Letting democracy win

What if we could make democratic elections ... well ... democratic and meaningful?

Every four year, Norwegian citizens elect a new Norwegian government, although we statistically end up electing the same more often than we elect a new one. Every time, there are massive election campaigns, similar to the campaigns we see in other democracies around the world, with parties touring the country and bashing other parties, debating each other and occasionally trying to bribe voters. So are elections truly a representation of the people, or is the government hijacked by PR agencies?

Political engagement

In an actual democracy, people should at least be aware of what they think about an issue for the entirety of the four years the government sits. If a new political issue comes up now, right after the election, you have an entire four years to get your facts straight. Use that chance, or your vote will be hijacked by people who will not give you time to even think if their argument hold or not.

In addition to having a well thought out opinion, you also have the possibility and right to influence politicians directly by writing them. If you found a documentable flaw in an argument, make sure it gets documented and well known.

Campaign rules

It gets ugly. My first idea was to start up an NGO that keeps track of party karma. Every time a party presents something negative about another party, karma goes down. If they advertise their own programme, karma goes up. If they lie, karma goes down.

Better yet, this should go into legislation. To protect democracy, parties should not be allowed to slander each other. Three strikes and you're out of politics. Three out of the party, and the party is out of the election. Campaign about your own platform, not about how ridiculous you think other people's platforms are.

Fact check

One of the parties in the winning coalition of last week's election in Norway defended their platform with arguments that didn't hold up to fact checks or even logic check. Somehow, they were exempted from media scrutiny. I want to bring forth an abstraction of at least two issues known to me:

1) Moving the threshold the wrong way
A group of people A get divided into group B and group C. As it turns out, a very unpopular group D is made up ONLY of people from group B and E. Group C, on the other hand, are just fine. So to reduce the number of people in group D, they want to move the division threshold, so that more people from group A go into group B and fewer into group C, thus increasing the number of people who will end up in group D.

2) Restricting the wrong group
Two groups of people are under different legislation. There are great restrictions on who can apply to be part of group A, and you have no rights to benefit C. Due to international agreements, it is very easy to get into group B, where you do get and abuse benefit C. In order to reduce the abuse of benefit C, they wish to put heavier restrictions on people who want to join group A. To be able to hide that this is a flawed argument, they lied about group A's rights to benefit C. A fact check would have revealed this.

Even in a political climate where parties DO criticize each other, there was never a protest against this flawed logic. Even the state run "politically neutral" national TV station NRK did not confront or reveal the party about their lie in example 2.

New rule about politics: Three lies and you're out!

Winning

...and every year, we hear some parties saying that they "lost" and will look into what they did wrong in this campaign, while other parties cheer and celebrate that they won over the other parties. However, parties are not supposed to win a democratic election. The people are. And the people win the election only if the parliament accurately represents the diverse opinions of the people.

I am looking forward to the day when all elected representatives celebrate that "yes, we have put together a good representation of the population, and are happy to work with each other."

Ministers

After the election is over and coalitions are formed, parties negotiate about core issues and ministers. Since ministers carry the power to implement politics, the resulting politics will come from these negotiations. This means that if everyone who elected party A did so because of issue B, are at risk of getting party C take that post, and party A gets post D instead, even though that's the one topic where the voters disagreed with party A.

Therefore, it would be more appropriate if we could elect which party each minister should come from. During the election, I could elect one party for minister of environmental protection, and another party for minister of education, because that would more accurately represent what I think in a holistic manner.

Summary

So here's the action plan:

• Make use of all four years to find out what you mean in every political issue. Do it systematically.
• Write to politicians about your findings. Get heard.
• Document and publicize lies and flaws of logic.
• Fact check the arguments.
• During elections, parties should advertise their programmes, not what they think of other parties' programmes.
• Campaign rule: Trash opposing party three times, and you're out of politics. A party losing three candidates this way, and the party is out of the election.
• At any time: Three lies and you're out of politics.
• Celebrate everyone who got elected, not just your own coalition. You are all there to represent the people.
• Allow people vote on which party should take which ministry post for "holistic voting"

Think tank

So who wants to fund my politically independent political think tank?

