Thank you Jeremy. The idea that this is a design problem really shifts things.
It helps explain why so many people feel disconnected or frustrated. Not because they’re disengaged, but because the system wasn’t built to reflect or respond to them in the first place.
What stands out is that alternatives aren’t theoretical. They’re already happening, and they show what becomes possible when people are actually included in meaningful ways.
It also feels like this could go even further. But even this shift, toward more genuine participation and shared responsibility, already points in a different direction than what we’ve been working within.
That alone feels significant, especially right now.
The essay is mistakingly thinking candidate selection back when we had robust lower case "d" democratic governance structures was like it is now with natinal level candidate selection. Governance was organized through robust small “d” democratic structures, candidate selection and accountability were deeply interwoven within dense local civic ecosystems instead of being mediated through distant, centralized filters.
Local parties, civic associations, trades groups, business groups, municipal institutions, and others functioned as continuous vetting and accountability mechanisms people rose through visible participation, reputation, and demonstrated competence within their communities, not just through fundraising or media positioning. Because most policy authority and fiscal control sat at the local and state level, officials were directly accountable to constituencies that interacted with them regularly and could exert real pressure or replace them without navigating nationalized party hierarchies. This produced a tighter feedback loop between decision-makers and the governed, where accountability was practical and immediate rather than abstract and episodic.
A big problems with this is proposal is that in order for meaningful democratic capacity to exist it requires widely and deeply federated decision power. Just replacing elections with sortition or deliberative assemblies inside a centralized political economic structure doesn’t restore democracy; it just switches out the interface while leaving power concentrated. And if you do return to widely and deeply federated structures than the random assembly system becomes void. The key variable isnt the selection mechanism, it’s whether the system allows for genuine local autonomy, legal variability, policy variability, and distributed and pluralized capital formation.
And the proposal as given would quickly smuggle in an unexamined managerial layer that becomes the real locus of power, this is because some people must design and audit the lottery, define eligibility, curate and sequence topics, select and brief experts, set deliberation rules, allocate time, and integrate outputs into binding policy, yet none of these actors are themselves selected by sortition or subjected to equivalent accountability, so the system simply displaces decision making into a technocratic meta-structure that is upstream of the assemblies; without locally grounded institutional ecosystems (fiscal authority, capital control, civic integration, etc) to constrain it, this “deliberative” layer is far easier to capture, standardize, than even the current system we have is
And it doesnt answer, or even ponder a single structural question
How do you explain where forms of this neighborhood based democracy is ALREADY working and showing much better results than the oligarch fascist “democracy “ (aka USA)??? Take your time….
Thank you, Jeremy, for a fantastic piece. The fact that societies are considering deliberative democracy seriously is positive and Audrey Tang's work is so encouraging as it shows it can be done at scale.
Amazing how little we hear about these alternative forms of governing. By design, no doubt, inherent in the system that desperately needs to be changed and that fiercely resists any meaningful attempts to change it. We need to get the word out! This is a great contribution. Thank you.
lets take a brief look at the two examples the essay provides, because they don’t actually support the essay’s sortition argument. Kerala and DAANES/Rojava both rely on layered, territorially grounded governance with embedded institutions, not random selection. Kerala’s model is built on elected local bodies, neighborhood groups, and long-standing civic and political organizations tied into real fiscal channels; Rojava’s model (to the extent it functions at all) is structured through councils, parties, and administrative layers, not lotteries. In other words, both cases align with what I described: participation emerging through durable, locally embedded systems with continuity, accountability, and integration into real decision-making power, not episodic, randomly assembled panels.
At the same time, both examples have intensive flaws that need to fixed (although the DAANES/Rojava has, at least in theory, an excuse derived from the near constant state of armed conflict the territory has been in for well over a decade) and which leave them with quite coercive centralized constraints, which is part and parcel the structural matters I’m raising. In DAANES/Rojava, the commune layer exists alongside, and is ultimately subordinate to, military/security command structures (SDF/Asayish), which is at least partially explainable given constant conflict. But in Kerala, the constraints are more revealing, even where local participation is real, budgetary authority is partial and conditional, major economic decisions are shaped by centralized banking/financial systems outside local control, and regulatory frameworks channel regions into predefined roles within a larger, coordinated economic system. So even one of the strongest real-world examples of participatory governance still operates within structural limits that prevent full democratic autonomy.
