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Chapter 13
The Demos Would Function Like a Homeostatic System
Homeostasis is the tendency of a system, especially the
physiological system of higher animals, to maintain internal stability, owing to
the coordinated response of its parts to any situation or stimulus tending to
disturb its normal condition or function. Heartbeat, respiration, and temperature
regulation within our bodies are homeostatic systems. Our bodies contain several
other such systems. The tendency of a homeostatic system is to avoid the
extremes and to hover around a central norm. The principal effect of these
systems in our bodies is to produce the stable conditions and supply of
substances required to keep us alive.
The function of government has long been compared to the
function of a biological, homeostatic system. Competing interests pulling in
their various directions cancel each other out or achieve some sort of
compromise resulting in movement away from the extremes and tending toward
political moderation. With its divided powers, the republican form of government
in particular such as that used by America has been presented as a prime example of government functioning as
a homeostatic system.
Historically, however, it has been the few which created and
participated in government to the exclusion of the many. This includes the
republican form. Therefore, the interests that competed within government have been
among
the elite while the interests of the many have gone largely suppressed or
ignored. The homeostatic tendency has always been away from the extremes of the
elite and toward a moderation that has always favored the elite as a whole.
The demos has been designed from the ground up to function as
a homeostatic system. It would balance the competing interests and powers much
more perfectly than does any government that exists today. Further, since the
demos would be constituted of an electorate consisting of the widest practicable
inclusion of the entire populace, the competing interests would include the
interests of all of us. The resulting political moderation produced by the
demos, the ever current consensus, would tend away from all extremes including
away from the extreme of our current republican form which favors the few and
excludes the many.
Recall that the demos has nine economic and three
electoral issues. Each economic issue would be framed and treated in such a way
that its current demos consensus is expressed as a simple numerical, percentage,
or monetary value, or as a simple line on a chart displayed on the issue’s
demos page. As members changed their votes over time on an issue, the
continuously recalculated consensus on the issue would slowly change, sometimes
increasing and sometimes decreasing.
In a manner similar to the homeostatic systems within our
bodies, the electorate’s consensus on each demos issue would tend away from
all extremes and hover around a more central norm. It would not be any
mathematical restrictions or formulas which caused this homeostatic behavior but
the many opposing views and votes of the electorate pulling each issue’s
consensus in opposing directions and canceling each other out, resulting in the
avoidance of the extremes.
Under the hood, each economic demos issue would be represented and
processed mathematically. Although the issues would not be directly coupled
mathematically—the calculated output of one issue would not become the direct
input for another issue—the issues would be interrelated and would form a
logical, functional whole (shown in Appendix 1, figure 3) which would be responsive to the many millions of
inputs of the demos members and would produce a cyclic stream of calculated
output. This output would be used both to update the data displayed on the demos
issues’ pages and to supply a few economic parameters within which our
government and society must function, keeping our society functioning smoothly
and evolving peacefully as conditions change.
Taken together
and in their general result, the three electoral issues dealing with the election
of the president, senators, and representatives also function in a
homeostatic-like manner. The demos electoral method—to be discussed in detail
in a later chapter—empowers members of the
electorate to reach out to each other across their states or the entire nation
to elect their champions to office, people who resemble them in body, mind,
interests, and pocketbook and who will truly represent them. The resulting bodies of senators and
representatives resemble the demographic composition of the electorate as a
whole and automatically track that composition as it changes over time. Further,
to get elected to office the views and proposals offered by a presidential
candidate would have to avoid extremes and be moderate to appeal to a broad
spectrum of the entire electorate. In their overall results the demos electoral
issues work together with the economic issues in a homeostatic manner serving the
good of the entire nation.
It is not that we wouldn’t continue to argue and haggle animatedly over issues both within and outside of the
demos and the other branches of government.
Our national debate and deliberation
would increase tremendously as a result of the demos, and, moreover, evolve over time to higher, more enlightened levels. Once the
millions of members of the electorate who are currently kept deliberately misinformed,
misguided, and powerless discovered that in the form of the demos they finally held real power and had a meaningful role to play in government, their political interest and participation
would increase tremendously. It would be the electorate’s consensus within the demos, the social contract, that
would tend toward stable norms and produce a smoothly-functioning, peacefully-evolving society, even as we haggled vociferously over the issues.
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© Copyright 2001 Roger D Rothenberger
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