Democracy

how good is democracy as a way of government? does democracy necessarily mean government by referrendum? or government by debate? India tried the former and had its development stalled for years. Japan's recovery was tripped up because of democratic politicking. and where nations such as Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and Indonesia democratically elected left leaning governments, the world's greates 'advocate' of democracy decided to instigate coups and put in puppets, resulting in much suffering and chaos. so if even the world's greatest advocate of democracy have such little regards for democracy, can the world really place so much faith in it?

another reason why i think the former is not viable: the truth is rarely democratic. it is, or it is not. for example, say we take a rabbit into a room of 101 people. and we ask the people to, without further inspection of the rabbit, say whether the rabbit is male or female. does it matter if 51 people think that the rabbit is male (or female)? of course not.

so now in every situation, every matter of governance, there must be a most optimum course of action. the problem is that, most of the time, we don't know what that is. so we think, "well... one person might be wrong. let's be democratic and ask everyone's opinions. and then we take the most popular one." is it really wise to do so? for the majority can be wrong. how else could Jee-Double-U Bush get elected, not once, but twice? or how else would schools in Kansas have to teach Creationism as a viable alternative to evolution? we therefore delegate to people who are specially trained for the task of governance (just as we delegate the task of surgery to people who have gone through intensive training) and we apprise their performance once every so often, based on certain standards.

i reckon it's all about degrees and extents. anything taken to extremes are detrimental. the debate about democracy should be about what extent of involvement of the people and what extent of control should the people cede to the government. it should also be about when and under what conditions more power can be given to the government, and when the people should wield more power.

of course, based on what i've just said here, there might be some problems with Singapore's system of governance. the balance of power between the people and the government cannot be tuned rapidly enough to suit the time, often being set too heavily on the side of the government. this causes a whole set of problems. also, i feel that the 'apprisal system' will only take effect when things go too far wrong.