Is it possible to have a representative, democratic, pluralistic social system

Great Debates
1

I have been listening to alot of heavy metal music thanks to VH1, which is usually based on a sense of feeling at odds with society. And I just listened to Sepultura’s refuse/resist about standing up to political tyranny and I am wondering if it is even possible to have a social order that is pluralistic, democratic and representative.

For most of human history disobedience to the political leaders generally led to massive pain and abuse. The same can be said of the social order, however alot of the trauma today is self generated. Most people seem to internalize the idea that diversity (being fat, creepy, pathetic, weird, ugly, a loser, too loud, too quiet, whatever) ensures a deserving of trauma just as for many dictatorships being diverse (communist, capitalist, socialist, internationalist, whatever) was the same, a license to abuse to maintain the integrity of the order.

Alot of countries have risen above that today in regards to politics. Instead of a single, unifying mentality enforced with brutality we have a pluralistic, representative governmental system that allows and welcomes new ideas. However our social system is still a single, unifying mentality enforced with brutality. Luckily the brutality is not really external anymore (bullying and verbal/physical abuse are somewhat more rare nowadays than 100 years ago) but the internal brutality people direct at themselves is still rampant. Perhaps my view is skewed because I go to college and am surrounded with young people, but I don’t see alot of tolerance for social disobedience. Our political systems may be 21st century, but our social systems are still basically stone age. In the old days people didn’t question the political leaders, gave them almost divine status and were brutal to those who didn’t obey. We do the same with our modern social systems. Most people don’t question ‘why’ it is bad to be (to pick an easy target) obese, but they struggle hard to avoid it and punish themselves (and to a lesser extent) others brutally for it.

An issue like this is heavily laden and hard to debate. Most people are going to say ‘of course it is good to be yourself’ then turn around and insult people for being creepy while going on another diet and laughing at people who do weird things. In fact its been said that a good portion of humor is just designed to ridicule diversity which makes me think that our brains just aren’t hardwired for a pluralistic, tolerant social system.

And by ‘diversity’ I don’t mean the good kind (being gay, being short, etc) I mean the bad kind. Being an obese, creepy, pathetic person with tourettes for example. Is it even possible to form a society that accepts all forms of diversity except those that try to impose their will on others (the same way we do with modern democracies, we allow new ideas as long as they don’t trample on the ideas of others) or is social conformity so ingrained into our psyche that this just isn’t possible?

Hopefully this makes sense to some people. Our political systems have advanced alot. As someone who has studied issues like political dictatorship I can say dictatorships tend to be marked by things like

-an unquestioned central tenet/leader/philosophy
-brutality towards the disobedient
-the view that the individual means nothing compared to the state
-the view that dissent is horrible and can lead to terrible things (in the Nazi regime they used to put out propaganda slides telling Germans that simple criticisms of the war effort made the Soviet attempt to turn Germany into a giant Gulag that much easier)

Nowadays we try to have a representative political order. The will of the people determines to a degree what politicians do at any given time.

Is a representative, pluralistic social order even possible or are we just hardwired to have a dictatorial social order with heirarchies, rules for obedience and penalties for disobedience? As it stands now the external forces holding social conformity together are getting weaker in many parts of the world. However the internalized messages people have that it is almost unforgiveable to be a threat to the social order by being disgusting, pathetic, creepy, ugly, whatever is still there. People mostly police themselves socially whereas in a poltiical dictatorship people are policed by external forces.

It’d be nice if we eventually lived in a world where external and internal repression didn’t exist for the social system, where the system placed the individual as the most important part (as opposed to social & politicial dictatorships that hold the state/system is what is important and the individual can/should be brutalized for disobeying it) and new ideas were welcome because they could lead to new things as long as those new ideas didn’t involve oppressing others. But I really don’t know if that is even possible.

2

So you’re saying people should WANT to be obese, creepy, pathetic, misanthropic losers?

Look, we’re human beings. We aren’t blank slates on which we can create any social order we wish. We are chimpanzees with slightly larger brains. People crave social validation because humans are social animals. If we could create humans that didn’t care what other humans thought of them, those humans couldn’t create a society, they’d be incapable of cooperating with each other. We call those people sociopaths.

I don’t think a society made up of sociopaths is possible or desirable, and I can’t understand why you seem to.

3

This already seems to be the case as found on Jerry Springer and Maury.

4

Depends on your situation. Queer people are still murdered on the street in hate crimes. A lesbian was murdered on the street in Washington, DC last week by a masked gunman. Shot in the head. Her mother says it was a hate crime because her daughter was out. A transsexual woman was murdered on the street in Phoenix a couple months ago. Shot in the back. The anti-gay hysteria fomented by politicians and preachers of the religious right is currently making a hostile and potentially more deadly climate for queer people in America right now. Internal brutality is expected to do the job of keeping people in their place, but for queer people who overcome this and come out of the closet, there are violent homophobes ready to kill to enforce it.

5

What I’m saying is that just as we’ve evolved to have political systems that treat disobedience and new ideas and new leadership as acceptable and that the individual is more important than the system, perhaps we can do the same with social laws. There is a difference between not caring what others think and not harming yourself or others for disobeying rules you’ve never questioned.

