Y'know, it's not often I get to examine these assumptions about democracy... I think you have a point, in that the 'consumer' shares some complicity in their own deception... It's a fine line between acknowleging responsibility and blaming the victim, the kind of morass I always seem to get caught up in whenever I suggest abused women have some responsibility to change their circumstances.
Where it really gets troublesome, is when I cop to my own elitism, and acknowledge that I don't really think people on the whole are smart enough to run this complicated a civilization democratically. Which begs the question of who *is* smart enough.
When I think about how this experiment in democracy began, the agrarian economy that Jefferson was so in love with is a couple orders of magnitude less complex than what we live in now. And history is chock-full of civilizations that outsmart themselves to beyond the point of sustainability, so there's this huge, slow crash.
The Briscoe Gap fantasy in Fire Upon The Deep is just another version of this wish for really clever good guys to swoop in on a spaceship and make things really simple for a change.
I've concluded that the defining point of any society is not when one peron says to another, "You've got to do it this way, or I'll kill you." It's actually that point at which the person of lower social rank says, "OK, teach me how this works" and consents to being led. It's hardly surpprising to me how few people of good conscience want to step up to bat as leader-teachers, given what keeps happening to the best ones...
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
manufacturing informed consent
Where it really gets troublesome, is when I cop to my own elitism, and acknowledge that I don't really think people on the whole are smart enough to run this complicated a civilization democratically. Which begs the question of who *is* smart enough.
When I think about how this experiment in democracy began, the agrarian economy that Jefferson was so in love with is a couple orders of magnitude less complex than what we live in now. And history is chock-full of civilizations that outsmart themselves to beyond the point of sustainability, so there's this huge, slow crash.
The Briscoe Gap fantasy in Fire Upon The Deep is just another version of this wish for really clever good guys to swoop in on a spaceship and make things really simple for a change.
I've concluded that the defining point of any society is not when one peron says to another, "You've got to do it this way, or I'll kill you." It's actually that point at which the person of lower social rank says, "OK, teach me how this works" and consents to being led. It's hardly surpprising to me how few people of good conscience want to step up to bat as leader-teachers, given what keeps happening to the best ones...