Do you remember?

On a bend of a quiet road in the furthest reaches of the most rural New Jersey exurbs of New York City circa 1962 (before 'exurb' was a word), twin boys toddle under a late summer sun in the green grass of their front yard under the watchful gaze of their mother.  I am one of those boys.  My brother thirteen is the other. My attention is on a toddlery activity.  Toy trucks or cars may have been involved, or perhaps just a hole being excavated with sticks or rocks.  Whatever it was was interrupted by the approach from across the street of the neighbor woman, in a dress as I recall -- the common uniform of housewives in those days.  "Say hello to Mrs Pelagidis," my mother must have said, which I must have done before turning back to whatever had been occupying me and my brother.  The play reached a stage at which my brother thirteen assumed controls of the equipment.  To entertain myself I turned to observe my mother and Mrs Pelagidis engaged in barely fathomable adult conversation.  My mother said something that caused Mrs P to laugh.  From my vantage close to the ground, I studied the course of the laugh, from the way it burst involuntarily out of  Mrs Pelagidis' red painted lips to the way her mouth reformed to a smile, to the way the smile faded.    I remember the thought in my head "How long until the smile from mommy's joke goes away?"

I've held onto that memory for 60 years.  I can revisit it at will-- not all of the details are still there, but the progress of that laugh has never decayed.  I remember clearly the shape of Mrs P's mouth, the red lips, the whiteness of the teeth that suddenly appeared as they parted reflexively to react to my mother's wittiness, the smile dimples punctuating her cheeks, and after the staccato burst of laughter had stopped, the glacially slow closing of the ruby painted lips ultimately concealing the teeth once again, the lingering tension at the corners of the mouth slowly relaxing long after the drollery that had started the process had been uttered.  Perhaps I'd watched the progress of a laugh more than once which is where that sociological question came from.  Not only do I remember the smile, but I have a lifetime of memories of remembering the smile.

My first week of Junior High School, my class got a tour of the school library.  It was a long sunlit room full of books and tables that took up about half of one side of the corridor of a recently added wing of the school called the 'Annex'.   "Does anyone know what 'annex' means?" the librarian asked.  Having searched the data storage in my head for a trace of the cool sounding word and come up blank, I scanned the faces of my classmates for evidence of anyone with the answer.  The fact that I remember the incident might be an indication that someone knew and that maybe it stung a little that the someone wasn't me.  I remember the librarian's clarification of the term: that an annex was an addition, joined onto a main existing structure.  News to me.  Interesting.  In any case, it stuck in my head that in 6th grade, the meaning of the word 'annex' had been beyond me.

Months later, bored out of my mind one day, I resorted to a reliable time-killer, looking through a drawer of saved artwork and writings from over the years and I came across plans I had drawn up 4 years earlier in second grade for building a robot from spare pieces lying around the house.  The memory of the ambition came back to me easily.  The design called for a bucket for the head, antennae for ears, a sheet of tin for the torso, wheels for feet, and remarkably, for a computer "annexed to the brain".  I stared at the word scrawled in pencil with an 8 year old's wobbly penmanship -- "ANNEXED".  Had I once (sort of) known the word but forgotten it?  What kind of kid knows the word "annexed"?   More importantly, where was it when I needed it for the library tour?   

Forgetting the right answer is unfortunately not as rare for me as I'd prefer it to be. This past weekend, we had guests over for pie and coffee.  The subject of the conversation somehow turned to concerts we'd attended over the years.  My wife recounted the incredible story of her parents having the foresight to take her brothers and her to see the Beatles in Memphis at the height of Beatlemania in 1966.  She recalled the unsettling sight of her mother screaming along with the teenyboppers.  Our guests recalled concerts they'd attended -- Snoop Dogg for one and Chuck Berry for another.  I struggled to come up with my own.  I remembered seeing Mott the Hoople once.  But that was almost sad in retrospect.  Struggling to come up with something more impressive, a faint notion tried to light some synapses in my brain: Hadn't my wife and I seen Talking Heads at Pine Knob in the Michigan suburbs for their Speaking in Tongues tour in 1983?  It felt like a good possibility, but somehow no matter how hard I tried I could not conjure the image of me and my wife in the audience of a Talking Heads concert.  "Did we see Talking Heads?" I tried to ask her over the cacophony of reminiscences of fondly remembered events.  She thought for a moment.  "Yes we did." she finally said, less than forcefully.  I awkwardly tried to leverage her agreement into my own contribution to the conversation, but before I could, it hit me: if I wasn't even sure I had been to the concert, what business did I have using it as a memory to finagle a point for my team in the one-up-manship contest?  How could I expect anyone to be impressed when I myself had not been impressed enough to remember it? 

