FUTURE SHOCK THE THIRD WAVE

THE THIRD WAVE

 

able. But if one hundred men all desperately want the same brass ring, they may be forced to fight for it. On the other hand, if each of the hundred has a different objective, it is for more rewarding for them to trade, cooperate, and form symbiotic relationships. Given appropriate social arrangements, diversity can make for a secure and stable civilization.

It is the lack of appropriate political institutions today that unnecessarily sharpens conflict between minorities to the knife-edge of violence. It is the lack of such institutions that makes minorities intransigent. It is the absence of such institutions that makes the majority harder and harder to find.

The answer to these problems is not to stifle dissent or to charge minorities with selfishness (as though the elites and their experts are not similarly self-interested). The answer lies in imaginative new arrangements for accommodating and le-gitimating diversity—new institutions that are sensitive to the rapidly shifting needs of changing and multiplying minorities.
The rise of a de-massified civilization brings to the surface deep, unsettling questions about the future of majority rule and the entire mechanistic system of voting to express prefer-ences. Some day, future historians may look back on voting, and the search for majorities as an archaic ritual engaged in by communicational primitives. Today, however, in a dangerous world, we cannot afford to delegate total power to anyone, we cannot surrender even the weak popularinfluence that exists under majoritarian systems, and we cannot allow tiny minorities to make vast decisions that tyrannize all other minorities.

This is why we must drastically revise the crude Second Wave methods by which we pursue the elusive majority. We need new approaches designed for a democracy of minori-ties—methods whose purpose is to reveal differences rather than to paper them over with forced or fake majorities based on exclusionary voting, sophistic framing of the issues, 0f rigged electoral procedures. We need, in short, to modernize the entire system so as to strengthen the role of diverse mi norities yet permit them to form majorities.

To do so, however, will require radical changes in many our political structures—starting with the very symbol of democracy, the ballot box.

 

 

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