The fallacy of absolute democracy

I believe that democracy is a good idea, but like good ideas it can become bad if taken to an extreme. Here is one such extreme position: “The will of the people is an absolute and sacred Law, and it must never be questioned or denied”. This isn’t an abstract example, but a very real one, one that I’ve heard from quite a few people. In fact, in some countries, a parliament, being the representative of the people, is considered to have absolute and unbounded sovereignty. But I argue that such a notion is not just wrong, but absurd.

Why? Well, what if the people decide to cancel gravity? How would that work out? Okay, let’s say that such example is unfair, and disregard physically impossible decisions. Still, the idea of an absolute political sovereignty leads to the following logical paradox:

What if the people decide to turn the country into a dictatorship or a monarchy? If we respect their decision, then we must cancel democracy, thereby taking away the people’s right to make decisions. But this would deny the people the very power we were trying to uphold by respecting their decision. To put it in simpler terms, what if the people change their minds tomorrow and decide to go back to democracy? Oops, too late.

This is, of course, just a real-world example of the so called omnipotence paradox, which basically comes down to: “Is an omnipotent being able to take away its own omnipotence?” In our case, since we’re talking about real-life entities, rather than abstract supernatural beings, the logical conclusion must be that the people (or their representatives) cannot be omnipotent, i.e. their power of decision must be appropriately limited, so as at the very least not to create logical paradoxes. In other words, we must accept that people can make mistakes. And since Godwin’s Law reigns supreme, let’s recall that Hitler was elected in a (more or less) perfectly democratic process.

So, if the people can make mistakes, then there must be a mechanism that protects people from themselves by having some sort of a veto power over people’s decisions (including parliaments), but not having the power to make their own decisions. In many countries such mechanism comes in a form of a Supreme Court or some review board, comprised of professionals, who are assigned by an apolitical process (as much as it can be done), but not elected.

Why is this important? Because there are people in many countries, who try to pass laws or perform actions inconsistent with democratic principles, while, ironically, appealing to democracy. For example, in Israel there are legislative attempts to deny some basic rights from certain parts of the population or to allow a prime minister, who has been formally accused of a crime, to get absolute immunity from prosecution. clearly such things can’t be allowed.