This fact was first asserted by University of Sussex Professors Roper and Conradt in their paper "Group Decision-Making in Animals," published in the January 9, 2003 edition of the prestigious scientific journal Nature. Subsequent studies are throwing more and more evidence behind their conclusions.
Let me add my two cents worth here. Anyone who has seen a flock of geese take off from a lake in a non-emergency situation can confirm Professor Roper and Conradt's hypothesis. First, four or five geese take off in one direction, then a few minutes later they come back from a different direction (having gained altitude), and they are joined by four or five more geese from the flock. This is repeated several times until the "scout geese" are headed in a direction that the rest of the flock agrees with, and then the rest of the flock takes off after them, and the flock "disappears" in that direction.
Sounds like democracy to me.
Certain groups of libertarians are strongly anti-democratic, stating that democracy is nothing more than two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. This demonstrates either a profound ignorance of modern democracy on their parts, or a brazen attempt to mislead others with a faulty analogy.
First, a modern democracy--whether a parliamentary or federal system like our own--more closely resemble the best form of government of which Aristotle wrote in his Politics (Book 4: Chapter 11), than the "democracy" that he spent so much time inveighing against in the rest of his Politics. That "democracy" was, if you read carefully, rule by a nation's poorest citizens (mob rule). Only oligarchy by the plutocrats and tyranny by a usurper were held in greater contempt by the tutor of Alexander of Macedonia. What Aristotle stated he preferred was a constitutionally limited government, dominated by a large and thriving middle class, who could (by themselves) keep the smaller groups of poor and wealthy citizens in check when they proposed their most extreme programs. Some translators call this form of government a polity; the Romans called it a res publica or republic.
Second, in a modern democracy, there is a presumption of some degree of equality between the individual citizens within the nation-state. Two wolves and a sheep could hardly be called equal under the majority of circumstances. And in a practical sense, if the only carnivorous repast in the locality is that one sheep, the wolves would be much better off in the long term asking the sheep how to become vegetarians.
No, equality would be three wolves sitting there deciding which of them will become dinner for the other two. And once again, that is a short term, and highly irrational solution. No matter what, at some point in the future, you are going to have one hungry, living wolf, and two wolves dead and eaten, unless they change the carnivore paradigm under which they are operating.
The "Republics" of which so many of these libertarians claim they are enamored are ambiguous creatures. Historically many "republics" have, even to this very day, been governmental systems that have institutionalized the cultivation of sheep for their society's wolves. Our neighbor to the south, Mexico, is a striking example of this phenomenon. Mexico has millions of dirt poor peons, supporting a minuscule elite whose outsized wealth is barely taxed by the government, and a small, insular middle class consisting of government officials, doctors, engineers, professors, lawyers, and other professionals. The only sure way into the wealthy elite for Mexico's peons is through its insanely powerful drug cartels. These cartels today rival both Mexico's Federal and State governments in terms of power. Let us hope that Mexico has no Lucky Luciano to bring peace and cohesion to the cartels, as Luciano did to organized crime in this country in the 1930's, or we all might be in trouble.
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