3.2 - Democracy
Democracy is a system that can only work if the voting members are equally informed. There are two ways to accomplish this. The first is practical now; it simply involves testing the voters to see if they are informed about the issues. If they can show they are informed, they can vote. Very tough, but doable. The second requires that all voters (a) be of requisite intelligence, which implies genetic engineering, and (b) be forced to educate themselves, which implies considerable loss of freedom.
We can sum up the problem thusly: Any two uninformed people can outvote an informed person; worse, in today's unfiltered rights-fest, any two idiots can outvote an informed genius.
The idea of one man, one vote seems alluring until you realize that most people have no idea what is going on. Some because they can't wrap their heads around it, and some because they neglect to. Consequently, the trend that develops from democratic voting is a downward one; decisions are made for the wrong reasons, and that means that instead of a general force towards the best choice, voting looks more like random noise, slightly peaked with the input from the right side of the IQ gaussian... until the media is involved.
The media doesn't inform. It propagandizes. A lot. Shamelessly. Huge segments of the population sit and drink it in, eyes wide and minds closed. Terrorists! Pedophiles! Immigrants! Global Warming! At that point, the gullible portion of the populace — almost everyone on the left side of the gaussian, and not a small number of the right — is pushed one way in particular, and viola - we end up with politicians like Bush, ex post facto laws, and shows like American Idol.
So you can't fix the system with input from the populace, unless you change the system — and lo and behold, you can't do that without input from the populace. That leaves the only option as continuing to skate downhill, faster and faster, until a core of disaffected people burn out the old leadership, re-assert basic rights (or assert some new set of rules) and the system gets a clean re-start without the enormous weight of the baggage of the old.
I think we may be within a decade or two of this happening; right now, the only element of the bill of rights that hasn't been significantly eroded, if not outright trampled, is amendment three — no one has yet been forced to quarter soldiers in their homes; I suspect this amendment has simply been superseded by technology. Aside from that, a good deal of article one has been corrupted as well. The government is currently operating in a mode that shows absolutely no reluctance to make vicious law against personal or consensual, informed, victimless choices such that they become criminal acts.
In the business realm, small players are becoming ever more marginalized as a consequence of draconian patent and copyright laws; internationally, our actions are almost universally reviled due to our government's insane drive to impose our system, and artifacts of our system, upon other sovereign countries. Our military is being misused, our economy is being outsourced, land ownership has become an illusion that can be shattered at any moment by a local government seeking higher tax revenues, and a myriad of other problems of similar divisiveness and corrosive capacity eat away at our day to day lives.
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