That’s why the sortition proposal is actually weaker than both examples, and weaker than what we have now. It removes even the imperfect pathways of accountability (elections, party competition, public scrutiny) and replaces them with temporary, randomly selected bodies that lack continuity, institutional memory, and embedded accountability, while simultaneously introducing an unaccountable managerial layer that sets agendas, frames decisions, and controls implementation. Without restoring distributed fiscal power, local control over capital, institutional plurality, and real jurisdictional autonomy, those assemblies wouldnt govern, they would pseudo-deliberate inside a system whose core decisions are made elsewhere.
What's your take on a potential solution? I like seeing counter arguments so that I can think critically and learn from people like you, but I also think critics should speak to possible alternative solutions. Either actionable reforms within current system or countering with another alternative design.
So, one possible solution might be the establishment of an actual social contract for citizens/voters/residents. The contract is self selective and renewable. It ties in to local governance first, and lists rights/privileges as well as responsibilities/obligations. Issues in need of resolve/actions are issued as a form of currency (political capital). Individuals can decide themselves how to vote by accessing data and research provided, or seek their own. If voting exposes a participant, they can pass the decision to a representative of their choice to mask themselves politically/religiously/sexually/etc. A kind of stock exchange of political capital emerges. Government efficiency lowers the cost of delivery and customize service and infrastructure delivery which can lean on pledged obligations and responsibility to deliver and implement community services through community service and deepening local sovereignty in terms of supply and delivery of essential services.
Social contracts could be gamefied to allow participants to quest for higher agency and authority within community thereby becoming leaders and increasing their local basic income/welfare payments.
This could extend to organically train and deploy police, sanitation, energy, food, care, and nursing equivalent workforce, decoupling from "for profit" ROI frameworks in relation to basic community services.
At larger scales of regional/national/transnational/global governance the system can scale more effectively because the issues will be about wider policies and distribution of interregional flows of resources/capital and policy frameworks. Ideological posturing becomes irrelevant as governance becomes about delivery rather than choosing the team that delivers. Datasets that are transparent from the bottom up, but opaque from the top down will help alleviate vulnerability from rivals and neighbors.
Everything could be blockchained to ensure records and prevent corruption to some extent. Lobby groups wanting to pay for influence will have to make community wide donations. Global business or other entities with particular geographic interests regarding resources or trade routes pitch directly on the local community exchange. Payment rails are built in.
Good news! People have already been pursuing actionable reforms in the direction I'm talking about and some, with increasing frequency, have actually been having success! Around the country there are examples of local areas have been clawing back rights. And people are starting remember the knowledge of the workings of capital structures again!
The USA’s political economy actually still contains quite large degrees of heterogeneity and diffusion; its just sort of nullified. And I’m increasingly seeing/hearing discourse on the ground level reminiscent of 1830s gen 1.0 Democratic Party’s commentary and the domestic set up we have now is deeply enabled by the planetary economic central planning structures of capital “G” Globalization which very well may be on its way out the door…
To the extent that democracy ill can be fixed through structural change this is a brilliant and useful piece. Thank you for writing it, Jeremy.
What remains to be written however, is a companion piece, that addresses the affect, attitudes, and ideals that citizens need to bring to any restructuring efforts in order for them to work. It's the same problem realized by those Swedish intellectuals when they discovered that the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals would be unreachable without what they subsequently developed and call the Inner Development Goals.https://innerdevelopmentgoals.org/
This is a most helpful collection of alternative models to the dysfunction‑by‑design form of democracy we struggle with in the United States—one shaped by wealth supremacy and white male supremacy. Grassroots, neighborhood collaboration on real problem solving fosters group cohesion and group cognitive sovereignty. It reflects the subsidiarity dimension of what Blake and Gilman describe, in conjunction with planetarity, in Children of a Modest Star: decision‑making and problem‑solving happening at the most local, competent level, with higher levels supporting rather than overriding. That’s a natural and necessary component of regenerative, planetarity‑based approaches to democracy and economics.
