Nicholas, this is a brilliant and necessary piece. I have little to give in critical opinion on the specifics, but I do have a question to ask in the context of the historical moment you describe.
I want to consider that while we can and should debate system design, any system must be constructed to operate within the substrate available to it. In the language of Constructor Theory, it is constrained by the possible tasks its design can perform upon that substrate.
The problem with modern democracy, I believe, is not a flaw in the system's design per se, but a fundamental degradation of the substrate upon which it operates. The system places power with citizens to come to accord on the visible issues of the day, but it presumes a "common interest" that no longer naturally exists. This "informational malaise" among a diverse and disconnected citizenry creates a logical vacancy at the heart of the system.
This vacancy gives rise to the need for a manufactured and elevated "common interest" within political parties. The work of politics is no longer about governing, but about the complex and expensive business of generating interest itself. This business is expensive, so parties inevitably turn to wealthy elites, severing the feedback loop from common voters that is supposed to connect them to the people.
Your proposal for a people's chamber is a powerful attempt to patch this system, but I wonder if we first need to discover and prop up the logical gap in the substrate itself. Where can we find the common ground?
Is it bio-logical? Are there real, common interests in matters of poverty, healthcare, or other matters of the body?
Is it eco-logical? Is the environment, natural or built, a matter for everyone's national concern?
Is it intra-logical? Are there common issues of regional disparity?
Is it inter-logical? Is there a common interest in our nation's sovereignty and its relationship with the world?
Is it psycho-logical? Is the very nature of the Australian project sculpting our citizens in a way that needs common debate?
Is it socio-logical? Is there a shared cultural emergence that requires a common set of policy options?
My wager is that while all these "logics" are ruffled through in every election, the actual selection pressure is based on a much cruder table of options. For each party, the column titles are the same: Us, Them, Cash Cows, and Sheeple. The qualifier is "screws," and the winning formula is the one that maximizes how much good it does for "Us," how much bad it does to "Them," how tightly it can turn the screws on "Cash Cows" for funding, and how effectively it can screw the "Sheeple" into voting for it.
This connects to a thought I recently published in an article, "The Purpose of Vision is to Become Blind." The primary benefit of our senses is to allow us to become consciously ignorant of almost everything they perceive. We operate 99.99% of the time as zombies, mindlessly avoiding obstacles, to free up our conscious awareness for what is truly meaningful.
The current political system violates this fundamental principle. It is a system of disingenuous "screw tactics" designed to hijack our better judgment. People disengage not out of apathy, but as a healthy, protective act. They instinctively want to remain "blind" to a system that is designed to be a meaningless obstacle, not a useful tool.
This, I believe, reveals the true debate that is missing from our commons. The missing area where democracy requires its own renaissance is not technological; it is info-logical. If we are to design a better system, we must also focus on constructing and maintaining a coherent info-logical commons. This would be a shared informational substrate where genuine, non-manufactured common interests can actually emerge and be acted upon within the dynamics of a revitalized democratic system.
You may say, "Where might we find such a devilishly ingenious info-logical commons?"
Well, to this I'd take a line from Black Adder's Baldrick and say, "I have a cunning plan."
What you're saying is very deep, but also shallow at the same time - and I'm not saying that as a joke or as an insult. It's intended as quite the compliment, but also as critique. Less pompously, perhaps you're being too clever by half.
This problem with identifying the common good isn't some new development, despite the complications (and richness) that modern diversity creates. It's (surely!) the perennial subject of political theory. What are the ideas and institutions that might enable many people to divine and then pursue their collective interests (while each also pursues their own individual, and sectoral interest).
Your observation that our senses fade out of consciousness when they're working well is a nice way to think about the adversarialism baked into our politics. But none of it was 'designed'. It's the product of different interests struggling, winning, losing, compromising. But like fast food, something that worked well enough when the world was young and being attracted by fat, salt and sugar was adaptive, adversarialism refracted through competitive media is progressively corroding more and more of our lifeworld.
If you've got "a shared informational substrate where genuine, non-manufactured common interests can actually emerge and be acted upon within the dynamics of a revitalized democratic system", please do share your cunning plan. But remember I've crafted my own ideas as approaches to activism - and as a couple of simple principles, because I can't see any point in yet another grand plan that's unveiled - to join all the others, all on the assumption that someone will win the argument as to what to build and then we'll all agree to build it. That never happens - like I said, political systems are not 'designed'. They're struggled for.