This was not the first time I had had trouble confirming my presence at that Talking Heads concert in the suburbs of Detroit some 40 years ago.  It's not out of the question that that could be due to the ingestion of memory impairing substances preceding the event, but given my wife's hesitation, it's not clear to me that our notion of attendance at the concert wasn't formed from hearing about someone else's experience of it.  Even if we had been there-- and I don't rule it out*-- it could hardly be called a memory.   It's more like poorly constructed folklore.  The memory of something seems to be an important element of it having happened.  Something that evidence could prove happened to me but that I can't remember-- is it a question for history, or is it a zen koan?

My guests barely knew who the Talking Heads were anyway.

~~~~~~

* I don't rule it out even knowing that anyone who remembered it would insist that anyone who had been to that concert would have remembered it.  I am representing those who prove that it's possible to forget the unforgettable.  (and no one's fault if they do.)

The Frog's Eye and the Feedback Loop

On a sunny summer day, a Northern Leopard frog sits on a lily pad at the edge of a pond.  A beetle lands nearby and retracts its wings.  After a moment of stillness, it starts to crawl.  The frog, immobile to now, leaps on the beetle in a flash, scoops it into its mouth with its sticky tongue and swallows.  It returns to stillness.  Moments later, the shadow of a heron wading close by falls suddenly over the frog.  Before the heron has a chance to swoop in, the frog leaps toward a patch of darkness on the surface of the pond and escapes under the canopy of bobbing lily pads swimming for deeper water.  It is a simple sequence of interactions, facilitated by the frog's vision.

The eyes of a frog protrude from its head to a unique extent for any vertebrate.  They are relatively immobile, moving only as the frog moves its head.  Unlike human eyes which have a focal point that requires them to be directed at an object in order to see it, every surface of the frog's eye sees equally all at once, in light and, masterfully, in dark.  Even a frog's eyelids-- a top, a bottom and a third nictating eyelid that lubricates the eye when it is on land-- are transparent.  Moreover due to parallax effects of the placement of the eyes and their bulging shape a frog has nearly 360° of peripheral vision at all times.  Thus a frog is a vision machine, turned on whenever the frog is awake, and evidence suggests even when it's not. Frogs see color and as has been recently demonstrated can even distinguish between shades in what a human would consider complete darkness.  In fact, a frog's survival is very much dependent on what its eyes can perceive.  As one researcher put it, a frog "will starve to death surrounded by food if it is not moving." 

Our intuition about vision is that the eyes merely perceive the external world by transmitting images whole to the brain to interpret. But this is not the case for frogs.  

We know this because of a landmark study of frog vision by Jerome Lettvin, Humberto Maturana, W.S. McCulloch and Will Pitts, described in their paper, "What the frog's eye tells the frog's brain"  published in 1959 for the Proceedings of the Institute of Radio Engineers.  Lettvin a professor of electrical and bioengineering and communications physiology at MIT had met Pitts-- a self-taught wunderkind in math and logic from Detroit--  as a graduate student at University of Illinois. Lettvin, Pitts and their American colleague McCulloch were all researchers in the up and coming field of cybernetics, the study of the organization and control of systems biological and electronic, and especially the interaction between machines-- specifically computers-- and the humans who operate and interact with them. The term 'Cybernetics' was coined in 1947 from the Greek κυβερνήτης for "steersman" by Norbert Wiener and Arturo Rosenblueth, early pioneers in the field.  Wiener and his group at MIT were interested in studying components of systems (mechanical, organizational and biological) built to respond to problems organically encountered in the course of operation-- a class of engineering problem the solution to which promised a wide array of applications, not least the engineering  of what has come to be thought of as artificial intelligence.  The bedrock of cybernetics was the feedback loop, in which one part of a system provides input to a processor producing a response which in turn is intepreted by the originating component as instructions for what to provide next in the way of input.  

Ensconced at MIT following his graduate work, Lettvin had become interested in vision and the role it played in how creatures interact with the world. Maturana, a Chilean national completing his Ph.D. at Harvard at the same time had done electron microscopy of the hundreds of thousands of fibers in the frog's optic nerve and his results had inspired the method devised by the researchers for distinguishing classes of nerve bundles in order to intercept neural firings to get readings of responses to visual stimuli.