I realize we are monkeys. But we are heirarchial monkeys. Anyone who has been to a junior high can see that. Nonetheless we have risen above this and have democracy instead of just dictatorship. True, our democracy is massively flawed (most people just side with the evolved monkeys from the same political party as them and demonize the other party. Conformity in action. Plus we vote on things like looks, conformity, etc.) but we did rise above it over the course of thousands of years.

perhaps we are evolving towards that. Not only is tolerance growing, but so is intelligent social criticism. A person can criticize social values via books and the internet and make people rethink what they value in a society. Perhaps the unspoken end goal is a ‘live and let live’ society where people realize the individual is more valuable than his usefulness to society and people are constantly thinking about social laws instead of blindly following them and inflicting suffering on themselves and others for disobeying. Even if we can’t have a ‘perfect’ society I’m sure we can have a better one. Modern society is better at this than society of 200 years ago by far, I see no reason to think this trend won’t continue.

6

I think you are assuming there are 2 options, dictatorship or anarchy. Anarchy is a lack of rules, dictatorship is a set of brutal rules no one questions that usually have nothing to do with what is in the best interest of the people. What I’m saying is there is also a 3rd option of democracy. In democracy we vote for the rules, the rules are representative of what benefits the people, and the rules constantly change (because politcians change).

In a dictatorship if there are tax cuts or a war you don’t question them. The state just find ways to force you and everyone else to obey them, usually with rewards and punishments. In a democracy you question everything, you vote for new rules, for new rulers, etc. In anarchy there are no rules. Plus in a democracy the well being of the individual is paramount, in a dictatorship the individual means nothing except as a tool to keep the system running.

To again, take an easy example, take our cultural disgust for bodyfat. You said ‘should people WANT to be obese’, but why is this bad? Did all the citizens (especially all the women) get together and say “I think that a social rule saying bodyfat is disgusting will be in our best interest” the same way we say “I think a president who will support tax cuts and a war in Iraq will be in our best interest” when we go to vote? Nope. What happens is people are born into this society, they do not question the social rules and they reward and punish themselves and others (often brutally) for obeying or disobeying the rules.

In north Korea you don’t question why the Kims are in power or why they have their rules, but you are punished or rewarded based on how obedient you are. In cultures you don’t question why we feel the way we do, and you are punished or rewarded for obeying those rules. Democracy isn’t a lack of rules, it is a system where you constantly question the rules, ask if they are in the best interest of the people, you have meaningful ways to changing the rules and you feel the individual is paramount and deserves happiness and not to suffer.

Can we have a pluralistic, representative social system? Can we ‘vote’ for social laws that represent what will make the people happiest, most successful, most comfortable and have the concept that people don’t deserve to suffer as a part of our cultural system or is this just not possible?

What constitutes pathetic? What is creepy? What we consider pathetic or creepy would be acceptable in other cultures, what they consider creepy is ok to us. In China 60 years ago beating capitalists to death was considered ok. Perhaps the concept of ‘pathetic’ or ‘creepy’ will always be bad, but what it actually takes to be ‘creepy’ changes all the time.

Why is it ‘creepy’ if a man dresses like a woman but ok if a woman dresses like a man? Two hundred years ago both options were creepy. We do not question these rules, we just seem to assume this is the way it should be and we punish and reward ourselves and others for obeying them without a concept of human rights. Politically we did the same thing hundreds of years ago with the divine rights of kings.

7

Wesley, I must admit that I am somewhat intrigued by the premise of this thread, but I’m not entirely sure what it is that you’re asking/proposing. So, I’d just like to respond to a couple of your statements to see if I’m misinterpreting what you’re saying.

I would argue that there’s a fourth option, for which I will adopt the term “memetic” that I’ve seen used in various places. The most important difference between the democratic and memetic models is between “conscious” and “unconscious” decision making. I’ll note that these are fairly rough terms, other descriptors might be “centralized’ versus “decentralized” decision making, though these may not be quite right either.

Conscious/centralized means that the citizens must actively choose what social order they want, e.g., by voting, which is then deemed to be the social system of the region. This is contrasted with unconscious/decentralized decision making, where the overall social order is emergent from decisions made by each social unit (the individual), and from the many different ideas of what society should be are in competition. This model does not require active questioning and criticism by each individual as in the democratic model, nor is it necessarily banned as in the dictatorship model—active, questioning thought can certainly influence the memetic social system, but the social system cannot be changed by sheer force of will.

Depending on the point of view one takes, the memetic model could be confused with either the anarchic or dictatorship models. If one looks at sufficiently small stretches of time, the earlier ideas remain entrenched while newer competitors have not had sufficient time to combat them, and the social world appears to be a dictatorship. If one looks over long stretches of time, many ideas have risen and fallen, and it appears that there are no rules at all. If one seeks to have a complete set of infallible rules, each applicable to all times equally, one will see anarchy in the memetic system.

Now, Wesley, if you mean by “representative democratic” the conscious/centralized system, I would argue that such a thing is impossible in human society, for the reasons Lemur866 provided. If, however, what you want is a memetic system where a larger portion of people are actively engaged in questions the tenets of society (as some of your statements lead me to believe), I can’t see why such a thing would be impossible. You even mentioned that such critical looks at social systems are on the rise, suggesting that society is heading in that direction.

My emphasis. No, they did not, but that doesn’t matter. They’re collective actions were sufficient to show that they had made the decision that bodyfat is not in their best interest. And many people have questioned whether our attitudes towards bodyfat are healthy, and it continues to be questioned. Almost certainly, our beliefs about what is attractive and healthy will change as time moves on, and new ideas become more popular, as a result of both active questioning and passively obeying the current social rules.

A system that (a) holds the happiness of the individual as paramount, (b) succeeds in making the maximum number of people happy and © does not exert any social pressure? I have significant doubts that such a thing will ever come about—the third item is probably impossible by itself. I’ve heard a lot of speculation that our own culture’s emphasis on personal happiness is one of the driving factors of our unhappiness. I’m sure you’ve heard the same from some source (I don’t have any cites at hand).

8

That isn’t what anarchy means.