We had that for a couple centuries where the test was birth right. Somewhere down the line, we decided to cut their heads off.
Democracy in theory gives ordinary people power to choose their country's destiny. As someone who has a loved one in sg, I think their situation is peculiar but part of it is that their "aristocracy" actually does a decent job of providing for most of the people, so they don't feel the need to revolt against the PAP. In the US, we too have an aristocracy (although people might not want to admit to it) but they have not done a good job of taking care of people and so they is currently a lot of unrest that is flaring up here and there. It has a different flavor, but there is certainly political strife. So, imo, aristocracy is not a stable system because that aristocracy, being unaccountable, can turn against the people that hold it up, and thus be vulnerable to deposition.
I don't see a massive distinction between Singaporean elite-driven one party "democracy" and American elite driven two party "democracy". Both fail in certain ways but they function up to a certain point.
For example the United States constitution didn't happen quickly - there was a long period of people writing and discussing about such things, the age of enlightenment (I'm still grasping to understand how it happened, it seems so unlikely). There were also only under three million people living in USA when it became independent.
Ditto on Chinese immigrants in the later 1800s, Germans, etc. The point is that immigrants are always a minority in their host country, so they naturally have less of a base and thus power.
> And if their cultures clash with each other, you have a recipe for enduring intra-national strife.
Feels logical but also feels unproven.
So it is widely accepted that there is no/negligible genetic difference, but there are cultural differences at least when it comes to prosperity.
However it is also the case that cultures are extremely slow to change - multiple generations - almost to the actual speed of evolution. Essentially conceding the point that even if it isn't genetic there is some kind of heritable negative/missing positive traits which can last multiple generations.
Moreover, it sounds like there's a jump in logic in your post. Immigrants don't export their culture usually, they mostly adopt the new country's culture for the most part. Certain things are retained but people who've never immigrated before don't realize how much moving to another place changes you.
It's one thing to caution against removing all barriers literally overnight. I don't know that it would be a disaster, but I don't know for sure that it wouldn't, and it's reasonable to exercise some caution. But, at the risk of making an inflammatory analogy, it would have been morally defensible to ask if there was a way to end chattel slavery in the US without a civil war that killed ~3% of the population. It was not morally defensible to oppose ending it. Global apartheid is an evil of a similar scale, and first world governments its active cause, not innocent bystanders. It is our duty to figure out how, not whether, to end it.
[1]https://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/03/29/world/asia/bangladesh-...
[2]https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/bangladesh-isl...
People would have to arrive, in numbers for a long time, have kids, retain the culture perfectly in that regards as it blends into US cultures and then override the existing culture to do so. That's like 100 years in a vacuum. That's like imagining you'd see to eye with your ancestors from 1918. Ya think?
If 1 person of culture A arrives to a territory inhabited by 1M people of culture B, which culture will prevail? With a high confidence, B.
If we assume more or less continuous, non-chaotic behavior of this function, the range of A/B ratios where the change is hard to predict must be somehow narrower than [1/1M .. 1M], likely closer to [0.5 .. 2].
This is not a mathematical proof, of course, just an illustration. Mathematics is only possible where axioms hold; in human world, very-very few, if any, axioms ever hold.
> we would be tearing down the statue of liberty
> It is a popular mental dysfunction
This characterization of people who disagree with the parent, along with the comments above, does not seem to invite discussion, but rather a flame war.
> it doesn’t work like that.
In fact it has. People have been making the same predictions as you about immigrants to the U.S. since the first immigrants arrived. Can't trace your family to the Mayflower? You shouldn't be running the country. (I'll save redundancy by citing my other comment):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17437962
And yet the evidence is that the wealthiest country in the world and its leading advocate of democracy (over a longer timescale) is run by those very immigrants and their decedents.
Freedom and democracy are universal values; they are embraced in "cultures" all over the world (U.S., almost all of South America, Japan, Taiwan, S. Korea, India, Europe, etc. ...) and provide the most stable governments, the most freedom, and the wealthiest economies. Bangladesh might have had a bad experience - there are no guarantees - but of course we don't know how much that depends on poor execution nor do we know if other forms of government would have been better or worse. Maybe democracy was actually the best option.
