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What can we do to re-shape society for the better? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by testman@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

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If top of the society is immoral psychopaths with power, and most of the society is composed of people with good intentions, then there is not much hope for "beta uprising" until things go way beyond point of recovery, because powerful psychopaths will not let their power get taken away.

Not sure if this is just evolutionary biology, but this cycle of psychopaths at the top has been going on since when, at least ancient Egypt. And in all these thousands of years, the system that enables this cycle got way more reinforced than it got dismantled.

So is it maybe better idea to put benevolent people's energy towards designing and preparing a new societal system that will have built-in mechanisms for preventing corruption and malevolence? "prepare" as in get ready to implement for when the current messed up system is about to grind to a halt and collapse? Well, it would be best to figure out how to go full Benevolent Theseus™ by replacing parts of currently failing system with the corruption-proof ones.

What are some resources related to this topic? Recearch on societal dynamics, designing political systems, examples of similar revolutions that already happened, etc. Post any links that you consider relevant

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[–] TotallyHuman@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't see it as obvious. If anything it makes it harder for vested interests to have an outsized influence, since there are no traditional politicians to bribe. What flaws do you see that I'm missing?

[–] ExLisper@linux.community 1 points 1 year ago

The proxy naming is not anonymous. In normal democracy if Elon Musk wants to buy votes he can in theory pay million people $100 each to vote the way he says that there's no way for him to verify how they voted. I can take his money and then vote the other way. He wouldn't know.

With digital voting systems (when those are correctly implemented) what you do is separate the vote signature from the vote's content. I submit a encrypted vote and sing it with my certificate. It goes to system A which verifies the signatures but doesn't have the decryption key to check how I voted. After verification the signatures are stripped and encrypted votes are moved to system B (which is air gaped). System B has the decryption key so it decrypts the votes and counts them but since it doesn't have the signatures anymore it can't check which vote is mine.

The proxy system cannot function as an anonymous system. Once I pass my vote to someone I also have to able to retract it. Let's say Elon Musk has 1000 votes and I say I want to retract one. The system needs to be able to check that Elon Musk does in fact have my vote. This means that Elon can pay me for my vote and verify that he actually got it. Which means that rich people will buy votes form the poorest and have greater power than other people. Which will lead to oligarchy.