The Draft: (Collapse V Change)

My six part series The Civic Engine is based on the following draft essay

We are living through a time of great anxiety, a total disconnect between the reality of the everyday lives of people on the ground and the political priorities of the “powers that be” have left people with the dual feeling of helplessness and desperation. Helpless to solve problems we all know exist and desperate for some other option, yet without any apparent alternative on the horizon. The challenge is not one to be underestimated, recent events have laid bare the scale of the problems in our system. Layers of rot that have moldered for decades, only now to be called unforeseeable by those responsible for its neglect. We have a comparable example in Ancient Athens; a history we may be surprised to learn more about.

Political division ruled life in Athens during these days, to such an extreme that civil war or tyranny seemed less far-fetched every day. Everyone acknowledges the existence of the crisis, but this oligarchic republic was not capable of resolving them, to the contrary they were the source of much of the strife. It is in this context that we find another form of civic participation other than elections: that of democracy.

On the precipice of war and economic collapse, a collapse stirred by stagnation and increasing corruption, poverty and inequity. The state petitioned Solon, a man known for his wisdom and just nature, to serve as a kind of arbitrator between the parties. He would determine the resolution of this crisis and what shape the Athenian polity would take for the coming decades and centuries. He was to solve the complete inability of their system of elected representatives to contend with its own incentives to overcome these problems. Those who attained election could only do so with the consent of powerful interests who individually benefitted from aspects of the crisis, even if they would theoretically support solving broader crises in society. This dynamic in fact guaranteed that none of the crises were addressed and Athenian society seemed doomed to face its own demise with no control of the wheel.

This desperation ultimately led to Solon’s radical proposal: rule by the citizenry, selected by lot rather than by elections. Along with equality of rights, Isonomia, these principles form the basis of our legal system today. What distinguishes democracy in this time from our modern understanding is that this encompassed the great majority of representative commissions in the whole of the city-state.

The legislative power lay largely in the hands of a kind of congress, the Boule. A body of 500 members chosen randomly from the ten Tribes artificially redistributed by Solon’s reforms, no longer were representatives beholden to the power players that had previously been locked in a stalemate. What predictably followed was a society set about educating its citizens for the work of governance, and relieving them of their debt bondage. Following this jubilee and new enfranchisement, the demos were liberated to pursue new collective projects the likes of which have few equals in our cultural and scientific heritage. It was the period of Plato, Aristotle, Archimedes, among the many others whose contributions serve as the foundations of our understanding of the universe. Particularly, Athens was free to resolve its internal contradictions as the will of the peop;le was more accurately reflected and given due agency within the halls of power.

Naturally this was a different day, and certainly as a slave and patriarchal state does not represent the kind of complete picture of what I would propose. All things equal Athens improved from these innovative reforms, I can only imagine the impact that expanding the franchise to the whole of Athenian society would have produced.

Thankfully, the representative selection of a random sample scales very well with the size of a population, such that we would not need to significantly alter the number of legislators in order to achieve a 95% or higher confidence interval of representation. That an assembly chosen by lot can be a superior alternative to the electoral system of representative congresses or parliaments is understandably difficult to believe at first glance. What if a group of incompetent or deluded people obtain power? I ask what is the likelihood of that occurring?

Say 10% of people are deluded or incompetent as a simple toy example. Say you have a body of 500 to make a decision. What is the probability that a majority of them will be deluded or incompetent? The z-score for this situation turns out to be around 29.89, in other words practically impossible. What is the likelihood of electing an incompetent or deluded representative in a system of elections? If it suits the interest of those who provide the means to gain power: corporate groups, aristocratic families, existing state actors and others, it may become a certainty. I think recent experience has shed light on the fallacy of terming the US system of government a democracy, and for that matter an urgent need for an alternative that is substantially different from previous modern attempts.

People have learned to underestimate the people, tragically often thanks to the electoral system. That prevents them from even being able to understand what rule by the people would look like. Thankfully, some insights from the social sciences and recent successful experiments lend support and credence to the validity of a sortitioned popular assembly. While many bring up mob mentality and demagoguery in a theoretical democracy, it is important to ask what conditions are conducive to mob mentality and what conditions lead to wisdom of the crowd?

Herd mentality is a condition of human life that can’t be eradicated, but it can be curtailed and stymied through processes of deliberation, honest communication, impartiality, a lack of perverse incentives, and freedom of expression. When one is elected, are they capable of deliberation? Of course we see that to the contrary electoral factionalism renders that a practical impossibility at times, even within a party itself. Officials are told to toe the line for political expediency and to ensure that they are not undermined by potential challengers or by the withholding of support.

When one is elected, are they incentivized to honest communication? I could tell you thousands of jokes that have been made to the contrary, and the sheer weight of the historical evidence hardly needs consideration. No. I will grant exceptions to this rule and others, as often social movements and the brave quiet work of millions ensure that sometimes even dictators have been made to kneel once the people united in common cause.

Are our elected representatives impartial? By definition they must not be in a two party system. In effect our system converges to half of voters being unrepresented for a given office half of the time. This could lead to nothing but the prosperity of discord and stagnation, cliques and vengeance. Again external pressure at times have forced compromise and movement on popular demands, but each example of this is ephemeral, paling in comparison to the constant pressure towards civic decay.

