cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/32632129
“[R]epresentative democracy is a failure and elections are a circus. If we want to reform democracy, elections have to be abolished.” | A political strategy for degrowth
Before reading the article: party politics is a 20th Century form of organization that worked in the context of 20th Century conditions; expecting it would work for the 21st Century and the digital era is, in my opinion, not going to work. From what I read on history of economics, a new paradigm is adopted when the current one fails repeatedly and the ruling class has no option but to pick some different framework that can still benefit their interests. I think this is the most likely (although not the most desirable) path to degrowth in the next ~20y.
I feel like sortition has the potential to be even more of a failure than representative democracy in today’s post-truth social media brainwashing society, though I still view it favourably.
It’s hard to do worse than elections that install fascism. Representative democracy kind of hits the bottom of the scale there. And that’s the fancy representative democracies with careful attention to separation of powers and all that.
And that’s not to mention that every representative democracy in human history has resulted in policy that is contributing to the destruction of the Earth’s capacity to sustain human life.
Compared to that, the mere potential to be a failure is hardly something to shy away from. At the very least you should look at the failure risk of versions of sordition that are actually under consideration - ones that have checks and balances - rather than the worst potential.
Remember that sortition is government by committee. You’re not selecting one person to be in charge by lot and taking a gamble on that person’s competence; you’re selecting a group of dozens or hundreds of people, from a pool of qualified volunteers, and having them come to a consensus on what to do.
If I had to decide who would make better decisions, a committee of 100 or so ordinary citizens, all of whom were more politically active and aware than the average citizen (or they wouldn’t volunteer in the first place), or a career politician whose first priority is to manipulate citizens into voting for him and whose second priority is to make money off his position, I’d choose the committee every time. Better a group of people who may have been influenced by post-truth brainwashing than one of the people doing the brainwashing in the first place.
Not all forms of sortition are based on volunteering, sometimes it’s proposed as a civic duty similar to jury in the States. Volunteering introduces a selection bias which could make the system unfair.
The main issue with it in my view is that in present-day society there’d be many attempts to influence the committee (read: corruption). Of course this also applies to representative democracy, but that doesn’t make it any less of an issue because that’s one of the major problems with representative democracy that needs to get fixed.
I can easily picture a dystopian implementation of sortition where the public sees it as a lottery where they can get rich by getting selected and taking bribes from corporations once they’re in, much the same way American representative democracy currently works (and to a lesser degree, representative democracy everywhere).
I think there are more important things than fairness. We have laws requiring employers to give you paid time off for jury duty and it’s still a significant burden on a lot of people. For someone to be chosen by lot to participate in what’s likely to be the equivalent of a full-time job? Frankly, it would be unfair to place that burden on people who didn’t sign up for it.
And sortition would be pretty much guaranteed to fail if the people chosen by lot weren’t drawn from a pool who’d already proven they understood, to some degree, the issues they would be making decisions about. If we take conscripts instead of volunteers, we’d have a committee full of people who didn’t know, or care, about the issues, who didn’t want to be there in the first place, and who’d happily rubber stamp the decisions of whoever on the committee was the loudest and most passionate so that they could go home early.
And I think you have to draw a distinction between influence and corruption. Everybody has the right to advocate for policies that benefit them. Everybody has the right to form unions and groups and lobby for policies that benefit them. So of course this committee will be influenced by outside parties. The alternative is decision makers who don’t listen to people telling them what they want and need, and that’s not good for society.
And of course there will be explicit and implicit bribes, there will be be influence campaigns, and so on, because you can’t have any decision making process, anywhere, that people won’t try to rig.
But: it’s much, much more difficult for some corrupt billionaire to bribe 100-plus members of a committee - especially if, as I hope, that committee makes decisions by consensus, anarchist style, instead of by majority vote - than it is to bribe one politician. And once you’ve bribed all those committee members, as soon as their term expires you have to bribe a whole new committee, because there’s no guarantee that any committee member will be selected by lot next year (and, in fact, I’d argue someone shouldn’t be eligible to serve again for x number of years after being chosen). On the other hand, bribing a career politician is a continuing investment that pays off year after year after year.
As primising it might sound at a first glance as many problems will occur with this sort of rulership in the end.
Two thoughts for you:
- There‘ re 4 categories of problems at all:
- well known/ basic problems, complete unknown/ chaotic problems,
- sort of mixed up things /complicated problems,
- a net of Interdependent things/ complex problems.
Not for all these sorts of problems a decision through many experts is the best way. E.g. chaotic problems need a leader who guides through the chaos. A slowly deciding experts circle who likely opts for the middle way, isn’t the best option for those environments.
See the Known-Unknown-Framework https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/There_are_unknown_unknowns
- Second thought: In history of humankind, we had all sort of sizes of societies - from small groups of 8 people up to thousands and more. It turned out in our history that humans always need someone who collects, aligns and represent a group of people - a leader. There never was any community that relied on many representatives that shared roles and reponsibilities.