For the experiment which used the Northern Leopard frog (Rana pipiens) as subjects, electrodes were attached strategically to the optic nerve and to the superior colliculus-- the vision receptor of the brain.  Over the eye was mounted a specially constructed aluminum hemisphere on the surface of which were moved various objects of different shapes, sizes and colors by means of magnets in varying light.  In this way, readings could be taken of the frog's neural responses to the visual stimuli.  What the researchers discovered was that certain bundles of nerve fibers were prone to respond to specific categories of visual stimulus.  Contrast between contiguous areas of the visual field (distinction of an object from the area surrounding it) was detected by one type of bundle.  The movement of an edge on the plane evoked responses from another. The net curvature of an edge (the shape of much of a frog's diet) stimulated a third category of bundle. Another was sensitive to changes in degree of ambient darkness-- such as what might be caused by a descending shadow.  Each type of bundle transmitted a signature pattern of impulses to the brain at the introduction of its associated visual stimulus.  The researchers concluded that the optic system of the frog had evolved to detect specific features of the visual horizon in whole, and that far from being a passive camera scanning the environment for images for the brain to interpret was on its own detecting and sending information whole pre-interpreted for the brain for a hastened response-- capture and intake in the case of beetles, flight in the case of herons.  As Lettvin put it to a colleague, “The eye speaks to the brain in a language already highly organized and interpreted, instead of transmitting some more or less accurate copy of the distribution of light on the receptors.”

 We're told that Lettvin was laughed off the stage at American Physiology Society in Atlantic City when he presented the paper.  Walter Rosenblith, an MIT colleague and leading researcher in vision was so skeptical of Lettvin's results that he snubbed his colleague in assembling a meeting on vision shortly after the conference-- but on challenging Lettvin in his lab to demonstrate his methods, he was reportedly convinced.  The paper became among the most cited for at least the next ten years. 

One researcher inspired by it was Stafford Beer.   Beer was a British theorist, consultant and author in business management of a field that he called Operational Research.  Heavily influenced by the cybernetics of Norbert Wiener he had written for years about how the optimal structure of an organization should emulate the nervous system of an organism -- with tendrils into the environment-to-be-perceived and fed to a central brain for processing the data and quickly directing the limbs in how to respond to conditions at hand, but his focus had been on the structure of the midcentury corporation.  He had never had an opportunity to apply his theories on anything beyond a client company, let alone to a social movement, until he was approached by Fernando Flores, a young up-and-comer in Salvador Allende's coalition Socialist government that had been elected in Chile in November 1970.  

As a graduate student at the University of Illinois in the early 60s, Flores had been inspired by encounters with the cybernetics community headed  by Heinz von Foerster, director of the Biological Computer Laboratory.  Now working for Allende's government as an employee of  CORFO, the acronym for Chilean Production Development Corporation, Flores wanted a system cybernetically devised to permit rapid response to current conditions within the various economic sectors of the country.  To this end he hired Beer as consultant to engineer the project.  

Beer had been thinking for years about how to get around the persistent problem in pre-internet times of information lag.  Owing to the speed at which economic data was collected, typed up and published, information  gathered for strategic planning purposes was typically 3 months old before it was analyzed by decision makers, making the response frequently too late and irrelevant to the situation on the ground.  Given the international opposition to Allende's election immediately raised from the world's most powerful players economically and strategically,  opposition in the form of barriers of trade and blacklisting (to say nothing of the active plotting against Allende orchestrated and enabled from the Nixon administration and CIA, including the assassination of a pro-Allende General shortly after the 1970 election in an unsuccessful attempt to embolden anti-Allende factions in the military to prevent Allende's assumption of the office), Flores was wanting to devise for Chile something that did not exist at the time anywhere in the world except in the US and UK, and at that, still very much as more a set of ad hoc links set up between disparate technologies of a handful of universities than an integrated system.  

In a very real sense, Beer was tasked with creating an interconnected network-- an internet if you will-- from the ground up.  The project was dubbed Cybersyn (a portmanteau of Cybernetics and Synergy) in English and Synco (for Sistema de Información y Control) in Spanish.  Beer's original design called for links between the behemoth mainframes of the time strategically placed around Chile's challenging geography (4000 miles from North to South and only 60 miles from East to West.), but at the time only one was available for the project's use in the country, an IBM/3060 in Santiago-- and given the hostility of the international business community to Allende's socialist  government, likely to be the only for the foreseeable future. 