I thought the introduction was worth the $ of the book; a masterful summary & similar in effective scope as Pope Francis’ executive summary of Querida Amazonia; both intros stand-alone gems.
Luke Kemp: "One thing to bear in mind is that we put absolutely no money into the sphere of creating innovations in democracy, to improving how we represent people at scale. If we actually rewarded this like we reward startups in the space of AI, imagine what we could do." [1]
Roman Krznaric: "There’s a new wave of deliberative democracy, direct participation through random selection. Anyone can set up a citizens assembly in their own town. They tend to come up with much more radical and transformative policy proposals than regular politicians, and tend to take a longer view than the politicians caught up in short term cycles. They are sowing the seeds of asabiyyah, of social trust, helping to build a new society in the shell of the old, so that in a moment of crisis we are ready." [2]
This is certainly one of your best posts to date Jeremy!
I think you hit the nail on the head by naming sortition as the preferable solution when it comes to governance. A close second to sortition would have to be some other radical change, such as ranked choice voting, which has been gaining in popularity (however has continually been challenged by status quo interests). Ranked choice does allow better representation of voter preference, however it still retains some bias in favor of "charisma, wealth, ambition, and connection,” whereas sortition lacks any regard whatsoever for those attributes.
I want to name a few more thinkers in this space, as there has been a lot of speculation regarding how one might separate these left hemisphere attributes (though in other ways perhaps good and necessary) from the more altruistic telos of a right hemisphere disposition. Zak Stein has written about "values-guiding-technology" (see axiological design) [1] and Daniel Schmachtenberger has spoken at length on "wisdom-binding-power." [2] There was also a paper by Harold Hutchinson and George Yarrow concerning the possibility of "lateralisation in the governance system." [3] They wrote:
“[Our governance systems today] attend far too much to activities concerned with power, control and coercion, to ‘grasping’ actions that are the focus of the left hemispheres of human brains… Without right hemisphere input, governments have become easy meat for the partisan lobbyists importuning Leviathan to use its monopoly power in ways that further their own narrow interests, without adequate consideration of their system-wide implications.”
But I think sortition is the best way to achieve the desired separation. Because if we did have sortition, such a governing body could in fact freely deliberate on the important qualitative issues facing society, drawing upon expert testimony as needed, with only their unencumbered “valueception” guiding them. In this way, perhaps we could make some real progress addressing those most complex issues facing us today. If there were ever a moment in history that should wake us up to the need for a radical change of just this sort, that moment is now.
This is a really optimistic piece much appreciated. For me, it shines a bright spotlight on the difficult and problematic relationship between modern fiat money which PAYS for the things we need to collectively achieve—and which is something that can only be CREATED by the sovereign government—and the movement/need to find ways to operate outside and independent of that sovereignty when it becomes oppressive. It’s a “Catch-22” we have yet to resolve.
Thanks Jeremy. I think we have to zoom out one more level. When the territorial nation-states of today were formed, the main difference was the uniformity of rule. The royals suddenly had absolute power to impose one rule for all. The State was theirs. "L'État, c'est moi" as King Louis XIV put it, just after the elites had agreed to stop fighting the 30-years war and split up the continent between themselves.
When governments were set up, they were set up not to represent the people, but the State. The citizens are the subject of the State. To maintain some kind of facade, they allowed people to cast a vote once in a while about who was to represent the State.
But the fact remains that someone still controlled the State. I have never seen a document saying that it was handed over to the people. Wouldn’t I have a certificate saying so? No, instead I get a birth certificate indicating I’m a subject of the State. When I had my first child, the bureaucracy threatened to name my child if I didn’t register an official name.
I like to draw parallels to how a mafia works. They have their turf, small bosses and big bosses. They meet occasionally to collude on what works best for them, but never hesitate to backstab each other when they get the chance. And they see the residents as their cash cows. The more land and residents, the more money they can extract. When they get big enough, they set up a council to help them run the show.
So what if they want to be nice and let the residents cast a vote about who their preferred boss would be? Wouldn’t that reflect poorly on the residents if they accepted that? Realistically, they would be offered a few rotten eggs to choose from, and maybe it would make sense to vote for the least bad one. But to keep voting for these selected rotten eggs would not change much, because they still represent the mafia. And the local mafia still pulls the strings, until overrun by a bigger or neighbouring boss.
