This is just a small little thing, not really worthy of an essay of its own, but interesting enough to me that I wanted to put it out there. For a long time I’ve had a metaphor in my head. It’s an imperfect metaphor, but so is every metaphor- otherwise it wouldn’t be a metaphor. Since I’ve never seen it talked about in exactly these terms before, I thought I’d put it on the internet for discussion.
So you know this is basically a thumbnail sketch of the history of representative government. Historians have long understood the transition from violence and civil war (and intrastate violence) to modern states (Westphalia treaties, for example) and representative governments as being a process of ritualising and sublimating violence into various political systems. Following French Revolution, for example, there are even posters showing a person dropping a saber from one hand while the other hand is putting a voting slip into a ballot box, to make the point more explicit.
I first encountered this idea in nrx discussions, as a point against extending the franchise. The idea being, if voting is meant to measure war readiness, adding people who cant be bothered to show up, children, women etc deligitinizes it.
So you know this is basically a thumbnail sketch of the history of representative government. Historians have long understood the transition from violence and civil war (and intrastate violence) to modern states (Westphalia treaties, for example) and representative governments as being a process of ritualising and sublimating violence into various political systems. Following French Revolution, for example, there are even posters showing a person dropping a saber from one hand while the other hand is putting a voting slip into a ballot box, to make the point more explicit.
Interesting. I'm building an intuition that many social systems have at their root being a form of violence reduction.
I appreciate the implication that wealth / consumption capability, weighted by interest in it, should be included as a weighting factor.
I first encountered this idea in nrx discussions, as a point against extending the franchise. The idea being, if voting is meant to measure war readiness, adding people who cant be bothered to show up, children, women etc deligitinizes it.