Types of Government in Modern Society Part 2

Last week I covered all the types of government we humans have tried and broadly categorised them into representation, autocracy and oligarchy. The rule of representatives, the rule of one and the rule of a minority, respectively. And sadly that's really all we have had success with.

But this is the 21st century, surely we can do better than our ancestors' attempts at nationality, peace and prosperity?


That's right Obama, yes we can.

But will we? And will we succeed?

In my most personal, humble and cynical opinion, I think not. Representation is as good as we are going to get. Hopefully I am utterly wrong. In which case we have a whole variety of possibilities.

Ok so let's play a game guys. Go grab your greek dictionary! Don't have one? That's ok, just use the internet! Go find a greek prefix like demo- or klepto- or nympho- etc. Then simply add the suffix -cracy to the end of it and there's your system of government.

For example:   demo -is the prefix for people so democracy is rule by people.
                         klepto -is the prefix for thievery so kleptocracy is rule by thieves (this term is               colloquially used in real life to describe corrupt governments)
                        nympho- is the prefix for sex so nymphocracy would be rule by sex. I have no idea how that would work in real life, so I will let you use your imagination here.

Now go do it and post your futuristic form of government in the comments below. :P

In the meantime, notice anything peculiar about the last two previous examples? They are all oligarchies. Oligarchies dressed up in a dominatrix outfit, promising you to rule for eternity if you can just keep going for another 5minutes, in the case of the last example. But they are oligarchies nevertheless, simply because they all involve the rule of a minority (now I'm not so sure about the last example).

There really is only one form of government we haven't tried. The government everybody claims our beloved western nations have when in reality we don't.

Democracy.

Rule by the people. Not to be mistaken by "rule by the representatives of the people" which is the prevalent system of government in first world countries. A democracy is where the people themselves make executive decisions. So if a citizen thought it would be a good idea to go to war with New Zealand because they hate Kiwi accents then every single citizen of the nation would vote for or against and based on the vote the nation would either declare war on New Zealand or remain at peace.
Essentially all political decisions are decided by citizen initiated referendums. Love it or hate it, that is democracy.

Perhaps it is not such a good form of government. It gives the ignorant masses a direct chance to mess up the country's future by virtue of their own stupidity. But then, the problem isn't the form of government but the education of the masses. Once the nationwide literacy is resolved then educated and responsive decisions get made.

We live in a unique era in that, for the first time ever, we actually have the infrastructure to support this kind of government. There is a good reason democracy has never existed and that is because there has never been infrastructure that allows for it. Voting by paper all the time over trivial political matters is expensive and a downright nuisance. Now, however, the whole world is connected by fibre optics and radiowaves. And of course we have the computing power to compile and count billions of votes in a matter of picoseconds.

If there is ever been a time in our history for each and every human being on the planet to directly change the direction humanity is heading it is now.