As Beer discovered, one thing that Chile had no shortage of at the time was Telexes, hundreds of which had been lying in storage since the project for which they were originally procured had been shelved by a previous administration.  The windfall permitted instant communication of data over great distances through telephone lines. Telexes were installed in strategic factories, farms and offices across the country.  To gather and process the information, Beer conceived of a "war room" of large-screen wall-mounted monitors fed with data and controlled by decision makers arranged in a circle to enhance the democratic spirit of collaboration in specially designed fiberglass chairs custom made in Chile per Beer's specifications. with simplified controls built into the arms giving each participant the ability to call up charts and relevant data from their respective sectors for group discussion.  The technology was new but the war room bore a certain resemblance to something out of Star Trek or Kubrick's 2001.  

With a middling economy that had historically underperformed, Chile was an unlikely place for an internet to be pioneered.  In devising a system to maintain Cybersyn beyond his involvement with the project, Beer took inspiration from the new theory of 'autopoiesis' describing the self-regeneration of biological -- and by extension, human designed-- systems that was developed in Chile by none other than Humberto Maturana with his colleague at University of Chile Francisco Varela.  Beer invited Maturana and the latter's University of Illinois mentor Heinz von Foerster to see the progress of the project and share thoughts and suggestions with the team.  Allende himself visited.  

The strikingly futuristic room was small and the heat generated from the cramped equipment and close quarters sometimes caused malfunctions, but the Cybersyn concept was given a test by a paralyzing national trucker strike joined by small business owners and shopkeepers in September 1972 (all of it instigated and funded covertly by Nixon and Kissinger's CIA as it turned out) to bring their foe Allende's economy to a halt.  As a test of Cybersyn's design and purpose, word from across the country was quickly brought to the war room via Telex. In this manner the team could rapidly determine where there were shortages, where there might be factories that Allende's government could nationalize.  In spite of the striking of the petit bourgeoisie, workers who were very much in the Allende camp assumed control of factories and with the help of the cybersyn team knew where to send goods and equipment to keep the country fed and supplied with essentials.  The strike which ended after 26 days was weathered successfully in part due to the part that Cybersyn played in mitigating stoppages and blockades.

A second strike of shopkeepers, professionals and Santiago taxi drivers in June 1973 (also enabled due to heavy CIA involvement) further destabilized the country.  On September 11, a violent military coup headed by General Augusto Pinochet seized control of the government.  In the course of events, Allende was killed at the Presidential Palace (by suicide a scientific autopsy much later appeared to confirm).  Stafford Beer was back in the UK at the time.  Fernando Flores,  who had met with Salvador Allende earlier that day was later arrested along with hundreds of Allende officials, imprisoned and subjected to the Pinochet regime's brutal brand of torture for 2 years before being released and forced into exile.* 

In spite of its early successes, Project Cybersyn's fate had already been somewhat sealed. In the face of growing economic and societal instability, intense right wing propaganda (and to some extent poor PR on the part of the Allende government), the project had come to be tarred as authoritarian overreach.  The taint of its association with Allende's moderate socialism all but guaranteed that it would be relegated to the dustbin of history by Pinochet's extreme right-wing coup.  Heavily backed by the US,  Chile became a laboratory for the austere economic policies of the University of Chicago school personified by Milton Friedman, an early testing ground for the neoliberal world order that would soon come to dominate and suffocate the global economic and political order. 

The public's introduction to Cybersyn was somewhat responsible for its demise.  To the Cybersyn team, Control didn't mean Authoritarian rule as was frequently misinterpreted to great effect by foes of Allende's project, but rather informed response to the best information.   In fact, when Stafford Beer was tasked to sell Salvador Allende on the plan, in explaining one of his famous charts of his Viable System Model of overlapping circles demonstrating the flow of information and control in a system in all directions, he was struck by Allende's characterization of the highest level of the hierarchy, the brain of the organism as being "por fin, el pueblo" (At last the people).  In the conception of the Cybersyn team, the fuel for the feedback loop was information transmitted, fully interpreted, by the specialized organ of the state's economy, the workers, to stimulate an informed response from a centralized decision-making organ acting to the benefit of the body politic.  Much like the eyes and brain of the frog.  

Georgios Cherouvim

_____

Inspired by material from Cybernetic Revolutionaries, by Eden Medina, MIT Press, 2011.

