Majority: Is NOT Always Right

People say that democracy is the voice of the people, since the majority speaks, right? Yeah... 'right'. Believe me when I say that the voice of the majority actually doesn't even know what's good for them. It happened to me.

I recently volunteered to be in a committee to organize a team-building event for the great blue giant potato chip company I work in. There were about 13 of us committee members.

Well, the way it worked, was that we, the committee suggested 4 options for the population to vote. The first round, one of the destination was actually in a neighboring country so naturally, this option won overwhelmingly. Alas, the top management vetoed this decision due to safety and security concern as the country was in a civil unrest. 

Fine. 

Second round of voting, the winner was a famous theme-park-cum-gambling destination and the close second by about 5% less votes was local treasure hunt.

Now, do note that the difference in votes were very small. The journey to the theme park destination will take about 6 hours from here, theme park entrance fee not included, event will have to be 2 days 1 night over a weekend, participation was highly likely to be low (family concerns, wasted weekend, other plans etc etc), and it is highly likely that everyone will be doing their own thing there (there was precedent; it happened before). Free vacation for some, that's all.

On the contrary, a local treasure hunt will be a day event, on a working day where everyone can participate, highly likely 80-90% of the population will turn up (well, how do you exactly say 'I don't go to work today'?), big budget can be allocated for super cool prizes instead of paying for buses and hotel rooms, there can be t-shirts/souvenirs for everyone, and most importantly it will be a very TEAM-ORIENTED-EVENT.

Of course, the committee can always choose to do the right thing over the majority-is-always-right thing. In fact many on the committee felt that way. However, the world is not a perfect place (and I found it too ridiculous to argue against people who would not change their minds).

Today, the decision was to go to the theme-park-cum-gambling destination, and participation rate was about 55%. And we call this TEAM BUILDING?

On the grander scale, you wonder how the 'majority' (by gerrymandering, of course :p ) Government can survive all these years? Well, don't (sorry, can't resist! LOLxD ).