A World Beyond Political Parties?

In my previous post I listed a ranking of political parties from the frivolous to the functional. Despite their ideological and practical differences, they all function for the same purpose: To gain power and to use this power to make the world a better place according to their principles.

My experience in the Green Party which I consider to be the most egalitarian and sensitive political party is that the very nature of party politics brings out the worst in people. The people in the Green party believe that they are being inclusive, sensitive, and egalitarian. In fact, they use those concepts in as ideological weapons to silence those who do not agree with them. Inclusiveness becomes pandering to special interest groups, sensitivity becomes political correctness, and egalitarianism becomes communism. The problem is that the Greens share the same corrupt social structure as the other parties. They are held together by ideology which is used in the worst way to silence those who do not agree with those in power. In my earlier blog Ideology vs Philosophy, the biggest problem in politics is the abdication of personal responsibility to blindly follow party ideology.

So what’s the solution?

In doing a little more searching, I came across an old idea that was first presented to me many years ago by George Sagi who enthusiastically attempted to promote Direct Democracy to the Green Party. Being a political party, we were not interested in what he had to say, believing that we had all of the answers. For the most part, political parties are not interested in Direct Democracy because it challenges the parties role in society.

What is interesting is that now, ten years later the UK Conservative Party is attempting to remake itself using the principles of Direct Democracy. Political Parties are now questioning themselves because business as usual is not working.

The combining of Direct Democracy with information technology has become the latest incarnation of Direct Democracy. There have been political parties in New Zealand & Europe experimenting with Direct Democracy using computer technology. It appears that the next potential incarnation of Direct Democracy we may see is Open-Source Governance where the government stems from emergent cooperation and self-correction among members of a community. Sounds pretty cool to me.

I predict that as society continues to advance with technology and with robotics and AI doing more of our labor, we may end up having more time to directly participate in governing ourselves. What will this do to political parties? Perhaps they will evolve into voluntary networks who will represent you if you decide you don’t have the time to do so yourself. With political parties continuing to make themselves irrelevant in today’s world as evidenced by voter disillusionment and boredom, we may see a world beyond political parties as we currently know them.