At some point in history – some smoke-filled Enlightenment salon, some powdered wig convention – someone floated the idea that when opinions differ, the “fairest” way forward is to count hands and let the larger number win. On the surface, it feels intuitive. If ten want tea and nine want coffee, surely the tea-drinkers deserve their kettle.
But the trick lies in the numbers. By this logic, 49% of the people get exactly what they did not want, and their consolation prize is the promise of “next time”. What passes as fairness is simply coercion with polite manners.
The problem is structural:
- Majority ≠Mandate. A slim majority is just a statistical accident elevated into divine authority.
- Minorities Lose by Default. If you belong to a permanent minority – ethnic, cultural, ideological –you may never taste victory, yet you’re still bound to abide by everyone else’s “consensus.”
- Abstainers Become Scapegoats. When two candidates split a third of the population each and the rest sit out, the “winner” is crowned with less than half the electorate behind them. The abstainers are then blamed for “not preventing” the outcome, as though voting for a candidate they disliked would have saved them.
Why did this formula gain traction? Because it looked neat. It gave the appearance of fairness, a clean heuristic: count, declare, move on. Like democracy itself, it was born of Enlightenment rationalism’s obsession with rules, numbers, and abstraction. The premise was that humans are rational agents, and rational agents could submit to a rational procedure. The reality: humans are messy, tribal, irrational.
Majority rule became a ritual of laundering domination into legitimacy. “The people have spoken” is the priestly incantation, even if two-thirds of the people didn’t.
If we strip the veneer, what remains is not fairness but a convenient shortcut – one that was accepted, then sanctified, because it seemed better than monarchy and cheaper than perpetual stalemate. And so we’ve been living under the ghost of that decision ever since, confusing arithmetic with justice.
Philosophics 