(March 22, 2025 at 11:59 am)HappySkeptic Wrote:(March 22, 2025 at 11:34 am)Hippea Fly Guy Wrote: Fair enough, share where it derives it's authority? There are no natural law parallels prohibitions or proscriptions for stealing, deception or killing these are all effective survival strategies rewarded in nature and anathema to democracy. Clearly it's not based on anything natural. It's not nature, evolution and biology that has an issue with LGBTQ, those objections come from society, governed by mob rule (your Democracy) based on something other than objective reality and natural selection.
First, no country has a true Democracy. They have "representative democracy" or "Republic" at best.
The U.S. Democratic system is partly based on the government of ancient Rome. It gives enough power to various classes of society so that they feel their voices are heard. There may be moral philosophy behind the concepts of "one person, one vote", but in the end the system has to promote stability.
Democracy gives the governed a say over their lot in life. I say that is a moral imperative, but it isn't actually required for stability. A brutal dictatorship can be stable if it listens to the people just enough to quell rebellion. The rest comes from control of media and instant suppression of dissent.
As for community-positive vs selfish action, those have nothing to do with democracy. Collective action have clear survival strategies for a clan or group, and are always at odds with selfishness. A stable society will find ways to balance these in a way that people can support. Good law is a benefit even to those who would prefer to screw over others, even if they can't see it.
Moral systems come from a combination of complex human nature, and human-generated philosophies that we agree should benefit us all if universally followed.
Let's narrow the scope a bit and reduce the hiding places for the 800# gorilla in the room. In this context democracy vs republic is a distinction without a difference they are essentially the same and always subject to the prevailing world view of society. Society based on agreements and cooperation where people agreed not to steal, murder and oppress one another based on "you name it" and succeeded, point it up, please. We've been here 600,000 years give or take a couple thousand years "societied" up about 8000 years ago so it shouldn't be to difficult to point up one egalitarian society mainstream or fringe that's didn't oppress some group in the last 10,000 years.
Human nature is no different from animal nature nor anymore complicated. It's a handy excuse when you want rationalize tossing the baby but keeping the bath water and argue for the same environment with different people in charge. As Huxley put it "in the garden protected from the ever-pressuring cosmic process", I believe your words were "selfish actions". Human generated philosophies indeed, Judeo/Christian philosophies. There is a price to the perceived safety in the garden.
The cooperation argument presupposes agreement, when in reality, for the majority of our history, cooperation likely manifest itself as Denisovan Prime deciding it was best that everyone cooperated with him or risk exposing their brain housing group to a lighter knot or other Mousterian tool. Do not confuse cooperation with domestication, self or otherwise.
Where there is life, there is competition for resources. Survive long enough to pass on your genes. The rest is religion.