For or against direct democracy?
Three arguments are generally raised by opponents of direct democracy:
• Absence of safeguards: nothing prevents us from impulsive excesses and actions and from excesses of
populism since the electors can react in real time. What would the American people have done if, for instance,
right after September 11 they had the means to make immediate decisions via their computers?
• Absence of expertise: should questions that are a matter of experts' choices be submitted to the people? This
would probably lead to disastrous questions!
• Absence of motivation: abstention rates are already so high that if the citizen were asked to vote on everything
and anything, this would be a catastrophe.
None of these arguments stand up for very long:
• On the absence of safeguards: everyday the news show us how our decision makers and elected
representatives are not the last ones to react in an excessive, heated and partial manner, doing so by following
processes that remain often occult and covered by the State secret. How many wars could have been avoided if
the people – those who will shed their blood on the battlefields – were able to decide for themselves? In a direct
democracy it is on the contrary much easier to establish safeguards and periods of latency, to fix dates that give
the time for reflecting.
• On the absence of expertise: today elected representatives are experts in politics, namely the art of wining
positions of power and visibility. The struggle to establish who is going to decide mobilizes more energy than
knowing what to decide. True experts are not elected representatives but mostly unknown professionals. They
are requested by politicians to help with their thought processes so they can finalize their decisions. In this case,
why wouldn't the citizens have too the right to appeal to experts and even give them their voices? Let's add that
the lack of expertise from the citizens on many domains is widely due to the fact that their advice is rarely
requested, at such a point that they are often obliged to make their claim in the streets.
• On the absence of motivation: abstention is neither due to a disinterest in politics nor a disinvestment in
individual responsibility. It is nothing else but the separation between the head and the body, one of the many
symptoms of pyramidal collective intelligence. To be convinced, let us simply observe the explosion in the
number of NGOs and humanitarian organizations in which so many people invest their time and hearts. It is for
them a direct, efficient and real access to the life of the city on issues that seem very real, this within structures
that are closer to Collective Intelligence than pyramidal collective intelligence.
Copyleft 2004 - Jean-François Noubel – jf TheTransitioner.org page 29
Collective_Intelligence_Invisible_Revolution_JFNoubel.odt
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