Like Otto Neurath said:
“We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in a dock and reconstruct it from the best components.”
Thanks Nicholas, and I take your "deep but shallow" critique as the high compliment and fair challenge it was intended to be. You're right, political systems are struggled for, not designed, and there's no room for yet another grand plan to be unveiled.
It is true we build and maintain our ship while remaining within it, as Neurath said. But I'd add that we are also of and adjacent to it. We are its planks, its sail cloth, and we are the sea itself. Our individual reality is not separate from the system's reality.
And this leads to my "cunning plan," which isn't a blueprint for a new ship, but a diagnostic tool for the sailors. The plan is to solve the info-logical paradox.
The paradox is this: we observe, navigate, and act to be causally-effective through our free will. We use our internal qualia, such as our sense of trust, our moral compass and our aesthetic judgments to steer. And yet, we take these qualia to be 'of ourselves' alone, when they are in fact emergent properties of the entire system: the ship, the ocean, and the particular storms we find ourselves adrift in.
This is where I think my idea connects directly to your concept of the "lifeworld." The adversarialism you describe and the "bullshit world" of cheap talk and messaging succeeds precisely because it exploits this paradox. It manipulates the storm (the media environment) to warp our individual compasses (our qualia). It makes us believe our manufactured outrage and division are our own authentic feelings, when they are actually emergent properties of a system designed to produce them.
So, the activism I propose isn't about handing everyone a new blueprint for the ship. It's about providing the sailors with better navigational tools. It's about building systems for everyday situations that deliver "verifiable honesty"—a just-in-time foundation that underwrites the integrity of our trust-based world. This would be a ground-up emergence of stability; a newly solid deck beneath our feet for our common senses to once again explore, exploit, or simply ignore.
I recognise the scale of this claim. This isn't a magical solution. It's a testable hypothesis with falsifiable predictions, and my work is focused on developing the methods to find the extraordinary evidence these ideas demand.
I look forward to catching up with you soon to discuss. Massive thanks for the reply on my email related to this.
You may remembers the character James Cole, played by Bruce Willis in the film Twelve Monkeys.
Like James Cole said:
"It's just like what's happening with us, like the past. The movie never changes. It can't change; but every time you see it, it seems different because you're different. You see different things."
Thanks - I'm still sceptical, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding something. Reading what you've written, which remains oracular about what precisely you have in mind, makes me think that you think politics is a largely rational activity or should be. I think we'd both agree that it's not rational right now. But lots of people have been calling for more fact checking, and yet we know that people remain largely unmoved by fact checking.
As neuroscientists seem to have discovered and philosophers like Martha Nussbaum have argued for a while now, the emotions are fundamental to how we make judgements. So I'm wary of any appeal to cutting through to the truth. All I'm trying to do is to situate decision making in a world in which people are not completely alienated from one another, a world that's not mediated by power and patronage, a world in which they feel as much at home as they can when seeking to understand and execute their responsibilities.
There was a time I thought sortition was the answer too, short-circuiting all of the various ways leadership positions are gamed by existing interests. But to go back to the Magna Carta, really that was a truce between barons and Kings, between the top-end of status hierarchies. The later checks and balances in democracies all derived from that same truce, to counter-balance higher status people and groups against each other, to allow none to gain dominance.
But I now believe status is the ‘atom’ of human social life. There is no avoiding status hierarchies, only (as Will Storr’s brilliant book talks about) the possibility of creating status hierarchies that target collective good. As Victorian England did, with its Republic of Letters. It made the science and engineering of that time a high status activity, targeted at collective good.
There is no such thing as ‘the people’, groups of people don’t have agency in that way. Right now look at the US, where ‘the people’ clearly want a King back, and Trump is their only choice. They love status, status is ultimately just quality, and it can be gamed, but never avoided. In a sortition-led society, who ‘speaks’ for the nation? Who leads the sortition?
I'm not sure there's a disagreement here. I think you're critiquing what you take to be the naivete of my proposal. You think I'm proposing the idea that 'the people' can and should govern themselves in a democracy. In a sense that's right - but perhaps that's best thought of as the reigning myth in a democracy - by which I mean not something that is simply wrong (like the myth of dragons), but as something that gives voice to certain aspirations.
I don't propose sortition from a desire to abolish status or hierarchy — in fact, my starting point is very close to Storr’s, namely that status games are an inescapable feature of human social life and thus a building block of institutions.
