RE: What is the number?
December 15, 2021 at 5:27 pm
(This post was last modified: December 15, 2021 at 5:31 pm by Anomalocaris.)
The goal of democracy is to ensure people’s legitimate desire for fairness does not require rioting to pursue. That is a always a worthy goal to pursue, yet experience shows that has never been a goal that could be consistently met over the long run by any practical system. So From time to time any democracy would need rioting for its own good.
The longer any democracy, or for that matter any government, attempt to hide the fact that it is no longer possible for some legitimate desire for fairness to be pursued with any chance of success without rioting, the more violent the eventual inevitable riots will be. Suppress the fact for long enough, and the eventual riot will be violent enough to upend the entire edifice.
Arguably other biggest fundamental survival advantage of democracy over autocracy is it is possible to accommodate a periodic moderate level of rioting in a democracy, leading to periodical beneficial change. With autocracy any rioting is a direct threat to perceived power of the government, thus it is incapable of tolerating rioting calling for change and would thus suppress it forcefully for a long time. So autocracy is more likely to fall cataclysmically when the pressure to riot can not longer be contained.
The longer any democracy, or for that matter any government, attempt to hide the fact that it is no longer possible for some legitimate desire for fairness to be pursued with any chance of success without rioting, the more violent the eventual inevitable riots will be. Suppress the fact for long enough, and the eventual riot will be violent enough to upend the entire edifice.
Arguably other biggest fundamental survival advantage of democracy over autocracy is it is possible to accommodate a periodic moderate level of rioting in a democracy, leading to periodical beneficial change. With autocracy any rioting is a direct threat to perceived power of the government, thus it is incapable of tolerating rioting calling for change and would thus suppress it forcefully for a long time. So autocracy is more likely to fall cataclysmically when the pressure to riot can not longer be contained.
