMHO, than CHurchill's oft-quoted aphorism that
democracy isn't perfect it's just better than any other system ever
tried:

Democracy is the ONLY system that persists in asking the all-important
question (for both progress and the avoidance of systemic corruption)
of whether the powers that be are the powers that OUGHT to be.

We can not leave those who possess or exercise power to be their own
judges of whether their power is going to be, or of whether they ought
to remain in power.  That would be as absurd as suggesting that
individuals could audit themselves for tax compliance purposes, since
the more money one retains, the more of that type of power they are
able to keep for themselves.

At the end of the day, to justify a guardianship of a person or people
without the right of that person or people to fire their guardians and
"to find new guardians for their future security" as the Declaration
of Independence puts it, is to prove that the person or people is so
incompetent that they can't know right from wrong even after an
educational process.  One can, rarely, make that kind of showing and
set up a guardianship of the person or the estate for an individual,
but I don't think it's even possible to make that case about a people
or a large population without resort to the most pernicious and evil
stereotypes such as race hatred discrimination.

If man is not fit to govern himself, who then is fit to govern?  --
Thomas Jefferson

If there are such elites out there fit to govern me or some population
of some kind (much less to govern the internet globe) they should
rightly be proud of their intelligence and wisdom and therefore be
willing to prove it up publicly.  We have to start somewhere, so I
suggest we start here, and if such a person is available I could ask
them questions and evaluate their wisdom and expertise in order to
determine if they are competent to not only modify or waive their own
rights, but my rights as well those of an entire population.  Perhaps
we shall find that elusive person of such stature that he meets
Jefferson's satirical portrait of an aristocrat "Born booted and
spurred and ready to ride others by the Grace of God."

Is it really too much to ask a governor that he or she inquire of the
governed in terms of gaining knowledge and finding out if the shoe
fits or will likely fit?  It's not only not too much, it is only
fitting, right and proper to conduct such an investigation.  And what
will be the outcome of this data collection if it conflicts with the
opinions of the expert or aristocrat?  Here again, human beings, no
matter how expert, are extremely poor at reversing their own
positions.  It is rare to nonexistent to see a person defeated in a
debate openly admit their wrongs and change their position. Indeed in
present politics, such changes of mind would likely be denounced as
spineless "flip flopping" on the issues.

Only outsiders can speak truth to power objectively and without
serious conflicts of interset.  And only democracy has outsiders in
sufficient number to speak truth to power.  When the words of truth
are spoken to power the truth must be invested with all the power
appropriate to truth. The power appropriate to truth must be a power
able to override those in power who are erring in the exercise of
their power.   Thus, an equal vote for all the governed Outsiders is
but a humble and minimal request.  An equal vote amongst all the
governed is really the least that the powers that be can do, if they
are fit to govern at all in the name of the public's interests.

After all, the wisest of the wise aristocrats would fully realize the
limits of his or her own wisdom, and the justice of having the good of
the governed be the ultimate test, and thus the wisest aristocrat
would institute democracy, confident that he or she would trounce any
opposition in any fair election.

Consequently, democracy is the only candidate running for a political
system to truly serve the public interest.  It runs unopposed in that
race.  In "real" life there is democracy and then there are various
flavors of pretenders to wisdom, also known as usurpers of power.

Paul Lehto, Juris Doctor


-- 
Paul R Lehto, J.D.
P.O. Box #1
Ishpeming, MI  49849
lehto.paul at gmail.com
906-204-4026
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