3.1.1 Basis of Policies of Humanism
Democratic Anarchy is the Future of Democracy
The introductory speech concluded that democracy in the world today oscillates between poor and no democracy. In all democratic systems, there is a big problem in protecting the interests of weak individuals from dominant people in everyday life. In today’s alienated society, man can create a mass of inconveniences for man for which he is not responsible to anyone, making unfavourable changes in the community. In this way, inconvenient tensions are created in society. This phenomenon is almost legalized, as one can see in everyday life. In the “developed” West, individuals seek a job by trying to sell themselves. Significant servility to the employer is expected at work as otherwise, the worker may lose their jobs. As a consumer, the individual is exposed to aggressive propaganda. In day-to-day life, the individual has almost no protection against offences, tricks or any other form of behaviour that bothers them.
The way out lies in equal human rights. The future of democracy must give people equal rights, which means utterly equal power in society. It will solve society’s problems. The future of democracy will no longer be based primarily on voting for the people but on evaluating the people’s actions. Individuals will be given equal and independent legislative, judicial and executive powers to judge other people. A little power in the hands of individuals may incentivize people to comply with the interests of others in the best possible way. This kind of democracy will be simple, quick, and efficient. It will completely change the foundation of social policy and build a good society.
Let people allow everyone who, within the scope of their activity, can affect others in any way to do it freely upon their will. People do not even have many choices because they cannot interfere with the freedom of activities of presidents, doctors and mechanics, or any other person, nor do they have the ability, the time, nor the right, not even the desire, to do so. However, all these people may create advantages and disadvantages for members of society through their actions. People can sense whether or not the activities of a president, doctor, mechanic, or any other person, bring some advantages or disadvantages to them. And according to it, individuals should have the right to award a person who creates advantages for them and punish a person who produces disadvantages for them. Such a right would direct all people to perform the most significant benefits and the least damage to other people. Such an orientation of society would indeed follow the people’s will in the best possible way and, therefore, would present a developed democracy.
This study claims that equal rights of people are the only proper orientation of society. Let each person get the same power to negatively evaluate, let’s say, three individuals who hurt them the most in any month and positively assess three individuals who create the most significant benefits in a month. For example, if a prime minister, neighbour, and boss harm a person the most in one month, they will negatively evaluate them. On the other hand, if a friend, teacher, and singer, produce the most significant benefits to a person, they will normally positively assess them. Also, people may use all the evaluations for positive or negative assessments or in any combination. This is the essence, and the rest is a technical matter which will be performed through an application on the Internet.
The sum of positive and negative evaluations that individuals receive from other people could be publicly presented on the Internet. The counting of these evaluations will tell everyone how appreciated they are in society. These evaluations will become at least as important to people as page visits, likes, and followers are important today. Nobody would like to be on the negative side of assessment, but on the positive side as much as possible. They will achieve this goal by working to create the most significant advantages for the community and diminish or abolish all disadvantages. This will create a good society.
In this manner, all people will become equal authorities with a bit of direct power in society. Given that all people will have equal rights and the power to give their awards and punishments to other people independently of any written rules, such a democracy will present anarchy. That is the reason why this evaluation system is named democratic anarchy.
Democratic anarchy is, in fact, a fair marketplace of human behaviour in which individuals have equal power to present good people just as customers portray good products by purchasing them. Such an assessment will objectively show positive people, just as the commodity market objectively indicates the quality of goods. However, democratic anarchy will be more valuable than the commodity market because it directly presents problematic people, while the commodity market cannot directly point to problematic commodities. It will also be more objective than the commodity market because all people will have the same power of evaluation. Democratic anarchy will contribute to the improvement of society more than the commodity market can contribute to the advancement of goods.
People will get direct power in society for the first time in the history of humankind. Such power will eliminate uncontrolled or insufficiently controlled individual power originating in privileged social status. People should understand that the privileged positions of individuals are the basis of problems for society. The lack of equal human rights is why humanity was never good. Democratic anarchy would direct each member of the community to respect other people. People will become values to all people. People will be considered equal for the first time, resulting in harmonious and constructive social relations.