I’m not sure who the big bosses are in the countries I have lived in. But I’m under no illusion that the government is there to represent me.
And until we attempt to break the foundations of the territorial and absolute nation-state, the imposed uniformity of rule, we are its biggest supporters. Ordinary people being angry at our elected leaders is just projecting.
the only way to avoid choosing between such set of elite will rule over you is to ensure that elite are dismantled and prevented from being created. without that preventative measure, we're going to run into this over and over again. that weed removal is essential.
Thank you Jeremy. This so resonates with my belief in local decision making over one's place. The fact that most localities can now also generate their own energy, at least in theory, makes such a transition even more possible. We just have to believe that we can do this. That another way of doing things is possible. That the Nation State is a 19th century invention suited to western European conditions at that time and that other ways of organising ourselves are possible.
beautifully laid out. this ties directly to the issue that those closest to the problems should have a say in how to remedy the problems. especially concerning the poor and marginalized, they have no voice and no seat at the table. these ideas about true democratic practices are game-changers. look forward to learning more.
This is a lens that makes the wave of AI layoffs look like an opportunity to participate in real governance. The key, it seems to me, is that bit you mentioned about "significant renumeration."
That was interesting. I've always had an issue with democracy because as I understand it, women and slaves were excluded from the process. I can't help but feel that somewhat scuppers the whole "for, by and of the people" premise.
I definitely think picking folk at random makes sense, that way you are going to get a more representative sample of the population.
Thank you Jeremy. The idea that this is a design problem really shifts things.
It helps explain why so many people feel disconnected or frustrated. Not because they’re disengaged, but because the system wasn’t built to reflect or respond to them in the first place.
What stands out is that alternatives aren’t theoretical. They’re already happening, and they show what becomes possible when people are actually included in meaningful ways.
It also feels like this could go even further. But even this shift, toward more genuine participation and shared responsibility, already points in a different direction than what we’ve been working within.
That alone feels significant, especially right now.
The essay is mistakingly thinking candidate selection back when we had robust lower case "d" democratic governance structures was like it is now with natinal level candidate selection. Governance was organized through robust small “d” democratic structures, candidate selection and accountability were deeply interwoven within dense local civic ecosystems instead of being mediated through distant, centralized filters.
Local parties, civic associations, trades groups, business groups, municipal institutions, and others functioned as continuous vetting and accountability mechanisms people rose through visible participation, reputation, and demonstrated competence within their communities, not just through fundraising or media positioning. Because most policy authority and fiscal control sat at the local and state level, officials were directly accountable to constituencies that interacted with them regularly and could exert real pressure or replace them without navigating nationalized party hierarchies. This produced a tighter feedback loop between decision-makers and the governed, where accountability was practical and immediate rather than abstract and episodic.
A big problems with this is proposal is that in order for meaningful democratic capacity to exist it requires widely and deeply federated decision power. Just replacing elections with sortition or deliberative assemblies inside a centralized political economic structure doesn’t restore democracy; it just switches out the interface while leaving power concentrated. And if you do return to widely and deeply federated structures than the random assembly system becomes void. The key variable isnt the selection mechanism, it’s whether the system allows for genuine local autonomy, legal variability, policy variability, and distributed and pluralized capital formation.
And the proposal as given would quickly smuggle in an unexamined managerial layer that becomes the real locus of power, this is because some people must design and audit the lottery, define eligibility, curate and sequence topics, select and brief experts, set deliberation rules, allocate time, and integrate outputs into binding policy, yet none of these actors are themselves selected by sortition or subjected to equivalent accountability, so the system simply displaces decision making into a technocratic meta-structure that is upstream of the assemblies; without locally grounded institutional ecosystems (fiscal authority, capital control, civic integration, etc) to constrain it, this “deliberative” layer is far easier to capture, standardize, than even the current system we have is
And it doesnt answer, or even ponder a single structural question
How do you explain where forms of this neighborhood based democracy is ALREADY working and showing much better results than the oligarch fascist “democracy “ (aka USA)??? Take your time….
This is a thing In Process. But I like the question!
Thank you, Jeremy, for a fantastic piece. The fact that societies are considering deliberative democracy seriously is positive and Audrey Tang's work is so encouraging as it shows it can be done at scale.