~~~~~~

* On his release, with the Pinochet government still in full swing, Flores, whose brainchild Project Cybersyn was, emigrated to the US where he took up residence at Stanford University. Finding himself present at the creation of Silicon Valley, he was able to ride the wave of the earliest internet bubbles to turn his experience and expertise in organizational logistics into a fortune-- ironically becoming an exponent of Silicon Valley libertarianism.  For Stafford Beer, Cybersyn was a point on the path of an opposite trajectory-- the one-time business consultant was turned into a committed socialist by his experience of Allende's Chile; and he continued to offer his services to cybernetic projects in Mexico, Venezuela and Uruguay.

Solidarity When?

Late last week, I happened to be listening to a popular YouTube broadcast of the left when a listener from Florida called in hoping to make a point about how one of the "biggest obstacles to left-wing power in this country" was its "antagonistic relationship with working class people like me and what I believe is a racist anti-white culture within the left that is driving this antagonism "   He came prepared with a 2019 academic study from Colgate University and a personal anecdote to support his premise.  The Colgate Study measured attitudes of those who identified as either liberal or conservative toward a story about the life circumstances of man named Kevin who "lived in NYC, was raised by a single mom, struggled with poverty his whole life, and was currently receiving welfare assistance" but whose race was varied along with whether or not the subject was first given information to read about white privilege.  The researchers found that while conservatives seemed to look down on poor people of either race with or without the benefit of receiving information about white privilege, and liberals who were not first given information about white privilege expressed sympathy toward a poor man whether he was described as black or white,  self-identified liberals who had read about white privilege before hearing Kevin's story were more sympathetic to his present circumstances if he was described as black than if described as white, even to the point of blaming the white Kevin for his own poverty or agreeing with the proposition that "White people deserve to be poor in a kind of moral sense." 

