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Parliaments don't scale
Tim GILMAN
Saturday, 5 April 2003 22:24:57
World Parl Email List,
In December my real life took precedence, but I'm happy to again have time to dedicate to the discussion at hand. Although late to the party, I'll try and stay with the current topic. Topic 5 is this:
* How can we create a movement for global democracy and a world parliament and invite everyone to participate? *
After catching up on a few hundred emails, I find myself torn between conflicting ideas. Some people have expressed that only a structure of world parliament is capable of making sense of billions of individual voices.
Please do not misunderstand me; I deeply desire the creation of a world parliament to create sanity in our world. I fully support the efforts of entities attempting to pursue and ratify robust international law. However, I don't think the parliament model is currently possible given that it would require ratification by countries that are politically unable to give up some areas of sovereignty. I wish the situation were different, but if peace and justice are to be obtained, other methods must be considered.
The writing of Lucile W. Green on Dec/3/02 regarding cities as the basis of global governance instead of nations made me pause (for 3 months!):
* How about cities? Cities are natural and voluntary concentrations of people in organized communities with local systems of organized self-government. *
I don't think Lucile meant to make the point that cities are the smallest pieces of human organization that could be used to build a larger world parliament. I think Lucile's point is that cities are the largest conglomerates of * local systems of organized self-government *.
The writing of Marielle Jensen helped me interpret Lucile's idea.
Specifically, the idea of sociocracy really drove home the notion that people communicate best in small groups. Other people have touched on the idea that the greater the number of people involved in a discussion, the more likely discourse will be replaced by competing monologues.
Indeed, this is convincing rhetoric to support a world parliament based on representative democracy.
Marielle Jensen also wrote * fractal structures * when describing sociocracy. At first I laughed out loud (I love fractals -- they show up in the weirdest places!), but then I realized cities are about as big as human organizations get before the same pattern is played out on ever larger scales. It was then that Lucile W. Green's comment about cities hit me over the head like a rolling pin.
Simply put, parliaments don't scale
Simply put, parliaments don't scale. They function for something as large as a city, but anything larger leads to problems where people are no longer able to directly evaluate and participate in government proceedings (that's what representatives are for, after all). On a national scale, parliaments are only considered * democracies * in that every so often citizens exchange votes for representation.
A major original tenet of an acceptable world parliament was the idea of transparency. That is, the proceedings of the world parliament would necessarily be fully accessible to any citizen. A major conflict I've been trying to resolve is this: How can a system of representative democracy in the form of world parliament guarantee transparency? For example, if a citizen discovers flaws in certain aspects of a governmental agency, would the citizen need to go through the elected representatives to attempt redress? Since representatives can claim * too busy *, the citizen is effectively excluded from participation in the government.
Rather than discard some of the more reasonable requirements that a global democracy must address (like transparency) in order to immediately arrive at a solution (world parliament), I prefer to continue posing questions until the problems become manageable.
Reducing complex problems into manageable subproblems
Since I'm a computer programmer, I've become familiar with reducing complex problems into manageable subproblems. I think the * world parliament * part of Topic 5 is too problematic, so I'd like to remove it from my line of questioning. Topic 5.1 might be:
* How can we create a movement for global democracy and invite everyone to participate? *
Global democracy is still too big of a problem to chew on, so how about local democracy instead? Topic 5.2 might be:
* How can we create a movement for local democracy and invite everyone to participate? *
Finally, I'm not sure the entire planet needs to be concerned with whatever local democracy one is currently engaged in, so Topic 5.3 might be:
* How can we create a movement for local democracy and invite local people to participate? *.
I'll try my best to come up with a reasonable answer, but I've already written too much for one email!
Warm regards from Mountain View, California, =- Tim
WP21 Alliance Forum on a World Parliament for the 21st Century
E-mail : world-parl@forums.alliance21.org
Fax 1 717 264 5036
Information, inscriptions, désinscriptions: germa@alliance21.org
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