Re: [Ag Meinungsfindungstool] Abschied

[Scott Raney <scott AT metacard.com>]

2014-08-24 6:52 GMT-06:00  <pa.rei AT gmx.de>:

> das ist wirklich sehr schade. Ich bin überzeugt, dass viel von dem, was du 
> uns vermittelt hast, wichtiger Teil unserer Theorie wird, nicht zuletzt der 
> Funktionale Faschismus.

Not to beat a dead horse, but I'm not a big fan of the term
"functional fascism" either.  It has currency in English too, but
mostly as a term to describe corporate and other organizations.  The
*essence* of fascism is authoritarianism, with all of its correlated
features (tribalism/nationalism, prejudice against minorities,
conventionalism and conformity, etc.)  "Functional fascism" is the
concept that you can have some aspects of authoritarianism without the
others.  History, and the psychological research, shows that this is
simply not true: Allowing any of these qualities to dominate in an
organization leads the authoritarians in the population to activate
and start pushing for the others.

The preventative for "functional fascism" is the same as for regular fascism:

1) Distribute decisionmaking to all of the population (i.e., direct
democracy).  This prevents authoritarians, who are a minority of the
population but also the minority most motivated to participate in
public policy decisions, from pushing their agenda through.

2) Reduce the level of fear, particularly fear of resource scarcity.
We all have an authoritarian mode.  In some people it's almost always
on, but in others it has to be "activated".  Fear is that activator.
One of the flags for posts in the system must therefore be a
"fearmongering" flag to mark those contributions whose primary purpose
is to activate the authoritarian mode, which will allow people to
filter those out.  This will help them to make rational decisions.

3) Accept dissent, and assume that decisions will not be reached
through consensus.  As I said last time, up to 25% of the population
will simply make irrational decisions because they operate in
authoritarian mode most or all of the time (Altemeyer's book has some
good examples of this, but this is one of core findings in all the
other research on authoritarian behavior too).  This means any
decision rule that requires large supermajorities will simply fail to
work with the general population.  The main advantage of "consensus"
is that it makes laws much easier to enforce because they will more
likely be perceived as being "moral" by the population (that
perception being 5 times more powerful a motivator than the risk of
getting caught is).  But fortunately as it turns out authoritarians
are just more likely to follow laws (or orders) even if they consider
them to be immoral, so we don't actually lose much by because we can
assume that most of them will still follow a law even if they voted
against it.
  Regards,
    Scott