h. Participatory Democracy
PD =Participatory Democracy... although it also stands for Permaculture Design of course :) .. nice coincidence ...
Also see Spanish Page on this (has different content), which you can translate online ...
Start here ...
I was glad to see some of my basic concerns with PD expressed & answered when I started investigating ... and this short video answers most of them. So the article below is a continuation from this .. as it doesn't address the other concerns I have.
Related articles
17Nov14 - am still figuring out how all these are related to this "Participatory Democracy" thread
It is easy to see where the fear of "mob rule" might be coming from: mobs HAVE persecuted the weak or the too brilliant throughout the ages, very unjustly and sometimes incredibly viciously - even if mostly through ignorance and indifference to others' suffering or apathy when confronted by psychopathic minorities, like the massacre of the witches of the middle ages or the holocaust of the Jews, gipsies, homosexuals and disabled more recently.
We like to think those horrors belong to some distant 'less civilized' past, yet right now, with so much more global communication & more education (supposedly) on the side of the masses, massacres continue and in fact escalate.
Like the massacre of 200 species per day that civilization is consuming to feed it's relentless 'progress', the 20,000 children dying of hunger per day, which are part of the very same imperialism devouring entire ecosystems, which is also at the root of all the other declared and un-declared wars currently happening all over the planet.
Whilst the comfortable middle & upper classes (who have the most material power & time to change the system) remain massively confused and ineffectual - in great part thanks to the increasing barrage of Weapons of Mass Destruction (so effective at increasing collective stupidity), the working classes of the civilized world are kept immoblized by grinding poverty, the daily struggle to keep families fed, clothed and housed
On a smaller scale, it is painfully obvious, if you've been working in groups for a while, that encountering collective stupidity is at least as probable (if not more) than coming across great collective intelligence.
Here numbered in proportion to the amount of intelligence, committment and effort (energy) that is required of the participants
7. Refuting the Central Point
6. Refutation
5. Counterargument
4. Contradition
3. Responding to Tone
2. Ad Hominem
1. Name-calling
The pyramid above maps very usefully a solution to this timeless paradox -
when are we engaging in useful, interesting, stimulating dialogue with people we disagree with?
And when are we just being drained by 'stupid people' who aren't actually contributing anything useful to the discussion?
Because it is obvioustly quite easy for a bruised ego to confuse the two, but the pyramid above gives some objective criteria to aim for.
This one goes into more detail:
But I think the pyramid is useful because it's a lot more than a list: it helps us to visualize easily some expressions we have in our culture which are very pertinent, like
"please stick to the point" (top of the pyramid) or "get to the point"
"lowering the level of the discussion" - it's very easy to slide down the pyramid, if there is even only one person at levels 1 or 2 it can quickly infect others, just as playground bullies often find easy mobs to call on: there's a stricking feeling of 'being back in the playground' when conversations are dragged down to that level, with with petty bullying and cruelty that masks as 'fun', with petty name-calling (which is quite different from identifying a pattern and arguing with some evidence) and when we're in a discussion that just stays at the 'gossip level' and we tend to come out of it feeling drained instead of revitalized.
"raising the level of the discussion" (climbing up the levels -
