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What if we practiced direct democracy?

Direct democracy (or participatory democracy in the jargon of the early 21st century) is the literal implementation of the Enlightenment myth.

The Enlightenment myth rests on the following hypothesis: if citizens are educated, provided with a decent livelihood through non-subordinated work, and allowed to debate collective issues, then they will make appropriate decisions.

This does not work for two reasons:

•

It reflects a positivist vision of the individual, which conjectures that depravity is caused by precariousness and ignorance. However, the limits of human nature derived from our genetic inheritance, which must be controlled by social organization, are entirely different, namely social ambition and cognitive dissonance.

•	This ignores technological progress, whose counterpart is that certain issues require in-depth study that cannot be conducted individually by each citizen.

Deepen

Consult the question 'Why is Enlightenment philosophy a dangerous myth?', followed by the justification 'What is a human?'.

See chapters 4 and 7 of the book From Capital to Reason.

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