Do representatives have perverse incentives? The consequence to this setting is that legislators exist in a high pressure environment where the best one can do is sacrifice in order to obtain the cache to achieve something, and it tends to be a Faustian bargain. We are ratcheted into ever more delirious policy decisions by one party, while the other wallows in complete ineptitude (perhaps, willingly so). For fear of authoritarian takeover, we allow our aspirations to be forfeited to the god of “pragmatism”, which in turn undermines the very possibility of resisting the undertow. Elected officials become encumbered by the weight of their duties and the threat of political rivals and allies. Scared and desperate people don’t make good deliberators.

One only need recognize the fact that our legislators lay the task of writing law to lobbying groups to see that perverse incentives are the very substance of our oligarchic system. Rome fell under the weight of these chains, Athens did not.

Is one free to express themselves? Only in relation to the faction, and sometimes not even then. Again history reveals that time after time the personal beliefs of legislators subsumed by “necessity”. Whether I cite WMD’s, the Vietnam War, or any number of excuses for atrocities that have been tolerated for the sake of expediency or party discipline, one sees a connection to the perverse incentives we have increasingly come to recognize in our politics. Certainly the people at large are not represented in anything like a meaningful way. They express themselves in protest and are beaten, arrested, thrown into jail, or prohibited from working.

Now comes the time to consider how these questions would be answered regarding democracy as it was. Are jurors capable of deliberation? I can spare some effort and simply agree with society’s current understanding of judicial proceedings. The process of jury deliberation bears flaws of course, but to imagine holding an election for the deliberation of a criminal case reveals its subtle value. Jury deliberation is most effective when selection is allowed to be impartial and demographically representative of a broad swath of society. It is often said that deliberation in such a context could be ruled by a tyranny of the majority, but all that could imply as an alternative is some manner of tyranny of the minority.

Does an assembly incentivize honest communication? For this I cannot say necessarily that it incentivizes honesty rather than disincentivizes dishonesty. In a citizen’s assembly, deception does not carry the same kind of rewards present under electoral pressures. Assemblypeople are insulated from the financing and party demands of electoral race. They do not need to appease special interests from their district, once they are done they are done and they are free to vote their conscience. People tend to enjoy expressing their honest opinions on matters in the absence of external pressure.

Does an assembly incentivize impartiality? Any person has their own interest, socioeconomic or otherwise. This highlights the necessity for a deliberative process where all rational alternatives are considered. The assembly has the opportunity to share their perspective and the obligation to listen to opposing perspectives. The greater the degree one considers another’s opinion the greater will their own opinion be considered and respected. Of course in the cases of personal interest, many corrective measures have been innovated in our own legal systems, flawed as they are. Mandatory recusement is such a policy that can be implemented to safeguard against inappropriate dealings. Furthermore, given the aforementioned lack of electoral incentives, I suspect that it would be significantly easier to uphold those standards.

What is the incentive of the juror? Can they arrange a kickback in exchange for services rendered? It would be difficult to maintain political cache when your term is certain to end without possibility of reappointment. The juror owes no one for their placement, it was a matter of mathematical chance. Chance asks for nothing in return other than your participation in the proceedings. The incentive for the juror is to influence policy in a manner that represents their own interests and beliefs, which in aggregate by the Central Limit Theorem would approximate the opinion of the population at large without care for faction or ideology.

Does the assembly permit and incentivize free expression? While I don’t have a choice of who particularly will be selected, I can rest assured with high probability that there will be many people with similar backgrounds and interests in the sample, insofar as they are popular. This being democracy, if I can say with 99% confidence that the assembly will have truly representative characteristics, it seems a better option than 50% optimistically (assuming one of the candidates indeed represents me).

A common misgiving I have heard is a concern over competency. Surely randomly selected people wouldn’t produce the knowledge or expertise required of a legislature. I would firstly ask whether our system really selects for that either. It seems to me what is selected for is the ability to fundraise and campaign, to log roll and obfuscate. Nor do legislators even pretend expertise now, instead they seek expert (read “lobbyist”) advice and testimony. This would surely be a feature of a future sortioned body as a part of the deliberative process, without the deleterious ties with special interests swaying who is considered an expert or not. Secondly, I’d argue in fact that the randomly selected process itself would be an effective way of amalgamating the kind of collective knowledge that would be required for good governance. The diversity of opinions, of technical, historic, socioeconomic, artistic and other intangible forms of expertise that make up a representative sample itself is greater than the sum of its parts. Look to such examples as the cattle auction demonstration of wisdom of the crowds.

According to Jon Stewart in a recent interview with AI ethicist Tristan Harris, “Most people have lost faith in the idea that we have a system and institutions that are strong enough and moral enough to be responsible…” It is simply unacceptable to lie down and accept a system that is not fit for purpose and promises to drag us into annihilation, warmongering, and profiteering. The only way we will be able to take decisive collective action is if supreme legislative authority lies in the hands of the people themselves, not elected oligarchs and sycophants to power.