Everyone will judge other people freely. Many people complained that individuals might evaluate other people maliciously because of spite or envy. The answer is that such a risk exists, but an individual assessment cannot cause significant harm to anyone. The damage an individual can cause is insignificant compared to that of state authorities because they can force the entire country in the wrong direction. In the proposed system, such authorities would get a large number of negative evaluations from people, which through minor regulation, could prevent them from producing evil as dictators did throughout history. Is it worthwhile to allow individuals to judge others wrongly if such “trials” would prevent major destructions in society?
However, people who would perform ill-placed evaluations would not be able to hide their counterproductive orientation. They would show it by their actions, making them receive negative evaluations from society to a greater extent. This will force them to pay more attention to getting to know themselves and find a way to achieve a constructive orientation. Each individual may, by their activity, bring conveniences and inconveniences to society. Therefore, each individual will get positive and negative grades, which the community will need to accept. However, the people who create a more significant number of inconveniences to society would get negative evaluations from more people. On a longer-term basis, it will force them to change their behaviour.
The evaluation system is already in place in societies where public opinion is sought about the success of some actions. However, such an assessment does not have direct power. The community would need to have a lot of courage and wisdom to adopt such a measure, but then it will realize huge benefits.
Something similar to democratic anarchy was already implemented on YouTube, where people get a chance to vote for songs or videos with a “like” or “dislike.” No more than 5% of people evaluated songs or videos inappropriately, which means that 95% of people valued the authors of these videos fairly. This suggests that democratic anarchy will serve society properly or even better than YouTube because people will have limited evaluation rights and will not spend the evaluations irrationally. They will most likely evaluate other people honestly because they will feel honoured by having direct power in society.
It can be assumed with high certainty that the equal power of people will, by its nature, make malice and envy hardly exist. However, if something like that still happens, each person would be able to correct a possible wrongful assessment that they gave to others by instigating a correct evaluation even many years later when they experience enlightenment under the influence of equal human rights. Their conscience will make them do it.
Those who are still suspicious about democratic anarchy, it may first be implemented by presenting the evaluations only to the evaluated people themselves and not to anybody else. This would be like people listening to anonymous gossip about themselves, which everyone is interested in. As a result, most people will try to improve their behaviour in society. However, the secret results of the evaluation will not stop the worst people from continuing bad behaviour. Then community may decide to discourage the wrongdoers by democratic acceptance of the full implementation of democratic anarchy. And even then, if people receive more favourable than unfavourable evaluations, they may keep the result a secret from other people. If the total assessment is negative, it will be visible to everyone, forcing negatively evaluated people to improve their behaviour.
Many people, including university professors, have criticized democratic anarchy, saying that people cannot judge others objectively. The answer to them is that objectivity is desirable but not essential. Besides, voters do not need to be clever or educated to have the right to vote, so why should this be the case in democratic anarchy? People will judge others the way they feel, and every person will be obliged to consider the consequences their actions may have on other people. This is what is needed for creating a good society. By adopting democratic anarchy, people will appreciate other people, which will bring considerable benefits to the community.
But the question remains: To what extent can each person evaluate the causes of benefits and troubles objectively, and therefore, how competent are they to evaluate the actions of another person? People are subjective so they may misjudge people with their grades. The answer is: In the direct relationship between people, every person should make decisions as they experience them, and society is obliged to respect every person’s sensory and emotional states, no matter how subjective they are. Nevertheless, a system that supports equal human rights will develop objectivity in the community. An orientation that respects every individual in society is the only correct one. People who receive negative grades will have to learn what is wrong with them, which will teach them to form objective criteria for valorizing the benefits and disadvantages of acting in society. As a set of subjective members, humanity will learn objectivity through shared practice.
Objectivity will remove conflicts in society. In the future, people will probably only give and receive good evaluations and then they will know that they live in a good society. After these explanations, no one with good intentions for the bright future of humankind should refuse democratic anarchy. However, due to the influences, authorities have been imposing throughout the history of humanity, people hesitate even to discuss democratic anarchy.
Once democratic anarchy is accepted by society, it will not give much power to individuals, but their collective evaluations will have enormous power. A person who receives many negative assessments would try even harder to avoid doing anything inconvenient to other people. Moreover, the people who receive inadequate evaluations will never know who has evaluated them negatively, so they will try to improve their behaviour towards everyone. As a result, bullies will not exist at school; employers will not abuse their employees, neighbours will not produce obnoxious noise at night, salespeople will not cheat their customers, politicians will not lie to people, etc.