That raises the question of whether those building blocks - which I've also called the DNA or logic of our institutions - make for good or bad status games. It seems to me that both in principle and in experience, electoral politics is prone to tip status games in predatory and toxic directions.
It rewards gaming the system - almost all the finer points of campaigning and media management - though perhaps a better way to put it is electoral politics ruthlessly punishes those who won't play the media game. It generates outsize rewards for dominance and success in ways that are misaligned with the public's interest in being well governed - in charisma, money, attack ads, celebrity. And it encourages the counterfeiting of various kinds of virtue. Indeed there's something inherently invidious in selecting for merit predicated on people competing for promotion by touting their own virtues.
This, to my mind, is exactly in the spirit of The Status Game, which argues that flourishing societies are those that direct the hunger for status into pursuits that serve collective goods — Victorian science, the Republic of Letters, etc. I’m not denying hierarchies; I’m trying to re-engineer them so that they reward the kinds of competence, cooperation, and public-spiritedness that a healthy democracy depends on. In that sense, the objection you raise actually reinforces my underlying case: the question isn’t whether hierarchies exist, but whether our institutions structure them in ways that strengthen or corrode the public realm.
Yep not a disagreement I don't think! More a question probably about how to achieve another Victorian England detouring of status towards 'success' hierarchies, I think that was Storr's term. How to engineer status hierarchies focused on the public good, when existing status hierarchies will of course resist that detouring mightily. How to make sortition for example a high-status thing that will then drive that shift.
I think I am in line with the author's thinking. I support "random sampling" (up to a point) and jury-trial (but too expensive to society). My question is how we can address the non-uniformity or inhomogeneity in the public. Some people really have no time for jury duty, and jury-pay will keep their families hungry. Some people are ignorant of the majority of public policy issues. Voluntary opt-out only solves part of the problem. How about the incompetency part?
Why is jury trial too expensive to society? Certainly we should pay them better than we do in most jurisdictions. On incompetency I'm not sure what the problem is. Parliamentarians are just those who got preselection. They're not experts. There are plenty of poorly informed ones. The experience of most people who've participated or been close spectators of citizens’ juries is that the members acquit themselves well. Some have low levels of education (this is also true - but not as true - of parliamentarians) but many poorly educated participants are conscientious participants. One big plus is that they don't try to fake wide knowledge - which is more or less required of professional politicians and spokespeople.
May I say there are at least two hidden assumptions in your statements that (1) basic human decency and sense of justice are widespread in society. Not perfect, but widely spread. (2) sufficient common sense and minimal necessary knowledge for the modern world are widespread in society -- typically this requires reasonable primary and secondary education for most citizens?
Perhaps you need to read some more from unbiased sources about whether your concerns are borne out in experience. You obviously don't trust my judgement which is that members of citizens’ juries are more conscientious than parliamentarians - which may be well advised.
Perhaps. My personal experience indeed is very limited. However, I do agree with you that "citizens’ juries are more conscientious than parliamentarians" so far as I have witnessed. I have seen enlisted men outperformed college-degreed officers in paperwork and in military logistics. I have seen high schoolers wiser than PhDs on real-life matters. It is not just a capability issue, but also an intention and attitude issue. The typical parliamentarians do not have the right intentions and they take advices based on expediency as convenient to them. If one's understanding of the world is biased due to any reason, then there are blind spots in reasoning. One potential issue of my experiences is probably that I have seen way too many uncivilized ordinary citizens who cannot think straight or act with basic human decency.
Back in early 1990s, or was it late 1980s I took a class lectured by Michael Taylor in the General Philosophy Faculty that discussed the possibility of demarchy/sortition. I was taken by the idea. But … my issue was fear of being hose chosen by lottery captured by the public servants who support them.
Yes, that's something you need to think about - and which I have thought about, but no doubt there's plenty more thinking to be done. I'd agree that that's an issue that needs to be kept front of mind as one tries to advance the cause of sortition. Right now, it's not an issue as any conceivable allotted body would be an adjunct to our existing system where it would have its influence as a critic, not as the body in charge of the system.
Nicholas, this is a brilliant and necessary piece. I have little to give in critical opinion on the specifics, but I do have a question to ask in the context of the historical moment you describe.
I want to consider that while we can and should debate system design, any system must be constructed to operate within the substrate available to it. In the language of Constructor Theory, it is constrained by the possible tasks its design can perform upon that substrate.
