Democracy and Dimensionality

Last night, narcotized by common drugs and the general ennui of modern life (here, we call it sian), I fell asleep at my desk. While imprinting a standard Qwerty keyboard onto my face, I had some odd thoughts in that fleeting moment in which you aren't sure whether you're asleep or not.

The first thought was nothing new. 'Democracy is a sham,' said the Ghost of Politics Past. I sniggered in my mind while my body drooled mindlessly.

'Democracy doesn't work, or it works by not working,' said the Ghost of Politics Present. I thought of how India and the USA worked. Huge confederations of many states, each with conflicting interests, with any democrats in them united by the urge to mobilise large bodies of people to produce narrow ends (something like a serious workout regime). My mind nodded vigorously.

'Democracy is a multidimensional construct which people fail to understand because they map it to at most two dimensions, which is far too few dimensions for any mapping to succeed,' said the Ghost of Politics Progressive. 'But with the advent of quantum computing nodes interfaced to human brains, we will have the ultimate democracy, and it will prove to be the most useless thing ever constructed because it will reduce the solution space for any problem to nothing.'

At that point, I was sure I was asleep because the conscious mind cannot handle such thoughts without thinking of Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. But I was also sure that there was a great deal of truth in what the last GPP had said. When you predicate ideology and consequent action on something which is meant to represent the largest possible range of human opinion, you are actually painting yourself into a corner because humans are by nature complex and contrary. The more degrees of freedom you allow, the less actual progress there is.

It's enough to make you an authoritarian, it is. Sigh.