A teacher I had in school years ago posed this question to our class: Is majority rule the best way to run things? Now, I'll put aside the few times in our history (the US) when the popular vote was over-ruled by the Electoral College...Most of the time, the popular vote confirmed the result the E.C. got...and we elected people like Millard Fillmore and Warren Harding. They may have been very good men at heart, but were not well prepared for running the country. Having said that, we had a discussion and arrived at the conclusion that majority rule, while not perfect, was the best way to decide on a collective course of action. She pointed out the above Fillmore/Harding example and asked us to reconsider...I was puzzled as to where this was going and asked her in private what the idea was...she said she was showing us how the idea of majority rule works. By having a general class discussion and deciding on a collective answer, she was giving us a demonstration.
There were times in world history when it was believed by a majority of people that the Earth was flat...people were well-persecuted for postulating otherwise. History is rife with examples of times when the majority of people were PLAINLY wrong, in the prism of history as we see it from here. Just wondering what you all think...