The problem with modern democracy, I believe, is not a flaw in the system's design per se, but a fundamental degradation of the substrate upon which it operates. The system places power with citizens to come to accord on the visible issues of the day, but it presumes a "common interest" that no longer naturally exists. This "informational malaise" among a diverse and disconnected citizenry creates a logical vacancy at the heart of the system.
This vacancy gives rise to the need for a manufactured and elevated "common interest" within political parties. The work of politics is no longer about governing, but about the complex and expensive business of generating interest itself. This business is expensive, so parties inevitably turn to wealthy elites, severing the feedback loop from common voters that is supposed to connect them to the people.
Your proposal for a people's chamber is a powerful attempt to patch this system, but I wonder if we first need to discover and prop up the logical gap in the substrate itself. Where can we find the common ground?
Is it bio-logical? Are there real, common interests in matters of poverty, healthcare, or other matters of the body?
Is it eco-logical? Is the environment, natural or built, a matter for everyone's national concern?
Is it intra-logical? Are there common issues of regional disparity?
Is it inter-logical? Is there a common interest in our nation's sovereignty and its relationship with the world?
Is it psycho-logical? Is the very nature of the Australian project sculpting our citizens in a way that needs common debate?
Is it socio-logical? Is there a shared cultural emergence that requires a common set of policy options?
My wager is that while all these "logics" are ruffled through in every election, the actual selection pressure is based on a much cruder table of options. For each party, the column titles are the same: Us, Them, Cash Cows, and Sheeple. The qualifier is "screws," and the winning formula is the one that maximizes how much good it does for "Us," how much bad it does to "Them," how tightly it can turn the screws on "Cash Cows" for funding, and how effectively it can screw the "Sheeple" into voting for it.
This connects to a thought I recently published in an article, "The Purpose of Vision is to Become Blind." The primary benefit of our senses is to allow us to become consciously ignorant of almost everything they perceive. We operate 99.99% of the time as zombies, mindlessly avoiding obstacles, to free up our conscious awareness for what is truly meaningful.
The current political system violates this fundamental principle. It is a system of disingenuous "screw tactics" designed to hijack our better judgment. People disengage not out of apathy, but as a healthy, protective act. They instinctively want to remain "blind" to a system that is designed to be a meaningless obstacle, not a useful tool.
This, I believe, reveals the true debate that is missing from our commons. The missing area where democracy requires its own renaissance is not technological; it is info-logical. If we are to design a better system, we must also focus on constructing and maintaining a coherent info-logical commons. This would be a shared informational substrate where genuine, non-manufactured common interests can actually emerge and be acted upon within the dynamics of a revitalized democratic system.
You may say, "Where might we find such a devilishly ingenious info-logical commons?"
Well, to this I'd take a line from Black Adder's Baldrick and say, "I have a cunning plan."
Thanks Steven,
What you're saying is very deep, but also shallow at the same time - and I'm not saying that as a joke or as an insult. It's intended as quite the compliment, but also as critique. Less pompously, perhaps you're being too clever by half.
This problem with identifying the common good isn't some new development, despite the complications (and richness) that modern diversity creates. It's (surely!) the perennial subject of political theory. What are the ideas and institutions that might enable many people to divine and then pursue their collective interests (while each also pursues their own individual, and sectoral interest).
Your observation that our senses fade out of consciousness when they're working well is a nice way to think about the adversarialism baked into our politics. But none of it was 'designed'. It's the product of different interests struggling, winning, losing, compromising. But like fast food, something that worked well enough when the world was young and being attracted by fat, salt and sugar was adaptive, adversarialism refracted through competitive media is progressively corroding more and more of our lifeworld.
If you've got "a shared informational substrate where genuine, non-manufactured common interests can actually emerge and be acted upon within the dynamics of a revitalized democratic system", please do share your cunning plan. But remember I've crafted my own ideas as approaches to activism - and as a couple of simple principles, because I can't see any point in yet another grand plan that's unveiled - to join all the others, all on the assumption that someone will win the argument as to what to build and then we'll all agree to build it. That never happens - like I said, political systems are not 'designed'. They're struggled for.
Like Otto Neurath said:
“We are like sailors who must rebuild their ship on the open sea, never able to dismantle it in a dock and reconstruct it from the best components.”
Thanks Nicholas, and I take your "deep but shallow" critique as the high compliment and fair challenge it was intended to be. You're right, political systems are struggled for, not designed, and there's no room for yet another grand plan to be unveiled.