Democratic anarchy will take privileged powers from all the people. This will eliminate social evil and form a good society where all people will try to please other people in the best possible way. When people get accustomed to the mutual evaluation, they may democratically decide to increase the power of each assessment by assigning, for example, the value of one dollar to each of them. Each positive evaluation a person receives from somebody will bring them one dollar, and each negative assessment will take one dollar away from them. These evaluations would not affect ordinary people much. If two people do not like each other, they may negatively evaluate each other for years, which would not be a big deal. Getting or losing one dollar in the developed world does not mean much.
The power of evaluations will extremely efficiently affect authorities responsible for making decisions in society. The higher the leader’s position in the community, the greater their responsibility to people will be. For example, the US President might get 100,000,000 negative evaluations from the American people for bad policies, lies, and criminal aggression against countries. That would cost the president $100,000,000 in only one month. On the other hand, the president’s supporters might not necessarily evaluate such presidents positively because they might have higher positive evaluation priorities and spend their positive evaluations elsewhere. Non-privileged presidents would no longer dare perform bad policies. And if it happens somehow, they would leave their positions. Only the most skilful and brave individuals would dare lead countries. They will not be authorities anymore but peoples’ servants. Democratic anarchy would, in its very roots, eliminate the possibility of an emergence of particularly inconvenient leaders, fascists, nationalists, chauvinists, racists, and all potential dictators who inconveniently or destructively influence society
So, what if influential people who own mass media unfairly accuse someone of evil in society and thus prompt people to give inadequate evaluations to the wrong person? Such things are easily possible today. However, a proverb says: “Lies have short legs.” One day the lies will be revealed, and then nobody would like to be in the place of these lying individuals because the people will punish them with inadequate evaluations. They may be receiving the punishments for a long time and would not dare to be immoral again.
Furthermore, the system would allow everyone to reach satisfaction by negatively evaluating an individual who creates inconveniences for them or society. Such pleasure is more favourable, constructive, and efficient than any form of revenge that the alienated society practices. Satisfaction also brings the power of reward through positive evaluation, by which the individual supports the individual who creates conveniences.
The proposed assessment system would allow each member of society to become an authority in society. Considering that the assessed person would have no opportunity to complain, it may be expected that the community would appreciate the needs of each member, which would contribute to the formation of a convenient social orientation. Once such a system is introduced, everyone will try to get to know another individual and their needs in order not to inflict inconveniences on them unintentionally. In such a society, the individual will behave vis-à-vis other individuals with respect and in good faith. They will try to act in the way they will bring to the other individual and society as whole fewer inconveniences and more conveniences.
It may be assumed that the system of mutual assessment will lead to a grouping of people according to the principle of related interests. Society members with equal interests will become relatively isolated to accomplish in mutual contact more conveniences and avoid the creation of inconveniences to the society members with opposite interests. In this way, the system will allow the exercise of different interests in society and the development of different orientations.
In such a system, all inhabitants will permanently try to create the most significant possible conveniences for individuals and society. Historically viewed, one can accept the rule that in the cases where such social orientation existed, the community used to prosper and lived a prosperous and constructive life, while in systems where individuals found conveniences to the detriment of the society; a destructive orientation used to occur leading to the break-up of the social order.
The point of democracy is to create rules that allow people to live well. So far, the best result has been achieved by the law, but laws have not solved social problems. Democratic anarchy can resolve disputes in society more successfully than rigid normative acts can. Mutual evaluation of people will form unwritten rules of social behaviour that will provide a better solution for individuals and society than laws can regulate. Democratic anarchy will create a fairer society, reducing crime in the community, so the judiciary will have less work to do. However, judges and prosecutors, who conduct proceedings against individuals and law enforcement agencies that protect society, will have some work to do and therefore must have evaluative immunity.
But once democratic anarchy is established, people will have the power to administer justice independently, so they will seek it less in the courts. As a result, the courts will have less work to do and lose importance along with the state’s repressive apparatus, including the police and prisons. State laws will become obsolete in the future, which means they will go down in history. This will free people from the alienation imposed by the authorities throughout history and bring them closer to their nature.
Democratic anarchy cannot be corrupted. On the contrary, it will most likely eliminate immorality in society. Through equal evaluation rights, people will learn what is and is not objectively ethical. People will obey the ethic they spontaneously establish. There is no greater morality than equal human rights can provide. This is probably the only moral possible because ethics can hardly be based on privileges. Privileged people cannot escape from promoting self-interests which quickly moves them out of morality. Democratic anarchy alone will be capable of creating an ethical and fair society.
