Spanish – Nota del editor: El autor decidió publicar esta nota en inglés, en su versión original. Accedió a la generación de una nota en español generada por IA, que podés encontrar acá.
English – Editor’s note: The author decided to publish this article in English, its original version. He agreed for me to publish an IA generated article in Spanish, that you can find here.
As a spoiler: At the present, we do not live in democracy.
In the birthing days of western culture, in ancient Rome ruled Tarquinius Superbus a legitimate king, but also a brutal and degenerate tyrant who him, and his family, had no limit or qualms, not even against children.
For decades they visited outrages on both rich and poor, not bothering to hide their acts as the force of arms, the legitimacy of law and its alliances with other kings afforded them impunity. One day, they sent soldiers to pull a teenage girl, practically a child, from school classes to one of the debased tyrants to be raped.
The girl apologized to her family and killed herself due to the unlivable shame visited upon her. Her body was paraded across Rome as the sparks of revolution started and the king had to flee into exile.
There was a gathering of the rich and notable, known as the Senate, where they debated how should Rome be ruled. Its documentation is very interesting because there were only two known systems at the time, Monarchy and Democracy, the latter only being applied by the greatest city of the time before Rome´s heyday, Athens.
These rich citizens said that monarchy indeed had been a most terrible disgrace, and that such indignity should never be allowed to happen ever again, therefore, Monarchy could not be reinstated, not even under other king.
However, they also stated that the alternative, Democracy, was far even worse, immoral and disgusting than the vile tyranny they just ousted. To allow people without enough money any political rights was intolerable. Thus, was born an alternative system that persists until today: the Republic. A government exclusively of the rich.
Forced by the circumstances, romans eventually had to create parallel institutions for the poor, the plebeian tribunes, the equivalent of today´s deputies of the parliaments around the world. These were able to pass laws as well, tough the rich retained the last word through their institutions. These represented the interests of the poor.
Modern Western Republics
In the birthing years of the US, James Madison, one of the Founding Fathers, explained in The Federalist, that whilst the Roman Republic had institutions to represent the people, what characterized the modern republic was the absolute and total exclusion of the people from the decisions of the government. This on the basis that the few that were allowed to vote only had the right to select which amongst preselected rich candidates would be allowed to rule the country.
As many of you might remember, voting was not allowed for most of the population until well into the 20th century. Women, people of other races and the poor being the most usually excluded from any political rights. Yet, on that time they realized the danger of the word Democracy and started to call the Republic, Democracy.
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Just like in medieval times the conquerors, whether Christian or Muslim, built their temples on top of their enemies religion temple, to impede the conquered from worshipping at the ruins or eventually rebuilding; so did the Modern Republicans, who built their temple on top of Democracy by usurping the name and not just deceiving people to believe that both terms were equivalent, but also sending the Republic concept behind the curtain, and using the skin of their victim as their own face just like Hannibal.
The Republic system, as its publicly known, its non-representative. Politicians are not obliged or incentivized at all to respond to the interests of their constituents as there is absolutely no relevant consequence of not doing so. Politicians are, in the letter, our employees, yet they do not serve the common good, it is known.
The Foundation has Breaking Lines
Democracy in modern times tried be born again during the French Revolution, and a second time during the heated debates in Paris amongst the founding socialist thinkers.
The first one was choked in blood and ended up on an imperial monarchy, and eventually in a republic. The second one was a very interesting debate where two sides vied for preeminence: those who believed in justice and freedom versus those who masked their ambitions for exclusive and privileged power by proposing a bureaucratic dictatorship in the name (and the total political exclusion) of the poor and the workers. The latter won, and the results are visible until today in the toll of lives and misery that communism wrought upon the world, becoming everything their adversaries said they would be.
The break in the foundations of the Republic that will allow Democracy to be born is on its lack of any real representation of the constituents. The reason why the Republic is “legitimate” is because, based on the equal rights of all human beings, it obtains legitimacy from the act of voting.
A contract is “signed” during the act of voting, where the mass of votes is the signature of the population as a whole: the politicians are allowed to act in your stead and oblige you; and the politicians are supposed to, at their will, to act in the benefit of the population as a whole. This is called consent.
So the break in the foundations is double: One is the lack of representation and the lack of consequences for it; as Kelsen demonstrated, a rule or a law is not such if there is no enforcement of it. Therefore, representation does not exist, both in the logical / theoretical world, and in the real world of facts.
Last, but most important is the reason for the representation: It is stated that being our system a “democracy” participation of the citizenship would be the ideal world, but it’s impossible due to the sheer number of people making non-representative democracy impractical.
Democracy and Software
If the reason to exclude us to decide on our own futures is that its not practical, that reason is long gone. If cellphones and computers are safe enough to handle money and documents, then they are safe enough to handle votes. Blockchain technology gives safety and certainty enough to allow an unquestionable voting system.
We no longer have a need of Parliaments of Congresses, these institutions where created to represent the will of majority of the population. We have the moral obligation to replace these historically defective institutions with a long and unbroken history of betrayal to the constituents, and replace them with the direct vote from our own devices. It is time for the decisions that change our lives be finally our own, our lives should be owned by ourselves and not by a privileged unaccountable minority.
For those elitists who fear for their undeserved privileges, the rest of the balances and checks of the Republic will still be in place: the upper houses, the executive power and the justice courts. If Democracy is finally given birth, humanity will be incredibly reinvigorated by the participation of the people in our own future instead of this constant sensation that we are just cattle followed by an individualistic apathy and despair.
It’s on the software engineers the crucible of possibility, it´s on their magic fingers to create their second revolution after open source, to which we owe much of today´s prosperity and technological edge.
Will you pledge yourselves to save humanity from its stagnant dystopian state?
Desde Ánima queremos ayudar a una fundación sin fines de lucro que promueve el aprendizaje de las personas que menos tienen.
Por eso, toda donación recibida durante 2024 será donada a la Fundación Fonbec, que podés investigar acá.
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