It is true we build and maintain our ship while remaining within it, as Neurath said. But I'd add that we are also of and adjacent to it. We are its planks, its sail cloth, and we are the sea itself. Our individual reality is not separate from the system's reality.
And this leads to my "cunning plan," which isn't a blueprint for a new ship, but a diagnostic tool for the sailors. The plan is to solve the info-logical paradox.
The paradox is this: we observe, navigate, and act to be causally-effective through our free will. We use our internal qualia, such as our sense of trust, our moral compass and our aesthetic judgments to steer. And yet, we take these qualia to be 'of ourselves' alone, when they are in fact emergent properties of the entire system: the ship, the ocean, and the particular storms we find ourselves adrift in.
This is where I think my idea connects directly to your concept of the "lifeworld." The adversarialism you describe and the "bullshit world" of cheap talk and messaging succeeds precisely because it exploits this paradox. It manipulates the storm (the media environment) to warp our individual compasses (our qualia). It makes us believe our manufactured outrage and division are our own authentic feelings, when they are actually emergent properties of a system designed to produce them.
So, the activism I propose isn't about handing everyone a new blueprint for the ship. It's about providing the sailors with better navigational tools. It's about building systems for everyday situations that deliver "verifiable honesty"—a just-in-time foundation that underwrites the integrity of our trust-based world. This would be a ground-up emergence of stability; a newly solid deck beneath our feet for our common senses to once again explore, exploit, or simply ignore.
I recognise the scale of this claim. This isn't a magical solution. It's a testable hypothesis with falsifiable predictions, and my work is focused on developing the methods to find the extraordinary evidence these ideas demand.
I look forward to catching up with you soon to discuss. Massive thanks for the reply on my email related to this.
You may remembers the character James Cole, played by Bruce Willis in the film Twelve Monkeys.
Like James Cole said:
"It's just like what's happening with us, like the past. The movie never changes. It can't change; but every time you see it, it seems different because you're different. You see different things."
Thanks - I'm still sceptical, but perhaps I'm misunderstanding something. Reading what you've written, which remains oracular about what precisely you have in mind, makes me think that you think politics is a largely rational activity or should be. I think we'd both agree that it's not rational right now. But lots of people have been calling for more fact checking, and yet we know that people remain largely unmoved by fact checking.
As neuroscientists seem to have discovered and philosophers like Martha Nussbaum have argued for a while now, the emotions are fundamental to how we make judgements. So I'm wary of any appeal to cutting through to the truth. All I'm trying to do is to situate decision making in a world in which people are not completely alienated from one another, a world that's not mediated by power and patronage, a world in which they feel as much at home as they can when seeking to understand and execute their responsibilities.
I greatly admire your dogged - and it seems to me intelligent and wise - pursuit of this admirable goal. Bravo.
Thanks Ingolf.
You have a fan in Tim Dunlop - and me, too!
There was a time I thought sortition was the answer too, short-circuiting all of the various ways leadership positions are gamed by existing interests. But to go back to the Magna Carta, really that was a truce between barons and Kings, between the top-end of status hierarchies. The later checks and balances in democracies all derived from that same truce, to counter-balance higher status people and groups against each other, to allow none to gain dominance.
But I now believe status is the ‘atom’ of human social life. There is no avoiding status hierarchies, only (as Will Storr’s brilliant book talks about) the possibility of creating status hierarchies that target collective good. As Victorian England did, with its Republic of Letters. It made the science and engineering of that time a high status activity, targeted at collective good.
There is no such thing as ‘the people’, groups of people don’t have agency in that way. Right now look at the US, where ‘the people’ clearly want a King back, and Trump is their only choice. They love status, status is ultimately just quality, and it can be gamed, but never avoided. In a sortition-led society, who ‘speaks’ for the nation? Who leads the sortition?
I'm not sure there's a disagreement here. I think you're critiquing what you take to be the naivete of my proposal. You think I'm proposing the idea that 'the people' can and should govern themselves in a democracy. In a sense that's right - but perhaps that's best thought of as the reigning myth in a democracy - by which I mean not something that is simply wrong (like the myth of dragons), but as something that gives voice to certain aspirations.
I don't propose sortition from a desire to abolish status or hierarchy — in fact, my starting point is very close to Storr’s, namely that status games are an inescapable feature of human social life and thus a building block of institutions.
That raises the question of whether those building blocks - which I've also called the DNA or logic of our institutions - make for good or bad status games. It seems to me that both in principle and in experience, electoral politics is prone to tip status games in predatory and toxic directions.
