A Modest Proposal

By Paul Pipher
 
It was with considerable interest that I watched Brett Hennig’s TED-talk last Sunday entitled WHAT IF WE REPLACED POLITICIANS WITH RANDOMLY SELECTED PEOPLE.  Mr. Hennig said that with any new ideas the details have yet to be worked out.  Here are a few suggestions that he may find useful.
 
The first is that we already have a similar system in place, the Jury Selection System that can be used almost as is.  Most of us have already had some experience with it and can imagine that putting aside our career, friends and families for an extended term will be much more rewarding if we know we can count on the privilege for 4 years.
 
The politicians of ancient Greeks were well aware of the convention ‘power corrupts’, and their leaders did their best to get as much of it as possible.  Thus it would be best for the leader of the new Sortition parliament to also be chosen by lot.  So what if they know nothing of Roberts Rules of Order.  That book is an elitist collection of false truths put together years ago for the sole purpose of getting things done.  Much better would be for each parliament to develop its own rules.  Sure, there will be much primal screaming at the beginning, but under the tried and true democratic principal that ‘the squeaky wheel gets the grease’, an organic system would surely arise.
 
Some of you might object to a group of amateurs wrestling with the technical aspects of running a country, but this too is elitist.  Rather than relying on an educated Civil Service, hired by nepotism, prone to the ‘expert’ syndrome and special interest lobbies, they could be selected at random from the population at large, again for a term of 4 years.  It’s discriminatory to say that someone with only a High School education could not learn on the job how to run the Nuclear Reactor at Chalk River, say.  Trial and error gives true feedback.  It is a wonderful fact that our country’s library system includes far more books than could possibly be read in any one person’s lifetime.  No wonder it has been called the Poor Man’s University.  And if we could encourage everyone to make better use of Libraries, we could get rid for that hotbed for upper class elites, the universities themselves.  With the amount of money that could be saved, Sortition would truly bring a ‘paradigm’ shift, reduce taxes and bring down the price of real estate in Chalk River as well.
 
Lastly, I would like to compliment those who rely for their understanding of government, and life itself, on the plenitude of TED-talks freely available.  Freely on YouTube, that is: to attend the talks in person costs $8,200 a year.  (Those wealthy enough to attend in person should be excluded from the Sortition process itself, as being patently elitist.)  But until we can get the Sortition system fully sorted out, we will have to rely on those who can explain the magic of life in 18 minutes or less, populist folks such as Juan Peron, Ferdinand Markos, Donald Trump and Pot Pol.  They knew well that anyone who thinks complicated issues need more than 18 minutes to explain, are not worth listening to themselves.