Democracy hampers and dilutes social change.

This is not a criticism to democracy, or a rejection thereof, just a realization about social dynamics.

Imagine that you have a revolutionary idea to promote social change for the better.

You face two polar choices: go about promoting it to others, or submit it to a democratic referendum. This is not a false dichotomy, every choice in between would also be available in a continuum, but it's easier to see the problem I'm trying to point out by reasoning about the extremes.

If you go right away for the referendum, the proposal will most certainly be defeated by a large majority our of sheer social inertia. It takes time and effort for people to become familiar with an idea. Odds are that some who oppose it, to protect their privileges, will organize their opposition and make it even harder to pass.

The other extreme is to go about approaching people and campaigning and growing a social movement organically. This will also face resistance, both from inertia and from organized opposition.

You can keep the movement coherent by progressively involving people who learn about the idea and come to support it. Multipliers who really get it can be of great help in attracting others who may become supporters at first, and eventually become such multipliers themselves.

But getting involvement and help from people who don't support the idea is risky. They will bring preconceptions and misalignments that are present in society at large, and then, instead of applying a uniform social force, you may find the movement divided, and social forces applied in opposing directions.

Again, submitting decisions about the movement to a society at large that still needs the social change you wish to promote is a sure way to dilute it so much that it becomes comparable to an homeopathic solution.

As long as those who really get what the movement stands for are a minority in society, democracy will yield results against the movement. Even representative samples of the whole will be against. And once the movement succeeds to the point that a majority of society supports it, the social change will have been accomplished, and the organized movement may very well no longer be needed.

So movements and organizations that wish to promote ideas for social change need to protect themselves from this sort of democratic dilution as a condition to be able to carry out the social transformation they set out to promote.

This encompasses avoiding two kinds of infitration: by those who are actively hostile to the proposal, and by those who feel sympathetic but don't really grasp the full extent of the proposal, or the strategies required to get there.

The former is a constant threat to social movements: turning opposition into controlled opposition is a great way to preserve privileges that might otherwise be challenged.

The latter is less insidious but also a very serious risk worth considering: people who don't really understand what the movement is for or how to get there may end up antagonizing required actions from the inside. If there are so many of them that they form an internal majority, whether or not the movement or organization adopts internal democracy, they may be able to force decisions that oppose the original goal, leading the movement to failure.

Both of these risks are constantly present in the Free Software social and political movement. Besides our natural opponents, who promote nonfree software explicitly, there's plenty of opposition from a very popular dissidence that claims to promote software freedom without really understanding it, pushing for "reasonableness" or "flexibility" or tolerance to programs or deployment methods that submit users to unjust power that makes them dependent and helpless, victims of control that immediately and then progressively costs them freedom (control over their own lives) and other valuables.

These are setbacks for the software users, for the movement, and for society at large, that deserves the freedom we pursue.

It's a daily part of our struggle for social change.

So blong,