Universal values are closer to, don't have sex with your mother or don't eat people and we still have notable exceptions for those
Certainly there is plenty of writing throughout recorded history in many cultures about freedom and oppression, and democracy as a form of government at least goes back to ancient Greece and Rome (a republic).
We have no idea how often it was implemented on a small scale (a village, etc.), but I find it hard to believe that nobody thought of taking a vote until 1776.
Implementing those things in government might have been difficult, but so was developing physics, literacy and the Internet. That doesn't mean people didn't want those things throughout history.
> Universal values are closer to ...
I don't think it's worth debating the meaning of 'universal'.
Based on the responses I've had to this post I think people might believe I am against democracy. My point was that it's not a universal value of humanity and so if we want democracy it needs to be supported. It will not be supported by base human instinct
TIL that the Greeks were nei bother. Rome was also originally a Republic.
Why is this entire thread full of bollocks history and bollocks sociology?
Id go as far as to say that someone thinking that Rome and Greece are early cultures might be the person with "bollocks history"
Additionally you are using Alexander the Great as your earliest marker? How was he democratic at all. He was a literal military dictator as were the Hellenic kingdoms that's descended from his empire
> If freedom and democracy were universal values then they would have shown up in some of the earliest cultures, which they did not.
We have a ton of resource from the Greeks because they wrote shit down. By invoking "the earliest" civilizations you're hiding behind a greater unknown because we lack an equivalent level of written resource until ~3500 BC. So written resource becomes available 5,500 years ago and democracy has written examples available 2,000 years ago, 3,500 years after written record. Ergo, according to your bullshit if something occurs 3,500 years after writing is established even though that was 2,000 years ago that means _nothing_ toward "universal values".
I can't believe you'd twist history like this to much such bollocks points. What the fuck does "universal values" even mean? We can barely trust the tablets we have and we have limited to no written record of societies beyond 3,500 years ago. But because of this window of 3,500 years between writing and democracy not appearing you classify it as "non-universal". You're full of shit by basing your entire argument on this window that conveniently fulfils it. Humans have existed for hundreds of thousands of years yet this 3,500 year window is all that matters to you. Dwell on that.
For reference, I am not arguing that democracy IS a universal value but just against that you can prove what is or isn't a universal value by cherry picking our patchy written record like you do.
Alex is a shit marker to be fair but gives a general gist for the rise of the Hellenic world. Examples of democracy within city states existed prior to 6 BC Athens but 6 BC Athens is the best known one.
In HN comments, it's more important not to turn this site into a flaming pit than it is to be right about Hellenic antiquity.
As to your points. We have written history from thousands of years before the Greeks. The code of Hammurabi predates them significantly. We also have scattered historical records from other ancient cultures and it's not like their government system was a mystery. They had Kings and emperor's, not elected leaders.
Even with the Greeks, how many of the city states had any sort of democratic system and weren't a monarchy or oligopoly? Youre accusing me of cherry picking but all you can point to is a single geographic area in a relatively small span of time and even then, only a few of the population centers had any sort of democracy.
It's ironic that people in the US who have such great fear of immigrants worry about being overrun by criminals, when the US itself already has by far the highest amount of criminals locked in prison in the world.
>Instead, we would be tearing down the statue of liberty
Quite silly to point to mere symbolism (whether or not a statue exists) while ignoring the physical reality of human suffering behind bars.
Some of these are bad things, some of these are good, and the last one is ugly.
We know this will happen. Bangladesh was in fact a grand experiment in this regard. After independence in the 1970s, an intellectual elite gave the country a western style constitution, with principles of secularity and freedom. What did the Bangladeshis do with it? They quickly repealed those provisions, made Islam the official religion, etc.
It is a popular mental dysfunction in the west to deny that culture matters. To believe that the west’s material wealth is the result of random chance, rather than what people believe, how they act, and what they do.