As an illustration of the application of the study to his own experience, he related the story of how when he was a teenager in Florida in the 90s his single mother, working her way through school behind the cash register at a liquor store for little more than minimum wage unknowingly and absent-mindedly neglected to ask for an ID before selling a 6-pack of beer to a woman who turned out to be an underage undercover agent.  Weeks later, the lapse came back to her tenfold when the bust came down.  His mother was subsequently humiliatingly arrested on the job for it for which she was fired on the spot and "frog marched" out of the store to be charged.  Unable to raise bail she was jailed overnight without a chance to let her teenage son know where she was and what had happened to her. Saddled with legal expenses and court obligations for months and no longer on an income she was forced to go on public assistance.  The police and "by extension the lawmakers had nothing better to do with their time and taxpayer money than to publicly humiliate a poor white woman and drive her life into the ditch."  The caller used this as an example and not the worst of how poorly white people are treated by the police and yet at a leftist rallies he had attended  in support of Black Lives Matter following George Floyd's murder by police he had gotten the message that "poor whites have no skin in the game" and their struggles with the police did not matter.  As he told it, he was there in support and solidarity but came away from it disillusioned when one of the speakers reportedly said apropos of nothing that had been said before, "Poor white people, you all need to understand that your problems are not important right now" and then "went on to plug her small business."  The last part of his point was drowned out by one of the hosts mocking his sense of insult.   

Declarations of victimhood for being white have a tendency in leftist circles to raise suspicions along with eyebrows.  (Mine were raised.)  And of course as bad as poor people as a class have it at the hands of police, black people have it the worst .  But I think somewhere in there, the caller (who was not after all raining on a Black Lives Matter protest in progress, but merely trying to air his experience from one to illustrate an assertion on a leftist call-in show) had a valid point which I don't think he perfectly expressed-- not entirely through his own fault, although the responses he excited from the presenters of the broadcast which made it difficult for him to lay out his argument without protest may have to some extent made it for him. His framing of his mother's experience and of the results of the Colgate study as a case of anti-white racism, aside from doing him no favors with the audience he was addressing, is a mischaracterization of the problem that obfuscated matters, provoked a defensive response from the broadcasters and prevented the landing of what I think is actually a very important point.  

"There is without a doubt a class struggle but there is no white people's struggle." the host of the broadcast said accurately in support of his objection to the caller's story and it echoed my thoughts about the fault in the caller's presentation.  But to say that the caller's experience at the rally was an example of narcissistic extrapolation that has no bearing on leftist power seems to me to be missing the crux.  As the caller said, "If we're talking about winning power in this country, we need as many people on board as we can get so when the left alienates poor white people it's not just me the guy in the crowd who got his feelings hurt it's sort of a ripple effect."  Like it or not, and who the hell likes it, there is a problem building solidarity on the left (and has been at least since the time of Marx) which is very much exemplified by the readiness with which many poor whites are prepared to abandon class solidarity at the moment their own very real struggles are discounted by those who should be comrades due to the lack of a racial component to them (which if there is anything to the Colgate study seems to be the point of it).  The anomalous speaker at the George Floyd rally so hasty to draw a boundary of race on whose experiences were permitted to be brought to the table was tellingly a member of the black bourgeoisie according to the caller (or at least that was the perception) -- did she have skin in the poverty game?  Truthfully, how attuned to the pain and humiliations of poverty that doesn't fit the liberal mold are the hosts of the broadcast?  What the caller was talking about is the kind of pocketing of aggrievements that the left is lately so brilliant at festering and fostering but that only manipulators of the right seem to be capable of corralling to their own benefit.

In short, the left has a Solidarity problem.  It will not be solved by alienating anybody for deficiencies in their place on the hierarchy of grievances.  True, the gentleman's story had a huge element of subjective hurt to it.  Whose doesn't?  When someone tells you they are feeling excluded unfairly, believe them first.  Then defend them.  Then march forward together.

Democracy by Lot

If you've ever looked at the sad state of leadership in this (or any other) country and thought, "I could do better than that!", I agree.  You could do better than that, and if we lived in an actual democracy, you would have the opportunity to put your money where your mouth is.  But none of us who select our representatives by plurality from candidates put forth by nomination of a party do live in a true democracy, because the party system, for all of its advantages and conveniences in an ideal world is in practice a terribly undemocratic way to select our leaders.  Particularly in the land of Democracy, the un-democratic bully of the world, the United States.

