The Will Of The People
Why representative democracy rests on a totally incoherent and logically impossible premise
There are among us still some who imagine that representative democracy is not merely a complete catastrophe that must always, pace Plato, eventually lead to the emergence of tyranny. For such naïve individuals, the supposed virtue of representative democracy rests primarily on the belief that there exists such a thing as “the will of the people.” Much as primitive people used to believe in souls, ghosts, gods, and spirits of fire, wind, water, and trees, so too do some people today continue to believe that “the will of the people” is something real, as opposed to merely the consequences of inadequate cognition.
This article will explore the vague notion of “the will of the people” and demonstrate why it is both a logical impossibility and empirically disproven. We will begin by demonstrating that “the will of the people” is an intellectually incoherent concept when applied to more than one person. We will then proceed to show that it continues to be an intellectually incoherent concept even when applied merely to a single individual.
Let us imagine a very small village containing just twenty people, eight of whom are younger than eighteen years of age and four of whom are over the age of seventy-five…