It rewards gaming the system - almost all the finer points of campaigning and media management - though perhaps a better way to put it is electoral politics ruthlessly punishes those who won't play the media game. It generates outsize rewards for dominance and success in ways that are misaligned with the public's interest in being well governed - in charisma, money, attack ads, celebrity. And it encourages the counterfeiting of various kinds of virtue. Indeed there's something inherently invidious in selecting for merit predicated on people competing for promotion by touting their own virtues.
Likewise I've argued for what I call bottom-up meritocracy within the citizens' chamber precisely to tip the scales as far as I can towards healthy as opposed to toxic hierarchy. (eg. see here: https://www.nesta.org.uk/event/democracy-doing-it-for-ourselves/ and here https://app.box.com/s/hlwwv64txsww4n3tkuz03c6ybswd5yvw/
This, to my mind, is exactly in the spirit of The Status Game, which argues that flourishing societies are those that direct the hunger for status into pursuits that serve collective goods — Victorian science, the Republic of Letters, etc. I’m not denying hierarchies; I’m trying to re-engineer them so that they reward the kinds of competence, cooperation, and public-spiritedness that a healthy democracy depends on. In that sense, the objection you raise actually reinforces my underlying case: the question isn’t whether hierarchies exist, but whether our institutions structure them in ways that strengthen or corrode the public realm.
Yep not a disagreement I don't think! More a question probably about how to achieve another Victorian England detouring of status towards 'success' hierarchies, I think that was Storr's term. How to engineer status hierarchies focused on the public good, when existing status hierarchies will of course resist that detouring mightily. How to make sortition for example a high-status thing that will then drive that shift.
I think I am in line with the author's thinking. I support "random sampling" (up to a point) and jury-trial (but too expensive to society). My question is how we can address the non-uniformity or inhomogeneity in the public. Some people really have no time for jury duty, and jury-pay will keep their families hungry. Some people are ignorant of the majority of public policy issues. Voluntary opt-out only solves part of the problem. How about the incompetency part?
Why is jury trial too expensive to society? Certainly we should pay them better than we do in most jurisdictions. On incompetency I'm not sure what the problem is. Parliamentarians are just those who got preselection. They're not experts. There are plenty of poorly informed ones. The experience of most people who've participated or been close spectators of citizens’ juries is that the members acquit themselves well. Some have low levels of education (this is also true - but not as true - of parliamentarians) but many poorly educated participants are conscientious participants. One big plus is that they don't try to fake wide knowledge - which is more or less required of professional politicians and spokespeople.
May I say there are at least two hidden assumptions in your statements that (1) basic human decency and sense of justice are widespread in society. Not perfect, but widely spread. (2) sufficient common sense and minimal necessary knowledge for the modern world are widespread in society -- typically this requires reasonable primary and secondary education for most citizens?
Perhaps you need to read some more from unbiased sources about whether your concerns are borne out in experience. You obviously don't trust my judgement which is that members of citizens’ juries are more conscientious than parliamentarians - which may be well advised.
Perhaps. My personal experience indeed is very limited. However, I do agree with you that "citizens’ juries are more conscientious than parliamentarians" so far as I have witnessed. I have seen enlisted men outperformed college-degreed officers in paperwork and in military logistics. I have seen high schoolers wiser than PhDs on real-life matters. It is not just a capability issue, but also an intention and attitude issue. The typical parliamentarians do not have the right intentions and they take advices based on expediency as convenient to them. If one's understanding of the world is biased due to any reason, then there are blind spots in reasoning. One potential issue of my experiences is probably that I have seen way too many uncivilized ordinary citizens who cannot think straight or act with basic human decency.
Back in early 1990s, or was it late 1980s I took a class lectured by Michael Taylor in the General Philosophy Faculty that discussed the possibility of demarchy/sortition. I was taken by the idea. But … my issue was fear of being hose chosen by lottery captured by the public servants who support them.
Yes, that's something you need to think about - and which I have thought about, but no doubt there's plenty more thinking to be done. I'd agree that that's an issue that needs to be kept front of mind as one tries to advance the cause of sortition. Right now, it's not an issue as any conceivable allotted body would be an adjunct to our existing system where it would have its influence as a critic, not as the body in charge of the system.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNtNsF2XEtJ/?igsh=MWMxOXozcDBoZGwzbg%3D%3D