If we abandon reason and transparency in a democracy, voting doesn’t count

Written as a comment in response to the Ear to Ground coulmn "Press ignores church's role in Bush's policies", August 3 on www.truthdig.com:

Comment #16866 by Hilding Lindquist on 8/05 at 12:16 pm

Re: Comment #16825 by Stephen Smoliar on 8/05 at 7:51 am

In turn regarding: Comment #16617 by Hilding Lindquist on 8/04 at 8:11 am
(See Even the butterfly makes a difference below.)

“I have to take issue with Hilding Lindquist: ‘voting is the packaging that comes with the gift of reasoning between informed participants.’ The best packaging for the ‘reasoning between informed participants’ is CONSENSUS.”

Maybe I wasn’t clear enough—or go far enough in my explanation. You see, “reasoning between informed participants” is the process of forming consensus/agreement. And voting is the means by which we indicate whether or not we have reached consensus/agreement. The last time I was in a consensus building group (fairly recently, I’ve just taken the summer off from my group activities) the larger we were the more we used a show of hands or some other voting mechanism to indciate how close we were to consensus/agreement.

My point was that coming to consensus/agreement (deciding as a group) through informed reasoning by the participants is the substance of democracy (there’s some history here). The mechanism for marking who is in agreement and who is not—voting—is simply that.

However, because we are dealing with millions of diverse people—who probably will never reach a true consensus on any specific agreement—it does not mean we have to abandon informed reasoning between the participants.

There have been a number of studies out that demonstrate that a group of people each one of whom makes an individual decision about something like the jellybeans in a jar will produce an average that is pretty close to the actual number ... even though there are outliers way off the mark.

Central to all this is transparency ... the people have to be able to see the jelly beans in the jar in order to make an informed estimate.

Stephen ends his comment with, “This takes us back to the hypothesis that our problem is not that America is not a population of ‘informed participants’ but that the mass media are doing everything they can to keep them from BEING ‘informed participants!’”

I don’t know of a time when the population of these United States was not being misinformed by yellow journalism, end times evangelism, corporate interests, labor interests, political interests, war machine interests, etc., etc., etc.

The one thing that I know that motivates the “population” of our nation to take action is the loss or the threatened loss of there livelihood ... or some part thereof.

What the Neocon corporationists have accomplished to date, is put us firmly on the path to a major upheaval due to the continuing economic degradation of labor.

Maybe they actually believe they can turn the United States into a banana republic with a huge split between economic classes dividing them into owners (i.e., those who own enough to support themselves and their families) and workers… but the workers have no place to go but into the streets.

(Of course there is always the prospect of another World War to bail ‘em out.)

And I also believe that the primary “creative” dialectic in a capitalist society (which gives it its vibrant strength) is between the interests of asset and knowledge capital on one side pursuing their self-interst (with their own little sub-dialectic contributing to the mix) and the interests of labor on the other side pursuing its self-interest. (Give either side the upper hand, and you got trouble.)

But I digress. What I do believe is that if we abandon reason and transparency in a democracy, voting doesn’t count.