Proof is all around us.  In the US, mid-term elections are tomorrow.  Already $2 billion has been spent from extra-partisan PACs-- a record for a non-presidential election made possible by a Supreme Court decision (Citizens United) in 2010 that essentially protected unlimited political donations from corporations as free speech.  The result is a cacophony of negativity dominating the interstices between segments of our news and entertainment programs-- a vile non-stop parade of one horrifying character assassination after another, each cancelling the other out; the winner being the PAC with the biggest pot for the most unavoidable pattern in the carpet.  In practice, this is not the PAC representing the broadest possible interests, but normally only the narrowest of interests on topics of primary concern particularly to the deepest pockets that keep them funded.   This is not to suggest that the negativity doesn't bleed into the news coverage as the conversation takes shape around the tropes that money would like us to pay attention to.  

As for voting itself, can it be trusted?  Is it fair?  Does it reflect our wishes?  For a variety of reasons, the waters are muddied now-- which is becoming true when elections are rigged and even when they are not.  Across the US, one of our parties -- the Republican one--  is actively in the process of dismantling and straitjacketing the possibility of free and fair elections.  Why?  In the name of securing "free and fair elections" which they define as elections in which Republicans (the party of the dominant oligarchic minority) win.  The assurance of this, sadly for the planet, for the people and for human rights, necessarily entails the suppression of democratic votes, which is achieved through a variety of measures such as limiting how and when votes can be cast-- e.g., only during working hours on a workday; the gerrymandering of districts to consolidate Republican voters and diffuse those most likely to vote for Democrats; requiring voter IDs, the procurement of which can be time consuming and costly for those that society keeps at the bottom of the economic ladder; and if that's not enough to deter them, legal harassment up to and including entrapment, prosecution and imprisonment for infractions of arcane very selectively enforced voter fraud ordinances.  In pursuit of a lock on voting procedures across the country Republicans have for years been actively and very successfully working to take over oversight of local elections state by state in their truly frighteningly effective way and they will succeed thanks to control of state legislatures and supreme courts even in the least expected places-- in moves that even if they are challenged are likely to stand thanks to a very partisan republican hold on the Supreme Court of the United States. But the sentiment that leaving democracy to the people is dangerous is not restricted to one party.  A strong contingent of neo-liberal democrats regularly work hand in hand with media concerns to undermine challenges from the more populist impulses from the fringes of the party and many openly advocate for a democracy of the meritocracy on the theory that the benefit of the wisdom of the deserving will trickle down to the unmeritorious masses. 

The net effect of this chaos at the voting booth and control of the ballot and of the outcomes is that this neoliberal ideal of democracy by elites is to a great extent the reality,  See how great it's working?  It is no wonder that so many don't vote (for which the elites are thankful), and that even those of us who vote in hopes of preventing the worst outcome rarely get anything more from the process than severe anxiety and justifiable dread about the direction our country is taking.

There is a solution.  It's called sortition-- democracy by lot.  Let elections be decided not by money but by fate.  In short, what if we elected our leaders from among each and every one of us not by majority or plurality vote for a handful of names offered by parties, but from among all the members of the citizenry by a certified random selection process. We are already familiar with the concept of this from our jury system in which we are periodically selected for duty by lottery (based on certain qualifying criteria).  What I am talking about is rule by citizens  (among whom could very well at any time be you or me) selected by a chance process. The practice, still trotted out these days from time to time for special purposes such as "citizens' commissions" in Europe in particular, was more widespread in ancient times particularly in Greece, and from renaissance times in Italy -- Florence, Lombardy and Venice specifically-- but candidates were generally selected from only among land owning males.  Nothing about the notion requires that however, and of course here and there it was designed to take the fullest advantage of its most appealing potential attribute, inclusivity.  Most charmingly, according to Wikipedia, "Local government in parts of Tamil Nadu such as the village of Uttiramerur traditionally used a system known as kuda-olai where the names of candidates for the village committee were written on palm leaves and put into a pot and pulled out by a child."  I'd be in favor of something like that in this country-- but only if the names in the pot were from everyone in the community.  