Amazing how little we hear about these alternative forms of governing. By design, no doubt, inherent in the system that desperately needs to be changed and that fiercely resists any meaningful attempts to change it. We need to get the word out! This is a great contribution. Thank you.
lets take a brief look at the two examples the essay provides, because they don’t actually support the essay’s sortition argument. Kerala and DAANES/Rojava both rely on layered, territorially grounded governance with embedded institutions, not random selection. Kerala’s model is built on elected local bodies, neighborhood groups, and long-standing civic and political organizations tied into real fiscal channels; Rojava’s model (to the extent it functions at all) is structured through councils, parties, and administrative layers, not lotteries. In other words, both cases align with what I described: participation emerging through durable, locally embedded systems with continuity, accountability, and integration into real decision-making power, not episodic, randomly assembled panels.
At the same time, both examples have intensive flaws that need to fixed (although the DAANES/Rojava has, at least in theory, an excuse derived from the near constant state of armed conflict the territory has been in for well over a decade) and which leave them with quite coercive centralized constraints, which is part and parcel the structural matters I’m raising. In DAANES/Rojava, the commune layer exists alongside, and is ultimately subordinate to, military/security command structures (SDF/Asayish), which is at least partially explainable given constant conflict. But in Kerala, the constraints are more revealing, even where local participation is real, budgetary authority is partial and conditional, major economic decisions are shaped by centralized banking/financial systems outside local control, and regulatory frameworks channel regions into predefined roles within a larger, coordinated economic system. So even one of the strongest real-world examples of participatory governance still operates within structural limits that prevent full democratic autonomy.
That’s why the sortition proposal is actually weaker than both examples, and weaker than what we have now. It removes even the imperfect pathways of accountability (elections, party competition, public scrutiny) and replaces them with temporary, randomly selected bodies that lack continuity, institutional memory, and embedded accountability, while simultaneously introducing an unaccountable managerial layer that sets agendas, frames decisions, and controls implementation. Without restoring distributed fiscal power, local control over capital, institutional plurality, and real jurisdictional autonomy, those assemblies wouldnt govern, they would pseudo-deliberate inside a system whose core decisions are made elsewhere.
What's your take on a potential solution? I like seeing counter arguments so that I can think critically and learn from people like you, but I also think critics should speak to possible alternative solutions. Either actionable reforms within current system or countering with another alternative design.
So, one possible solution might be the establishment of an actual social contract for citizens/voters/residents. The contract is self selective and renewable. It ties in to local governance first, and lists rights/privileges as well as responsibilities/obligations. Issues in need of resolve/actions are issued as a form of currency (political capital). Individuals can decide themselves how to vote by accessing data and research provided, or seek their own. If voting exposes a participant, they can pass the decision to a representative of their choice to mask themselves politically/religiously/sexually/etc. A kind of stock exchange of political capital emerges. Government efficiency lowers the cost of delivery and customize service and infrastructure delivery which can lean on pledged obligations and responsibility to deliver and implement community services through community service and deepening local sovereignty in terms of supply and delivery of essential services.
Social contracts could be gamefied to allow participants to quest for higher agency and authority within community thereby becoming leaders and increasing their local basic income/welfare payments.
This could extend to organically train and deploy police, sanitation, energy, food, care, and nursing equivalent workforce, decoupling from "for profit" ROI frameworks in relation to basic community services.
At larger scales of regional/national/transnational/global governance the system can scale more effectively because the issues will be about wider policies and distribution of interregional flows of resources/capital and policy frameworks. Ideological posturing becomes irrelevant as governance becomes about delivery rather than choosing the team that delivers. Datasets that are transparent from the bottom up, but opaque from the top down will help alleviate vulnerability from rivals and neighbors.
Everything could be blockchained to ensure records and prevent corruption to some extent. Lobby groups wanting to pay for influence will have to make community wide donations. Global business or other entities with particular geographic interests regarding resources or trade routes pitch directly on the local community exchange. Payment rails are built in.
Etc.
Good news! People have already been pursuing actionable reforms in the direction I'm talking about and some, with increasing frequency, have actually been having success! Around the country there are examples of local areas have been clawing back rights. And people are starting remember the knowledge of the workings of capital structures again!