Democratic anarchy will, for the first time, be able to enforce the golden rule “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” which is well capable of creating a good society. In essence, democratic anarchy has accepted the principle of a fair market economy with which it rewards the good behaviour of individuals. It should work perfectly. Once democracy anarchy is established, it will initiate fast and significant social improvement. The moment people get the right to evaluate others and be evaluated by others, they will be less willing to confront others and be more inclined to please them. This is the best outcome of democracy possible. The technology needed for the implementation of democratic anarchy is already available. Democratic anarchy can be implemented soon, which means a much better society can be quickly built. Democratic anarchy will most likely realize the dreamers’ dreams in the history of humankind.
Ancient direct democracy will be needed again
Under pressure from democratic anarchy, governments will follow the needs of the people. They will not dare make the most important decisions for society alone because they can easily make mistakes that might bring about the people’s wrath and a large number of negative evaluations. Suppose authorities are not sure what the people’s needs are. In that case, their responsibility, clearly defined by the respect of peoples’ evaluations, will direct them to discover love towards peoples’ participation in strategic decision-making processes through referendums. In this sense, they are likely to develop a variant of ancient democracy that will, quickly and efficiently, involve people in direct decision-making about common needs, most likely through the Internet.
The people may directly create their fiscal policy by allowing each individual to decide how much money they want to pay from their gross income for taxes. The total sum of all the people’s decisions about taxation would determine the total amount of funds allocated for taxes. People will not pay taxes as much as they want. Instead, they will form the total money for taxes, collected proportionally to their salaries. In the same way, each person can decide how to spend taxes. Each person will determine how much tax they would set aside to develop the economy, safety, education, health, infrastructure, and other collective spending needs.
Something needs to be said about democracy here. People do not have equal incomes. Labour that achieves higher productivity should have a higher income to contribute more to production. People will voluntarily deduct taxes from their income so that higher salaries will have greater voting power. On the other hand, people will have to set aside money for taxes because the organization of society has a price. A tax-free society cannot survive. The management of the commune will have to determine the possible intervals of tax policy in percentages with the approval of the commune assembly. For example, people may be given a choice to allocate up to 10% above and below existing taxes. If the current tax is 20%, people will choose taxes between 10% and 30% of their gross incomes. Such a restriction in determining the amount of taxes will reduce the differences in people’s voting power concerning the differences in their income. However, the voting power in people’s fiscal policy will not be equal.
In the economy, it is more favourable to base voting power on labour productivity than on complete equality. In the economy, people should have the power to vote in proportion to their contribution to creating the economic wealth that society possesses. It should be accepted that behind the higher achieved productivity is more valuable work. Therefore, more valuable work should be rewarded with greater voting power to stimulate people’s productivity to a greater extent and, hence, prosperity in society.
When deciding on the distribution of joint money, then voting power based on the realized productive power of workers is a good, suitable, and just method for establishing democracy because it will contribute to the development of society. In making political decisions, people must be equal, and of course, one person should have one vote.
Theoretically, people can decide on collective spending within the consumer groups as much as possible. If they are democratically allocated, all shared consumption groups will have a far more significant overall impact. Following the living experience, people will learn how much money should be collected for taxes and how to spend it. Thus, this spending will no longer be alienated from society; it will most efficiently follow people’s needs in the best way. Given that the new political system offers stable and good relations among nations, people will no longer allocate money for military expenditures. Armies will cease to exist. In the proposed democracy, waging wars will no longer be possible.
The people must directly make strategic decisions in society, such as accepting basic laws because it creates the best social policy. In making political decisions, every person normally has one vote. Nothing else can better follow the people’s interests. Professionals will make all other decisions, and they will be directly responsible to the people for those decisions. Once people get the power to participate in the decision-making process and judge those who make decisions on their behalf, it will most likely present the most developed form of democracy. One can hardly define a better political system. People will become satisfied with such a democracy and will not allow anyone to seize it from them.
The commune’s policies will no longer be formed in alienated centers of political power. It will be based on the needs of everyone so that it can be called a humanistic policy. It presents the future of democracy. One day, some political party will adopt democratic anarchy somewhere and win the election. It will be the beginning of significant political system reform and a considerable development of society.