How does this work?  The procedures for it require that eligibility for selection be agreed upon and that the method for selection be transparent and accepted.  Both of these simple requirements are opportunities for disagreement.  On the matter of transparently random selection, I have ideas of my own but am open to suggestion.  On the contentious matter of eligibility, several possibilities present themselves.  There will no doubt be those in favor of restricting it to much the same class of people we are stuck with now at the top, much as the Greeks and Italians did.  Alternatively there is certainly something to be said for making it wide open and voluntary.  Volunteering oneself for the possibility of being selected is no guarantee of being selected, so opportunities and incentives for corruption are limited on this side of the equation. Even so, one can easily imagine restrictions and suppression on qualifications and the process of volunteering evolving to the point at which the self-selection of volunteers trends toward a homogeneous pool of names-- a situation which should be engineered against.    

For my part, for American democracy by sortition, I would advocate for true random selection from among the set of Everybody in the US, with the barest minimum of requirements for eligibility (age, opt outs based on special circumstances, a notion of who qualifies based on citizenship, for instance).  I would not exclude the incarcerated or the undocumented.  I would in fact be in favor of involuntary participation for all permanent  residents above the age of -- let's say 13-- and voluntary participation of non-permanent, but long-term current residents in the country.

What I am advocating is that for our representation in government, we pull random names out of a hat, such that you and I have just as much of a chance at running things for a change as Nancy Pelosi or Mitch McConnell.  The end of money in politics-- a cure for the corruption of campaign finance.  Random selection also means representational democracy--  a government that reflects the makeup of the population by every demographic, by all income levels, by social relations, by height, by weight, by interests, by musical taste, by eye color, by handedness.  Representation for all instead of just the 16,000 households (not mine, and none of them likely to be yours either) that the 2 parties currently represent, and who are already over-represented.  Aside from the abolishment of parties (Get Rid of Them!), I see no reason to tamper too much with the structure of our legislatures at this stage-- this is merely a fix for the selection process, which I would predict would in short order begin to result in a fix for the governing. 

And why stop at the legislature?  We should select the president (or perhaps an executive committee), the cabinet, our judges from circuit court to supreme court the same way.  The terms for each  would be short and staggered so that at any time every branch of government would be run by fresh, perhaps hesitant and reluctant hands as well as by those who know the ropes but who will not be entrenched.  Would some of the selected suck at the job?  Yes! Would some take advantage of the opportunity to enrich themselves to the extent of dereliction of their duty to their fellow citizens?  Yes! Would many refuse to serve?  Yes!  And what's your point?  This is different from the current situation, how exactly?  The certainty that random selection will result in some bad apples or duds is why terms are short and do not repeat (already a vast improvement-- a fix-- of the current system in which incumbency advantages the worst of the lot to remain in place to suck indefinitely).  Is it worth it to ensure that our representatives truly represent us?  Yes! Yes! and Yes!  

I imagine we would naturally structure our civic education in a way that would prepare each of us to the extent of our abilities for the possibility of being selected to serve.  But this is hardly as important as the possibility for each of us that our raw ideas will be heard without being drowned out by money or prevented by corrupt control of the limited interests that partisan politics enable. The result I am convinced would be better, more representational government that is less bought, less professional and more creative in coming up with and implementing solutions for the real challenges that actually face all of us.  And as I have said elsewhere, the principles of sortition applied to government could also be applied to other troubled and troubling areas of our failed democracy: the military, the constabulary and industry for starters.  Imagine if instead of shouting into the darkness about crime for instance, you were for a brief period of time given some degree of charge over it as a randomly selected one-term officer of the peace.

I do not have time, patience or credentials to make a scholarly, bullet proof case for the practice.  I present this to you merely in an effort to get the concept before you.  I am convinced that this quite obvious cure for democracy will never make it past this blog post.  But you can't blame a guy for trying.