The Economist ~ The Republic

Day 1,040, 14:24 • Published in United Kingdom United Kingdom • by Spite313


Dear friends,

I’m writing to you today about a topic close to my heart in this game: democracy, public involvement in government and the encouragement of both those things. I was reading a quite funny little parody/criticism of me penned by some minor political party yesterday, and it occurred to me to write a rebuttal. In this little rant, the angry youth of Britain accused me of being a Philosopher King, tormenting Britain’s citizenry with the forever-unattainable carrot of social democracy whilst machine-gunning down citizens as they attempted to vote. The artwork was actually quite good!

Anyway, the Platonic reference had me thinking. I’m not a fan of Plato to be honest. I’ve never believed in destiny, or really any of his more esoteric displays of abstract thought regarding the soul. However, I have chosen to day to write about res publica, the republic. A republic is a very advanced form of democratic government, which is the main form of democracy in use today. Republics have an electoral system whereby most official posts are elected. In most countries, this mean a legislature (law making body like parliament or congress) and an executive (President, dear Leader etc). In some places, everything from the Judge to the head of the local street-sweepers is an elected position. The point of this is that public decisions should be made by people accountable to the public. So if they screw up, you kick them out.

Direct democracy (or just democracy) is the most basic form of democracy. A small tribe reaches a river, and have to make the decision whether to sacrifice their supplies to swim the river and reach more fertile hunting grounds, or stay this side and keep their gear. Of the twenty people, fourteen elect to swim, so the whole tribe swims. Democracy in action. In ancient Greece, the landed elites sometimes practiced a form of democracy, which probably originated when the chiefs of many small family or clan units started working together in one city. The heads of families could go along, have their say, and vote on decisions. The largest cities at the time we around twenty thousand people, which probably produced a few hundred voters.



Later, as votes became more complicated than “yes let’s fight”, “no, I don’t want more tax”, bureaucracy was formed. The point of a bureaucracy was to actually do what the people asked. It’s easy enough to vote for a new bridge to be built, but someone has to find the money, the stone, the stonemasons, and so on to build it. This professional class could actually make decisions based on prior knowledge, and to some extent limited democracy by putting it within the framework of the realistic. So voting for huge bridges and no taxes no longer became an option, and votes were decided on by someone who knew what was going on, and did the job full time.

Eventually this complexification created a political class, whose main job was to organise and develop the state for the benefit of the people. Whereas an ordinary citizen could quite easily decide whether or not they wanted to pick up a sword and stab a neighbour, deciding on whether the state should invest 2.2 or 2.3% of national income into the development of new irrigation procedures was a pretty specialist (and boring) thing to ballot him over. These decisions however still needed to have some public input, so specialists were elected by the public to make decisions. This way the public was still voting, but by proxy. They put their individual vote into proxies, who voted with the power of one hundred, one thousand, one million citizens. These people would be surrounded by bureaucrats and experts who would be able to advise them on all aspects of every decision, and they made the decision with a level of awareness usually only held by a specialist.

As political leadership moved from an amateur to a professional role, much was gained. Direct democracy was still preserved in some cases, for clear cut issues which the government feels is beyond their mandate. Examples of this are national independence movements, votes on the sacrifice of state (and therefore public) sovereignty, and so on. These “big” issues are ones which by necessity effect the social contract agreed between government and people, which is basically a transfer of power from many individuals to a few. If this power is weakened, or changed, or the elected are no longer located in your country, then the contract has been changed and a referendum is needed. What a referendum isn’t really needed for is the “price of cheese act, 2009” - Or whatever other madness arises from the bowels of the bureaucratic collective.



How does this apply to eRepublik? Well those of you with memories will recall that upon the original proposition of a system of national referenda, I agreed the concept was a good one. For matters such as joining alliances, referendums are very important. It is arguable that joining the PEACE bloc in 2009 was the most crucial decision this country has ever made, and it should have went to a national vote. However, the technological means didn’t exist, and so we settled for a super-majority of congress. If this was rerun now, I would argue more strongly for a referendum.

However, what this concept eventually became, in the form of the Democracy Act, was a concerted attempt from minority groups within the UK to circumvent congress. Failing to pass their laws there, they attempted to introduce a system where they felt they had a better chance. The law was full of loopholes and problems: no named means of running referendums; a very low minimum number of votes; no definition of terms; no review body. The Act was basically potentially a complete transferral of all government and congressional authority to the public vote, and a frighteningly small vote at that. History has taught us that although referendums are good for general topics, specialist subjects are better handled by specialists.



In my opinion the proponents of this Act took completely the wrong angle. Rather than trying to buck not only thousands of years of experience and development, as well as the game mechanics, they should have attacked the root of the problem. Our goal as politicians is to multiply, as crude as that sounds. We need to understand two things. Firstly, the forums and IRC aren’t as accessible as they probably should be. Secondly, not everyone wants to access it. A hell of a lot of people join a game to mess about, fight a little, try and balance their income/expenditure and get rich. Yeah, they’ll vote for representatives, but they don’t necessarily want to vote on the Cheese Act 2009. They’d much rather nominate someone who really likes cheese to do it.

Our goal should not be to try and regress to a situation where we deny these basic facts, but instead to act upon them. We need to give every citizen the knowledge needed to run for congress should they wish, the information to choose a party, choose a future. Choose their President, and get rid of them if they wish. What citizens in this game want is to be able to play without people constantly telling them “do this!” as if there was only one way to play. Just because you love politics, and think that Cheese will liberate the masses from bourgeois oppression doesn’t mean they do, and if they do, then recruit them, and you’ll be overrunning the cheese-hating fascists in parliament in no time.

So before you start writing your next article to dissect my words today, think about it. Instead of the easy route, choose the harder one. Instead of just whacking up an impromptu system to poll the public, ask yourself “do they give a s**t?!” Even better, ask them. Likelihood is, they don’t.

Iain Keers