The USA’s political economy actually still contains quite large degrees of heterogeneity and diffusion; its just sort of nullified. And I’m increasingly seeing/hearing discourse on the ground level reminiscent of 1830s gen 1.0 Democratic Party’s commentary and the domestic set up we have now is deeply enabled by the planetary economic central planning structures of capital “G” Globalization which very well may be on its way out the door…
To the extent that democracy ill can be fixed through structural change this is a brilliant and useful piece. Thank you for writing it, Jeremy.
What remains to be written however, is a companion piece, that addresses the affect, attitudes, and ideals that citizens need to bring to any restructuring efforts in order for them to work. It's the same problem realized by those Swedish intellectuals when they discovered that the 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals would be unreachable without what they subsequently developed and call the Inner Development Goals.https://innerdevelopmentgoals.org/
That’s a key point. You need both the right kind of system AND it populated with the right kind of humans. Neither by itself is gonna do it.
This is a most helpful collection of alternative models to the dysfunction‑by‑design form of democracy we struggle with in the United States—one shaped by wealth supremacy and white male supremacy. Grassroots, neighborhood collaboration on real problem solving fosters group cohesion and group cognitive sovereignty. It reflects the subsidiarity dimension of what Blake and Gilman describe, in conjunction with planetarity, in Children of a Modest Star: decision‑making and problem‑solving happening at the most local, competent level, with higher levels supporting rather than overriding. That’s a natural and necessary component of regenerative, planetarity‑based approaches to democracy and economics.
Thanks for this great public service, Jeremy.
I think Children of a Modest Star is an excellent book, one which I reference in my Ecocivilization book chapter on planetary governance
I thought the introduction was worth the $ of the book; a masterful summary & similar in effective scope as Pope Francis’ executive summary of Querida Amazonia; both intros stand-alone gems.
Luke Kemp: "One thing to bear in mind is that we put absolutely no money into the sphere of creating innovations in democracy, to improving how we represent people at scale. If we actually rewarded this like we reward startups in the space of AI, imagine what we could do." [1]
Roman Krznaric: "There’s a new wave of deliberative democracy, direct participation through random selection. Anyone can set up a citizens assembly in their own town. They tend to come up with much more radical and transformative policy proposals than regular politicians, and tend to take a longer view than the politicians caught up in short term cycles. They are sowing the seeds of asabiyyah, of social trust, helping to build a new society in the shell of the old, so that in a moment of crisis we are ready." [2]
This is certainly one of your best posts to date Jeremy!
[1] https://youtu.be/W7JsDrHrRsI
[2] https://youtu.be/fXTbcDgg9ek
I'm glad to see you mention two authors both of whom I think are brilliant pathbreakers in their ideas
I think you hit the nail on the head by naming sortition as the preferable solution when it comes to governance. A close second to sortition would have to be some other radical change, such as ranked choice voting, which has been gaining in popularity (however has continually been challenged by status quo interests). Ranked choice does allow better representation of voter preference, however it still retains some bias in favor of "charisma, wealth, ambition, and connection,” whereas sortition lacks any regard whatsoever for those attributes.
I want to name a few more thinkers in this space, as there has been a lot of speculation regarding how one might separate these left hemisphere attributes (though in other ways perhaps good and necessary) from the more altruistic telos of a right hemisphere disposition. Zak Stein has written about "values-guiding-technology" (see axiological design) [1] and Daniel Schmachtenberger has spoken at length on "wisdom-binding-power." [2] There was also a paper by Harold Hutchinson and George Yarrow concerning the possibility of "lateralisation in the governance system." [3] They wrote:
“[Our governance systems today] attend far too much to activities concerned with power, control and coercion, to ‘grasping’ actions that are the focus of the left hemispheres of human brains… Without right hemisphere input, governments have become easy meat for the partisan lobbyists importuning Leviathan to use its monopoly power in ways that further their own narrow interests, without adequate consideration of their system-wide implications.”