Dimensions of the Israel-Palestine conflict

It is possibly the most well known conflicts in the world, it has been going on for a while now. Not the longest war in history, but may very well end up earning the title.

Much can be said about the complexity of the situation. In a video from Prager University, Dennis Prager says that he studied "semester after semester discussing the Middle East conflict as if it were the most complex conflict in the world, when in fact it is probably the easiest conflict in the world to describe. It may be the hardest to solve, but it really is the easiest to describe."

The explanation then goes on about the "Israel wants to live, but surrounding Arab states refuse to recognize Israel" perspective. I see this as one axis of the conflict, and a natural conflict by karmic law. After all, the modern state of Israel was founded on the assumption that everyone wanted to kill the jews. Without this assumption, there would be no reason for the Israeli Jewish state to exist in the first place, and the assumption is thereby ingrained into the state at birth, and a task for the state to overcome. Though that is a slightly buddhist digression.

My experience studying various conflicts tells me that the longer a war has been going on, the more complex it becomes. As I have a fairly visual mind, I made a quick drawing of some of the perceived conflicts and a few interesting cash flows (green).

Each conflict by themselves can easily be described, as each conflict is one dimensional. Together, they make a messy two dimensional picture. I note a conflict between the Israeli military and the Israeli government, in that, as with any other government agency, they need to fight for its budgets. Indeed, this means that the military needs military conflict and demonstrated real threats to avoid cuts.

In short, any conflict is about one or more of: power, money, land, revenge. Politics. And as we know, conflicts by themselves do not kill, though they may verily be used an excuse. Therefore, I wish to introduce my three dimensional model, which is what is making this so much more interesting:

This is what would be the proper, religious and ethical axis. While everyone are looking at individual one dimensional conflicts to try to solve the two dimensional problem, the reason we get involved is how we feel about the third dimension, the axis of good and evil. The conflicts themselves may be legit, and conflicts do occur, it is how they are dealt with that is problematic.

As conflicts get deeper, people are pulled downwards, into a darkness where only conflict is perceived, terror and murder are permissible tools, and you're moving away from the divine. Those who manage to elevate themselves from the conflict and see the real madness from above just wish for peace.

In the Israeli/Palestinian area, there are people both above and below the surface. And as is typical, the evil side has a huge propaganda machine. Evil has used propaganda in order to turn "the enemy" into aliens you're allowed to kill. Good has typically not had such a propaganda machine. So if good is to win - that is, for peace to be accomplished - as many people as possible need to be lifted from the hateful abyss of the underworld to the peaceful overworld.

By doing so, those who are involved in each conflict will eventually find their own solutions, we don't need to interfere with every little detail of every little or major conflict, that will all just take care of itself. And this is the basis of many a religion; the fight is not between the Israeli and the Palestinian, it is between good and evil. If we want to help, what we need to find out is, how do we pull people up from the abyss and show them the light?

Fortunately, there seems to be a point where civilian populations just won't take it any more. And hopefully, the people will rise from being the people that everyone want to blow up - to become the people that loves everyone.

Honour, stress and bullying

In the Art of Manliness blog, an interesting article series gives a good description of Honour, its function and in part 2, its decline. Of particular interest is the traditional immediate response to injuries to one's honour. While my first thoughts on honour practices is that this may increase stress, my latest studies of stress makes me now think otherwise.

Maintaining a strategy of immediate response allows the body to complete the full adrenalin-fight-rest-cycle. When the response is completed, the entire thing is over. This, however, is difficult to achieve in an honourless society. It is particularly difficult in situations where you have to battle a boss, who launches the insult friday night, and you can not respond until monday morning. Further, when you do make a response, it is not necessarily the end of the story, because it now has to go through lengths of red tape. The entire thing may last for months before it is resolved, which means that you're likely to generate adrenalin in your body continually for the entire period, wrecking your health.

Further, groups of people with horizontal honour increases social skills, which in turn also reduces stress and increases your support network. Honour is a guideline for personal integrity, which means you have to look inward to strengthen your inner core. It is this perspective that seems to be missing today. As I pointed out in an earlier article, looking outwards to support a fragile inner core is exactly what generates bullies and bully victims.

Which means that honour is another piece of the puzzle.