= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Ezekiel comments on "Progress" - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (69)
Quick poll: Who here has actually met someone who thinks democracy arises inevitably from human nature?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_End_of_History_and_the_Last_Man
Plato thought so. I think Marx did too, for similar reasons. I've met hardcore marxists.
Marx's idea was the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and its evolution into a "classless society", without discussing the details of the governance, though he did quote the example of the Paris Commune (the following quote is from Wikipedia):
I've never read Marx, but I don't think Plato's Republic would match most modern definitions of "democracy"; it was made up of predefined castes ruled by an elite minority.
No, Plato sketched out the way that his Republic would gradually deteriorate - one of the inevitable stages was "democracy". He also suggested that once the people began to rule, they would not only enjoy their freedom, they would begin to value freedom for its own sake - and then they would start to do ridiculous things, like free all the slaves, allow women to rule, and even show concern for the rights of animals.
That's really interesting. Thanks for the education.
The Republic wasn't democracy, but points along the political cycle he sketched were democratic (though surely Plato wasn't thinking of anything as specific as parliamentary democracy as we know it today.)
The young Marx would have said that democracy (though not anything as specific as parliamentary democracy as we know it today - more like free association, cooperation, and individual autonomy) expressed the truth of human nature, while the old Marx would say that human nature plus the path of technological development existing over our whole history implies that at a certain point something like parliamentary democracy would be inevitable (but not irreplacable.)
What does "inevitably" mean? Obviously democracy is not universally used; does that make the statement trivially false?
In this context, it would mean that those countries that aren't currently democratic will almost certainly adopt democracy at some point in the future.
And stay there? Or visit it as part of, for instance, a random walk?
And stay there, except for occasional digressions.
In other words, assuming I understand the claim: as time approaches infinity, so the probability of a randomly selected country being democratic approaches 1.
If you delete "inevitably", then I have. Otherwise, I have not.
If you delete "inevitably", then every human behavior and institution that ever existed arose out of human nature - where else would it come from?