But I think sortition is the best way to achieve the desired separation. Because if we did have sortition, such a governing body could in fact freely deliberate on the important qualitative issues facing society, drawing upon expert testimony as needed, with only their unencumbered “valueception” guiding them. In this way, perhaps we could make some real progress addressing those most complex issues facing us today. If there were ever a moment in history that should wake us up to the need for a radical change of just this sort, that moment is now.
[1] https://consilienceproject.org/technology-is-not-values-neutral-ending-the-reign-of-nihilistic-design-2/
[2] https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/three-wise-men-talk-about-wisdom
[3] https://rpieurope.org/to-see-or-not-to-see-that-is-the-question-moving-on-from-a-half-brained-system-of-economic-governance/
This is a really optimistic piece much appreciated. For me, it shines a bright spotlight on the difficult and problematic relationship between modern fiat money which PAYS for the things we need to collectively achieve—and which is something that can only be CREATED by the sovereign government—and the movement/need to find ways to operate outside and independent of that sovereignty when it becomes oppressive. It’s a “Catch-22” we have yet to resolve.
Thanks Jeremy. I think we have to zoom out one more level. When the territorial nation-states of today were formed, the main difference was the uniformity of rule. The royals suddenly had absolute power to impose one rule for all. The State was theirs. "L'État, c'est moi" as King Louis XIV put it, just after the elites had agreed to stop fighting the 30-years war and split up the continent between themselves.
When governments were set up, they were set up not to represent the people, but the State. The citizens are the subject of the State. To maintain some kind of facade, they allowed people to cast a vote once in a while about who was to represent the State.
But the fact remains that someone still controlled the State. I have never seen a document saying that it was handed over to the people. Wouldn’t I have a certificate saying so? No, instead I get a birth certificate indicating I’m a subject of the State. When I had my first child, the bureaucracy threatened to name my child if I didn’t register an official name.
I like to draw parallels to how a mafia works. They have their turf, small bosses and big bosses. They meet occasionally to collude on what works best for them, but never hesitate to backstab each other when they get the chance. And they see the residents as their cash cows. The more land and residents, the more money they can extract. When they get big enough, they set up a council to help them run the show.
So what if they want to be nice and let the residents cast a vote about who their preferred boss would be? Wouldn’t that reflect poorly on the residents if they accepted that? Realistically, they would be offered a few rotten eggs to choose from, and maybe it would make sense to vote for the least bad one. But to keep voting for these selected rotten eggs would not change much, because they still represent the mafia. And the local mafia still pulls the strings, until overrun by a bigger or neighbouring boss.
I’m not sure who the big bosses are in the countries I have lived in. But I’m under no illusion that the government is there to represent me.
And until we attempt to break the foundations of the territorial and absolute nation-state, the imposed uniformity of rule, we are its biggest supporters. Ordinary people being angry at our elected leaders is just projecting.
Yes, I have a chapter dedicated to planetary governance in my Ecocivilization book, too!
the only way to avoid choosing between such set of elite will rule over you is to ensure that elite are dismantled and prevented from being created. without that preventative measure, we're going to run into this over and over again. that weed removal is essential.
Thank you Jeremy. This so resonates with my belief in local decision making over one's place. The fact that most localities can now also generate their own energy, at least in theory, makes such a transition even more possible. We just have to believe that we can do this. That another way of doing things is possible. That the Nation State is a 19th century invention suited to western European conditions at that time and that other ways of organising ourselves are possible.
beautifully laid out. this ties directly to the issue that those closest to the problems should have a say in how to remedy the problems. especially concerning the poor and marginalized, they have no voice and no seat at the table. these ideas about true democratic practices are game-changers. look forward to learning more.
This is a lens that makes the wave of AI layoffs look like an opportunity to participate in real governance. The key, it seems to me, is that bit you mentioned about "significant renumeration."
Really compelling argument. Thank you.
That was interesting. I've always had an issue with democracy because as I understand it, women and slaves were excluded from the process. I can't help but feel that somewhat scuppers the whole "for, by and of the people" premise.
I definitely think picking folk at random makes sense, that way you are going to get a more representative sample of the population.
I look forward to the book.
President Jimmy Carter has been an open book concerning the country’s oligarchy problem. If you’re unfamiliar, its worth a search.
Excellent work too. 👊🏼👊🏼
OMG, thank you for one of the best, most helpful things I’ve read in a long time.