In Us We Trust

Is it just me or is this the strangest presidential election ever?  The clock is ticking; change is mandatory; but the country seems stuck in re-run mode. A Trump versus Biden rematch is seemingly inevitable, and for a good dose of dysfunctional nostalgia, how about throwing Jill Stein into the mix?  The sameness is not limited to presidential politics, or to the US for that matter.  The whole planet seems to be spiraling into a toilet of retrograde nationalism (at least in the parts of the world that western capitalism has not yet turned into a toilet of climate catastrophe).  To feel better about things, I could take drugs or practice my Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, or I could write once again about an obvious solution to the cesspool of electoralism: universal sortition-- the random selection of our leaders for short non-consecutive terms through a scientifically equitable process from among the pool of all of us.  Scientifically randomized universal sortition is the cure because it removes money, careerism, influence peddling, partisanship and all of the myriad barriers and issues (natural and manufactured) to people's ability to vote and to get representation.  It doesn't end with selection.  Legislatures (and judiciaries and executives) selected by sortition convene to get the same non-partisan information about issues of the day, to debate and to deliberate without having to answer to parties or to donors or to special interests or to worry about re-election.

A common objection I hear from people when I raise the possibility of sortition as a replacement for the current system is that government, leadership and politics require an intelligence that random selection among people (let's come out with it, among Americans) is unlikely to find.  The complexities of the modern world make the stakes too high to be trusted with the average Joe or Jane.   By definition of course statistically the intelligence of the group will be average unlike the higher concentration of brains we presume are in a hierarchy based on achievement (or historically secured for itself by a clever bloodline).  Call me a little slow (or of average speed),  but I still think average human intelligence is much smarter than we presume and is suppressed by our measurements of it and by our expectations.  I also think the proof of the intelligence of our current elite is in the pudding.

People are more intelligent than they get credit for, though the application of this innate capacity of humans is not encouraged in public life.   A huge part of what makes people stupid about government is partisanship.  Money in politics incentivizes the cultivation of stupidity.  Every now and then  I’m surprised to learn that a very intelligent colleague has ridiculously inane politics. Doing away with partisan politics will give people much less incentive to nurture their stupid side and provide occasions to exercise their native intelligence. A society that runs on sortition will have its structure transformed.  Currently we teach people they’re stupid from a very young age to keep them from pursuing power (because we want them to work, not to lead or to own—our education is designed around this).  What if we give people the respect they deserve-- that we ourselves demand-- as human beings with human brains?  When our leadership is randomly selected among our fellow citizens, it will be in our interest to structure public education in a way that nourishes everyone's intelligence.

All of this said, the fact remains that some people are just plain stupid. But don’t stupid people get a say?  I say yes.  If everyone has a shot at non-partisan power, I believe that’s incentive for people to  be at least somewhat less stupid-- to rise to wisdom as the occasion demands.  Face to face, person to person, people will try harder I think to get it right. 

Will people still make decisions against their interest or best judgment?  Perhaps, but if we ourselves are our leaders, we will have a more direct engagement with the issues that face us.  Our experience of politics will be not merely as judges in a beauty contest between scoundrels who have their own interests and agendas and careers at heart.  We will not have the luxury of letting the professionals fuck things up.  There will be no need to appeal to greater, more gifted and advantaged authority. There is no greater, more gifted or advantaged authority to appeal to, so the lawmaker must appeal to herself.  This is the point of universal sortition.

About 1% of those selected for the legislatures, judiciaries, councils governing our world by sortition will be miserable with their loss of representation, but this is the 1% that thanks to their masterful manipulation of the electorate,  are easily 5000% over-represented now anyway.  Their representation needs to be "trued-up" to their number. The reckoning is long overdue.

About this small segment of society and its potential for mischief, I saw a discussion on a recent book about Jury trials-- the most familiar practical application of sortition already in place-- and the authors’s thesis is that basically we don’t have jury trials anymore because of plea bargaining.  They’re becoming so rare as to be statistically non-existent.  And it’s pretty safe to say that the ones that do happen are very carefully designed so that the fate or liability for damages of any Harvard dude on trial is rarely if ever going to get decided by a resentful dummy.  The point is our legal system is designed to be manipulated by the clever weasels who run it. We’d just have to make sure that clever weasels don’t get to manipulate sortition to their favor in a similar manner. 

When you get down to it, it's just a place people live