The House of Everyone

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The Vision for a New Kind of Democracy, the House of Everyone.

The idea given on this website is an example of what I call a New Vision for Democracy.  We seek to create new solutions to old problems by finding ideas that are not just criticisms of existing practices but rather repair the system by making it better.  Instead of being against the system one can find ideas that work within it and create better solutions.  Ideas can still be radical, new and revolutionary, but the central underpinning for our idea to end poverty is to find a way to correct globalisation, making it work for the poor.  We outline a new vision for democracy, a new kind of institution that can enable better solutions to be found for the world.  Karl Popper, the philosopher, said that democracy works best for society because it allows criticism. We argue that ideas are necessary for criticism to exist, and solutions are best found if there are many people working on idea creation. Karl Popper called the society that allows criticism the 'Open Society'. We say there is a need for the 'Consultative consensual society'. A society where eveyone debates ever better ideas on solving problems common to them and seeks to create agreement among all people of the best ideas to follow into policy.

Traditional democracy is representative.  The voters choose someone who is essentially an accountable limited term dictator.  We suggest a new route to solving the problems of the world and society. 

In short we suggest having everyone enter into debates which they choose to enter giving ideas on how to solve problems in the interests of society.  The theoretical basis of this is distributed computing.  Essentially this is where many people each contribute to the solution of a problem.  The fact of the matter is that people each have a limited amount of mental capacity, so if a problem is broken down and given to many people who each solve part of the problem, much more complex problems can be solved.  This is also similar to the production technique known as Open Source used in the creation of Linux.  Clearly this requires an educated society and more resources should be ploughed into initial and ongoing education, rational thought and critical thinking. 

The essence of this new democracy is to be found in debate.  The many participants would contribute their ideas to a forum, perhaps on the internet, and would debate the relative merits of their ideas.  Criticism is essential for this process to work, maintaining quality of debate and ideas.  People would be stimulated by seeing the forum and create even more ideas and solutions.  The lack of need for voting on ideas would be counterbalanced by the fact that anyone could enter the debate and criticise any idea.  The debate would need people to realise that they must be constructive and respectful to others.  The debate would also have its guiding principal of finding consensus among participants.  We should stress that these debates are not a substitute for existing democratic institutions like parliament, but essentially they would create another house in parliament, one in cyberspace.  The House of Everyone. While this house would have no legal powers it would impact on the debate in the other houses of parliament, simply because it would generate better ideas that would be in line with people's feelings on various matters. A team of moderators would go through the forum and find common themes in the debates and write articles summarising the common points people make. These articles would be available on the forum and would stimulate the generation of yet more ideas. Articles would also be available on the constraints facing governments written by civil servants and academics which would give people a better idea of how to tackle problems which society faces.  Instead of the debate in society being divided into various interest groups lobbying parliament, people would interact in one forum to create a united Britain.

Legitimacy is created in this kind of democracy through everyone feeling like they have contributed to policy.  This would solve the government’s main problem which is to legitimise itself.  This is in opposition to the Neo-Conservative idea of the “noble lie” where governments don’t tell the masses everything to enable them to believe in the government. 

More ideas would be created and also ideas would be generated that were in line with existing thinking of the people of society.  Why should you only have a say when the election comes?  Why not be able to join the debate on society everyday?