The Poverty of Compromise

This idea of questioning things that he, the two you thought were unassailable in a particular domain, for millennia people were wondering about the best way to conceive of what democracy is.

Even Plato had this idea of what is democracy, and he had the question about who should rule. That's the whole idea of democracy; supposedly, we'd have to figure out who should rule. Should it be the philosophy kings who should rule? Should it be the population of citizens? He decided that a mob would readily vote away the rights of a minority; that's what he thought democracy was.

But Papa questioned this whole idea of looking at what democracy was. He went even deeper and said democracy has got nothing to do with who should rule. Democracy is the system which allows you to remove policies and rulers most efficiently, without violence. That's how you judge different democratic systems.

So you can actually make a judgment on France, England, the United States, Canada. These places have better or worse kinds of democracy. We might all call them democracy, but to the extent that we're actually able to get rid of the people that we don't like from the democratic system quickly, efficiently, easily, without violence, that's the measure of a good democratic system.

Rather than trying to figure out which system's going to give us the best rulers, that's the same mistake as saying what method of science is going to give us the true theory. No method of science is going to give us the true theory; science is an error-correcting mechanism. All we can hope for is to get rid of the bad ideas, and by doing that, we've corrected some of our errors, and then we can move forward to find something that's a better theory than what we had before.

This actually raises the idea of how to make good decisions when you're at loggerheads with someone else. This idea that compromise is supposed to be a virtue of some kind, and it's not. It's preferable to having a violent confrontation if you've got two people who otherwise can't possibly reach an agreement, and they're going to get into a battle of some sort.

But if you're in a situation where person A has idea X and person B has idea Y, the common understanding of what a compromise is, is it's somewhere between X and Y. Person A won't get everything they want, and person B won't get everything they want, so let's come up with a compromise; this is theory Z.

When that policy proves not to work, we shouldn't be surprised because neither person A or person B actually ever thought it was the best idea in the first place at all. They thought that X or Y was the correct idea. So when they implement Z, what happens when it fails is that no one learns anything.

Person A goes back to saying, "I always told you that X was the correct idea," and person B goes back to saying, "I always told you that idea Y was the best idea." So they haven't made any progress whatsoever. They've shown that Z is wrong, but no one ever thought that Z was correct in the first place.

So this is the poverty of compromise, and this is what you get in science at certain times. It's everywhere in politics as well.